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World History as Ecumenical History?
DOMINIC SACHSENMAIER
Duke University
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The Critique of Eurocentrism | |
| In the future, world history or transcultural history1 may come to experience more disputes between rival research approaches, political positions, and overall worldviews than most other branches of historiography.2 The exploration of spaces beyond nation-states and between single world regions makes it necessary to critically reconsider the structures and guiding principles of the field. The mere fact that a largely nationally organized scholarly community is somewhat ill equipped to handle transnational or even global research agendas may require significant disciplinary introspection. The question of whose world history, what perspectives, and what historiographical traditions are being applied will become even more pertinent than in the case of more localized research. In this context transcultural and world historians will hardly be able to distance themselves from intellectual and political questions that may be understood as the great themes of a global civil society in the offing. For example, the field will need to debate the value systems, experience bases, and research traditions that may underlie historical research and narratives at a global level. The calls for multiperspectivity and ecumenical narratives certainly point in the right directions, but behind these keywords lie very complex realities. Among the latter is the question of what constitutes a locally specific approach to world history in an age in which transnational schools of thought continue to characterize academic historiography in most societies. |
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Many of these concerns, which world historians have only just begun to address, can be subsumed under the catchword "Eurocentrism." In a recent series of articles Arif Dirlik has argued that world historical outlooks need to be basically understood as privileged, centric perspectives of the past. Even the purported desire to develop multiangled world historical visions, he holds, cannot overcome this situation since Eurocentrism or Western-centrism3 have always been characterized by their very inclusiveness rather than by their exclusiveness. In Dirlik's eyes, the effort to fit different societies or regions into an overarching narrative is impossible without ranking and filing them according to allegedly universal standards, which at a closer look greatly distort our vision of local historical contexts.4 For example, he suggests that world histories tend to operate with Western categories such as "nation" or "civilization," which are often presented as the subjects and not the products of history.5 According to this logic, local alternatives and other historical trajectories are necessarily ignored, if not suppressed entirely, by world historical scholarship. In this manner, the argument proceeds, world history implicitly supports a totalistic vision of the past, which helps provide the intellectual underpinnings for predatory forms of globalization that hollow out the possibilities for alternative, de-linked forms of local agency. |
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