No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Contextualization Is Not Antagonistic to Theorization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2012
Extract
Because the methodology of historical research gives primary importance to the study of the context in which events occur, it is often seen as antithetical to theory. Theory implies an abstraction from the details of historical reality—it is constructed on the basis of stylized facts—and seems therefore incompatible with the historian's approach. The latter purports to interpret the raw facts in all their richness and complexity. Interpretation is needed not only because all the facts are not known with certainty but also because the manner in which their effects interact is often open to debate. In the eyes of most historians, however, the ambition to interpret the raw facts in all their richness and complexity excludes any recourse to the artifact of a model, on the grounds that it is always a simplified version of reality that adds an unnecessary second-order elaboration of the facts.
- Type
- Roundtable
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012
References
NOTES
1 Platteau, Jean-Philippe and Wahhaj, Zaki, “Strategic Interactions between the Modern Law and the Custom,” in Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Ginsburgh, Victor and Throsby, Daniel (Amsterdam: Elsevier, forthcoming)Google Scholar.
2 Goody, Jack, Family and Inheritance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.
3 See also, in the case of Niger, Cooper, Barbara M., Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Oxford: James Currey, 1997)Google Scholar.
4 Ibid.
5 Aldashev, Gani, Chaara, Imane, Platteau, Jean-Philippe, and Wahhaj, Zaki, “Using the Law to Change the Custom,” Journal of Development Economics 97 (2012): 182–200CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Cooper, Marriage in Maradi.
7 Kuran, Timur, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.