Humanities, Qualitative Research In

History and Narrative

Research in this area may be focused on a topic, event, or individual and be represented through oral, written, or film or video documentary, biography, or autobiography. Historical research refers to topics, events, or [Page 402]individuals existing in the past (or past experience); it is narrative research when the topic or individual, or individual experience, is studied in the present.

Recent work in historical research reflects a linguistic turn in the discipline, influenced by postmodernism and the poststructuralist deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Historians working in this vein reject the possibility of an objective historical truth that can be uncovered empirically, asserting instead that there are multiple truths and ways of interpreting and representing a historical phenomenon that are perspectively situated and influenced by sociopolitical power structures. For example, Foucault's method of archaeology sought to unearth discursive rules that were sociopolitically constructed to understand the representation of past events. In his later writings, Foucault's analytic method of genealogy, significantly inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and exemplified in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, interpreted history as the product of continuous shifting power relations.

The poststructuralist linguistic turn raises significant concerns regarding the relativity of knowledge and possibility of empirical historical or narrative research. Other movements in postmodernism, such as semiotics (the reading of signs as signifiers of meaning so that anything might be called a text that can be read and interpreted—human action, a painting, etc.) and social and cultural history, acknowledge the sociopolitical construction of experience as one of constant change instead of a linear progression and of the situated nature of knowledge, but without yielding to complete relativism. Clifford Geertz's work in anthropology and writing on interpretation (e.g., the importance of providing a thick description) was influential in history as well as in social science, especially in social and cultural history.

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