Refusal of the sources and the problem of invention: A case study on how to reconstruct the life of subaltern groups in New Cultural History

Abstract

The culture of the subaltern class is largely oral and so the lack of direct documents on the behavior and attitudes of the lower class in the past has become the most important obstacle to research on these people. The efforts of the new cultural historians to write the history of the subaltern peoples individually aggravate the problem of the lack of documents. The "invention" is considered one of the solutions of the new cultural historians to overcome this problem. Considering the absolute sovereignty of the sources in modern historiography for reconstructing and understanding the past, this article, based on Natalie Zemon Davis' The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) has attempted to answer the question of how historians overcome the problem of lack of documents of their research subjects by using invention in the new cultural history. To answer this question, while describing the central role of sources in modern historiography, the conceptual necessity of paying attention to individual agency in new cultural history is explained. In addition, relying on The Return of Martin Guerre, the Practice of Invention in new cultural history is explained. Finally, the relation of this issue with the sovereignty of sources in modern historiography is discussed to reveal that, contrary to the claims of the critics of new cultural history, the use of this Practice does not lead to erasing the distinction between history and fiction

Keywords

• new cultural history
• subaltern groups
• invention
• sources
• the return of martin guerre