Language Matters!

Scott’s critique of Marxist historians’ approach to gender history helped illuminate for me something that I think is missing from a Marxist approach to history overall.  That is, because Marxist historians attribute historical change or differences including, Scott argues, gender, to material concerns and “modes of production,” they ignore a whole swath of other factors of change.  For example, Scott argues that Marxist historians ignore all physical differences in their approach to gender, giving gender no independent status as a category of consideration.  Consider, for example, Thompson’s approach to gender in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18^th Century.”  In this article, Thompson discusses the role of women in bread riots at length.  However, he is considered almost entirely with their material needs and motivations, rather than their role as women particularly.  He ignores questions like, “How might have women viewed the opportunity to protest as a chance to gain previously inaccessible power outside the home?” and “How might physical differences between primarily male and primarily female crowds have contributed to the presence or absence of rioting?”

Rather, Scott argues that historians should look for processes of change, not single origins.  She argues that gender is a primary way of signaling relationships of power, and that to examine the power dynamics at play in the conceptualization of gender, historians must pay close attention to language as an indicator of the symbols, normativity, and subjective identity that comprise an understanding of gender.  This close attention to language, which probably was inspired by historians like Foucault (Scott references Foucault), still plays a prominent role in women’s studies today.  How we talk about gender matters.  That is, the language we use about gender, as is evident in Ditz’ “Shipwrecked,” not only signifies what we think about gender differences, but also helps to perpetuate constructs of gender  and the power relations underlying those constructs.

Prompt for week 10

Below are some questions to consider in writing your blog post this week.  And of course, you can just touch on one or a few, rather than answer them all.

1) What did you make of Ditz’s interpretation of primary sources?  Furthermore, how do you think his sources fit into Scott’s following questions, which were posed in Meyerowitz’s article:

“When (and how)…did the language of gender crucially structure experience and actually influence behavior and decision-making, and when did it simply add a convenient rhetorical flourish or embellish with a hollow cliché? When…did the language of gender constitute other relations of power, and when was it just a minor paragraph of a supplemental example within the narratives of social and political order?”  (1351)

2) Especially having read some works from Marxist historians now, did Scott’s reference to the relationship between Marxist historiography and gender history reshape your thinking on the latter?  What did you make of Scott’s critique of the relationship?  What is Scott’s definition of gender, and how does she use it to formulate her conceptions of gender history?

Hamilton: the musical

Hi all. 

I mentioned the Hamilton musical last night. More info here: http://www.hamiltonbroadway.com

If you have Amazon Prime, you should download the Amazon Music app. The original cast soundtrack is included in the Prime package. 

This musical finally uncovers many historical silences: we now know that Jefferson and Hamilton debated central bank funding and neutrality via rap battle. 

If you REALLY liked Cronon and it might be your Final topic...

This is another interesting piece of environmental history covering the same period and region.



Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500-1800 on JSTOR

Cronon - ecological / environmental, cultural, and ecomonic history.

  Both Bloch and Prescott seem to be concerned with land or geography as either a given (land / landlords), or as a backdrop to the setting of the exploits of Cortes in Mexico.  Neither Bloch nor Prescott had an inclination to look at things through an ecological lens.  As methods, interpretations, and conclusions change over time - historiographically speaking - along comes Cronon and his use of ecology as a lens to examine the cultural conflicts between two or more peoples occupying the same place, at the same time, and the ecological transformation that takes place.  Cronon refutes the "improvement" theory of the English system of agriculture and husbandry that one could see Prescott embracing.  As a result Cronon is concerned about ecolology and the environment in a way Bloch and Prescott seemingly are not.  And, although Cronon recognizes the environment as an independent entity - an actor with its own agency, he does seem to attribute all of the ecological and micro-climatic change to human agency.   Fascinating are the ways Cronon posits the European invasion as bringing "Economic and ecological imperialisms" which reinforced one another, and that "capitalism and environmental degradation went hand in hand."  While not ignoring Indians as modifiers of the environment, Cronon seems to tie the bulk of environmental change to the economics of the European inspired marketplace (market forces?) and lets the Indians off the hook as emerging capitalists, with perhaps no other choice than to be compelled by the system of trade being thrust upon them.  The study of place names, and the concepts of property rights, also facilitate the examination of the interplay between Indian and English cultures and the affect on the New England ecological transformation:  "It was the attachment of property in land to a marketplace, and the accumulation of its value in a society with institutionalized ways of recognizing abstract wealth... that committed the English in New England to an expanding economy that was ecologically transformative." (79) 

Environment in Question

In lieu of answering my own prompt, I wanted to highlight my changing thoughts of Cronon’s Changes in the Land from the perspective of an undergraduate to a graduate student.

My sophomore year as an undergraduate, I took a class which encompassed the historiography of New York State history and colonial culture. We read Cronon’s work as a pseudo-bible for environmental history, a case example for understanding the relationship on the New York frontier as settlers met Natives west of the Adirondacks and into the Finger Lake region. Taking Cronon’s word with out any real thought or conscious discourse, I saw environmental history (in a context to New York State of course) as an unavoidable ‘school’ of historical thought.

