Historiography and Historical Thought: Current Trends Nazi leadership or developed without a clear plan in the course of the

war. Both approaches failed to deal concretely with the Holocaust as it involved perpetrators and victims on the local level. More recent studies such as Christopher Brownings Ordinary Men: Police Reser e Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) have sought to study the killing through the concrete participation of individual perpetrators.
Berman A 1988 From the New Criticism to Deconstruction. The Reception of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL Geertz C 1973 The Interpretations of Cultures. Basic Books, New York Green A, Troup K 1999 The Houses of History. A Critical Reader in Twentieth-century History and Theory. New York University Press, New York Hunt L 1984 Politics, Culture and Class in the French Re olution. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Hunt L (ed.) 1989 New Cultural History. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Iggers G G 1997 Historiography in the Twentieth Century. From Scientic Objecti ity to the Postmodern Challenge. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, NH Jenkins K 1995 On What is History? Routledge, London Jenkins K (ed.) 1997 The Postmodern History Reader. Routledge, London Lyotard J F 1979 La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le sa oir. Editions de Minuit, Paris. (English edn. 1984 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN) Megill A 1985 Prophets of Extremity. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Novick P 1988 That Noble Dream. The Objecti ity Question and the American Historical Profession. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Scott J 1988 Gender and the Politics of History. Columbia University Press, New York Spiegel G 1990 History, historicism, and the social logic of the text in the Middle Ages. Speculum 65: 5986 Stone L 1979 The revival of narrative: Reections on a new old history. Past and Present 85: 324 Thompson E P 1963 The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books, New York White H 1973 Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD White H 1978 Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD White H 1987 The Content of the Form, Narrati e Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD Windschuttle K 1997 The Killing of History: How a Disicipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. Free Press, New York Wolfe P 1997 History and imperialism: A century of theory from Marx to postcolonialism. American Historical Re iew 102: 388420

7. Conclusion
The concerted attack on ideas of objectivity and historical method on the part of postmodernist critics has by no means resulted in the abandonment of serious historical study based on research into the sources. Although the borderline between scholarship and literature has become more uid, as for example in Simon Schamas Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations (1991) which points at the tremendous problems in telling a truthful history, few historians, whether in the areas of political, social, or cultural history, would abandon the commitment to honestly reconstructing the past. At the same time, the condence of nineteenth-century professional historians in the possibility of telling denitely wie es eigentlich gewesen has yielded to the recognition that the same sources and the same set of events lend themselves to a variety of interpretations, but that these interpretations do not necessarily disprove one another but cast dierent perspectives on a subject. The years 1970 2000 have seen the collapse of illusions dear to modern historical thought until then: the linear progression of Western history and the accumulation of historical knowledge. The scope of historical study has been expanded immensely. The concentration on centers of political power and macroeconomic and macrosocial processes has been supplemented by a new interest in many aspects of life and culture which previously had not entered the imagination of historians, or at least of professional historians, and which require special research strategies. These two scales, the macro and the micro, by no means exclude each other, and in fact, as we have indicated, political and social historians have become increasingly aware of the role of culture, and cultural historians have become aware of the social and political context in which collective human existence takes place. See also: Gender History; Historicism; Subaltern History

G. G. Iggers

Bibliography
Ankersmit F 1995 History and Tropology. The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Appleby J, Hunt L, Jacob M 1994 Telling the Truth about History. Norton, New York Barraclough G 1978 Trends in History. Holmes & Meier, New York

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia

1. Features of East Asian Historiography
The art of recalling the past has developed very dierently in Europe and East Asia. Whereas, since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides, Western

