[Assam] The Stuff of Which History is Made: A Brief Conversation with Carlo Ginzburg - The Hindu

[Ram Sarangapani]

Came across this in The Hindu. Great reading, and maybe netters may also
find it so.


http://www.hindu.com/nic/ginzburg-interview.htm
*The Stuff of Which History is Made:
A Brief Conversation with Carlo Ginzburg *

*Carlo Ginzburg* is one of the best-known historians working today, and his
work has been translated into many languages the world over. Born in Turin
in 1939, he was educated at the *Scuola Normale Superiore* in Pisa, where he
now teaches. He has also taught at the University of Bologna and was
Professor of History and Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance
Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) for an
extended period from 1988 to 2006. Professor Ginzburg is celebrated for
brilliant and methodologically innovative explorations into mentalities,
art-history, literature and social history. He is among the pioneers and
practitioners of the current known as "micro-history". His *The Cheese and
the Worms* (English translation: 1980) is an acknowledged classic. His other
writings available in English include *The Night Battles *(1983); *The
Enigma of Piero* (2000); *Clues, Myths and the Historical Method*
(1989); *Ecstasies:
Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath* (1991); *Wooden Eyes,* (1998); *The Judge
and the Historian* (1999); *History, Rhetoric, and Proof* (1999); and *No
Island is an Island* (2000). Here he responds to questions and remarks from
*Sanjay Subrahmanyam*, who is also Professor of History at UCLA. Professor
Ginzburg will visit India in December 2007 to deliver the first *Indian
Economic and Social History Review Lecture* at the India Habitat Centre in
New Delhi on the evening of 21 December 2007.



*S.S.*: Carlo, you come from a family of intellectuals and writers, in short
from a world where books and paintings must have been familiar to you from
your early years. Were you ever tempted to be a creative writer, a
film-maker or a painter rather than a historian? What do you think drew you
to history? Were there some particular intellectual influences, and can you
remember a time when you decided to take the turn to history in a definitive
way rather than something else ?


*C.G.*: I grew up surrounded by books; my mother was a novelist; my
childhood and youth coincided with the golden age of Italian cinema.
Predictably, as a teenager I toyed with the idea of writing fiction. I had
come across a remark by Cesare Zavattini, the script-writer of many Vittorio
De Sica's movies (including *Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D.* and so forth).
Zavattini described his own approach as based on a kind of "roommate
poetics" (*poetica del coinquilino*): that is participant-observation of a
kind. This programme impressed me. I was sixteen; I planned to write an
autobiographical novel based on myself and a few friends of mine, in which I
would have recorded events from a very close distance – in real time, or
nearly so. The main characters of the novel were my friend Giovanni Levi and
I. My silly project failed nearly immediately; I quarrelled with Giovanni
and we lost sight of each other for twenty years. In the mid-seventies we
met again and began to debate with other historians (most notably, Edoardo
Grendi) on a project we labelled "microhistory", which inspired a series of
publications, *Microstorie*, directed by Giovanni Levi and myself. The
British historian John Brewer once suggested that Italian microhistory might
have been related to Italian neorealist movies. As far as I am concerned, I
think he was not far from truth.

My involvement with painting was perhaps more serious; it lasted some years.
I was seventeen when I realized that I would have been a mediocre painter –
as well as, probably, an awful novelist. But retrospectively I think that
those two early failures shaped my later work as a historian. I enjoy
writing; I am fond of narrative experiments; I have been working for twenty
years on the competitive relationship between fiction and history. And I
have been dealing with images of different kind – from Piero della
Francesca's frescoes to Lord Kitchener's famous recruiting poster for the
First World War.

My decision to study history was the result of a double experience. On the
one hand, attending a seminar taught by Delio Cantimori, the great
historian, on Burckhardt's *Meditations on World History*; we read twenty
lines in a week – for me, this exposure to slow reading was a revelation. On
the other, reading Marc Bloch's *Les rois thaumaturges* (in English: *The
Royal Touch*). In a more implicit way I realize that I was walking in the
shadow of my father, Leone Ginzburg: a philologist, historian, and literary
critic. He died in a Nazi jail in Rome when he was thirty-five.



*S.S:* As your last remark suggests, you grew up in Italy in part during the
Second World War, a terrible and tragic time both in general and for you
personally. Since 1945, though things have been far more peaceful, still it
has been really quite turbulent in Italy, in the sixties, seventies and even
thereafter. You have both witnessed and even participated in some of these
political movements; and I was told that for some time there was even an
armoured car regularly posted in front of your apartment block in Bologna as
part of the repression of student movements. In what concrete ways have
these political struggles and movements affected you as an historian? Or do
you try to the extent possible to maintain a distance from them when you
write as an historian?


