1.1 On the possibilities for a deep history of humankind  (Page 6/7)

The Paleolithic, in this mode of writing, is a historyless period: a prologue. The idea that some human societies could exist outside of history intrigued nineteenth-century German historical philosophers. In Leopold von Ranke’s famous phrase, Asians were the “people of the eternal standstill.” See Arthur F. Wright, “The Study of Chinese Civilization,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 233-55, here 245 . So were Africans, Australian Aborigines, American Indians: indeed, practically everyone who wasn’t of European origin. It was an odd feature of the new history that historicity, if it was to be accorded to some peoples, had to be denied others.

The idea that only some peoples have history is blatantly erroneous. You don’t have to have much acquaintance with Paleolithic and Neolithic archaeology, let alone Incan and African archaeology, to realize that all human societies are full of history, even those whose histories we must reconstruct with the most fragmentary unwritten evidence. Thanks to the ontogenetic style of writing history, however, the idea that there is a time before history, and then a history, has worked its way into our curricula and our habits of thinking about the past. The errors into which this has led us have been legion. In recent years, we have swept away the instinct to deny historicity to non-Europeans; except, of course, where Paleolithic peoples are concerned.

In proposing a deep history there is a temptation to prescribe. We ought to have historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists in a single department. We ought to work in teams so as to bridge the methodological divisions that break human history into pieces. Most of this is so obvious as to need no comment; it’s the implementation that would be complicated. Before we set about the task of restructuring academic space, the intellectual architecture must be solidly constructed. The first task is to define the narrative arc of a deep history, something that clearly baffled Duruy and generations of textbook authors after him.

The narrative arc of modern history-writing, as noted above, follows the arc of ontogeny. As a practical matter, what this means is that histories—especially but not exclusively works of synthesis such as textbooks, general histories, and introductory survey lectures—frame their subjects using metaphors of origin, birth, roots, revolution, invention, and the like. The key feature of the ontogenetic metaphor is that it proposes a shift from nothingness to being or from stasis to change, a shift projected onto a moment of birth or conception. The nation was an early target for the ontogenetic metaphor: by the late nineteenth century, the idea of the birth of nations was making its way into chapter titles, section headings, and book prologues. The metaphor eventually found its way into book titles, such as Ferdinand Lot’s famous 1948 work, The Birth of France . Victor Henri Ferdinand Lot, Naissance de la France (Paris: Fayard, 1948). But the metaphor was readily exported for use in other areas. Western Civilization (via the Neolithic Revolution) was an early beneficiary, and the metaphor soon spread beyond this to other entities, ideas, and systems. Over the last fifty years, the list has become long indeed: for medieval Europe alone, claims have been made identifying the period as the point of origin for civil society, the state, commerce and trade, banking, cities, individualism, universities, the modern nuclear family, scientific method, law and justice, human rights, citizenship, colonialism, fashion, and even persecution.