Reason or Reasoning? Clio or Siva?

Abstract

We moderns are accustomed to believing that only the West developed a tradition of historiography, with most cultures having myths and epics and legends in place of history-writing. Because everyone nevertheless had a history, that history could be narrated in the terms of a rational historiography that would redescribe this past in terms alien to those whose past it was, treating their own mythological and epic forms of recording and relating to that past as, at best, rather unreliable raw materials in the reconstruction of that past. This essay challenges these presumptions. It argues that history is a code, and it is one incapable of coding non-Western pasts. While we will of course go on writing history, we need to reconceive what it is that we are doing when we rewrite
the pasts of others in terms different from their own; we need to think of history-writing not in an imperial vein, as the application of Reason to the past, but rather as a dialogue between different traditions of reasoning.