6776

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia historiography has been centered on histories written by individuals for individuals, since ancient times East Asian historiography has developed a historical culture pivoting on public historiography. The distinctive characteristic of East Asian historiography could be described as publicly sponsored history, a tradition that continues today as a basso continuo. East Asia as a historiccultural concept, comprises present-day China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, where history developed around China, which overwhelmed the peripheral countries with its physical size, and political and cultural ascendancy. This historic East Asia has been termed the Chinese world order or a system of international relations with China at the center. The system reached Korea and Vietnam in the early Han period (202 BC9 AD), and Japan in the rst century AD. This Sino-centric system also formed the common cultural heritage of East Asia: the classical Chinese language, and Chinese writing system; the Confucian social and familial order; Buddhism through Chinese translations; the legal and administrative systems, and the art of historiography. The peripheral states of the East Asian world might also be called Sino-graphic cultures, in the sense that they used classical Chinese as a common language, which is, in a sense, comparable with the use of Latin in mediaeval and early modern Europe. West, the Laws of Manu in India, and the Koran in the Muslim world. The purpose of writing history in East Asia was based on the Chinese philosophical premise that historical facts were the only certain and immutable reality. Chinese metaphysics was not premised on a revealed religion based on the existence of a unique, almighty God, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Rather, it took the world as an ever-changing phenomenon, as presented in the Yijing (The Book of Changes). Therefore, it sought immutable reality in history, because human beings could not alter that which had already happened. This belief took history as its axis in Chinese civilization. This culture of history later spread throughout East Asia in tandem with Confucianism, creating a common historical culture throughout East Asia. The proclamation of this philosophy may be found in Confucius statement that, All the empty words I want to write down are neither so clear nor so startling as seeing their meaning in action (Shihji). The Chinese had developed their own way of creating an immutable past. In China and Korea, it was standard practice that, once the states historical compilation bureau had completed compiling the ocial history of the previous dynasty, the bureau destroyed all the sources it had collected. This was to prevent the revision or rewriting of the ocial history, for once it was published by the government, the history itself took on the character of a sacred text. The most certain way to endow the ocial history with the imprimatur of authority was to destroy the sources on which it had been based. During the Korean ) n dynasty (13921910), for example, the source Choso materials were burned after use. When that was done, the account embodied in the ocial histories became the facts of history. In this fashion, East Asian cultures preserved the ideal that history was the sole immutable basis for human judgment. The biographies that comprise over half the material in the ocial histories maintained this tradition of objective narration in their own way. In the biographies, as in other sections of the ocial history, they rst set forth what they believed to be fact, and following that, the historians added their own evaluation. This vast corpus of biographies forces us to consider why the historians believed the biography to be a necessary part of a history. It is because in a culture that lacks a unitary supreme being, the records of the lives of eminent individuals are the only true sacred texts.

2. Role and Purpose of Historiography

For the most part, the task of historiographical compilation in East Asia was traditionally a staterun project. The ocial history produced by that compilation, along with materials collected for the purpose, constituted the core of East Asian historiography. It could be said that historiography was the primary cultural undertaking in East Asia. This is in contrast to the cultures of Europe, India, and Islam, where the concentration of cultural power has not been xed in history. For 2,000 years, Chinese historiography centered on the ocial history compiled by each successive dynasty as a state enterprise. Later generations positioned the Shiji (The Records of the Grand Historian) by Si-ma Qian (145 ca. 86 BC) as the rst ocial history and since then, 24 ocial histories have been compiled. A characteristic of these ocial histories is that they have an encyclopedic tinge; that is, the body of the work originated by Si-ma Qian brought an entire culture, its politics, economics, society, culture, technology, etc., into one unied structure. History was written as a means of comprehensively describing such a world system. Historiography in East Asia is perhaps equivalent to such primary cultural undertakings as Biblical commentary and the Corpus Iuris Iustanianus in the

3. Historical Objecti ity

The tradition was maintained of seeking objectivity in historical narration in the lives of the historians who wrote it even more than the narration itself. We can 6777

