An Simple Explanation

In my previous post I discussed the process of identity construction for those who were involved in the fascist welfare system in Franco's Spain. It was a theoretical analysis of two works by a Catalan researcher named Angela Cenarro Lagunas. I suggested that historians play an important role in the process of identity construction for individuals who have been victimized in some way. In fact, I would like to extend the idea of identity construction and history, because I believe that it may be the only purpose for a historian.

Doing history for history's sake is an idea with which many historians have grappled. I think that some are determined that this is the way that it ought to be: academic historians committed to the institute. Yet it is an extremely selfish perspective. One of my professors was so affected by the history day competition last week that she is changing her curricula. Never again will students be required to write final papers, though they may choose to do so and she is happy to help them along. She has determined to include websites, documentary and film, as well as physical representation (memorials, etc) as legitimate forms of historical research. She even went so far as to suggest that film and the internet are the most valuable tools that historians have. While there are those who must write, simply because that is what they do best, history is meaningless if the public cannot see it. If it is only an academic study, debated through the walls of the academy, printed in journals nobody reads, spoken at lectures nobody attends and conferences only academics consider, written in monographs nobody cares to pick up because they are intimidating, and limited in scope to address the historical significance of mating habits of the Japanese flying squid, then it is without purpose.

I say this because what I am as a person is a composite of identities, former and current, altered by processes that shift identity from what it might have been to what it ended up being. Though as the realist may say, it could have been no other way, and it may not have been possible to have been otherwise, understanding that process that shifted the identity alters my perception, not only of the identity that came to be, but of all identities before it. Since I look back through my life via the identities that I have compiled over time it is entirely reasonable to assume that the identities and processes that have happened more recently could color my perception of what happened prior to that point. Indeed, the very fact that a person can emerge from an event with two conflicting identities as was the case with Aragonese children after Franco's death, suggests strongly that these multiple identities exists. The fact that conflicting identities can, through the process of reflection, merge to define an entirely new identity, suggests that we compile our identities, and the fact that, in the case of Aragonese children for a time held an identity of confusion that limited their ability to recollect clearly other events suggests that those compiled identities, as they compress, blur our vision of the past. It becomes possible then, by introducing a past that is consistent with that blurred vision and altering it slightly and systematically, that a new identity may emerge that is based, not on the reality of the past, but of a constructed reality. Never has this principle been put to greater use than during what may be called the fascist era--that time between 1920 and 1950, years that will live in infamy for the crimes that were committed against humanity.

Why is this important? And how do all these things relate?

Every individual has a right to know his past as it was, or at least as near to as it was as can be approached. If there are events in my life that were positive, but understood as negative because of a filter somewhere else that was the product of another identity, it may cause resentment and bitterness. Conversely, there may have been a very traumatizing event that was very painful that has been suppressed by competing identities and processes. For the children in Franco's Aragon many were not able to draw their own past clearly as a result of the processes of fascist education. One even believed that his father and uncle were put to death because of wrong-doing, when the fact was that those men had not done anything, they had not even participated in the war, they were simply "red" liberals. Their death was part of a show of strength by the Spanish fascist party. The son, an adult now, was so traumatized by the education that he had received that he could not even mourn his own father's death without certain resentment toward him. To recover the past as it was--in the case mentioned, the boys father was shamelessly murdered by fascist military--should be the primary objective of the historian. He takes part in this activity in order that people might be able to understand their current identity.

The historian's job in constructing identity is a two-lane highway that is on a ridge with certain death if errors are made. The historian must see the past as it was, in the past, trying not to force his perspectives or modernity on it. After that, it gets tricky. The historian must construct an image, an image in current time, of what that past was like and communicate it in such a way that people can understand it without current prejudice. It is a process that is extremely tedious and difficult and (though historians hate to admit it) always full of many presuppositions. If all that historians were supposed to do was to analyze and debate within the walls and halls of academia, then the world at large would be left to their own devices to construct the past. Many would do this properly and with a general good will. But many, if not the majority, would turn it into a plot for power. Fascism sought to control history through memory construction, it ultimately did not work, but hundreds of millions had to die before the world figured it out.

To the point. I believe that historians as a whole have a singular, though multi-faceted, duty to the world: to identify the past as it was and provide space for those whose identity is tied to it in a form that can be accessed by those people. The historian should, through the process of reconstruction, provide identity to those who have lost it, or for whom it has been blurred. Yes, this is an idealist's view of it, but I think that it is closer to giving purpose to history than just saying that historians analyze the past simply because it exists, which is far too Edmund Hilary-esque for me. If nothing else, it is less selfish that believing that I do history so that I can be self-fulfilled.