ANTi-History

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

ANTi-history, developed by Gabrielle Durepos and Albert J. Mills, draws on poststructuralism, [Page 27]the sociology of knowledge, and ANT to make sense of the past. The approach developed out of an interest in how knowledge, particularly historicized knowledge, comes into being and influences human action. The interest in knowledge is rooted in the concerns of the sociology of knowledge to understand the social base or roots of knowledge. The interest in history is rooted in the concerns of Foucauldian poststructuralism to understand the ways in which the present is constructed through reference to past events, that is, that history can be seen as a study of the present rather than of the past. To trace the social bases of present knowledge, Durepos and Mills draw on ANT, which seeks to reassemble the present through tracing the sociopolitics of actors over time by focusing on the way networks of ideas cohere, or are punctuated, in forms of knowledge. Building on Bruno Latour's ANT, Durepos and Mills set out to fuse together insights from the sociology of knowledge, poststructuralism, and ANT to develop a historiography that is capable of dealing with the past as “available” through innumerable traces whose construction lends itself to equally innumerable histories. As such it is a method for simultaneously assembling and destabilizing histories. In other words, it is an approach that encourages the development (or reassembling) of historical analyses, not simply to represent the past but also to reveal alternative readings (or histories) that surface that which is marginalized, hidden, suppressed. In the process, histories are revealed as useful guides to human action at the same time that they are destabilized by an understanding that they are reassembled for current action rather than grounded in fact. Hence the term ANTi-history, which draws on the signifier of ANT to signal a link with actor-network theory and that suggests the tension between the simultaneous construction and destabilization of history projects.

Application

Above all else, ANTi-history is a liberationist project aimed at revealing the social bases of knowledge, particularly knowledge that has the added significance of being punctuated as history. In this way, people can become aware of the sociopolitical role of history and its significance in the creation and privileging of identities. To that end, an ANTi-history approach involves a number of processes that include critique of existing histories as partial and, in the words of Hayden White, invented rather than found, and in the reassembling of alternative histories that simultaneously bring to the fore previously marginalized voices and destabilize existing history as one of various alternative readings. The approach thus is far reaching and requires considerable time, commitment, and access to relevant actors and materials.

An example of ANTi-history can be seen in the recent work of Durepos and her colleagues on the study of Pan American Airways (PAA). This airline was in operation from 1927 until its collapse in 1991. In its day, it had a powerful influence on the culture as well as the economy of the United States. Much of this had to do with the sociopolitical role of the airline over time but was also helped in later years by a series of histories of the airline that kept, or perhaps revived, its influence in popular culture. Examination of the various histories presents a fairly coherent story in terms of the main characters and events involved. The main difference between the histories centers on the attention given to some events over others and the time in which they were written. The earliest history of PAA, for example, was published during World War II and focused more on the heroic contribution of the airline to the war effort. Later histories give more time and attention to different decades and events beyond the war years.

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