Category: Broadly Speaking: A Companion Interview

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Nuala P. Caomhánach is a doctoral student in the Department of History at New York University and evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on the concept, meaning, and construction of biological Time and Space across three bodies of scientific knowledge—Ecological, Malagasy, and Phylogenetic—as applied to conservation ideology and policy from the late nineteenth century to present day. In short, her dissertation aims to understand how Madagascar became the botanical museum to save all of nature (and thus, humankind).

Edited by: Tom Furse

Featured Image: Ludwig von Mises in his later years. Creative Commons.

Stefania Tutino is a professor in the Department of History at UCLA. Her work focuses on the cultural and intellectual history of post-Reformation Catholicism. Her most recent book was A Fake Saint and the True Church: The Story of a Forgery in Seventeenth-Century Naples (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her next book is The Many Faces of “Credulitas,” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

She spoke to contributing editor Glauco Schettini about her essay, “The Mystery of Mount Vesuvius’s Crosses: Belief, Credulity, and Credibility in Post-Reformation Catholicism,” in JHI (83.2).

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Glauco Schettini: Your article takes us to mid-seventeenth-century Naples and makes us witness a seemingly inexplicable event. In the aftermath of an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, black and red crosses began to appear on people’s linens, clothes, and bodies. As rumors about the divine origin of such apparitions spread uncontrolled, Catholic ecclesiastical authorities decided to launch an investigation into their nature. Would you like to summarize the unfolding and the outcomes of this investigation for our readers, as well as its broader meaning?

Stefania Tutino: My investigation uncovered a range of responses at all levels of society, from the most ominous interpretations of the crosses as a sign of God’s wrath foreboding ever more tragic catastrophes, to explanations based entirely on volcanic science and chemical processes. What I found especially interesting is that we do not see theologians or religious figures necessarily reaching for divine interpretations, on the one hand, and secular leaders or natural philosophers leaning toward more secular, “scientific” explanations on the other. Within the Catholic hierarchy, different people held widely divergent interpretations, and by the same token, some political leaders were at least as preoccupied by God’s wrath as their ecclesiastical counterparts. Another interesting aspect of this investigation is the sophistication of information-management systems, so to speak, or the propaganda machine set in motion by both the Roman Curia and the Neapolitan government. Yet another interesting layer in this story is the ways in which potentially supernatural events could become “politicized,” and—the other side of the coin—the fact that religion as an intellectual and cultural category encompassed a much broader set of questions than we might be accustomed to think.

As for the outcome, well, I am tempted not to reveal it and to invite the readers to find out for themselves! Suffice it to say that how the prodigy ended was just as mysterious as how it began. Yet even if at the end of the article readers might not be able to solve the mystery of the crosses, I hope they will feel they have acquired a more nuanced view of the world of post-Reformation Catholic culture.

GS: The story you tell was, as you write, a small but hardly insignificant episode in the history of early modern Europe. With a technique that is characteristic of microhistory, you employ this episode, with all its quirky details, to shed light on the religious culture of seventeenth-century Italy. More than ten years ago, Francesca Trivellato asked if there was a future for microhistory in the age of global history—a question she answered affirmatively. What do you think the future of microhistory looks like? And what can intellectual historians gain from adding a microhistorical approach to their toolkit?

ST: I personally think the future of microhistory looks great, even (and maybe especially) as our horizons get enlarged to a global scale. In this respect, not only do I agree with Francesca Trivellato, but I also think that her considerations on the future of microhistory are already proving true.

One of the features of microhistory that I find particularly important is its ability not to focus on the small for the sake of the small, but to focus on the small to the extent the small can tell us something deeper about the big. I am not a global historian, but the kind of global history I like to read is the kind that merges breadth with depth; that looks at connections and networks, and links, rather than juxtapose, different contexts in a kind of revival of old-school “comparative” history; the kind that poses specific problems in a new light rather than simply extending categories further into space; the kind that plays with scales and examines how specific issues change when we change the scope rather than the kind that simply takes the same unit of analysis and makes it wider by stretching it to cover more ground. For doing all these things, microhistory is a good aid, because few other approaches can teach us about how to make connections as well as microhistory does.