Re-reading this work as a first year graduate student, and for an entirely different purpose, I took away a nuanced idea of environmental history. On purely speculative (and perhaps completely and utterly false) notion, I drew up the idea that “environmental history” when termed by Cronon is an anachronism. Critically analyzing the argument and its self admitted short comings, could Cronon call his thesis based on inevitably ambiguous primary sources? When the mindset of the earliest Europeans in North America did not fathom ‘environment’ as we know it, and saw it purely as an economic tool, could their records be trusted by historians today? Cronon takes his contemporary term of ‘environment’ coupled by his knowledge of environmental science and subjects it to historical analysis. With such firm accusations and arguments articulated by Cronon (he did have a very consumable writing style), how could an analytical reader give credit to an author who presupposes his arguments with: “The types of evidence which can be used to evaluate ecological change before 1800 are not uniformly reliable, and some are a sort not used by historians.”

Sentences such as that, in addition to this gem- "A second fund of data resides in various colonial towns, court, and legislative records, although here the evidence of ecological change can sometimes be tantalizingly elliptical.”- make me as a historian question Cronon’s primary sources and their credibility to accuracy.

This long winded and potentially changeable mindset is the product of unease while reading Cronon and his many objections to what one should regard as environmental history. Although a great read, did Cronon bite off more than he could chew in an academic sense?

  

Response to Cronon

Cronon’s book, Changes in the Land, examined the ecological changes brought about in New England by the settlement of European colonists.  Cronon explained how the techniques utilized by the Indians and the colonists in relation to agricultural practices and other land uses impacted and forever changed the ecosystems of New England.  While mostly critical of the colonists’ mentality and their subsequent practices for these changes, he also laid the blame at the feet of the Indians.

Regarding a comparison of Cronon’s rhetoric to that of Prescott and Bloch in relation to land usage, from my perspective there seemed to be little similarity.  While Prescott did describe the natural features of Mexico in the time of the Aztecs and Cortes, his work seemed more concerned with how the land facilitated the conquest of Mexico than the impact on the environment.  Moreover, Prescott had never been to Mexico, whereas Cronon had spent considerable time studying the ecosystem of New England.  Prescott being a contemporary of Thoreau spoke of the natural environment in much the same way.  As for Bloch, he also spoke to the landscape of Europe during the post-Roman and feudal periods.  In addition, he recognized the natural landscape as it related to the lords and vassals, even discussing the presence of wolves and bears in cultivated fields and the need for hunting.  However, Bloch’s goal was to examine the relationship and development of the social aspects of the feudal system and while this involved descriptions of humans and their environment, the impact on the natural resources of Europe was not his main concern.

According to John Demos in his Forward, Cronon’s work “is the definition of a foundational work” (p. xi), implying that this book was at the beginning of the environmental history movement.  To me it certainly seemed to span the bridge between cultural and natural history in a way that I had not experienced before.  As with many of the books we have read in this class, Cronon’s book struck a familiar tone.  I found it especially interesting that in our modern world, we are currently in an environmental turning point.  In my everyday life, I am dealing with issues like managed hunts, stormwater management, invasive plants, animal and insect pests, and meadow and forest management.  It was interesting to read about these problems from a historical perspective.  While the goals of people have changed dramatically, the problems associated with humans and their interaction with nature have changed little.   

Reaction to Cronon Prompt

This week’s prompt asks us to compare “Cronon’s rhetoric to Prescott and Bloch in terms of land usage in history.”  For me, what came to mind was Cronon’s application of Liebig’s Law (41), which was developed in 1828.  I find it interesting to think that both Bloch and Prescott wrote after this principle had been developed, so it is possible that they would have been aware of it.  However, as Cronon points out in his preface, a work such as this requires the tools “of an ecologist as well as those of a historian to be properly understood” (xv).  This leaves me wondering about the boundaries between different fields, such as history/biology, history/ecology, history/economics, etc.  What sort of lag time is there when it comes to information flowing between different fields?  While it seems possible that Prescott had heard of Liebig’s Law, would he have been adequately familiar with it to apply it to his own work?  If not, would this have been because this information had not yet found its way from agricultural science into the realm of history, or perhaps because Bloch did not have a strong foundation in agricultural science?  This also leaves me wondering what modern historians do when they are confronted with problems that might be more easily dealt with by scholars of other fields.  Do modern historians often collaborate with, say, ecologists when they are interested in a particular aspect of a period in history that they are studying, or are scholars in a particular field more often simply left to their own devices?  While I realize that we may not have time to cover these questions in class, I hope to soon learn more about interdisciplinary practices in the field of history now that these questions have come to mind.

