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Family and Identity | page 1 2
by Peter Claus There was a time when historians confident in the tools of their profession could tell big stories about the nation, about class or, for instance, about large shifts in the environmental conditions of an entire sub-continent. These grand narratives are still around, of course, but they no longer for the most part connect to a political project such as Marxism or modernisation, where history has a telos, an end or purpose. In the place of grand narratives, historians have used a more promiscuous range of sources in order to understand change and continuity. With the decline of grand narratives has come also a more atomised sense of ourselves. We are no longer so confidently members of a social class but feel our identities are more fluid, in response to present social and political conditions that are more sensitive to gender, sexuality, ethnicity and religious backgrounds. This shift has given enormous scope to family historians eager to place the self at the centre of ideas about the past and indeed the whole enterprise of genealogy has arguably emerged from our reduced confidence in the ability to easily reduce the past to a simple universal story. The special nature of autobiography In many ways in the very act of doing family history we are concerned with our own autobiography and the biographies of those that came before us. The historian, Raphael Samuel, did not distinguish between autobiography and biography believing neither was spontaneous and that each obeyed invisible rules. Ordered into paragraphed recollections, sub-divided with narrative, providing stepping-stones that help the reader to leap from one theme to another, neither represents an unplanned stream of consciousness. Random individual and family memories, for instance, are fragments of experience that are first sliced into rough and ready gobbets and then into digestible, attractively presented chapters. Only then are they garnished with a more or less orderly chronology. Correspondingly ‘mental pictures’ may not be so much cooked up as arranged and ‘formed from information learnt, originally, at second or third hand’, as he put it. From this angle, lived experience admixes with family tradition, community fables are retold as if personal to the witness. As notes from his archive held at the Bishopsgate Institute make clear, he concluded our memories tend to play tricks on us. In autobiography, ‘events are conflated with one another or transposed from one place of existence to another; distances are magnified; time sequences shrink’.
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About Peter
Dr Peter Claus is a senior lecturer with the University of East London with special responsibilities for community based research projects, courses and events for school students, schoolteachers, students working in Further Education, plus enrichment courses for the public. He is a member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the University of East London and the Charles Booth Centre for Social Investigation at the Open University. He is currently preparing a co-authored undergraduate textbook on historiography commissioned by Pearson Longman and is editing a volume of Raphael Samuel's writings on the Lost World of British Communism for Verso.
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