Another aspect of microhistory that makes it exceedingly useful is its intimate relationship with primary sources—nothing will make you more attuned to the need to squeeze sources to the last drop of meaning than the need to investigate a very small phenomenon! Microhistory has a privileged relationship with narrative, not in the sense that microhistorical accounts are narratives (all kinds of history-writing are narratives, not just microhistories!), but in the sense that adopting a microhistorical approach always requires that the historian reflect on the heuristic value of narrative. This is not just an important aspect of our profession, but also an exciting feature of being human and thus being able to use language in that way. Also, microhistory does not like generalizations, and in fact it is a good antidote to the impulse to try to make things neat and simple and one-size-fits-all, which I believe is always a good attitude when studying history. By its very nature, microhistory is inclusive and not methodologically imperialistic: it can live comfortably within a number of different paradigms and historiographical contexts. It offers no grand narrative of its own, but rather seeks to find what does not fit in any given trend or overarching trajectory. In this respect, I think that all historians, even those whose approach is completely different from that of microhistorians, could use a measure of the irreverence toward generalizations, curiosity for the quirk, attention to the discordant that is typical of microhistory.

GS: The story of the crosses reveals the complexity and the internal diversity of what you call “post-Reformation Catholicism.” Throughout the article, you avoid both the term “Counterreformation” and the phrase “Catholic Reform,” which historians have most frequently used to define the multifaceted world of early modern Catholicism. As John O’Malley has reminded us in a book that is now a classic, these terms were forged in the heat of disputes that were academic and confessional at once; they were not just neutral descriptors of historical processes, but also implied a value judgment. Your decision not to use them looks like a way to set aside old debates in order to break new ground. How can thinking in terms of “post-Reformation Catholicism” transform our understanding of the early modern Catholic world?

ST: First of all, I believe that John O’Malley’s discussion of these issues is a classic for a reason: it provides what is in many ways a definitive explanation of both the nature of those terms and their implications. I also wholeheartedly agree with him about the terms “Counterreformation” and “Catholic Reform.” I personally never liked them not simply for all the reasons O’Malley lays down, which you briefly outlined, but also because they never meant much to me. I became a historian of post-Reformation Catholicism at a moment in which the sort of ideological, theological, and even confessional contexts out of which those terms originated were not just criticized, but in fact had started to become insignificant. What I mean to say is that the kind of history of Catholicism which I studied and was academically raised on, so to speak, had already moved away from the history of theology on the one hand, and traditional “ecclesiastical history” on the other, and had advanced toward the much more capacious realm of “religious” history. Thus, for somebody like me, born in 1977, using terms such as “Counterreformation” and “Catholic Reform” seems not just reductive, but also in a sense meaningless. For all these personal and historical reasons, I do think that O’Malley’s definition of “early modern Catholicism” is infinitely more effective at capturing the richness of this kind of history than the traditional alternatives.

You are right, though, that I tend to use “post-Reformation Catholicism” more than “early modern Catholicism,” and this is intentional. I have been starting to notice that in this (otherwise welcome and correct) move to progressively enlarge the range of the phenomena we associate with “early modern Catholicism,” sometimes we are going too far. As I said, I think it is good that we no longer reduce the history of early modern Catholicism to theology, but sometimes we tend to forget that theology mattered quite a bit. The Reformation was an important moment in the history of early modern Europe, and this theological conflict did change the history of the Catholic Church profoundly. The nature and implications of this change went well beyond the realm of theology, but without understanding the theological terms of the conflict, we risk not understanding anything else properly. I like to use the term “post-Reformation Catholicism” as a sign of respect, if you will, for the historical importance of theology, and as a reminder to myself never to lose sight of the vivacity and richness of early modern theology (in conversation with, not in lieu of, early modern religion).

GS: By reconsidering the relationship between credibility and credulity, your article exhorts us to problematize our understanding of belief. In line with the work of historians such as Ethan Shagan, who are trying to show how the very nature of belief changed through history, you suggest that we take early modern belief on its own terms, setting aside contemporary ideas about the proper relationship between belief and rational knowledge. What role do these issues play in your forthcoming book, The Many Faces of Credulitas? And what do they teach us about contemporary notions of belief?

ST: These issues are indeed at the core of my forthcoming book, which is an examination of some aspects of the category of belief in post-Reformation Catholicism. In that book, I make the argument that judgment and credibility became progressively central in the Catholic theological and religious discourse after the Reformation, and I explore the consequences of that centrality for the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Catholicism.

