| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Giuseppe Papagno. Un modello per la storia: Materiale, attività, funzione. Foreword by Maurice Aymard. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis. 2000. Pp. xv, 331. L. 38,000.

The cover's vivid detail from a Benoit Mandelbrot fractal painting sets the tone for this book, which spins models within models and decorates them with colorful, intricate detail. As Maurice Aymard remarks in a perceptive preface, Giuseppe Papagno does not propose his "model for history" as an explanatory device but as a tool for understanding historical processes. Or rather, a set of tools: for Papagno's material-activity-function triad comes in multiple versions depending on the historical problem at hand. All versions, however, consist of asking how some actor (individual or collective) deploys artifacts (materiale) in repeated actions (attività) with some visible, durable consequences (funzione) for social life. For reasons never explained, Papagno dissolves actors into activities, thus obscuring his attributions of agency. He makes much of interactions among the other three elements: materials, activities, and functions. Early in his book, indeed, Papagno makes claims for the three elements as components of self-maintaining systems and even lays out five "laws" of dynamics in such systems; those claims disappear as the book moves into its historical applications. . . .

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