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia nd an episode that presents the historian as a lofty gure in the life of a fteenth-century Korean historian. It is recorded that in 1431, as the compilation of the T aejong sillok (the Veritable Records of King T aejong) was nearing completion, his successor King Sejong (14181450) asked the compilers to show him their work in advance. In the previous dynasty, every monarch personally reviewed the veritable records of his predecessor; but King Taejong did not review the Veritable Records of King Taejo. Sejongs senior ministers replied that, If Your Majesty were to review [the work in progress], later monarchs would surely revise [the historians work]. Then, [future] historians would suspect that the monarch might look at the draft, and they would inevitably fail to record the facts completely. Then, how would we transmit [facts] faithfully for the future? In traditional East Asia, the role of the past was to serve as a normative history. This forms an interesting contrast to Western historical practices, where it evolved as a cognitive discipline. That is, in the West, the historian found his raison deV tre in rewriting the past. The discipline of history developed as a competition among the interpretations and approaches of dierent historians. History in modern East Asia is generally parsed with the two-character compound Chinese word lishi (Japanese, rekishi; Korean, yoksa), but until the middle of the nineteenth century it was expressed in the single-character term shi (Japanese, shi; Korean, sa). This word shi itself originally denoted the historian himself, and only later, by analogy, did it come to refer to the product of the historians craft, the written work of history itself. This is particularly important when we note that in the languages of Europe, it was precisely the reverse: The word historian was formed to refer to the maker of the written history. It is a notable characteristic of historical consciousness in East Asia that it tends to focus far more on the attitude of the historian, than on actual works of history themselves. dynasties (10 volumes); Shu, treatises on economy, technology, astronomy, etc., (eight volumes); Shi-jia, annals of feudal states and nobles (30 volumes); and Liezhuan, biographies of famous persons and foreign peoples (70 volumes). Simas format is encyclopedic in nature, systematizing the world in a single, unied structure; his historiographical format dominated East Asian historiography until the mid-nineteenth century. Ban Gu (3292 BC) followed Sima Qians work, but limited himself to the history of a single dynasty, which he completed as the Hanshu (History of the [former] Han dynasty). His practice, that each Chinese dynasty compiled the history of its predecessor, became standard for all of the following ocial histories. It was in the Tang dynasty (618906) that historical culture truly ourished, as history became an independent subject in the Chinese classication of learning. Historians were closely linked with governmental bureaucracy and their team method of compilation started in this period and continued until the twentieth century. A new format for compiling historiography was proposed by Sima Guang (10191086) in his 294volume Zizhi tongjian (The Comprehensi e Mirror for Aid in Go ernment) in 1084. It was an extensive historiography that employed the method of chronological order to help readers nd certain historical events through dynasties. It covers sixteen dynasties of 1,362 years and includes information from dynastic histories, chronicles, biographies, novels, etc. It is necessary to refer here also to the Hanxueh (the Han School), the development of which established historical study based on textual criticism of historical documents in the Qing dynasty. Qian Daxin (1728 1804) was one of the great gures among them, whose Nianershi kaoyi (Verication of the text of the 22 histories) was an examination of characters and language, dates and places, genealogies and institutions in the text of the 22 ocial histories. 4.2 Japan The idea of ocial history spread from China to the other East Asian countries that compiled their own ocial histories, modeled on the Chinese format and written in classical Chinese, not in their native languages. The rst Japanese state historiography was the Nihon shoki (The Chronicle of Japan, 720) compiled by Prince Toneri, and modeled after the Chinese format. It covers the period from the Age of Gods to the end # (686697), arranged in of the reign of Empress Jito chronological order, in annalistic form. Toneri used history as a forum to establish Japanese national identity and consciousness. This is in marked contrast < no to the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712) by O Yasumaro, which was also a historiography based on a transcription of oral tradition.

4. De elopment of East Asian Historiography

4.1 China In China, Sima Qian substantially established the tradition of Chinese historiography by inventing his own format for compilation. He succeeded his father as the grand historian of the Han emperor, and with his access to court archives, he completed the Shiji (The Record of the Grand Historian) in 130 volumes. It covers a history of three thousands years from the (legendary) Huang-di dynasty to his own period, and covers China and Central and South Asia. The format consists of ve sections: Benji, or imperial annals (12 volumes); Biao, a chronology of the successive 6778