More generally, reflecting on the question of belief in both the early modern and modern contexts, I think that the prevalent view remains one that sees the Enlightenment as a crucial moment of fracture separating the early modern notion of belief (which is confessional, dogmatic, and, save for a few exceptions, intolerant) from the modern one (which is based on the modern secular individual’s freedom to exercise her reason and thus to retain the right to believe in anything she chooses). I see things a bit differently. To begin with, when I look around in the world, I don’t see that pure reason has exactly triumphed. To the contrary, rather large pockets of credulity and unreasonable beliefs continue to exist even in the Western world, the venue in which the modern secular individual is supposed to thrive. And while of course some of those beliefs are dangerous to our society (and quite literally to the health of our communities!) and require serious reflection, others are simply the manifestation of being human as opposed to perfectly functioning computers. But aside from the state of belief today, I am a scholar of early modern Europe, and from my vantage point I see that the Enlightenment view of the progressive triumph of free secular reason is not a correct standard on which to judge early modernity. In fact, as a historian I believe that the Enlightenment itself needs to be taken as a precise historical moment rather than a kind of Hegelian description of how history inevitably unfolds, and that its complexities need to be explored, not denied. In the book, then, I look at early modern belief not from the point of view of the present, trying to establish how much or how little early modern notions of judgment and credibility measure up to modern ideas. Instead, I examine these phenomena from behind, as it were, as distinctive historical developments of a specific theological, intellectual, and historical tradition, in which, I argue, the tension between faith and judgment, authority and autonomy, belief and knowledge had always been at the center of the debate. In both my forthcoming book and this article, I recover a bit of the vibrancy and richness of pre-modern debates over these questions.

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Glauco Schettini is a PhD candidate in history at Fordham University, New York. His research centers on religion and politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic world. His dissertation, titled “The Invention of Catholicism: A Global Intellectual History of the Catholic Counterrevolution, 1780s-1840s,” investigates how European and Latin American counterrevolutionary thinkers reinvented Catholicism during the Age of Revolutions.

Edited by Tom Furse

Featured Image: Domenico Gargiulo, L’eruzione del Vesuvio del 1631 (1656-1660)

Isaac Nakhimovsky is an historian of political thought with interests in Europe since the 17th century, and the historiography of international law and political economy. He is the author of The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, 2011). He also has contributed to an edition of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (Hackett, 2013), and in two volumes of essays on eighteenth-century political thought and its post-revolutionary legacies: Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2017), and Markets, Morals, Politics: Jealousy of Trade and the History of Political Thought (Harvard, 2018). His forthcoming book is The Most Liberal of All Ideas: The Political Thought of the Holy Alliance.

He spoke with primary editor Tom Furse about his essay “Georg Lukács and Revolutionary Realpolitik, 1918–19: An Essay on Ethical Action, Historical Judgment, and the History of Political Thought,” which appeared in the JHI (83.1).

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Tom Furse: The First World War hangs over, in one way or another, Georg Lukács, Max Weber (“Politics as a Vocation”), Ernst Bloch (Spirit of Utopia), and Friedrich Meinecke, (The Idea of Reason of State in Modern History). At one point you argue that Lukács perceived the war in apocalyptic terms in his book, The Theory of the Novel (1916). Did you find that Lukács’s experience of the latter years of the war in the Central Powers led him to connect war and revolution?

Isaac Nakhimovsky: Georg Lukács ended The Theory of the Novel by drawing a parallel to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s description, a century earlier, of the Napoleonic wars as an “age of absolute sinfulness”: the question was whether a new age of renewal would follow or whether that would remain an empty utopian hope. That historical frame of reference, and the question it raised, were particularly interesting to me, as someone who had, perhaps oddly, come to Lukács via Fichte rather than the other way around. They also seemed particularly evocative in the winter of 2016-17, which is when I suddenly found myself rereading Lukács’s essays “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” and “Tactics and Ethics” with some urgency. These essays, which were published only a couple of months apart in the winter of 1918-19, come to opposite conclusions: the first rejects Bolshevism, the second endorses it.

The question that is usually asked of them—including, retrospectively, by Lukács himself—is, how was it that Lukács became a Marxist? How did he “convert” from his self-styled “romantic anti-capitalism” to Bolshevism? In fact, it was a different question that had originally prompted those essays, namely the question articulated by the editor who published “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” (who happened to be Karl Polanyi): was the war a revolution, or not? Was it just another power struggle, with one form of domination and oppression succeeding another, or an opening for transformative change leading to democracy and peace? From this perspective, what made Lukács’s pair of essays so interesting was that despite their opposing conclusions, they shared a conceptual framework for how to approach such questions.

In both essays, Lukács insisted that there were unavoidable ethical consequences for any individual’s answer to the question of how to conceptualize a particular historical moment: for instance, whether it was a war or a revolution, just another transition of power or a point of no return. This approach to ethical action, which Lukács and his contemporaries associated with Fichte, was distinct both from Kantian reductivism (which risked obviating the need for any historical understanding as a guide for political action) and Hegelian historicism (which risked devolving into an exercise in rationalization or self-legitimation). In this view, Fichte was not a romantic idealist but a theorist of historical contingency, who insisted that ethical action always entailed not only a judgment of ethical principle but also a historical judgment of “how much of what is right can be carried out under the given conditions.”

