Page 153 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1454 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Organizational Problems No system of periodization can satisfy all these differ-
Periodization also poses severe organizational challenges. ent demands. Like historical writing in general, schemes
How can we find labels that can do justice to many dif- of periodization reflect the biases and judgments of the
ferent regions and societies, each with its own distinc- era that produced them. They also reflect the questions
tive historical trajectory? The problem is peculiarly acute being asked and the scale on which those questions are
in world history because while neighboring regions or posed.This means that no single scheme will be appro-
states may evolve in closely related ways, societies sep- priate for the many different scales on which historians
arated by large distances may often seem to have little can and do write about the past.
in common.The modern history profession emerged in
Europe, and many well-established schemes of period- Schemes of Periodization
ization were designed to make sense of European his- The simplest approach to periodization—one that is
tory.This is true, for example, of the traditional division present in many creation stories—divides the past into
into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Such labels two great eras.These can be thought of as the era of cre-
make little sense outside of Europe, but they are so well ation and the era of today (as in some Australian Ab-
established that they sometimes get used nevertheless. original accounts), or the eras before and after “the fall”
Similarly, Chinese historians have long used dynastic (as in the Genesis story in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic
labels to provide a framework for historical writing, but tradition). Dualistic periodizations offer a powerful
these, too, are labels that mean little elsewhere. Is it pos- way of contrasting the present and the past, either to
sible to find labels that make sense for Africa as well as praise or condemn the contemporary era. Traces of
for the whole of Eurasia, the Americas, and the Pacific? such periodizations survive, even today, in dichotomous
On this question, too, there is currently no consensus schemes such as those of modernization theory, with its
among historians. stark contrasting of so-called modern and traditional
societies.
Ethical Problems However, most schemes of periodization are more
Periodization also poses ethical problems because it can complex, dividing human history into several major eras,
so easily imply value judgments. School texts on European each with subdivisions of its own. Dynastic histories
history have commonly used such labels as “ Dark Ages,” weave their accounts of the past using the reign dates of
“Middle Ages,” “Renaissance,” “Scientific Revolution,” and major kings and emperors as their frame. Such accounts
“Age of the Democratic Revolution.” When used of en- are present in Chinese dynastic histories and in the
tire historical periods, such labels were by no means neu- chronologies of Maya historiography. Dynastic histories
tral.They were generally used with the clear understand- often imply a cyclical view of the past, in which each era
ing that the Dark Ages were backward, that the Middle (like each ruler) passes through periods of strength and
Ages were transitional, and that real progress towards weakness. Historical accounts conceived within a more
modernity began with the Renaissance. Such schemes linear view of the past often take as their main frame-
carry value judgments about different regions as well as work a series of distinct eras, all of which may be seen as
different eras, because they implicitly compare the differ- part of a larger, universal trajectory.Writing in the eighth
ing levels of “progress” of different regions. Until recently, century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod described five great
it was commonly argued that, while Western societies had ages of history, beginning with a golden age, in which
modernized, many other societies were stuck in earlier humans were contented and godlike, and passing through
historical eras or stages and needed to catch up. Is it pos- several stages of decline—the ages of silver, bronze, and
sible to construct a system of periodization that avoids heroes—and finally to the era of his own day, which Hes-
imposing the values of one period or region on another? iod characterized as one of violence and stupidity.