새로운 상상의 공동체―종족사에서 인류사로―

Abstract

This article tries to examine the possibility to write the history of humanity which substitute tribal and national history. If we could expand our perspective on a larger scale, Eurocentrism that sustain modern historiography could be transcended. One way of putting Eurocentrism in its proper historiographical place is to frame it within the large scales that ought to be natural to world history. Eurocentrism is the product of an awkward syncretism between two distinct types of “imagined communities,” political communities and knowledge communities. When the scale of exchange network become larger, the local political communities seek to understand many other groups. Doing this meant re-thinking identities at larger and larger scales. Eventually, the local or tribal sense of community had to negotiate a workable relationship with the wider “knowledge community.”The large imagined communities associated with expanding knowledge communities may often seem abstract, but, as we know from the history of nationalism, they can nevertheless be imagined vividly, they can create powerful emotional ties, and they can enable unified action at very large scales. We can get a sense of how such processes work in practice by looking at the impact on Aboriginal Australian ideologies of contacts with outsiders. They had to construct transcendental categories that allowed them to place their own traditions within larger and more diverse social, ethical and religious schema. In his account we can see very clearly the complexity of negotiations between the tribal community and the larger knowledge community. Globalization is a modern variant of these ancient processes. Since the sixteenth century, traditional knowledge systems throughout the world have had to cope with a torrent of new knowledge, much of it generated by contacts between communities that had no previous knowledge of each other’s existence. These encounters, and the torrent of new information, impressions and ideas they generated, had a particularly powerful impact in Europe, which lay at the center of the emerging web of global contacts, and that may be why Europe’s traditional knowledge systems were revolutionized so early by the early stages of globalization. The challenge for historians is to help us negotiate a more objective and realistic relationship between regional and global identities. First, that will mean distinguishing clearly between them, which is exactly what the best of recent world scholarship has been doing quite successfully. Then, it will mean trying to understand with more rigor and precision the nature of the emerging global knowledge community because, unlike the tribal identities of modern nationalisms, this identity remains little understood and under-theorized. From national histories to the history of humanity: that is the logic of this argument. I believe that constructing such histories is no longer merely an interesting challenge. It is also becoming a duty for historians. Histories of communities are powerful ethical tools because they can mobilize loyalties, as is clear from the powerful role played by nationalist historiography. And historians have been powerful constructors of national identities. So they may have a very important role to play in helping us better understand and imagine the emerging community of humanity.