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia This tradition continued until the late nineteenth V tsugan (Comprehensi e Mirror of century. The Honcho Japan, 16441670), compiled by Hayashi Razan and # , was also in the same line of his son Hayashi Gaho ocial history sponsored by the Tokugawa shogunate, and the Dai Nihonshi (the History of Great Japan, compiled 16571906) was compiled under the support of the Mito clan. Apart from the historiographical tradition, it is important to add such auxiliary sciences as bibliography, classics, textual criticism, and philology, which had developed in Japan to the same levels as in the West by the nineteenth century. These originated, in Japanese tradition, from the Chronicle of Japan (720), of handing down variant texts or conicting readings and traditions intact to posterity. In this important respect, China diered markedly from Japan. In China, history was transmitted as an authentic, authoritative text, which admitted no variant. This dierence is richly illustrated by the work of V Hanawa Hokiichi (17461821). His Gunsho ruiju (Classied collection of Japanese classics and documents), begun in 1779 and still in progress, rst appeared in 1819, with 1,270 titles in 530 volumes; another 2,103 titles in 1,150 volumes appeared in 1822. The objective was not to establish the authoritative text and obliterate the others, but to make available all the variant texts, which later generations might judge. This collection compares favorably with such European endeavours as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, etc. The Meiji government, established in 1868, which was responsible for the restoration of the emperor as the focus of sovereignty, and led the subsequent modernization of Japan, also continued the tradition of ocial histories, founding the Oce for the Compilation of National History. The aim here was to create an ocial history of Japan, but for various reasons the objective was amended to that of compiling historical documents, and the original idea of compiling a national history was abandoned. The work of the Oce continues today in its successor, the Historiographical Institute, now part of Tokyo University. Moreover, virtually every prefecture, district, and locality in Japan, even down to the level of individual villages, continues the tradition of ocial history at the local level today, compiling local historical sources, and publishing local histories. Similarly, many individual government bureaus, as well as corporations, universities, and other corporate entities, regularly commission their own histories, extending the model of ocial history to the private realm. 4.3 Korea It was around the fourth century that Korea founded its historiographical tradition, though the epochmaking historiography did not appear until the twelfth century. Kim Pu-sik (10751151) compiled the Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms) in 1145, the oldest extant history of Korea, covering from antiquity to the decline of unied Silla in 935. It follows the format of Sima Quans ocial history as is shown by the name sagi (the Korean pronunciation of Shiji), and he intended to provide moral lessons for posterity. Iryo 3 n (12061289), a high-rank Korean Buddhist monk, compiled the Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the three Kingdoms) in 1281, which is the only extant history of Korea before the Choso 3n dynasty (13921910), together with the Samguk sagi. This work is unique in the sense that he wrote it privately, including myths, tales, and social issues, and even refers to the sources he used. So Ko 3 -jo 3 ng (14201488), compiled the Tongguk tonggam (Comprehensi e Mirror of Korea) as a Korean ocial history in 1485, modeled on Sima Guangs Zizhi tongjian. It covers the period from ancient times to the end of the Koryo 3 dynasty in 1392. This work was compiled under the inuence of neoConfucianism, and reects the moralistic purpose of praising good and condemning evil. An Cho 3 ng-bok (1712-1791) likewise published his Tongsa kangmok (Outline of Korean History), 20 volumes, in 1778, a chronological treatment of Korean history from Tangun, the legendary founder of Korea to the decline of Koryo 3 in 1392. 4.4 Vietnam In Vietnam, just as in Japan and Korea, some ocial histories were published including Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu (Complete Book of the Records of Vietnam) in 1479, which is based on the style of the Zizhi tongjian of Sima Guang.

5. Historiology in East Asia

The study of historical theory in East Asia began with Liu Zhijis Shitong (Comprehensi e Historiography), written in China in the eighth century (708). It was the rst thorough treatise in Chineseor any other language, for that matteron historical criticism, which also constituted a history of Chinese historians and a theory of historiography, and deals with such questions as selection and criticism of historical materials, historical objectivity, judgment in history, historical causality, etc. The work was a constant reference for Chinese historians until the nineteenth century, and gave rise to the meta-historical tradition in Chinese historiography. Lius theory of history was further developed by Zheng Qiao (1104?1162) in his Tongzhi (Comprehensi e Monographs, 200 volumes). In the introduction to the Tongzhi, he proposed his core idea of synthesis and inter-relatedness and causality, through which he argued the importance of the continuity of his6779

