Research Plan and BackgroundMy Research Plan for the Next Few Years Research Project in USA (spring 2002): The Methods of MicrohistoryWork in ProgressThe Reykjavik AcademySummaries - booksSummaries - articlesRumor, Scandals, Trials and MemoryThe Contours of Social History Microhistory, Postmodernism and Historical Sources |
Biography and Academy
Research Plan and BackgroundI graduated with a BA. degree from the University of Iceland in 1984 with a major in history and a minor in philosophy. In 1987 I finished my MA degree in history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA, and in 1993 I defended my doctural dissertation, receiving my Ph.D in history from the same institution. My doctoral dissertation is called: "The Continuity of Everyday Life: Popular Culture in Iceland 1850-1940." It deals with popular culture in Iceland and traces how the general public influenced the growth and the formation of rural and urban areas in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Two different cultural worlds are contrasted and an attempt is made to analyse how they affected each other, especially when people moved from rural areas to urban centers: when traditional ways of living mixed with more modern ones. Special attention is paid to the four different life stages which span the first three decades in people´s lives, i.e. infancy, first work experience, confirmation and marriage, and how people dealt with their everyday life experiences in each of these life stages. Although the overall everyday life experience is the subject matter of this research, the main focus is on people¹s attitudes and beliefs concerning work and education. The conceptual framework of the dissertation required that a special attention be paid to popular culture in rural areas since one of the main goals of the study was to show how the cultural background of Icelandic peasant society was utilised in the fast growing urban areas in the twentieth century, and how it changed during the same time period. For that reason, the main focus of the study is on the nineteenth century peasant culture, with, however, a considerable comparison to twentieth century urban life. After finishing my doctoral dissertation in 1993, I stayed on in the USA through the summer of 1994, teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. I returned home to Iceland at that point having been awarded a three year research grant by The Scientific Council of Iceland (later renamed The Icelandic Research Council) for the continuation of my work. My research is focussed not only on the subject matter of Icelandic history but also on the methodological issues concerning personal documents (first person sources) and their value for an historical inquary. My research is thus a continuation of my work for my doctoral thesis but, at the same time, with a heavier focus on the individual and his or her role in the society, expecially in connection with the struggles of everyday life. This approach has required various theoretical considerations, especially concerning the interconnection between man, nature, and society. My research projects have therefore developed into more of a methodological and theoretical experiment than I had planned at the beginning, where the focus was on the possibilities and the limitations of personal documents. This need for theoretical and methodological foundations for the study of popular culture is responsible for the direction which my research has taken. It became apparent when I began to focus on the ordinary individual and his or her experience in the society that the available sources were both incomplete and limited in number. In most cases they simply did not exist. This is one of the reasons that historians have paid little or no attention to the historical importance of these sources. It became vital, therefore, for me to investigate the extent of these sources and to determine how they could possibly be used constructively in historical inquiry. This was, I felt, extremely important, since I believe not only that the history of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries have not been studied from this angle, but also that we would gain a much fuller understanding of the social development of this time period from a study of this type. My energy and interest has, for this reason, been turned towards developing a methodology which is capable of directing a research which is based on the use of personal documents. The foundations for this work have already been laid and I am hoping for the opportunity to develop it further in the future so that I can link together different types of personal sources and make full use of their strengths. Ultimately, using these sources, I hope to be able to publish a number of monographs which cover all the different aspects of Icelandic popular culture. Before I go into a more detailed description of my research plan I would like to provide a wider perspective on my studies so that the continuity between my work in the past and my work in the future becomes more clear. It could be argued that my academic work has been developing in a very definite direction, a direction which it took very early during my BA studies at the University of Iceland. One could say, in essence, that this development has been marked by an attempt to get closer to the people about whom we know so little, those who are left out of most of our records and to whom the profession of history has paid minimum attention, i.e. the subjective experience og ordinary people. I feel that I have made some progress in this direction, and that I was able in my first book, Modes of Living in Reykjavík 1930-1940 (Lífshættir í Reykjavík 1930-1940), to break new ground in Icelandic historiography. This book was an expanded and revised version of my BA thesis, published by the University Press. In that work I tried to compare the recollected experiences of five families from different social classes (using oral interviews amont other sources), with statistics about the thirties concerning unemployment, housing, wages, and the overall economic situation during the Great Depression in Iceland. Since then I have further developed my ideas in this direction, especially in my work for my doctoral dissertation, where I worked with different source material and longer period of time. The research I did in connection with my doctoral dissertation is of continuing use to me, especially as I was only able to include a part of it in the thesis itself. A number of my recent articles, which have been published in professional journals in Iceland and in the USA, have been related to the approach I took there. In these articles, I have taken specific topics from my dissertation and explored them more fully. The most recent ones include: death (""Death is a river, but life is a straw": Death in Nineteenth Century Iceland"), moral authority and the church ("Moral Models in the Nineteenth Century"), Icelandic popular culture ("Popular Culture in