*C.G.*: I never became a militant, although the leftist movements of the
sixties and seventies had a considerable impact on me, both personally and
professionally. A book like *The Cheese and the Worms *(Italian version:
1976) and an essay like "Clues" (1979) emerged within that political
atmosphere. (They have been my most successful works; whether they are also
the best, I don't know). Clearly, there has been a link: but how did it
work? The answer is not obvious – at least, not for me. First of all, my
response to 1968 as well as to the political movements of the seventies was
framed by a previous layer of experience: I belong to a generation marked
above all by the Second World War, and not to the '68 generation. Some of
the main themes of *The Cheese and the Worms* – the challenge to authority,
the persecution of minorities – are to a large extent a development of my
first book (*The Night Battles*, 1966) which was also based on Inquisition
trials and dealt with the persecution of religious minorities (as I realized
many years ago, recollections of having been persecuted as a Jew during the
Second World War presumably played an important role in my approach to
history). More specifically resonant with the leftist movements of the
sixties and seventies was a critical attitude towards the alleged neutrality
of scientific knowledge which (among other things) inspired my essay
"Clues". But I had no sympathy either for the rejection of knowledge as a
mere appendix of power, or for the more circumscribed rejection of
positivism. The triad I started from in "Clues" – Giovanni Morelli, Sigmund
Freud, and Sherlock Holmes – implied homage to a tradition based on critical
positivism, which ultimately goes back to the Enlightenment. To this
tradition I do feel deeply indebted.


*S.S.*: You have spent a good deal of time in the United States in the last
twenty years. The relationship between the university campuses and society
at large is quite different there compared to Italy. Some people also
complain that when compared to Europe, the public culture of the US is
deeply anti-intellectual. Is that your experience? Can a voice from the
campus, even a prestigious one, make a difference in the larger public
sphere in the US as it could have once in Europe? Or is this supposed
difference just an illusion on the part of some Europeans?


*C.G.*: I agree with you: there is indeed a difference. Anti-intellectualism
is stronger in the US; in Europe, following a tradition which began in
France, intellectuals are by definition considered as individuals committed
to public matters. In the United States this is not the case, except for *
public* intellectuals (an expression which to my knowledge does not exist in
Europe); academics are not considered intellectuals *per se*. Such
linguistic detail is certainly significant, but to oppose Europe and the US
baldly on this ground would be simplistic. After all, the most impressive
example of a public intellectual who is also a specialist in his own
discipline (which he profoundly transformed) comes from the US: namely Noam
Chomsky.


*S.S.*: As you've remarked already, one of the three or four great themes
that run through your work is an interest in persecuted groups and
individuals, and the reader senses that there is a strong ethical drive at
work. Yet you are constantly aware that one should not turn history into a
simple exercise in ideological production. Would you care to reflect on
this? In this context, who are the historians you have most admired whose
ideological presuppositions you most *disagree* with?


*C.G.*: Historical knowledge is by definition, as it has been said, a
located knowledge, but one should try to avoid preaching (an attitude I
detest in all its versions: religious, ideological and so forth). Historians
must be involved in a constant, contentious dialogue with their own internal
devil's advocate. To raise serious objections against oneself is not an easy
endeavour (to be self-indulgent is tempting); but there is no alternative. I
started working on the victims of the Inquisition; only later I realized how
deeply my own cognitive approach had been shaped by the inquisitors' (I
tried to unfold the implications of this disturbing contiguity in an essay
entitled "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist").

To my surprise, I am unable to answer your second question and to provide
names of historians I admire whose ideological presuppositions I most
disagree with. Am I so parochial? In fact, the first name who came to my
mind is Joseph de Maistre, who was not a historian. [C.G. refers here to
Maistre [1753-1821], a conservative and anti-revolutionary thinker who has
sometimes been compared to Edmund Burke]. I feel in trouble – you put
forward your question as a real devil's advocate.


*S.S.:* You have a strong interest in a kind of intellectual history, and
your recent work on Hobbes is an example of this. However, you do not want
this to be a rarefied exercise, and you have written that "to understand the
present we must learn to look at it obliquely". What can reading a
seventeenth-century author, even one as important as Hobbes, tell us about
the present? Is it because he is summoned up as an ideological ancestor even
for present-day actors?


