Normally Exceptional - the Ginzburgian school of NPC design
You don't have to be very familiar with the Northern Italian roots of microhistory (in the work of Ginzburg, Levi, Poni, Grendi, et al.) as a methodological approach to be aware of its products - classics like The Cheese and the Worms, The Return of Martin Guerre, and The Great Cat Massacre are still v popular both in and out of the classroom - or understand its dissatisfaction with Annales school longue durée analysis + grand narrative (Muir's "gigantification of historical scale")...but it does help with blog posts! Channeling Marcia’s Freudposting on this one.
Zooming In
The microhistorical approach raises questions about selectivity and significance. By what criteria are names to be picked out and how representative of broader social trends and collective mentalities are the subjects' activities and thoughts? What can the few tell us about the many, especially when the process of selection is neither random nor statistically rigorous? How can historians concerned with trifles avoid producing trivial history?
It was Edoardo Grendi who first suggested that a response to these questions should rely on the statistical concept of a normal exception. Goes like this: as rebels, heretics, and criminals are the most likely candidates from lower classes (contact with the archive for people on the margins typically comes at moments of confrontation, a phenomenon that Trouillot discussed best in his Silencing the Past) to leave sufficient traces to become the subjects of microhistories, their behavior is, by definition, exceptional. However, as Ginzburg and Poni note in Il nome e il come, certain kinds of transgressions against authority constitute normal behavior for those on the social periphery, the kinds of behavior sociologists call "self help" - that is, those illegal or socially proscribed actions that were normal for those who had no other means of redress. Some transgressors, therefore, might be exceptions to the norms defined by political or ecclesiastical authorities but would be perfectly representative of their own social milieu. Understanding what behaviors and ideas were beyond the pale might also help to describe better the characteristics of the dominant group that defined what was considered normal.
Kinda related - the philologically-minded concern of the cultural microhistorians (one of the two big Italian splits in the heroic age of microhistory) for the accurate reconstruction of meanings within their original contexts reveals one of the most striking characteristics of their methods: they respect the strictest positivist standards in the collection and criticism of evidence but employ that evidence in highly unconventional ways. Again Carlo Ginzburg serves as the best example. As an explanation for his radical methodological attitude, Ginzburg claims Freud as his intellectual model, despite the fact that his work is often strongly anti-Freudian. It's not Freudian thinking itself, however, that interests Ginzburg but the distinctive character of Freud's mind: "the peculiar mixture in Freud's intellectual personality of a very positivistic attitude towards truth and that daring attitude about questions, relevancies, methods, and standards of proof." It's almost like a mirror of the work that Greatest Belgian in History Jan Vansina was doing around the same time, as Newbury explains in his paper on Vansina's legendary oral historiography debates:
"Contrary to what most people think, his essential challenge was not in methods, since he simply drew on and applied the methods of the day conventional to the field (or rather to several fields). Instead, his innovation was to apply those principles widely (drawn from history, anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology) - to see them as convergent, even essential, to each other. His interests were in redefining the scope of historical inquiry, not only in method, but by redefining the relevant actors...However, to do so, he had to operate within the rigorous confines of historical methodology of the day - to prove that within this broader field the historical actors were truly 'historical agents' according to the canons of the day. It was not enough to satisfy himself that Africans had a history: he had to present this in such a way that all historians could see that. Acceptance within a universal field of history was his goal. And it transformed not only the understanding of Africa but of the discipline of history as well."
In addition to seeing their subjects as normal exceptions, microhistorians consider certain historical documents as examples of a second kind of normal exception. If documents generated by the forces of authority systematically distort the social reality of the subaltern classes, then an exceptional document, especially one that records the exact words of a lower-class witness or defendant, could be much more revealing than a multitude of stereotypical sources. In selecting these exceptional documents and neutralizing the distortions in others, microhistorians have relied on specific criteria of proof designed to resurrect forms of knowledge or understandings of the world which have been suppressed or lost - reminded again of Trouillot and the quest to recover “histories of the unthinkable.”
Obligatory Congoposting
This part is more about my autism than anything in the rest of the post. Feel free to skip lmao.
Some of my favorite Continental examples of art made to unsettle - in the broad sense - are masks created by bifebwe societies of the Eastern Songye + related cultural complexes (Kalebwe, Luba/Hemba, etc), something that the ever-brilliant Dunja Hersak’s recentish revisiting of the kifebwe masquerades in African Arts takes note of:
"Consequently, the bifwebe were effectively instrumentalized not only through overt masende* action but also through their ambivalent identity of Otherness. Conceptualized as bizarre creatures from a mountainous wilderness beyond Songye territory, they defied familiar classification as either human, animal, or spirit, though imbued with attributes of all three. Those who wore the masks were referred to in the first place as muadi, a generic term or a transformational state of the familiar into something other…As anomalous creatures, the bifwebe would energize the public arena with the unpredictable, unusual, and spectacular but also, paradoxically, with regulating effects."