TF: Like many intellectuals in Europe who joined far-left or far-right parties after the war, Lukács eventually joined the Hungarian Communist Party. Many grappled with the ethics of revolution at this world-historical moment. Gustave Hervé transitioned from revolutionary syndicalism to nationalist chauvinism but maintained revolutionary violence as the ethical choice in face of bourgeois materialism. Hervé and Lukacs were both romantics of a sort, yet Lukács in his essay, “Tactics and Ethics” argues that the individual revolutionary had responsibility for action and inaction in those years 1918-1919. Hervé finds the ideal state at the end justified the means. Did Lukács find the Hungarian Communists’ revolutionary tactics ethically equivalent to Hervé’s thought of violence to achieve revolutionary change in society, or did Hervé’s politics render his revolutionary thought entirely unethical?

IN: Lukács’s conclusion in “Tactics and Ethics” was that one may not murder, but sometimes must (and he did go on to engage in revolutionary violence during the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic). The key context for Lukács’s thinking about means and ends in “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” and “Tactics and Ethics” is supplied by Max Weber, whose 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation” has become a canonical discussion of “political realism.”

Although the relationship between Lukács and Weber is well known, what surprisingly seems to have been overlooked are the close parallels between Lukács’s two essays and Weber’s contemporaneous lecture (delivered in January 1919, between the publication of Lukács’s essays, though not published until later). As I show in the article, both Weber and Lukács connected the problem of means and ends to the nineteenth-century idea of Realpolitik: though there’s no reason to assume that Lukács had encountered “Politics as a Vocation” before writing “Tactics and Ethics,” he was most likely familiar with an earlier essay that Weber had published in 1917, which defined “Realpolitik in the narrower sense” as “the adaptation of the means for attaining a given ultimate goal in a particular situation” (note the echo of Fichte). In that essay, Weber invoked both the revolutionary syndicalist and the patriotic soldier fighting to the death as illustrations of why the relationship between means and ends would always remain a matter of individual judgment and ethical responsibility.

From this perspective, Weber’s lecture and Lukács’s essays were parallel applications of this shared ethical framework in a moment of intense crisis. Weber had explicitly referred to Fichte in defining his “ethic of responsibility” as opposed to the “ethic of absolute ends” (responsibility for the consequences of using political power, as opposed to the application of pure moral conviction). Where the dramatic conclusion of Weber’s lecture restricted ethically responsible action to the institutional structure of the state, Lukács’s essays extended it to revolutionary politics outside (and against) the state. In other words, Lukács retained Weber’s earlier view that the revolutionary syndicalist was not necessarily acting irresponsibly out of moral conviction: instead, they could be making the judgment that, in Weber’s words, achieving “the art of the possible” required “striving to attain the possible that lies beyond it.”

The dramatic difference between Lukács’s two essays, then, is not explained by his conversion from romanticism to Bolshevism, or from a neo-Kantian to a Hegelian approach to political ethics. In the first essay, Lukács identified Bolshevism as an ethic of absolute ends; in the second essay, it was an ethic of responsibility. The difference is explained by a revised judgment about historical circumstances: a different answer to Fichte’s question “how much of what is right can be carried out under the given conditions.” In the first essay, the question was how to judge between democratic and undemocratic means for achieving democracy. In the second, the historical circumstances presented a much starker choice between socialism or barbarism.

TF: Notions of transition and transformation are important themes in the article. The first is the so-called transition of Georg Lukács’s political thought between his two essays “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” and “Tactics and Ethics” and the second is the transformative action of revolutionary opportunity to change the world. At one point, in reference to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa’s transformation into an insect, you argue that transformations are not necessarily short moments, but that ‘new’ traits might have seethed for a long time without any visual clue. Do you think that Lukács would have argued that Bolshevism had deeper roots in Hungarian society to it give a chance a transform Hungary into a social democratic society, or was Bolshevism entirely ‘new’ in the post-1918 world?

