Integrity and Historical Research by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland (eds.), New York/London: Routledge, 2012
Reviewed by María G. Navarro
Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland are the editors of a
work devoted to exploring in what sense integrity is a virtue relating to
historical research. The choice of this particular virtue is not casual. History
is obviously one of humanity’s most characteristic areas of research. The editors and authors of the eleven chapters
of Integrity and Historical Research begin
with the conviction that without a certain sense of history, and thus without
narratives about the social and personal world, all of us might be less human,
or even something completely different.
This book
does not merely justify and analyse this commonplace. Integrity can be defined
in many ways and applied to many things. Gibbons reminds of this when he states
“the word ‘integrity’ is used in many contexts, from the integrity of an
ecosystem or a database to the integrity of a person […] The ecosystem has
integrity when it is unpolluted and uncorrupted by factors alien to its
well-being and flourishing” (p.1). In each chapter the analogy between the
integrity of an ecosystem and of history becomes a metaphor, or indeed an
analogy to attribute new fields for investigation, new socio-political
responsibilities, and in a nutshell, new interstices to historical research.
All the
chapters in this book explore the relationship between integrity and historical
research in order to discover the meaning, purpose and impact of history in a
different horizon of understanding. One of the speculative and metaphorical
products of the association between integrity and history is that, as integrity
is a moral characteristic of an individual when he or she displays virtue
consistently over time, we can say that the integrity of an ecosystem is the
result of estimating the degree and nature of its incorruptibility over time.
This last
aspect is not just significant as an allegory or metaphor. The authors of this
volume affirm that historical research transforms the landscape (Nicholas
Brown, Rick Hosking, Angela Franks). History in general (not just the history
of eyewitness accounts or collective action, for example) corrupts our
geological ecosystems to the point of making them the backdrop to the cultural
and symbolic transformation of this particular form of research.
But history
does not just come from rocks; it is also part of the media education of
different nations, of our oral culture, and of our literary and film narratives
(María Reimóndez, Dave Mosler and Jessica Murrell, Juanita Feros Ruys, Jerome
de Groot, Patricia Duncker). The relationship between integrity and history
allows us to occupy the interstice between, on one hand, the visual and media
culture which produces stereotypes of the activity and profession of
historians, and on the other, the representations of time (present, past and
future) which historians produce for an audience, in a broad sense.
Occupying
these interstices is relevant, given that from this place we discover an
integrity which applies not only to landscapes, social groups (such as
historians), events, narratives, etc., but also to audiences, the politics of
memory, generations, novels or TV series (Catalina Botez, Emily Sutherland,
Jerome de Groot). Both the action of writing history and its effects
(political, geographical, on the landscape, on fiction, on the media) are
permeated by the question of what our integrity is and how far it reaches (Tony
Gibbons). The book is designed to approach each of these subjects, shining a
light on the effects of this integrity: literature, film, Australian
landscapes, oral narratives, eyewitness accounts, etc., form part of the
materials which challenge not only the authors of this book, but researchers
and readers in general. In a way, the fact that they are found in this book
responds to the need to approach in a defined way how this virtue affects our
action of understanding and writing history.
The
chapters are attractive from a literary point of view, easy to read and
enthusiastic, each with an individual approach, with the common feature of
providing an annotated bibliography on the subject. Perhaps the only objection
to raise is that there is no chapter dedicated to analysing the influence of
virtue epistemology on historical research in general, and the different
historiographic models in particular. This
hypothetical section would have been useful for understanding in what sense the
virtues of the social group formed by historians uses technology, argumentation
schemas and strategies, inferential models, heuristics, and perhaps, specific
cognitive biases in each era and current in historiography.
Finally, we
can say that this book, edited by Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland, is an
exhaustive and consistent compilation of the connection between Integrity and Historical Research. This
volume can be presented as a modern contribution to the question of how history
affects researchers in the human sciences, and how many research subjects
characteristic of the human sciences (occasionally) and unique to contemporary
society (in many other cases) should widen the goals of historical
research.
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