تاریخ نگری و تاریخ نگاری (Mar 2022)
Interdisciplinary History and its Position in Historical researches
Abstract
Proponents of "interdisciplinary history" argue that the exploratory-descriptive approach as the main method in historical research in Iran is no longer capable of answering questions or clarifying the complex problems of human society. This approach has triggered discussions in historical scholarship that can be divided into three categories. This paper adopts a descriptive-analytical approach and attempts to determine the number of interdisciplinary articles in historical journals in Iran - as a representative of academic historiography - on the basis of a statistical survey in order to answer the question of "the position of interdisciplinary history in historical research". In recent years, the advocates of the descriptive approach and those who believe in a "special work" in the historical approaches, although they had a relative dominance in the education and research in the field of history in all the years of the emergence of academic history in Iran and were even one of the main obstacles to the fundamental change in the curriculum of this subject in the years after the Cultural Revolution, prevented structural change in it by creating an atmosphere of "theory phobia" under the pretext of monotheism and maintaining the independence of history from other branches of the humanities. The statistics of 16 scientific-historical research journals in a period of 15 years, which have published 3926 articles, show that only 489 of these articles are "interdisciplinary history" research. The low number of interdisciplinary articles and the widespread non-use of theories in these studies, as the most important statistical data of this research, is a proposition contrary to the claim of the aforementioned trend, about the superiority of the supporter of "interdisciplinary history" over the Academic atmosphere of this field.
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