IN: The reference to Kafka came from an arresting piece by the novelist Aleksandar Hemon, called “Stop Making Sense, or How to Write in the Age of Trump,” which I happened to come across in January 2017 while I was also starting to reread Lukács. It found its way into my thinking about Lukács, and ended up staying there, because reading Lukács had also became an occasion for reflecting more broadly on the history of political thought:  a mode of inquiry whose nature and purpose it seemed necessary to reevaluate when confronted with a historical moment of uncertainty and potential systemic change. Ultimately, the article comes to the conclusion that “conversion narratives,” or any historiographical framework that makes it difficult to appreciate the contingency of historical categories, are more likely to inhibit than enhance the historical understanding that informs political judgment: they tend to obscure the existence of other historical possibilities, which in turn makes it harder to invent new political possibilities.

In Lukács’s case, the putatively ‘new’ trait is the ‘absolute sinfulness’ or ‘barbarism’ of 1919, not the Bolshevism that might or might not present an alternative to it. In that fraught moment, both Lukács and Weber reduced the scope of ethical action to a heroic choice for or against the state: in this way, the ethic of responsibility risks becoming the very kind of blinding ethical imperative that “political realism” is supposedly equipped to resist. In this regard, I came to think that the more skeptical spirit of Fichte’s approach to political ethics was less in evidence in Lukács and Weber’s highly charged interventions of 1919 than it was, decades later, in the political thought of Judith Shklar (whose engagement with Weber, partly via her Harvard teacher and colleague Carl Friedrich, is I think underappreciated).

Shklar’s essay on the “liberalism of fear” has also become a canonical text for “political realism,” but unlike many of her admirers she did not define her realism in direct opposition to Kantian ethics. Instead, like Fichte (who illustrated this particular point with the venerable case of two shipwrecked sailors clinging to a plank that could only support one of them), Shklar denied that an ethic of responsibility could guide action under conditions of necessity and war: conditions which both Fichte and Shklar defined as devoid of any value, save the value of exiting that condition as quickly and effectively as possible.

TF: Did Lenin and Trotsky’s War Communism economic model, even in its early years of 1918-19, change how Lukács saw Bolshevism and think of it as a potentially tragic failure?  

IN: Another important influence on my reading of Lukács and Weber was “The Allure of Dark Times: Max Weber, Politics, and the Crisis of Historicism,” which my former colleagues Stefan Eich and Adam Tooze published in 2017. Weber’s revealing mischaracterization of Trotsky’s position at Brest Litovsk, they maintain, is one indication that his fixed commitment to the state in “Politics as a Vocation” is not a product of sober political realism but an overwrought expression of a tragic fatalism. They develop this claim through a fascinating set of comparisons between Weber, the historian Friedrich Meinecke, and the theologian Ernst Troeltsch—but I was particularly drawn to their discussion of Meinecke, who has long interested me (partly because I think his interpretations of Fichte are wrong in an interesting way). According to Eich and Tooze, Meinecke was able to envisage new political possibilities (such as a supranational Europe) where Weber did not, because Meinecke’s historical perspective on political judgment made him receptive to the social capacity to create new values, which Weber’s rigid neo-Kantianism ruled out.

A different picture emerged by adding Lukács to this comparison between Meinecke (whom Lukács criticized for perverting Hegel into a theorist of Realpolitik) and Weber (whom Meinecke criticized as the Fichte of his time). It suggested that tragic fatalism was in fact an essential characteristic of Meinecke’s approach to historicizing political judgments. More fundamentally, it suggested that a greater receptivity to new political possibilities comes from a greater sensitivity to historical contingency, not an appreciation for the social construction of new values. This last point was, I think, made quite powerfully by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of ethical action in the face of the criminalization of German public life in the 1930s, when one socially generated system of values gave way to another. Under such conditions, Arendt warned, appeals to ethical responsibility too often served to mask accommodations to power (Realpolitik in the pejorative sense); and it was not responsibility but the independent exercise of judgment—an honest answer to the question “how much of what is right can be carried out under the given conditions”—that mattered, even in conditions where the answer was brutally reduced to the recognition of political impotence.

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Tom Furse is a PhD student at City, University in London. His dissertation is on how ideas in the social sciences and political economy influenced US military strategy. His interests lie in revolutionary politics, international relations and war.

Featured Image: Portrait of a young Georg Lukács in 1917. Public domain.

Isaiah Lorado Wilner is a historian of knowledge with interests in Indigenous studies and intellectual history. His research uncovers the interactions of nonstate and state knowledge systems, and he is now completing a book, developed from his dissertation at Yale, about the influence of Indigenous knowledge on modern thought. Wilner’s research has received recognitions including the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians, the Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Article Prize, the Modernist Studies Association Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection, and the Forum for History of Human Science Article Prize. He is the author of The Man Time Forgot (HarperCollins, 2006) and an editor of Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas (Yale, 2018).