She stumbles a bit, though, when confronted with a strange case of labeling:
"The [elder masks] are the most powerful kifwebe, recognizable throughout by their prominent features and especially their highly protuberant crests, an indication of their superlative control of Masende sorcery. As noted earlier, this fanning out of power distinctions may be a later development, since one of the well-known kifwebe in the collection of the Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren collected prior to 1928 in the Songye/Luba area of Katompe in Kabalo territory, was identified unanimously both east and west of the Lomami River by those I interviewed as the most powerful masker and yet named ndoshi, or witch. I was puzzled by this identification, expecting a reference to masende according to the classification I had learned, but concluded that this was simply a veiling of its true nature."
Beyond the point that many features of Songye relationships with the bandoshi complicate traditional readings of the low and villainous witch - my hobbyist’s opinion is that there’s much to recommend Koen Stroeken’s reading of Sukuma witchery in his book Moral Power: The Magic of Witchcraft - I wonder if her Kabalo Songye interlocutors weren’t just being honest? Does it have to be a veil? I'd guess that this weird description is an example of the normal exception; a man ostracized as a witch may still be representative of and powerful within mask society subcultures.
Rules for the Rabble
So here's where I'm at! Every non-elite NPC should have:
- One set of views/habits considered deviant by elite-mediated culture
- One social milieu in which they are considered remarkably average
- One archival confrontation - how does this character enter historical record?
* Wrote a post on this way back! Now realizing that I am many months late w/r/t continuing my Songye magical classification series. I'll come back to it, I'm just very forgetful -_-
It's interesting, what you describe here as a normal exception, I'd think of as a sampling bias, but ya it amounts to the same thing. If there is systematic bias in the data then that will necessarily limit interpretability (in this case I mean bias in terms of statistical variance, not in the sociopolitical sense, although the latter can be a subset of the former and is regardless of course it's own concern...)
ReplyDeleteMicro-history appeals to me in the same way that "neurotypical" research appeals to me (qualms with that word or concept aside I mean more in a statistical sense than in any hard-valenced sense...). Back when I used to do research in cognitive neuroscience, or talk about psychology, people would not unreasonably often immediately ask me about pathology, mental illness, cognitive disorders, etc.; and it's not that I don't think that's interesting, there's a lot we can learn from the exceptions. But, while not as sexy on-face, I find it more interesting to understand "the average person", or rather, to understand the system itself. Understanding the exceptions, understanding what the system is not, is also obviously helpful, but that alone only gets you so far.
That was long-winded haha but I see micro-history as like that. Rather than focusing on the exceptions, the Big Men of History or whatever, it's about trying to understand the "average" experience.
Wrt the Freud comment, I always think it's funny/interesting how people outside psychology view Freud lol; like yes he was brilliant and important to the development of the field, but at least within the context of psychology and neuroscience today, he's largely been outmoded- in large part because, by his own acknowledgment, his ideas were non-falsifiable i.e. non-empirical. I may be forgetting or am not familiar with some of the finer points of what qualifies as "positivism", but to the extent that it's about a framework in which all things can be explained scientifically, Freud does not even pass that test haha.
Wrt "Obligatory Congoposting" I find masks and the role of masks in various cultures really interesting. It's also interesting to me, and something admittedly I have not sufficiently thought about, that literal masks don't really exist in modern western culture, and I wonder why that is.
We have superheroes who are often represented by their "masks", and then there are arguably "digital masks" via anonymity. Ya I dunno, considering how interested I am in superheroes and how much time I spend thinking about such things, it's a little embarrassing now come to think of it how little I've considered this idea outside of the cliches or a few exceptions like Watchmen or Morrison's Pax Americana. I suspect I've thought about this before and just forgotten but I dunno...
I’ve wondered how well Grendi’s terminology stood up - historians are prone to abusing jargon that they borrow from other fields.
DeleteMicrohistory: I think this is a reasonable understanding of their aims; the issue of the Normal Exception ofc is that there’s lots of situations where the “average” experience rarely enters the record (part of what Ulrich - a brilliant microhistorian herself, though she had the blessing of working with egodocuments - originally meant with that famous “well behaved women” quote) outside of extraordinary circumstance. It’s deeply troubling in ways that are not fully captured by the usual “written by victors” or “historians will say they were friends” responses. I think that Trouillot really had the best take on the issue of silence and records tbh; in Silencing the Past, he argues (among other things) that silences are encoded in historical production at four moments in particular: ‘the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).’ Not all events are recorded; not all records are incorporated into archives; not all archives are used to tell stories; not all stories are used to write history. Although, as Trouillot acknowledges, these four moments are not universally present in all instances of history making, I think he succeeded at his goal of providing a framework to “help us understand why not all silences are equal and why they cannot be addressed—or redressed—in the same manner.” Very thorny.