Cronon, Transcendentalism, and Environmentalism

Cronon writes a fascinating ecological history that examines the shifts in environment both physically and socioculturally during the colonizing of New England. In setting the stage for discussion, he utilizes excerpts from Thoreau to frame a guiding question, “How did the ‘nature’ of New England change with the coming of the Europeans, and can we reasonably speak of its changes in terms of maiming and imperfection?” It is almost as if Cronon is invoking transcendentalism in that many such as Thoreau and Emerson looked to nature to provide answers to their many questions and now Cronon himself is looking at nature to provide insight to the changes that took place during the colonizing of New England. He believes that by utilizing ecological histories that it provides a larger context in which to examine the sociocultural changes that took place as land dominance shifted from Native American hands to the European settlers.

Prescott and Bloch view the environment as important, but it is not the main character within their historical narratives. Like a typical narrative, the environment is merely the setting that the people they are focusing on act within. Cronon is adamant in even his preface that this history is ecological and extends beyond human institutions such as economies, class and gender systems, political organizations, cultural rituals—to focusing on the natural ecosystems that provide context for these institutions. By examining the colonizing of New England, he looks beyond just the cultural ramifications for both Native Americans and Europeans. He also looks at the ramifications that echo and reflect within the larger ecosystem.

As for our final question regarding the concern of environment history being clear before Cronon, I’m not sure I can say. I feel that the other historians that we have read have not placed such an emphasis on environment and ecosystems as Cronon has. But I feel that given the time that Cronon is writing, he is reflecting his present by writing about the past. He published this in the early 1980s during which environmentalism was solidly gaining ground in academia. This began in the 1960s and through the 1980s (at least in anthropology) that in turn began a shift away from studying cultural ecology—the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments—into a more ecologically scientifically oriented study.

The Environment's Impact on Society

First I would like to say that I really thought this book would be tiresome, but I was really surprized that it was an interesting read which actually offered a lot of new and important ideas about the environment that are not typically studied. I also thought that by beginning the book with references to Thoreau’s Walden, Cronon really made connections of this topic through other areas of study. Similarly, other writers and poets often wrote about their surroundings and looked to environmental importance and beauty within nature. To think about environmental history as a more recent form of history is interesting since authors or poets have been talking about the environment for centuries, while maybe not in a historical context, and often described the environment as something that has its own role in our world and not just as something that exists. Cronon seemed to share this idea that the environment can alter history by its destruction or creation of plant and animal species.

Prescott, Bloch and Cronon all have different levels of importance geared towards the environment and its impact on history. Cronon certainly sees the environment as impacting history while the others seem more likely to argue that people impact the environment and as a result are changing history. Prescott discussed the environment in terms of how it benefitted people by existing in its natural form. From what I can remember, I do not think he really talked about Cortez proactively using the environment for his benefit, in the way that Europeans may have used trees for firewood in America. Bloch discussed the environment in a more proactive way. He talked about how land was actually used for the advantage of others and how it was distributed among individuals to create a more orderly society. In that sense, he talked more about land itself rather than the use of resources, from what I remember. Cronon definitely talked about resources but also how the environment naturally changes and is therefore able to impact societies.

Responses to the Cronon Prompts

 

In looking at W. Cronon, M. Bloch, and W. Prescott it is clear that each mentions the land with a different purpose.  Cronon in Changes in the Land (1983) is eager to describe ecological changes, and discuss how peoples have interacted with the environment.  Since people are a part of nature, land usage is central to his analysis.  Bloch explores, albeit briefly and superficially, how nature affects medieval persons in Feudal Society (1961, English translation).  He ventures to say, "The men of the two feudal ages were close to nature - much closer than we are; and nature as they knew it was much less tamed and softened than we see it today." (72)  Despite early dependence on hunting and gathering, he is more keen on noting the adverse effects of light depravation, severity of the cold, and early mortality.  Prescott, in History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), true to his literary sensibilities, draws a sweeping picture of the geography, topography, and climate of Mexico.  Apart from the fruits of the land, e.g. maize, wheat, and aloe, his reference to agriculture is to mark the "mechanical art[s]" of civilization. (19)  His concern is not for land usage as it is for describing early military encounters and politics. 

Bloch and Prescott attend to different historical purposes than Cronon.  In History of the Conquest, military and political events, with the hero Hernán Cortés (whom Prescott names Hernando), comprise the narrative substance.  In Feudal Society, social interactions are the center of feudalism, and although land usage is acknowledged, its relation to the medieval person is a background reality.  Prescott and Bloch do not share the same concerns as Cronon.  Nevertheless, Bloch would be the most sympathetic to studying ecological surroundings and peoples.  Interestingly, land usage could serve to better understand the Aztecs and Spaniards as it did in demonstrating the relations between Indians and colonists in Changes in the Land.    

The late 1970s and 1980s is when early works began to emerge, as Cronon points out. (172)  Implicitly and otherwise, topographers, geographers, ecologists, geologists, palaeontologists, and others, have dealt with environmental history.  While perhaps not looking at the direct sequence of past events between people and nature, they as scientists examine natural changes.