*C.G.*: Hobbes has indeed been invoked as an ideological ancestor; but
perhaps this is not his most interesting link with the present. Other
possibilities point to the crucial distinction between questions and
answers. Many people (including some historians) usually try to find in the
past answers to questions raised by the present. But trying to understand
the questions raised by the past is often more rewarding. We are dealing
with dead individuals who did not write for us, did not think for us, did
not live for us; they couldn't care less about us obviously. We have to
learn their language, and listen for their voices. But inevitably we also
have our agenda; we have our own questions, raised by the world we live in.
This asymmetry between past and present (an asymmetry which is the result of
a construction, not a given) generates the possibility of the oblique
approach to the present I spoke about.


*S.S.:* French and German intellectuals are often known to complain about
how the hegemony of the English language has reduced their autonomy and
margin for manoeuvre in the last half-century. Your mother tongue is
Italian, though you have some Russophone ancestors. In the last some years,
you even write directly in English sometimes. You certainly lecture in that
language quite regularly. What is your feeling about the place of English in
the world of intellectuals today?


*C.G*.: I would recall the distinction which has been articulated in Roman
law between two levels, *de jure* (in principle) and *de facto* (in the real
world). In principle, any language has an equal right to exist; in the real
world, some languages are more equal than others. Bilingualism (or
tri-lingualism and so forth) is a good, although insufficient remedy to
cultural and linguistic hegemony. But equality (in principle) does not
prevent comparison, and even aesthetic comparison. For a long time, from the
time I started learning English, I have regarded the English language, and
especially English syntax, as a model for conveying the results of
scientific inquiry in any language – including in my mother tongue, Italian.
There are splendid, deservedly famous examples of Italian scientific prose:
from Machiavelli to Galileo, from Antonio Gramsci to Giorgio Pasquali, the
philologist. But they are very idiosyncratic. English is a more accessible
model.


*S.S.*: You are often associated with the current known as "micro-history",
which as you recalled in an earlier response emerged out of discussions with
Edoardo Grendi, Giovanni Levi and others. At the same time, your reading
ranges far and wide and you have written about all kinds of societies and
not just those of Western Europe. Is there any contradiction in your view
between "micro-history" and "world-history"?


*C.G*.: No, there isn't. I consider microhistory as an intrinsically
comparative approach (although the comparison may be also implicit) whose
ultimate goal is to open up the possibility for better generalizations. For
the same reason, world-history cannot ignore microhistory. As Siegfried
Kracauer argued in his posthumous book, *History: The Last Things before the
Last*,* *to* *assume that reality is homogeneous would be a self-defeating
move. If you start from the opposite assumption – that is, that reality is
heterogeneous and full of discontinuities – generalizations become more
difficult, and the need for analytic case-studies more urgent. I imagine
that all this may inspire new forms of writing about world-history.


*S.S.*: You have written quite extensively about your objections to a kind
of relativism, where history is treated as just a form of rhetoric. Some
have even elevated this view to an ethical and political stance. Do you
believe that this was just a passing fad which has now lost ground? Or do
you see this as a real problem even today amongst intellectuals in both the
West and non-West?


*C.G*.: The argument put forward by the neo-sceptics is clear: since
historical writing is just a form of rhetoric, there is no clear boundary
between history and fiction. But as soon as I began to reflect on these
issues I realized that already in Aristotle's *Rhetoric* (the most ancient
and authoritative treatise in this domain) there is a detailed discussion of
proofs, which are considered a fundamental part of rhetoric. Therefore, in
my book *History, Rhetoric, and Proof* (1999), I opposed ancient to modern
rhetoric, Aristotle to Nietzsche (and Nietzsche's followers). The long-term
impact of ancient rhetoric based on proofs was considerable. Lorenzo Valla,
the fifteenth-century Italian humanist, used Quintilian's reworking of
Aristotle's rhetoric to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine, which
bequeathed one-third of the Roman Empire to the Church, was a medieval
forgery. Valla's intellectual tools are still part of the historian's craft.
To argue that truth and proofs have no place in historical writing seems to
me fatuous and irresponsible. Is this fad losing ground? Perhaps – although
I feel that I must be cautious, having said this now for fifteen years.
There are many reasons – cultural, psychological, political – which may
explain this resilience. To stress our own power to manipulate reality, to
the point of ignoring it, has an undeniable narcissistic appeal.


