The Past in the Present: Editorial

Welcome to this - the seventeenth – issue of the ISRF Bulletin.

Those familiar with the Bulletin will know that it usually consists of a number of short articles produced by ISRF Fellows, often with responses from Academic Advisors. In this issue, we are also pleased to include two articles by Fellows of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, with which we have partnered this year for the annual ISRF Workshop.

What happens when social scientists and historians meet and talk? This was the intellectual impetus for the theme of the sixth ISRF Annual Workshop which this year will be held in Berlin, with the title ‘Relating Pasts and Present: History of Science and Social Science’. For historians (and archaeologists), what constitutes knowledge and how (and by whom) it is produced is always specifically historically situated, while social scientists, from anthropologists to psychologists, remind us that there is always also a spatial or environmental element to knowledge. People across time and space cannot be expected to think or know in the same ways and by looking at how things change in historical perspective, we shed fresh light on global transformations more widely.

From outright racist interpretations of the bodies and cultures of ‘colonial subjects’ to the pernicious denigration of native peoples’ resistance to colonialism, Martin Thomas (this issue) is right to draw our attention to the uncomfortable truth that social science was itself deeply implicated in the Western imperial project. Not least, many early social anthropologists and ethnographers were simultaneously colonial administrators who used (and abused) scientific language and practices to justify the oppression of and violence towards colonial peoples. However, with the exception perhaps of Frantz Fanon 1 , most philosophers of social science writing in the mid-twentieth century would not have considered social science (or social scientists) at fault, which serves to further illustrate the importance of continually re-evaluating history itself, revisiting what we know to reassess how it is understood from professional and popular perspectives. From the Troubles in Northern Ireland to the fatalities following the most recent election in Zimbabwe, what happens when debate is exhausted and when situations become interminably polarised is unrest and violence.

The true value of re-evaluating what we think and why is well unpacked in relation to identity politics by Sherrill Stroschein (this issue). Identity, a standard research subject for social scientists of all types for well over a century, is an extremely powerful contributor to politics. Stroschein argues convincingly that the reason is an ‘ideological and identity overlay’, whereby one’s identity as NOT something is far more important to protect than any change that might come from voting differently. To cite a recent U.K. example, despite the fact that Cornwall (a rural county in the south west of the U.K.) is due to receive €1000 per capita in European Union (EU) funds between 2014 and 2020, the county voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU during the 2016 Brexit referendum. Contrary to patronising explanations that 56% of Cornish voters voted Leave because they did not understand the vote or because they are parochial, global economics and international law may actually have played bigger roles in the result. For example, with the exception of seasonal tourism, trades, and low-paid retail jobs, there is almost no work in the county. Cornwall’s traditional jobs were in mining, agriculture, and fishing, industries that have received immense pressure from EU regulations for many decades, while successive London-centric U.K. governments did little to address regional wealth disparities. One interpretation of the Cornish Brexit result is that it was important for voters to send a strong message of disagreement and disgruntlement to those faceless international lawyers in Brussels and politicians in Whitehall. Far from white sand beaches and idyllic cottages, the hugely under-employed, poverty ridden Cornish interior is, in many ways a county-scale example of what Jessie Hohmann (this issue) describes as an ‘object of international law’. As she makes perfectly clear, for all the highbrow, intellectual puff of contemporary law and politics, the ‘real’ – material, physical - world is where most people live and the ways in which this relates to governance is precisely what Hohmann’s ISRF-funded project will unpack.

To some extent we can see the ‘material turn’ that has pervaded the humanities and social sciences recently as a form of ‘crisis’ that has contributed importantly to all of the critiques of Western, post- Enlightenment thinking touched on above. Although, the term ‘crisis’ is itself at times a tool of social criticism (see Schmidt, this issue), an ‘instrument of rule’ used to control people and delimit who is considered eligible to contribute to democratic debate. 2 In her article here, Susanne Schmidt (Fellow of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) traces the history of the midlife crisis to the ancient concept of ‘critical’, ‘climacteric’ years or ‘periods of transition’. Some of Schmidt’s illustrations are included in this issue.

Finally, I am about to enter a period of transition myself as I reluctantly finish my role as ISRF Academic Editor in order to take up a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship on ‘Migrant Materialities’, at the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. It has been a great pleasure working for the Foundation and I hope to remain a keen colleague as it grows and blooms in new directions. For now, I very much look forward to welcoming you all to the sixth ISRF Annual Workshop, an opportunity for friends and Fellows to ‘talk down the discourse’, to borrow Sherrill Stroschein’s excellent phrase; a chance to discuss, debate, and deliberate on some of the most pressing concerns of our day in full, interdisciplinary perspective.