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History and Historical Anthropology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
“A foreign culture is not revealed in its entirety and its depth except by its view of another culture […] A meaning is revealed in its depth for having encountered and come into contact with another meaning, a foreign meaning: between the two something like a dialogue is installed which because of the closed and onesided nature, inherent in the meaning and culture taken alone […]
The dialogue of the meeting of two cultures does not bring about their fusion, their confusion—each of them keeps its own unity and open totality, but they are mutually enriched.”
Mikhail M. Bakhtini
The dialogue that we contemporary historians try to have with past cultures is at the same time imperceptibly the beginning of a dialogue with coming generations. The historian of culture in fact has a double and heavy responsibility. On the one hand, his mission is to “resuscitate” the past. His period requires him to do justice to the culture of vanished peoples, to bring life to their thoughts and feelings, even though he knows that a complete and adequate reconstruction of their spiritual universe is only an ideal, a utopia of the scholar. It is in this sense that each scientific reconstruction can only be a modern reconstruction.
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- Copyright © 1990 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
* This text is part of a communication made at the seminar of historical psychology of the Scientific Council of History of World Culture, of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (May 1987).
1 Translation of a passage from Esthétique de la création verbale, Paris, Gal limard, 1984, p. 348.
2 M. Vovelle, "Y a-t-il un inconscient collectif?", La Pensée, 1979, No. 205, p. 136.
3 K. Marx and F. Engels, Oeuvres, vol. 13, pp. 6-7. The idea of "correspondence" of the forms of social conscience with social structure must be interpreted in a more open and more dialectic manner. See. V.J. Kelle, M. Ja. Kovalzon, Théorie et histoire, Moscow, 1981, p. 232.
4 K. Marx and F. Engels, op. cit., Vol. 27, pp. 402-403.
5 See P.V. Volorouiev, Le choix des voies du développement social: theorie, histoire, modernité, Moscow, 1987.
6 M. Bloch, Apologie pour l'histoire, Paris, 1949; Moscow, 1986, p. 89.
7 P.V. Volorouiev, ibid, p. 23.
8 M.M. Bakhtin, ibid. p. 335.
9 See A. I. Gourevitch, Problèmes de la culture populaire du Moyen Age, Moscow, 1981.