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia torical development. Based on this theory he completed the voluminous Tongzhi, including the Twenty Summaries, his noteworthy encyclopedic chapters. Zhang Xuecheng (17381801) wrote his Wenshi tongyi (General Sur ey of Literature and History), a work on the theory and history of historiography (only published in 1920, long after his death). The rst chapter starts with The Six Classics are all history, in which he expressed his philosophy of history, that the very idea of the Sacred (tao) can only be known through mens actions (shi), which are recorded in the Six Classics. It is thought provoking to realize how few works of historical criticism were written outside China, in comparison with the voluminous amounts of historical works. It signies that traditional East Asian historiography was normative in nature, in the sense that it required little discussion of the nature of history. It is also necessary to refer to the fact that there were relatively few works of metaphysical interpretation of the course of historysave perhaps Wang Fuzhis (16191692) discussion of historical logic and historical tendency in work published only after his death. East Asians valued detailed precision in history, rather than the philosophical interpretations that were developed in Europe. Some exceptions, informed by Buddhism, were found in medieval Japan. Jien (11551225), a prominent Japanese Buddhist cleric, V (Notes of wrote his self-deprecatingly titled Gukansho the Views of a Fool, 1220), in which he proposed his V ri, an idea of philosophy of history with the term do historical inevitability, through which he explained historical processes in terms of the state of development and proposed his own periodization. Similarly, a century later Kitabatake Chikafusa proposed V Shotoki (Chronicle of the True Descent of in his Jinno the Di ine So ereigns, 1339) that Japan is a land founded by the gods and maintained by the blessings of an unbroken lineage of divinely descended emperors. introduced through translations of European and American works into Japanese. Japanese intellectuals created their own neologisms to translate Western terms by combining two or three Chinese characters together. Those newly invented terms in Chinese characters were later exported to China and Korea, and in consequence, East Asian scholars now share most academic terms in the liberal arts and sciences. The very fact that such translations were feasible, and successfully received, demonstrates the stage that Japanese historiography had achieved. By introducing Western historiography through translation, rather than keeping it as the preserve of a few language specialists, Western history and historiography were transformed into common intellectual property for all East Asian historians, and, in particular, made accessible to those who worked on their national histories. As far as historiography is concerned, there already existed a traditional Japanese historiography, and the auxiliary sciences made possible the introduction and importation of Western historiography. Native pioneers in the introduction of Western historiography, historians like Shigeno Yasutsugu (18271910) and Kume Kunitake (18391931), were initially trained in V sho V gaku tradition (Chinese, kaozhengxue: textual Ko criticism, which originated from the so-called Han School in the Qing period), and were thus well prepared to accept the empirical methods of Leopord von Ranke. They were particularly receptive to his notions of a rigorously critical approach to sources and the avoidance of value judgments, when his student Ludwig Riess, who was invited to Tokyo Imperial University as a professor of history in 1887, introduced Rankes ideas to Japan. The acquisition and acceptance of European historical theory was started by Japanese translations of leading contemporary European works on historical method and theory, such as those by J. G. Droysen, E. Bernheim and C. V. Langlois and C. Seignobos. Under # the strong inuence of Bernheim, Tsuboi Kumezo V ho V (Methods of Historical published his Shigaku kenkyu Research, 1903) in Japan, and Liang Qichao (1873 1929) published the Zhongguo lishi yanjiufa (Methods of Chinese Historical Research, 1922) in China. To study history in traditional East Asia had meant to become conversant with the ocial Chinese histories, and the introduction of Western ideas of historiography opened new horizons for students of history, who began to inquire, what are the historical facts, in the sense of going beyond the historical narrative to examine the underlying facts themselves. It was an indication of the opening of modern historical scholarship in East Asia, in which the introduction of Western learning played an important role. A typical example of this consciousness is found in Shigeno Yasutsugu, nicknamed Doctor Obliteration.

