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In Search of Narrative Mastery: Postmodernism and the Peoples without History
KERWIN LEE KLEIN
History and Theory 34 December, 1995), 275-298
This article traces the competing meanings of "master narrative" in current theoretical debates over history and culture. The phrase "master or meta narrative" has grown popular for describing stories which seem to assimilate different cultures into a single course of history dominated by the West. Master narrative, like its predecessors Universal History and speculative philosophy of history, has become something to avoid. But our increasingly global situations demand stories that can describe and explain the worldwide interactions of diverse cultures and communities. From this convergence--a growing wariness of global stories coupled with situations which seem to demand them--has emerged a popular new double plot of world history in which cultural differentiation and cultural homogenization go hand in hand. The development has led to some surprising homologies and contrasts among the new histories created by thinkers from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard to James Clifford and Francis Fukuyama. But our new "postmodern" distinctions between master and local narratives have carried over the venerable antinomy of people with and without history, and the search for timeless formal principles differentiating "historical" and "nonhistorical" modes of discourse and ways of being threatens to create new varieties of essentialism.
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Psychohistory and the Crisis of the Social Sciences
FRED WEINSTEIN
History and Theory 34 December, 1995), 299-319
Psychohistory is affected by problems similar to those affecting the broader discipline of history, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences generally: the heterogeneous composition of social movements, the phenomenon of discontinuity, and the capacity of people actively to construct versions of the world from their own idiosyncratic conflicts and in the context of the many different social locations they occupy. In particular, answers to the key question, how the social world is related to mind or events to cognitive and affective responses, seem as remote as ever. At the same time, ironically, a number of prominent social theorists, compelled to acknowledge the failure of rational choice and resource mobilization theories, have expressed a renewed interest in issues of collective identities, norms, values, moral obligations and transgressions, that is, in issues that have been central to psychohistory from the beginning. Historians no doubt will try to follow the paths taken by theorists, as they have in the past, but it is uncertain what paths they, in turn, will take.
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