Freud: I think Ginzburg would agree with you, he’s not much of a Freudian - his point was mostly about a parallel in methodological approach and not method itself. My own fault, I took the quote (from an interview in Radical History Review) out of context. The bit I put up is framed thusly: “First of all, the rules of historical method were set up at a certain moment by human beings. They are a human construct. Those rules were set up in order to pose specific problems related to specific evidence. They are related to specific kinds of history - political history, ecclesiastical history, institutional history, diplomatic history, and military history. If you start with different problems, you have to look for different evidence….This is really something relevant to historians also, not in the sense that they should have to apply Freud’s conclusions, but in the sense that he provides an intellectual model.”
Masks: It’s all cyclical! I’ve intentionally avoided talking much about masking so far, since it seems to take up an inordinate amount of space in discussions of Central African arts and culture already, but that’s not very fair ig. I might do a longer post on a particular Songye masquerade, similar to the posts on the Abrus Seed Mystery or the Pende initiation panels. Would love to see a masks post for your recent superhero project…maybe I should submit a hero soon tbh.
Wrt normal exception / sampling bias ya it's complicated by jargon stuff but I just meant to say I think they're similar or complementary ideas, for sure! Like the sampling bias can be explained in terms of statistical variance, but I was being maybe too cheeky in how I said it but the matter of what gets recorded into history and why is still what's driving that effect, I just think it's cool to converge on these and other matters from various angles.
DeleteWrt Freud I realize there are certain academic or intellectual perspectives that have built upon his ideas in interesting ways on its own terms and that's something I still don't know a whole lot about and am trying to be more cognizant of in the mean time, like I really need to read anti oedipus and other Guattari and Deleuze stuff, but I still think it's both funny and interesting haha. But it sounds like Ginzburg has a different idea than I was taking from it anyway, good to know.
Wrt masks ya I realize that's one of the more common ideas from Central African arts that gets talked about, but if it were something you were interested in doing I'm sure your perspective on it would be really unique and awesome. And definitely if you wanted to make a superhero out of it I bet it would be amazing!
Finally had a chance to sit down and really read this. I don’t have the educational chops to keep up with much of it, but the conclusion struck me as sort of the heart of the thing:
Delete“Every non-elite NPC should have:
• One set of views/habits considered deviant by elite-mediated culture
• One social milieu in which they are considered remarkably average
• One archival confrontation - how does this character enter historical record?”
This is brilliant and may change the way I approach creating my NPCs to some extent.
A question – when you talk about the “social milieu in which they are considered remarkably average,” I am curious about the sense in which you are using “average” here. I thought of the powerful masker / low witch example provided in the post; is this the kind of thing you mean? A person who is considered a deviant / criminal / outsider in one social situation is powerful or at least completely accepted, in another? This is really interesting and it seems to me, true to life…
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts…
This part of the post, especially, is something I would really like to incorporate into the characters I build; in many cases I believe it is already present, but it’s definitely something I will be more conscious of going forward. I am highly aware of how people (myself included) present different aspects of themselves in different social situations, but I’ve mostly been focused on how that impacts person-to-person interactions, rather than looking at different “slices” of society and how they present within that context. It’s a really interesting lens to peer through and one that I think may help deepen the character themselves. As usual, wonderful post – great, unique ideas here!
I reread my Not-Review of Tom King's Rorschach and apparently I was right on the verge of thinking about some of this masks stuff a while ago and then never went anywhere with it lol:
Deletehttps://weirdwonderfulworlds.blogspot.com/2022/11/rorschach-not-review.html
> I've talked a lot before about the idea of pareidolia, and of how the way perception imposes anthropomorphism onto things could be like a kind of animism, or a control mechanism, a cybernetic interface to the noosphere.
> It would be interesting to have something like a pulp hero, a Rorschach type, with a pareidolic mask. A living symbol like Batman claims to be, a force churning through the system of human minds via human bodies like Frankenstein's monster.
> Willed into being, something connected to the human experience, a reflection on meaning lacking any of its own.
Dan - Yeah, your read is totally on point! That's what the older Italians were arguing, at least, and the bit that seems most appropriate for games to me. I def detected that awareness in WWNE; I think that most of the impetus for this came from trying to understand what clicked for me in your D23 posts.
DeleteMax - I must have missed this post, but it's extremely cool! This helps clarify the sort of project you had in mind with the earlier comment; it does seem of a kind with many of your ongoing interests. I'm in favor of a full post, if that's a possibility.
I think I still need to read more of the animism stuff and various other things, but I do have at least one more post planned that discusses some of the related ideas, but not the masks stuff specifically. Also it would probably be advantageous for me to wait until after you've made a masks post lol, if you choose to do so, as I imagine you'd provide some extremely useful insights.
Delete