Wilner spoke with contributing editor Nuala P. Caomhánach about his essay “Body Knowledge, Part I: Dance, Anthropology, and the Erasure of History,” which has appeared in the current issue of the JHI (83.1).

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Nuala P. Caomhánach: In your article, you trace the evolution of the Hamat̓sa dance and the “remarkable effusion of ideas in dance” of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw over the course of the nineteenth century (133). Your argument is multi-layered and extremely generative. First, by analyzing Indigenous knowledge systems—such as storytelling, potlatch, and the Hamat̓sa dance—you are encouraging the field of intellectual history to move beyond its reliance on textual (particularly state) sources. You argue that state and nonstate histories are not only “equal” and legitimate forms of knowledge/political systems, but that they are inextricably linked during this tumultuous period. Indeed, you ask the reader to consider the provocative question “who is civilizing whom?” and demonstrate the influence of Indigenous knowledge on modern thought (114). Second, the “political genius” of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw to adapt and survive in the increasing violence of a capitalistic system offers a direct challenge to the western/other and primitive/modern binaries. Lastly, the expressive dance of the Hamat̓sa not only impacted the development of modern anthropology but shared in the making of today’s global indigeneity. With reference to the scholarship on modernity and sovereignty, how can understanding the body knowledge of the indigenous cultures of the Northwest Coast of North America expand the field of intellectual history and contribute to debates on modern thought?

Isaiah Lorado Wilner: We are commonly taught that modernity flows in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” The history that I’ve traced in this essay reveals the flow of knowledge in the opposite direction, from nonstate people to the state. The evidence I present is the work of the Kwak’wala-speaking peoples to civilize the man who came to study them, converting Franz Boas to the principles of potlatch, which led Boas directly to the transformational insights with which he is associated today. The deconstruction of race and the rise of the modern concept of culture—major steps toward decolonial thinking—resulted from the influence of Indigenous thinkers, specifically the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, who inculcated Boas in a system of knowledge enacted by means of dance.

In the example of the civilization of Boas by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, we see evidence of a deep and profound Indigenous influence on modern thought. This influence has been erased from the state’s account but it remains legible in the primary sources created by the community. It opens up a question about the Indigenous influence on modernity. What ideas have Indigenous peoples contributed to the modern world? How have Indigenous peoples, as sovereign political communities, influenced global culture and politics? In what ways have Indigenous ideas been erased, obscured, appropriated, distorted, and denied? Where is this history of erasure recorded, and what might accessing it mean for the ways we live and think going forward? To read for the Indigenous influence on the making of modernity, I suggest that we need to change the way we research, turning to the historical archives created by Indigenous peoples themselves rather than relying on state sources.

Many of these archives are nontextual. In this article, I turn to the archive of dance, which is one way that humans document, interpret, tell, share, and create history. In the state we associate dance with art; it is studied as theater, choreography, performance. But dance has a politics, and in the living world it serves central political functions. Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw dance enacts right and title to territory, transmits knowledge, and institutes kinesthetic culture. By dancing, people create a body sovereignty that connects them to their history, to their family, to their lands and waters, and to neighbors, allies, and relations. All this was achieved by the Hamat̓sa dance.

A dimension of this experience that I explore in the essay is the role of dance as a memory capsule. Dance, containing the residue of history, carries a concentrate of experience through our bodies, and it is reworked over time by dancers who create theory through movement, reactivating and converting suppressed body knowledge. The concentrate of history is an active agent, stimulating the opening of intellectual passages. The knowledge that results is not just a record but a means of transforming the past. Intellectual actions conducted in dance are erased by the text but they are viral, spreading socially, and they may come to have wide resonance. As the dance moves from body to body, it transmits ideas through techniques of motion and posture, communicating ideas and transforming the collective sense of belonging. Changes merely suggested in speech can be enacted in dance, spreading social transformation. This body knowledge, once it has been cultivated kinesthetically, becomes a sovereign repository of shared stories and ethics which can be reactivated for social purposes each time the dance is performed and the memory capsule is ingested again. Dance, as a medium of instruction, can also be deployed as a teaching tool, and the stories conveyed through the activity of dance access memories that propagate ideas. The process of performing a dance that records a social history erased by the state is a process of flooding the memory with history, reopening access to insight.

There is in dance both a tenacity and a creativity that is metonymic of the motility of culture. This would have profound implications for Boas, who was transformed by his exposure to the body knowledge of potlatch. The experience of dance deeply influenced Boas’s concept of culture, which is a kinetic concept, envisioning how people create worlds together through interactive movement, building up in rhythm a grammar of motion that constantly transforms. This Indigenous influence was erased by anthropology, which colonized Indigenous knowledge as its domain, and suppressed from the history of ideas.

