Academia: The Sources of Presentism in Historical Study (Hint: Money)

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

From reading social media, I can see that folks are building up a big head of steam, appropriately, behind a massed critique of James Sweet’s Presidential address to the American Historical Association, which complains of a troubling turn to “presentism” among historians and among people producing representations of history.

I share many of the criticisms that I am seeing from other scholars. The entire middle of the address frankly just seems muddled to me, and focusing on scholars of color as well as Black Americans on heritage tours in West Africa just seems like a misfired and misdirected choice in terms of laying the blame for presentism as he perceives it. (Or even just illustrating what he is concerned by.) Though it’s not a new choice either, and for a historian complaining of presentism, it’s rather ironically presentist for Sweet to see his complaint as relatively recent and new—in many ways his address reads like a reprise of the complaints that historians like Arthur Schlesinger had about the rise of “identity politics” and their impact on historical study.

However, here I want to narrowly focus on a different, specific issue, partly because I can see already that many other scholars active in public culture and social media are going to ably address the major issues with Sweet’s address. The issue that I suspect may be a bit more overlooked is that Sweet, like a number of academics who have worried lately in public about the erosion of disciplinary and scholarly norms (such as Steven Mintz) focuses on what he perceives as attitudinal and cultural shifts in professional practice while not addressing far more potent transformations in the basic institutional infrastructures underneath those practices.

In Sweet’s case, he quite rightly points out that the distribution of fields studied by historians completing Ph.Ds in the last decade has shifted markedly towards more recent times. My reading of his address is that he believes this to be a political and cultural transformation in the outlook of the newly trained historians and a response to a corresponding shift in the demands of their publics (students, readers, popular culture, political activists), who situate ‘relevance’ in the present day.

The simple thing that I think he might focus on instead (especially in a position of leadership in a professional association) is that the older the period of history that you study is, the harder it is to study it in purely financial terms, both in terms of the finances of the individual scholar and the finances of research-supporting institutions. And the institutions increasingly simply don’t provide the depth of financial support that they once did for such work, to the point that some periods and places have gone from being technically challenging to nearly impossible to do doctoral study on.

Take my field, broadly speaking. If you work on any region of sub-Saharan Africa prior to 1800, you will certainly need reading fluency in at least two, more likely three or four, languages to make a serious go of almost any project. Imagine, for example, that you want to follow on recent studies by Toby Green, Michael Gomez and other historians and work on Mande-speaking polities from Atlantic Africa between the Senegal River around to the Bandama River or so and then inland to the Upper Niger between about 1500 and 1700. You really ought to be trained in Arabic and Portuguese at a minimum, and at least one Mande language. For the end of that period, other European languages would also be important. And we’re talking the kind of Arabic and Portuguese that require paleographic training. And where are your archives? Well, there’s some Arabic materials that are still horribly under-consulted in Mali and elsewhere. There’s the material held in the Portuguese National Archives. There’s material scattered across a series of European archives.

Are you independently wealthy? No? Then even an intensely limited and highly focused study in this field is going to cost somebody a lot more money than it would cost to do a doctoral project on early independent Nigeria in the 1960s. And even that’s not cheap compared to the cost of doing work on Boston in the 1960s. Do most universities recognize that this kind of work is worth supporting in the way that they perhaps used to? Mostly not. Remember it’s not just finding a way to give way more money to that doctoral candidate than you give to others, in recognition of the cost that expertise but also its importance. It’s that you have to support all the people who have the knowledge to train the candidate in the specific skills they require. Paleography is not something you pick up on from a YouTube video, and self-teaching yourself Mandinka or Wolof or Krio only works if you’re an instinctive polyglot.

That kind of work has a cost in time, too: any doctoral project (or later project) that is a multi-archive, multi-nation study simply takes more time to complete, and not just because of travel alone. Every country you have to work in has its own distinctive process for clearing researchers, every archive has its own procedures that can at times take weeks or months to navigate.

In many premodern fields, you also really need archaeological studies as a support structure in order to craft the kinds of new interpretations of history that are more or less necessary for you to make your mark and get hired as a junior faculty member. But in some parts of the world, both national and international institutions have never undertaken archaeological inquiries despite the need for that work. In some places, they’ve stopped doing it because it’s become dangerous or because it’s technically difficult. So much of what you need to succeed in many fields of premodern inquiry has dried up, gone away, contracted. No one is paying for it.

And should you decide, stubbornly, that you’re going to go into deeper debt than all the other indebted doctoral students and you’re going to go to one of the two or three universities in the world where what you want to do is even possible, you will find at the other end that in a profession that is already bleeding jobs, your field has bled right out. And it’s not “presentism” as an attitude that’s primarily responsible, it’s that there are so few people in many of these fields because all the support structures have dried up. But the consequence is that in many smaller and medium-size departments, you would apply for a job and be read by colleagues who have very little professional insight into the field you work on and would feel at best tentative in trying to evaluate the originality or distinctiveness of what you do. You would have to do all the work of bridging to them—a problem not unique to premodern-focused historians, mind you.

So this isn’t politics and it’s not culture and it’s not attitudes. The answer here is “show me the Benjamins”. When higher education doesn’t invest in an intrinsically difficult field and it doesn’t recognize the field is expensive, most prospective candidates don’t choose it. One or two generations of that happening and you no longer have anybody available to train the people who might choose it anyway. Nobody would study particle physics, however important a physicist might deem it intellectually, if every doctoral candidate in the field was expected to have a million dollars of their own money available at the entry point to even access the experimental apparatus they needed to produce doctoral-quality research.

Image credit: Photo by Celyn Kang on Unsplash