Iceland 1850-1940"), and children¹s experiences in the nineteenth century ("From Children´s Point of View: Childhood in Nineteenth Century Iceland"). All of these studies have in common that they make considerable use of autobiographies as an historical source. Additionally, many of these articles are experimental in nature, where the possibilities of the autobiography for historical research are being tested. I am, currently, working on a book, which deals theoretically with the autobiography as an historical source and the meaning of history in general in this postmodern age (Life and History). This work includes an annotated bibliography of over 200 autobiograpies. During the course of my latest research, especially when I was working on the book Education, Love and Grief it became clear that I have been working on the same problems with which those historians who have been labled micro-historians have been working. By making the individual, rather than formal institutions as has traditionally been done, the focal point, I have created problems which I have had difficulties solving: e.g. How can an individual be taken as representive of a larger group or unit? Is his or her story worth telling? The approach of micro-history came, in some sense, to my rescue and directed my research into what I consider a very promising and intellectually stimulating path. The problem is that the field of micro-history, which has been developing for the last few decades, has become both complicated and technical. For this reason, I feel the need to be able to sit down and study micro-history systematically, with the guidance and help of a scholar who has been working in this field. The isolation here in Iceland has been overwhelming in this regard: there are only few scholars who know anything about the field of micro-history, yet the sources available to us in Iceland are extremely well suited for this type of historical research. In the past few years I have been trying to read all the available studies which have been guided by micro-history along with my students at the University of Iceland. But I realise that if I am going to be able to master this approach for my own research I need to be in contact with other scholars who have been using it in their research. Given my research in the past, which might be labeled "history from below", and the direction I hope to take in the future with the micro-historical approach, I am convinced that the German and American historiography can provide me with an important and a necessary theoretical framwork. I am also certain that it will help me dealing with improtant historical questions which need to be dealt with in an Iceland context. Germany, for the last few years, has been the stage of intense dialogue; a dialouge which has no parallel elsewhere in the world. It focused on everyday life history or Alltagsgeschichte as it is called in Germany, and dealt with the history and the experience of ordinary people. This approach to history is very much connected with "history from below" as it is practiced in the English speaking world except it has much stronger theoretical foundation and scholars are constantly dealing with the importance, the meaning, and the possibilities of everyday life experience. Alltagsgeschichte has both political and intellectual roots in Germany and together it has ceated an unusually dynamic atmosphere in terms of exchange between academia and grass roots historians.
In Germany, Alltagsgeschichte started out as a grassroots movement, mainly focusing on the everyday life in Germany under the Nazi regime. The outcome was a massive political debate about culture, history, society, and politices. Early on, professional historians became part of the overall discourse and provided it both with a strong conceptual and theoretical framework which gave Alltagsgeschichte the weight and strength to grow and develope into a mature sub-discabline. Risking an oversimplification, one can argue, that Alltagsgeschichte is a mixture of "history from below" as it is practiced in the USA and Europe, micro-history as it is practiced in Italy and elsewhere in the West (using anthropological and ethnographical methods), and last but not least, it draws its stength from the traditional German intellectual history. This approach became the history of everyday life, - Alltagsgeschichte. I belief that micro-history and Alltagsgeschichte will give me an unusual opportunity to work on my own theoretical framework, because it is situated on an intellectual crossroads, where different traditions come together, some which I am very familiar with, but others are still foreign to me. For this reason, I am planing to continue to study micro-history and Alltagsgeschichte as it has been practice in USA and Germany, using that comparism to build on my own experience, and make an attempt to deal with source material which has been totally neglected in Icelandic historiography. |
My research for the past few years has also concentrated on other kinds of personal sources
such as diaries ("I am 479 days younger than Nilli." Diaries and Daily Life of Halldór Jónsson from Miðdalsgröf"), personal letters (Education, Love and Grief), questionnaires from the Department of Ethnology ("Modern Fairy Tales? Gender Roles in Icelandic Society."; - "Questions and Answers: Documents from the Department of Ethnology."; "Experimental analysis. Creating an Historical Source."), and, finally, oral history and interviews ( Modes of Living in Reykjavík 1930-1940.). All of these studies have been directed towards an inquiry into the possibilities which these sources have for historical research. They have been theoretical in nature but at the same time an attempt has been made to have some balance between theory and context. This is especially illustrated in the book Education, Love and Grief and in the article "I am 479 days younger than Nilli." It is because of this connection between my former research and my research of the last two or three years, that I am anxious to go one step further and work more systematically on my overall theoretical approach in cooperation with other scholars.
"History from below", as it is practiced in the English speeking world, became early on both connected with demography and sociology and used the methology which was already established within these disciplines, putting aside the improtance of creating one for its own use. My own experince, once I was writing my doctural dissertation, tought me how pressing it was for those who relied mostly on qualitative sources to have methodology which would be able to direct their research. But thoes methodes did not exsist within the English speeking world except if your approach was quantitative by nature as most of these studies were. I, for example, ended up applying a demograpic analytical tool, - a life-course analysis -, on sources which were in essence qualitative. The method, in my mind, greatly limeted the scope and the depth of the inquiry.