The first part of the essay that is appearing in this issue explores the history of political thought that it is possible to write when we study the ideas transmitted and archived in the records of dance. I show that if we want to achieve a history of all ideas in interaction rather than a history of state ideas, then we need to move beyond the history of speech acts, which is focused on the movement of mouths recorded in texts, to trace the ways people transmit knowledge by moving the whole body. The Hamat̓sa dance provides an important example of the kinds of knowledge that Indigenous peoples have not only kept alive but transmitted to Western thinkers which have been erased from the master narrative. The history I narrate in the piece makes Indigenous stories told in dance legible to intellectual history so that we can access a fuller knowledge that has been denied us by the state archive and the state story. When we access the diversity of ways in which knowledge is encoded, then we will have a history of ideas rather than a history of states.

In this history of ideas, the concept of modernity looks very different. Rather than imagining a Self/Other rupture of the new from the old, we see a Host–Guest relation: the old survives through the new and the new recharges the old. The Hamat̓sa dance was a new dance that came from outside the Kwak’wala-speaking community. But the arrival of that modernity did not diminish tradition; it recharged it. The Kwak’wala-speaking peoples used the dance to revitalize and unify their society, organizing to achieve survival in an era of radical threat to land, body and mind. In the shadow of smallpox, amid a rapid population collapse, and in the face of a Canadian legal assault that outlawed the potlatch, the Hamat̓sa dance became vital fugitive knowledge. It played a central role in the survival strategy of potlatch, cultivating a culture of belonging, a stance of resilience, and an organized political movement that enacted an ongoing sovereignty. By circulating the dance, some twenty peoples came together to create a network of reciprocal gift giving and intermarriage that converted violence to nonviolence, redistributed wealth, and produced a festival of resurgence—an annual winter ceremony that disseminated the origin stories connecting body and land which are the essence of survival. Because the Hamat̓sa and the older dances that it interacted with operated together as instruments of governance, politics and diplomacy, both the circulation of the dances themselves and the movements conveyed by the dances record a history of sovereignty and political ideation. The study of these sources allows us to see modernity in Indigenous rather than Western terms. We come to appreciate modernity not as simple rupture, a break with the past imposed by the state, but a process of reweaving the vibrant fabric of tradition.

NPC: You relied on three types of historical sources for your essay: texts written by George Hunt and collected by Franz Boas, the media archives that propagate the Hamat̓sa dance, and oral histories with Indigenous knowledge keepers. In reconstructing the political and intellectual history of the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, Heiltsuk, and Wuikinuxv you began to think about the back and forth between the archives and community as “deep conversation” (136). You use the texts of Hunt and Boas innovatively to show how, in the face of state erasure, Boas was used as a “viable host [body] of fugitive knowledge” for the documentation of indigenous knowledge (121). In what ways did this methodology enable a richer understanding of Indigenous intellectual knowledge? What were the advantages (or pitfalls) of “deep conversation”? Additionally, is your research (inadvertently perhaps?) a memory capsule itself, a demonstration of potlatch to the reader and the field?

ILW: We might think of a distinction between collection and recollection. Collection is based on extracting lively knowledge from the storyworld. Boas aimed to collect the stories because he assumed they were going to die out. But the community’s goal was recollection. It had developed the potlatch as a means of memory work—to keep the sovereign storyworld alive and propagate it into the future. When Boas arrived, the people extended the potlatch, making him into a host body of their ideas. Consciously or not, Boas became a carrier of Indigenous knowledge even as he also extracted it. Today, we are beginning to grapple with this contradictory legacy. Recollection is a process of reconnecting the extracted knowledge to the community that gives it voice, identity, and meaning. I work with Indigenous knowledge keepers who are my teachers and guides to the living system of knowledge. By studying with them, I gain insights that help me to read the textual archive, framing the questions I ask.

Deep conversation is about recollection. When a researcher conducts an oral history, that researcher usually arrives with a project in mind and questions to ask. With deep conversation, you are not looking for an answer to a question. You are working toward a deeper level of understanding that will eventually guide you to the right kinds of questions to think about. Community intellectuals and experts are my guides to the living storyworld, which frames the ethics and approach of my research. I did not arrive intending to research the Hamat̓sa dance. It was only after my immersion in the community that I saw its centrality and decided I needed to learn about it. Then, as a result of my conversations with Hamat̓sas, I began to understand the importance of the different motions and postures of the dance—how certain ways of moving communicate specific ideas. It was expressed to me that the knowledge is in the movement; it is carried by the motions of the body. But no one had ever studied that transit of knowledge carried by bodies from a historical perspective. As a result of deep conversation, my work became an attempt to understand the impact of ideas that circulate through body knowledge.