6. The Rise of Modern Historiography in East Asia

Western concepts of civilization and enlightenment were introduced systematically to East Asia beginning in the mid-nineteenth century had a transformative eect on notions of history and historiography as well. The movement toward modern and scientic history in East Asia began with a variety of intellectual experiments among Japanese scholars in the 1870s and 1880s. As Korean and Chinese intellectuals ventured to Japan toward the end of the nineteenth century, modern Western notions and methods of historical inquiry and explanation gradually ltered across the entire East Asian region. It is worth special mention that Western cultures and technologies including historiography were 6780

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia Applying the European historical method to Japanese history, he re-examined the Taiheiki (Chronicle of the Great Peace, 13701371), and proved that the fourteenth-century military commander Kojima Takanori never existed. In China, Gu Jiegang (18931980) was one of the most eminent gures, whose Gushibian (Critiques of Ancient History, seven volumes, 19261941) contributed greatly to the modernization of Chinese historiography by taking a nely honed critical scalpel to the world of ancient Chinese legend, which had long been accepted as fact. His school was named ancient doubters. His method was rooted in the Qing dynasty (16441911) school of ancient doubters; however, it was at the same time backed with the new European historical method. Yi Pyo 3 ng-do (18961989) was the rst Korean historian to have received training in the modern historical method. He stressed critical and objective methods of treating historical sources in his Hanguksa taegwan (Grand Sur ey of Korean History, 1963). With the introduction of Western culture to Japan, history became re-institutionalized from the midnineteenth century onwards, from the governmental section to the newly established Imperial University. However, it should not be forgotten that the introduction of Western historiography reduced East Asian historiography from its former position as a state enterprise to merely a single academic eld within the university. Individual historians started to have their own specialty in order to survive in this new university setting, and in order to distinguish themselves from eminent amateur historians, their researches were published as monographs in the newly established historical journals. On the one hand, in the West, the professionalization of historical research resulting in the establishment of history as an independent university academic eld was a great achievement for this institutionally neglected discipline. In East Asia, on the other hand, the introduction of modern Western historical research heralded the end of the prestigious traditional East Asian historiography, which had aimed at a comprehensive description of the entire world. Since then, the subsequent evolution of East Asian historiography has developed largely along the lines of modern historiography, in the same basic methodological and theoretical terms as the rest of the advanced world. perspective of ancient history on Chinese historians. In particular, the discovery of oracle-bone inscriptions laid the foundations for the new Chinese ancient history led by such historians as Luo Zhenyu (18661940) and Wang Guowei (18771927). These new works were later synthesized with Marxist materialism by Guo Moruo (18921978). His Zongguo gudai shehui yanjiu (Study of Ancient Chinese Society, 1930) is the rst Marxist work on ancient Chinese society. Thereafter, especially with the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949, Marxism became dominant among Chinese historians. Traditional historiographical achievements were mostly replaced by reverse interpretations, a trend which was highlighted in the period of the Cultural Revolution (19661976). After the 1990s, the worldwide information revolution and the introduction of the latest historical methods of social history are changing Chinese historiography, opening it to the rest of the world. In Japan, soon after the introduction of modern European historiography, the emperor-centered state promulgated a new political orthodoxy, and began to restrict intellectual freedom, especially in the study of ancient Japanese history. Since the 1930s, social and economic history began to apply the Marxist framework to Japanese history, mostly to the study of Japanese capitalism. After World War II, Marxism emerged as the dominant historiographical school, and it was only in the 1970s that Japanese historians began to accept the idea of social history as their latest historical method from France, Germany, and England. Since the late 1980s, many Marxist historians quietly shifted from socioeconomic history to social history.

8. Metamorphoses of Public History

Currently, in East Asia, the aura of ocial history still oats on the surface of peoples collective historiographical consciousness. The past is still seen as the trustworthiest mirror on mankind. What is being sought from ocial historiography is not a history, but the history, the reliability of which, people undoubtedly believe, is guaranteed by public editorship. In China, 24 ocial dynastic histories have been published and the tradition of public history continues to the present day. The Qingshigao (Draft of the History of the Qing Dynasty) was completed in 1927, and was nally published in Beijing in 1977. This applies to local history too; the publication of prefectural histories sponsored by local governments began in the Ming dynasty (13681644), and continues even in contemporary China. In Japan, this idea is seen in school history textbooks and local histories. The Japanese Ministry of Edu6781

