Historiography is changing, and Marxism and the analog school have written history from a structural perspective. However, in recent years, new cultural history has emphasized individual experiences and everyday life, offering a new perspective on history through the lives of the people. New cultural history overcomes the limitations of existing historiography and presents a new direction in the narrative of history.
Historiography is changing. In the early days of historical research, simple chronological and biographical narratives were the norm, but over time, history has evolved into a discipline that analyzes increasingly complex structures and incorporates a variety of perspectives. Two schools of thought that have had a major impact on historiography since the modern era are Marxism and the Analytic School. Marxist historiography centers on economic structure and class struggle, focusing on economic factors and the role of the working class as the engine of historical change. Analytic historiography, on the other hand, takes a longer-term perspective, exploring changes in social structures and everyday life, emphasizing the structural context behind specific events. While these two schools adopted different perspectives on history and methods of narrative, they had in common the emphasis on “structure” in historical narratives. This approach was part of an effort to ensure that historiography was not simply a recounting of events, but an understanding of the underlying forces that drove them.
However, with the rise of deconstructivism, a trend toward deconstructing absolute standards or structures across societies, cultures, and disciplines, historiography began to change. Under the influence of deconstructivism, scholars began to focus on individuals, their micro-level experiences, and the diversity of voices rather than grand structures. The macro-structural frameworks of Marxism and the analytical schools had the limitation that ordinary people who actually existed in history were buried in the structure. This was especially true for the voices of the common people and minorities. The stories of individual lives were easily overlooked within the larger discourse, and this was an important gap in the historical narrative.
However, a new historiography that can overcome these limitations has recently emerged: New Cultural History. New cultural history focuses on human experience rather than structure, and is interested in how people perceived and understood social reality and gave meaning to it rather than how it was. This shows that individual experiences and perceptions can play an important role in the narrative of history. The New Cultural History saw that the everyday culture of the people was also a force that drove history, and while recognizing their historical value, it advocated looking at history not through revolutions and wars, monarchs and heroes, but through the trivial culture and everyday life of ordinary people. In this way, autopsy reports, clinical care cards, graffiti, and anything else that people have inscribed meaning into can be used as historical sources. This is such a revolutionary shift in thinking that it can be said to have deconstructed the existing historical research methodology.
Let’s take a look at an example of how New Cultural History recognizes history. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s book Cheese and Maggots is one of the most famous examples of New Cultural History. The book chronicles the life of a 16th-century miller in northern Italy named Menocchio. The author analyzes Menocchio’s daily life as recorded in 16th-century church documents, his statements during the Inquisition, and a list of his favorite books and their contents. Menocchio was executed for his heretical assertion that “the universe came into being spontaneously, just as cheese is made from milk and maggots crawl on cheese” in front of an ecclesiastical judge. Through careful examination of the documents, the authors show that Menocchio himself recognized this naturalistic view of the universe from his reading, and that his existence is an example of how the conventional notion of a popular culture passively mirroring the dominant culture is overturned. By recovering the knowledge and thought systems of the people that conventional historiography has overlooked, this approach emphasizes the fact that the people are not simply passive subjects who are influenced by the ruling class.
However, from the perspective of conventional historiography, one might question how a record of a one-off event that happened to an individual, such as “cheese and maggots,” can be representative of the group or society to which he belongs. This can be explained by adopting the concept of “exceptions to the norm” from neocultural historian Edgardo Grendi. First, exceptional individuals who are labeled as heretics by the ruling class, as in the case of Menochio, can reflect the culture of the subjugated against the ruling class and therefore have value as normal historical sources. Second, dominant groups distort the social reality of the subjugated to justify their authority, so records of the lives of the subjugated are bound to be exceptional and sparse. However, they are valuable as historical sources because they tell us a lot about the lives and thoughts of the subjugated. This is in line with what New Cultural History aims to do, which is to capture the diversity of voices and experiences rather than a universal, normative history.
As such, new cultural history is significant in that it opens up new horizons in historiography by restoring the personal histories of ordinary people and studying the lives of the people represented by them with new perspectives and methods. New cultural history is not just about discovering and studying new sources, but it has fundamentally changed the way we look at history. This is significant in that the study of history is no longer tied to a specific structure or ideology, but allows for a richer and more layered narrative through individual human experiences.
