Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Michel Foucault, Michel-Rolph Trouillot , and James C. Scott are connected in theory by the issues of power, silence, and that which is hidden in discourse between “unequal” participants. Put them all together, and Edward Said’s Orientalism is the postmodernist result—and Clifford Geertz may be the solution to many of the challenges historians face in the twenty-first century when it comes to dissecting the past in an “objective” fashion. source: Wikipedia Foucault informed us all about power and its influence, while Trouillot observed the silences created by the struggles over power. Scott took those silences and examined what was hidden within them, while Said argued the perception of the “other”—based on assumed power and unrecognized ethnocentrism—actually was deeply inherent racism in Western intellectualism. Enter Geertz: By immersing in a culture (past or present) to the point of assimilation, then and only then can historians approach their goal of telling stories ...