Histories of lesser known disciplines

September 5, 2013 9:27 AM

Literature, philosophy, art all obviously have histories that are an important part of their discipline's identities. Even my field, educational technology, has a few histories (Paul Saettle for example). I'm interested in the histories of other "lesser known" disciplines or maybe obscure disciplines. Specifically, why would the "lesser known" disciplines need histories? And do all academic disciplines have histories?
posted by PHINC to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

David Kahn's "The Codebreakers" is the definitive history of cryptography up through about 1960.

It's an interesting case because essentially everything he describes became obsolete with the development of powerful digital computers. It's a history of cryptography done without electronics.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 9:54 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Are you asking whether all disciplines have official, published histories? There's certainly no requirement. Most will probably have some sort of histories coming from either historians with an interest in intellectual history/history of science (e.g. George Stocking for anthropology) or from older members of the discipline itself.

Certainly many retired professors have both the inclination and the time to write such histories. It's not unlike a regular perosn turning to genealogy in his old age (and in fact you can easily do academic genealogies with advisors, intellectual schools, etc).

And the more academic histories are often useful because maintaining an understanding of a discipline's history is a good way of teaching future members of the discipline and of avoiding making the same mistakes. Again, not really different from other organizations that need an organizational memory: schools, churches, militaries, governments, companies (if they last long enough).
posted by col_pogo at 10:14 AM on September 5, 2013

Natural language semantics (what I do) is a young field, and didn't have any written history until recently. Barbara Partee has started working on it. She's in the "retired professor" category, and has the additional advantage of having been around almost since the dawn of the field.

Speaking as a young grad student in semantics, I find her stuff on history very useful. Classic papers from the 70s and 80s were written against a background of Things Everybody Knew and Assumptions Everybody Made — and generally didn't spell out those assumptions in full detail. But I wasn't around back then, so I do need to have those assumptions spelled out in order to really follow what's going on.

In other words, the disciplinary history she's doing is mostly for the benefit of insiders and not of outsiders. But you see the same thing in e.g. philosophy — it's not the only reason people do it, but one of the reasons people write about history of philosophy is to help later generations of philosophers follow debates that went on fifty (or five hundred) years ago so that they can build on those debates in their own work.
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 10:23 AM on September 5, 2013

I recall the book Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity being a mixed bag of articles on minor disciplines and how they came to be recognized as distinct fields with independent concerns. I seem to recall enjoying the article called something like "Accounting as a Discipline" for its historical overview.

It's been twenty years since I read that, so this will be a gross simplification, but I think overall the volume was inspired by Foucault's concept of power-knowledge, applicable to disciplines being formulated and institutionalized as solutions to problems arising in the maintenance of power relations (e.g. military history as a solution to military needs, cultural anthropology as the "handmaiden of Colonialism," etc.).
posted by Monsieur Caution at 11:48 AM on September 5, 2013

Response by poster: "Are you asking whether all disciplines have official, published histories? " Yes, even though it does seem that most if not all do.

Knowledges: Historical and Critical Studies in Disciplinarity looks good, and the library has a copy.

"later generations of philosophers follow debates that went on fifty (or five hundred) years ago so that they can build on those debates in their own work." I think that makes sense, so that newcomers can see how a discipline evolved and also gain a clearer understanding of the identity of the discipline.
posted by PHINC at 6:52 PM on September 5, 2013