*S.S.*: I was in the audience for one of your talks when an American
historian (I think it was our UCLA colleague Russell Jacoby) turned to me
and said in a tone of surprise (reacting to your response to a question that
had been posed): "So I see that he's still a Marxist!" Is that a definition
that means anything to you? Or would you respond that any intellectual in
your generation worth his salt should bear some traces of Marxist influence?


*C.G*. "*Je ne suis pas marxiste*", "I am not a Marxist": Marx once famously
said (a quip later reworked by his namesake, Groucho). Once again, we are
confronted with the distinction between questions and answers. Marx's
answers seem sometimes unsatisfactory, but the questions he raised are very
much alive and challenging. In a book I am currently writing I would like to
address the issue which Marx articulated in his youth in terms of a
relationship between base and superstructure. I am not convinced by Marx's
answer (or even by the metaphor he used): but the question is still there.


*S.S*.: You have often made comparisons and drawn contrasts between academic
investigation, and figures from the field of law and legal authority: the
inquisitor, the judge, the detective. But in regard to how one deploys
evidence, you stated once to me (in an email exchange about Natalie Davis
and her work) that some forms of demonstration are "enough for a policeman;
not for an historian, for whom the individual is the result of the
interaction between individual and non-individual elements". What, for you,
is the key difference between the techniques of a detective and those of a
historian?


*C.G*.: Historians are interested in a wider range of agencies, which
include not only individuals but collective entities as well (states,
political and religious groups, and so forth). Detectives usually focus on
individuals, especially if their inquiry is performed within a legal
perspective: individuals alone can usually be put on trial. Moreover, both
detectives and judges don't care about what we can term non-existent events,
which on the contrary can be rewarding and revealing for historians. One of
the masterpieces of twentieth-century historical writing which I already
mentioned, Marc Bloch's *The Royal Touch*, deals precisely with one of those
non-existent events: the healing of scrofula (an illness affecting the
glands of the neck) allegedly performed by legitimate French and English
kings. To put it simply: dreams, fantasies, and delusions are legally
irrelevant. But dreams, fantasies, and delusions are a large part of the
stuff of which history is made.


*S.S*.: You have a complex relationship to structuralism, which you seem to
have some affection for and also some discomfort with. You have also been
critical of a certain number of more-or-less "structuralist" authors of a
certain generation such as Georges Dumézil and more recently Mircea Eliade.
Do you think that this is a matter of their individual trajectories rather
than their collective method? Would you still hold to the idea that
structuralism and history can be comfortably reconciled?


*C.G*.: Structuralism has been used sometimes as an umbrella concept, too
widely in my view. Georges Dumézil actually felt uncomfortable when he was
occasionally associated with structuralism; Mircea Eliade was actually
utterly foreign to it. As far as I am concerned, structuralism is basically
synonymous with Claude Lévi-Strauss's work, whose rigorous anti-historical
approach I have found extremely challenging. In my long inquiry into the
Witches' Sabbath stereotype which I finally turned into a book (*Ecstasies,
*1989), Lévi-Strauss worked as a devil's advocate of a sort. In that book I
tried to reconcile history and morphology – a wider concept which referred,
besides Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, to the work of Vladimir Propp, the
great Russian folklorist, and to other scholars from different disciplines.
But reconciliation was only the ultimate goal. I first tried to assemble a
vast amount of data on the basis of formal resemblances, disregarding any
historical connection. An attempt to find a historical explanation came
afterwards. I am convinced that a provisional commitment to an
anti-historical perspective like morphology can be extremely fruitful for
historians. But very few historians (if any) agree on this.


*S.S.*: A final question. This will be your second visit to India, in
December 2007. It seems from our earlier conversations that you clearly have
very happy memories of your earlier visit. Leaving aside history and
historians, is there any part of modern Indian cultural production – art,
cinema, literature etc – that has particularly touched you or interested
you?


*C.G.*: I would immediately think of Satyajit Ray's movies. I had missed
them in the sixties and seventies; I discovered them in the early nineties.
Seeing *Devi* and *The Music Room *(*Jalsaghar*) have evoked feelings that
have been among the deepest emotions of my life as a moviegoer. (A short
life, as it happens: my love-affair with movies ended in the late seventies;
Satyajit Ray was a lucky, extraordinary exception to this rule). In watching
those movies I experienced a feeling I often had during my visit to India: a
sense simultaneously of emotional closeness and cultural distance. Ray's
characters also seem deceptively transparent but ultimately inscrutable to
me.


*S.S.:* Carlo, thank you for taking this time to answer all these questions
in such a thoughtful way.


Thank you.

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