The work that we do as historians is a memory capsule of the time that we spent learning and working. Writing, like dance, reprocesses these movements and activities that we participate in only briefly during a moment in time. Writing is body knowledge. For me this article became a memory capsule of a phenomenal time that I shared with my teachers. My Hamat̓sa guides directed me to the knowledge that flows through motions and postures and also to the theme of what remains secret, what dancers refuse to share with those who come to observe them. This work with the community helped me to formulate my ideas about semiotic knowledge, which consists of legible signs, and nonsemiotic knowledge, composed of messages that are carried in code, can be interpreted only by their owners, and therefore cannot be extracted.

NPC: You note that the secondary literature is “so thoroughly prejudiced and inaccurate that the work cannot be relied upon for anything other than a study of Western stereotypes of Indigenous culture” (135). You ask researchers to be mindful of the harm they may cause to people and the earth in replicating these stereotypes and assert that “a line must be drawn” (135). Could you speak more about this “line,” and how we as historians can prevent the burden being placed on Indigenous peoples to reinforce this line, i.e. do the work to uphold it?

ILW: The stereotype I start with in the article, beginning with the picture of Franz Boas posing as a Hamat̓sa dancer, is the stereotype of Indigenous violence, a stereotype that guides Western representations of the Hamat̓sa dance. The stereotype obscures the actual history of state violence and the active role played by both the Hamat̓sa dance and the potlatch in converting violence to nonviolence. This is tied to a number of other erasures: the erasure of Indigenous politics under the generalized label of culture, which denies Indigenous sovereignty and self-governance; the erasure of autochthonous modernities, visions of modernity that differ from the state’s modernity; behind that, the stereotype that Natives are not modern—if they are modern, after all, then they can’t be Native, since the West defines modernity against indigeneity. Postcolonial theories of the denial of coevalness deny the agency of Indigenous peoples to influence modernity, and that denial is rooted in a failure to examine Indigenous sources.

The misrepresentation of the potlatch offers a case study of this erasure. Anthropologists who relied on secondary sources to construct social theory extracted a few passages from Boas to define the potlatch as “agonistic”: based on violence, rivalry, or antagonism. I have found that the corpus of unpublished primary sources constructed by George Hunt tells a different story. The potlatch should be called irenic rather than agonistic. It was and is cooperative, leading toward peace, conciliation, and cohesion. Yet the stereotypes continue to circulate. And despite the voluminousness of the potlatch literature, few historians have contributed to it.

The cause of this is that historians have not done their work. The discipline of history has not looked at Indigenous communities in the same way it has looked at other communities: by studying the sources constructed by the community itself. A representation has been created by another discipline, primarily anthropology, and that has been used as the governing principle to characterize Native societies. One solution to the problem is for historians to get to work. When we create an accurate picture of the past as a foundation, then a proper study from many different disciplinary perspectives can begin. We should place the primary sources, textual and nontextual, created by Indigenous peoples at the center of our investigation, supplemented by oral sources from communities. The archives created by Indigenous peoples and preserved via anthropology will be central to our work.

Today we are beginning to repatriate those sources to their owners through what is called digital repatriation, the return of digitized copies of documents from state repositories. This is an important step, but not the only step, toward repatriating all of the Indigenous knowledge to its owners and developing new relationships on a reciprocal rather than an extractive basis. It is possible for scholars to find practical ways to contribute to the decolonization of knowledge. We can begin by taking the study of knowledge beyond the limits of national concepts, giving serious attention to sovereign systems of self-governance like potlatch. There is a history of sovereignty that begins before the state and continues in interaction with it. The construction of any history that denies that sovereignty is false and must be revised. The history of ideas, in this hemisphere and worldwide, is built on ideas that deny the reality of the peoples and lands at its basis. This history is being remade as we speak, and over time it will be reinterpreted and rewritten.

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Nuala P. Caomhánach is a doctoral student in the Department of History at New York University and evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on the concept, meaning, and construction of biological Time and Space across three bodies of scientific knowledge—Ecological, Malagasy, and Phylogenetic—as applied to conservation ideology and policy from the late nineteenth century to present day. In short, her dissertation aims to understand how Madagascar became the botanical museum to save all of nature (and thus, humankind).

Featured Image: Frenzy. Franz Boas adopts the pose of a wild Hamat̓sa. Image no. MNH-8300, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.