History Cosmologically Situated

    A project I hope to pursue, at some point in the future, is the coincident (side-by-side, as it were) reading of two books:  Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and Schweikart & Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States.  Both texts purport to tell a "history" of the same territory (the political entity that is the United States and its precursor colonies) and chronological period (1492/Columbus's voyage through present day).  Yet, despite drawing on the same shared store of "documents", the narratives recounted are markedly different, their authors comporting themselves from within distinct ideological cosmologies.   

    Levi-Strauss, in his setting forth a structural anthropology, proposes that the difference between history and ethnography involves the differential parsing of "conscious expressions of social life" on the one hand and "unconscious foundations" on the other.  Malkki's Purity and Exile, however (like the contrasting People's History and Patriot's History) demonstrates that the purported conscious/unconscious distinction carries us not very far.  History, we discover, is not so easily parceled out into explicit/particular vs. implicit/universal (Levi-Strauss).  What is explicitly voiced by Mishamo refugee or Kigamo townsperson, Hutu survivor or Tutsi official, People or Patriot, speaks genre-nuanced implicities.  What is particular to an event fixed in the experience of an individual or a group (the words spoken in an official ceremony, for instance) will be universalized within the situated context of the story teller.  

    Indeed, an appeal to unconscious vs. conscious quickly strikes as lacking coherence.  Is the remoteness and homogeneity of Mishamo foundational to the mythico-history emergent there?  If so, do we necessarily admit geographic circumstance to the realm of the "unconscious"?  Does explaining one's marriage choices in terms of pragmatics in one instant, and in terms of love and fate in another, counts as an "expression of social life".  In what way does classifying the diverse marriage configurations adopted in town (or the intermarriage taboos articulated in camp) as "conscious" aid in our understanding, whether historical or anthropological?  

    If there is something universal here, it is not some fetish unconsciousness, but rather the heuristic tendency in humans to find meaning in narrative.  Likewise, we need not make claims to consciousness (including the "historical" or "national" varieties discussed briefly by Malkki) to identify the features of situatedness in which particular genres of history are more or less likely to be produced.  Indeed, as Malkki's recounting of the points made in the Burundian White Paper makes evident, it is exactly when history is consciously constructed, rather than circumstantially emergent, that it reads least like history or ethnography.