Thread on alternatives to historical materialism in r/askhistorians
Thread on alternatives to historical materialism in r/askhistorians
Power users and mods just keep repeating: "History is not a science because culture (i.e., god) is all-powerful. We might use evidence but we distrust grand theories."
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This is a bit outside my experience with academic historians although the ones I run with are of a certain stripe. Then again I am not in a disciplinary feild like history and tend to disregard when my historian friends assert diciplinarity boundaries and norms because it feels like putting on a straight jacket that won't help me with my work as a grad.
It’s 100% a bourgeois thing to say “this is physics and this is history, and they can’t interact.”
I didn't read through the thread very thoroughly to get their take but it seems that even if culture was inhibiting to understanding history that an awareness of culture could mitigate this. Are there not theories of culture? I'm sure an anthropologist could help. I don't see why it's so damning lol other disciplines have learned to deal with this and the historians that aren't doing this are certainly able to.
I mean, sociology is a field and ideology is a subject of study, it just so happens that sociology has maybe the strongest Marxist skew (in terms of proportion of adherents) of any academic field, which is a real
moment for these dipshits saying culture is a confounding variable for historical materialism as though it is an uncaused cause (hint: it isn't)its
so this sub selects for the most annoying, racist bourgeois historians. the moderator who gave OP a long response revealed their attitude toward history as non-scientific due to “culture”. they backed this up by citing gender norms on clothing color being different in different areas. which is horrible evidence since gender as a concept was very similar in the two examples of England and Italy