Peter Seixas (ed.) Theorizing Historical Consciousness.
Allender, Tim
Peter Seixas (ed.) Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 2004, 255 pp.
This book brings together a group of international scholars from a
number of disciplines including history, philosophy and education. Its
task is to apply the complexity that surrounds the formation of
collective memory and historical consciousness to chart how people will
understand the past in the future. This is an ambitious brief offered in
an attempt to find a central theme that embraces a group of authors from
diverse academic backgrounds. However, there are valuable chapters in
the book that represent important intellectual progress in understanding
how identity can be shaped according to how individuals make sense of
the past.
Peter Seixas' introduction is compelling and seductive in
making the case for history, as an intrinsic part of popular culture,
that is now less shackled by the narrow notions modernity and
'progress.' He sees it is as enriched, instead, by
'collective memory' and 'historical consciousness'
approaches that examine how societies pass down beliefs about the past
and the historicity of everything present. The author's use of
modern German and French philosophers and his reference to specific
events in history, also frames the book in a convincing manner.
In part one of the book the writers, using strongly theorised
approaches, are concerned with historiographies and historical
consciousness. Chris Lorenz analyses the historian as both the producer
and the product of collective memory, ably drawing on the example of
Quebec and how identity has been developed over time. James Wertsch
examines how 'schematic narrative templates' that are
culturally specific, create ongoing continuities in the way historical
narratives are constructed even when sharp changes in political regimes
occur. Jorn Rusen, posits a hierarchy of four stances towards the past
as a means of moral orientation to the present and Mark Phillips'
chapter challenges the long-standing notion that genuine historical
knowledge can only come from a position of 'relative
detachment' by identifying the problematic and constructed nature
of this phrase.
Part two of the book deals with history education and historical
consciousness and will be of particular interest to history curriculum
specialists in Australia given that little has been written in this
country on this topic. Jocelyn Letourneau and Sabrina Moisan explore the
example of Quebec, once again, this time to commend teaching students
not one entrenched narrative but to explore, instead, critical
historical methodology, so that they can compare conflicting accounts
allowing them to accommodate ambiguities, paradoxes and
'dissonances.' Peter Lee, an influential British history
education researcher, builds on his earlier publications to illustrate
that school children already know that there are competing narratives
that concern the past. But that it is necessary, nonetheless, to
purposely teach them the skills and to give them the intellectual
apparatus to understand the past so that they are able to build powerful
interpretations of their own.
In the final section concerning the politics of historical
consciousness the book examines some practical examples of how the
relationship of academic historians and the shaping of collective memory
through state institutions actually works. Peter Novick looks at when
this relationship is a discordant one, such as when American veterans
lobbied for the cancellation of the Enola Gay exhibit at the
Smithsonian.
He gives another example when historians are divided amongst
themselves such as when Canadian veterans became incensed by the
Canadian Broadcasting Commission's revisionist docudramas on
Canada's role in the Second World War. In a similar vein Tony
Taylor offers a useful exposition from the viewpoint of an insider
directing the Australian National History Project and dealing with the
attitudes of politicians, academic historians and schoolteachers in the
process.
This book provides many entry points to the interested reader.
While the diverse material it covers makes it difficult to see it
entirely as an integrated work, the project has done well to bring so
many authors together, working as they do in the very problematic and
culturally specific domains that they are writing about.
TIM ALLENDER
University of Sydney
