Cases and Scale in Historiography

Conference organized by Michael Osman and Cristóbal Amunátegui (University of California, Los Angeles)

In the last few decades, debates stemming from the science and history “wars” have called attention to the ways in which cases are constructed and proven across disciplines. This has led to questions about the nature and selection of evidence, the role of scale, and the function of narrative in “making” a case. These questions seem apt, since for all their explanatory potential, cases also imply risks: they can collapse into anecdote, or devolve into overspecialized accounts disconnected from broader elucidatory aims. They can also fall prey to naturalizations of all kinds: despite claims to the contrary, cases are often made and seldom found. Pressure on the case, however, remains proof of its widespread use and continuous theorization. For some examples, in 2005 Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel published the study Pensar par cas, and in 2007 Critical Inquiry dedicated a double number to the subject. That same year Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung edited the volume Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History. More recently, in 2019 Lucio Biasiori and Carlo Ginzburg co-edited A Historical Approach to Casuistry: Norms and Exceptions in a Comparative Analysis, and Markus Asper published the collection Thinking in Cases: Ancient Greek and Imperial Chinese Case Narratives.

“Cases and Scale in Historiography” builds on these examinations by inviting scrutiny on the relationship between the case and one of its constitutive elements: scale. Among many other things, cases are a way of managing distance: between the past and the present, the far away and the near, norms and exceptions, ideation and reality. Thus defined, cases are inevitably bound to the shifting measures and temporalities of scale, something which may seem at odds with today’s dominant culture of scholarly specialization. Like magnets, cases have the potential of centripetally attracting different knowledge, sites, and periods in order to solve the problems they pose. To deal with the spatiotemporal vagaries of scale, however, entails facing a wide-ranging set of historiographical and epistemological difficulties: the scalar analysis imposed by cases seems to pit historiographical specificity against both blind specialization and Diogenean erudition. By pointing to the links between scale and the case, then, our invitation is to explore the limits and possibilities of the historian as both expert and generalist.

Speakers
Daniel M. Abramson, Boston University
Cristóbal Amunátegui, University of California, Los Angeles
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Columbia University
Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles
Samaa Elimam, University of California, Los Angeles
Sylvia Lavin, Princeton University
Katie Lloyd Thomas, Newcastle University
Emanuele Lugli, Stanford University
Xavier Nueno, École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne
Michael Osman, University of California, Los Angeles
Andrei Pop, University of Chicago
Laurent Stalder, Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

The conference is free to attend with advance registration and will be held in-person at the Clark Library. The registration form will post here approximately a month in advance, and registration will close on Monday, March 10 at 5:00 p.m. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.

Image: Eric Gill, [Pigotts], 1930. Pencil and ink on paper, 16 x 12 in. Eric Gill Artwork Collection, UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.