Self, Subject, and the
"Barefoot Historian"

Karen Halttunen

In his evocative historical essay Alongshore, the landscape historian John R. Stilgoe explores the stretch of Massachusetts coastline from Gurnet Light to Minot Ledge that is his family's year-round home. "I see flood tide or ebb each morning before I see my university. I am close to my subject, too close for relaxation, for comfort." To convey that close connection between self and subject, Stilgoe creates the persona of "the barefoot historian," a scholarly beachcomber who wanders along the shoreline and in and out of the text of Alongshore offering personal observations and insights that supplement the study's more conventional historical research into Pilgrim landings and salt haying, treasure hunting and tourism. The barefoot historian, Stilgoe takes care to inform us, is not one of the "summer people," but "a local, a native in faded blue shirt and threadbare khaki pants," whose understanding of the tourists must depend in part (ironically) on "winter days in library stacks." The device of the barefoot historian artfully establishes that John Stilgoe is native to the Massachusetts coastline that is his subject (and a mere winter visitor to his university and its libraries that house scholarly research). Alongshore is, he affirms, "a personal book, based on local observation, grounded in the 'local knowledge'" required of long-distance mariners before venturing close inshore.1

1

The "barefoot historian" captures one important creative response to the late-twentieth-century critique of the omniscient narrator of professional historical convention. Modeled on the objective voice of realist novels in the nineteenth century, the omniscient narrator was designed to "create the appearance of a dispassionate approach, uncontaminated by partiality or interest, unconstrained by the limitations of a single vantage point." "'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!'" commanded the Wizard of Oz after Dorothy's dog, Toto, exposed him as a cheap sideshow magician; pay close attention to the omniscient narrator's sleight-of-hand, has been the warning of postmodern critics in recent decades.2 This critique echoes the crisis in ethnographic authority that has bedeviled anthropologists in a postcolonial era: what legitimate claim has the anthropologist to represent cultural otherness from a single, partial vantage point whose subjectivity is suppressed (even, or perhaps especially, in participant-observer mode) by a purportedly objective authorial voice?3 One solution that has appealed to a number of scholars has been to acknowledge openly their personal connections with their subject, joining the barefoot historian in asserting that they are in some way native to it. In their creative efforts to escape the now-discredited claim to narrative objectivity, the barefoot historians have crafted a new set of conventions that lend a newly engaging, vital, and personal kind of authority to historical writing.

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