7. De elopment of Modern Historiography

Since modern historiography was introduced to East Asia, its development varied according to the situation in each country. In China, along with Gu Jiegangs ancient doubters, newly discovered archaeological results urged a new

Historiography and Historical Thought: East Asia cation vets all school textbooks, the idea of which seems a reincarnation of ocial history as far as history textbooks are concerned. Japanese schools teach students what rather than why. They cram students heads with a xed course of history Japanese history, world history, whatever without much attempt to have students recognize that there are diering viewpoints. Forty-two Japanese prefectures out of 47 have compiled their own prefectural histories some of which have been compiled two or three times over the last 120 years and there is hardly a city, town, or village anywhere in Japan that has not done likewise. These local histories are premised on the traditional historiographical notion that there is a historical truth that is embodied in authoritative narratives. Korea also continued to chronicle an ocial history and this tradition is alive in present-day South Korea. The 25-volume History of the Republic of Korea, whose publication was completed in 1979 by the National History Compilation Committee (established in 1948), is a state-produced history of the homeland. Since the late nineteenth century, the practice of history has undergone professionalization and specialization on a worldwide scale, and East Asia too has been drawn into this whirlpool. Since then the style of historiographical practice in East Asia has, in most respects, been the same as that in Western countries. The work of the historian, as an individual, is to write many research papers and books. However, many historians, as far as historians working on their national history are concerned, are also at the same time involved in publicly sponsored historiography; countless university-based Japanese historians, for example, serve on the editorial boards of local and prefectural history projects. We can thus observe the continuing coexistence rather than conict of the two diering traditions of historical study. To put it another way, East Asian historians simultaneously inhabit two worlds of historiography, one a world of Rankean (or traditional East Asian) factual objectivity and another world of post-Rankean interpretations varied and opposing voices. See also: Area and International Studies: Development in Southeast Asia; China: Sociocultural Aspects; East Asia, Religions of; East Asian Studies: Politics; East Asian Studies: Society; Japan: Sociocultural Aspects; Korea: Sociocultural Aspects; South Asia: Sociocultural Aspects
Han Yu-shan 1955 Elements of Chinese Historiography. W H Hewley, Hollywood, California Ku Chieh-kang (Gu Jiegang) 1931 The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian. Trans. Hummel A W, E J Brill ltd., Leyden Maruyama M 1974 Studies in the Intellectural History in Tokugawa Japan. Tokyo University Press, Tokyo Nivison D S 1966 The Life and Thought of Chang Hsueh-cheng. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA Schneider L 1971 A Ku Chieh-kang and Chinas New History. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA Watson B 1958 Ssu-ma Chien: Grand Historian of China. Columbia University Press, New York

M. Sato Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Historiography and Historical Thought: Indigenous Cultures in the Americas

1. Terminology
History is information handed down from generation to generation. Since information can be inherited in the form of natural objects as well as by culture itself, a basic distinction needs to be drawn between natural history and the history of civilization. The way people develop consciousness of their history is by taking information from their natural environment, their cultural artifacts, and their memory, which is then collectively conceptualized by means of interpreting, reconsidering, and agreeing on its meaning. Historical concepts resulting from this always reect the peoples experience of their natural environment as well as their specic cultural achievements. In exceptional cases a historical concept can be limited to the individual. However, historical research is more concerned with collective concepts, since it is characteristic of human societies that mainly those dominant concepts are handed down. Thus each society cultivates a particular historical concept, which again needs to be handed down in order to become and remain eective. All cultures are alike in inheriting their historical concepts in the form of oral (stories and myths) and gural traditions (monuments). In addition to this, civilizations often use writing (books and inscriptions) as the preferred means for handing down historical concepts to future generations.

2. America Bibliography
Beasley W G, Pulleyblank E G (eds.) 1961 Historians of China and Japan. Oxford University Press, London de Bary W T, Wing-tsit Chan, Watson B (eds.) 1960 Sources of Chinese Tradition. Columbia University Press, New York

The only people of pre-colonial America to develop a fully functioning writing system were the Lowland Maya. They used the written records to maintain knowledge of a wide thematic range and thus stored and conserved an enormous amount of cultural

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7