ABSTRACT

Throughout the inhabited world, history is and has been a public matter, one of identity and rights – and more sensitively so following the arrival of subsequent immigrants, let alone visiting traders or invading conquerors or, again, in the modern globalising age, curious tourists and serious research students. These naturally generate new and competing visions of that history, from the subjective to the plausibly objective, at popular as well as academic levels. It is not simply a matter of opposed versions and arguments over ‘facts’, but rather of the different social (and political) functions of historical knowledge and of the ways that is accepted or sought – in other words researched – to satisfy either indigenous or external mentalities. Thus, research into the past is never neutral but proceeds from one’s outlook on the world in general and on the region and people in question; and the findings are never unbiased or capable of serving as a final statement of the ‘truth’ – despite what revered local authorities may insist (or nowadays, for that matter, approved textbooks that can tend towards chauvinism if not indoctrination). Conversely, from the outside or universalist angle, new research methods and changing theoretical approaches – in archaeology, documentary study or comparative linguistics, for instance – may amplify the information at hand and correct details, and sometimes promote exciting, even revolutionary, revisions of previously received interpretations. But such revisionists can never claim to be setting a ‘true’ or ‘complete’ history; at best it can be only the latest fashionable and intellectual feat, History itself remaining intangible, a matter of interpretation, debate and relevance moving with the times.