Incidental Things in Historiography

Abstract

There are some obvious differences between an archaeological and a historiographical approach to things. Put crudely, archaeologists study material ‘things’ while historians study texts. If historians are confronted with things, it is usually through descriptions of them (texts)—thus through the medium of the written word. In the introduction to this issue, the authors propose that the concept of Beiläufigkeit can help us ‘to discuss the conditions and processes that are responsible for the variable status of things in a world of objects’. They also propose that a way of approaching the subject is by studying things ‘that were made to be incidental’. One way of applying this to historical scholarship is to look at the way things appear—and disappear—in the historiographical narrative. If Beiläufigkeit is a fundamental phenomenon of socialization, as they suggest, then it is also a consequence of historical learning: we are taught when things are historically relevant and when they are not. It seems important to question this, especially if we think of historiography as part of a larger discourse that stabilizes and perpetuates hegemonic narratives—such as the narrative of the emergence of the modern West.