Other Ways of Knowing the Past

Core Concepts

The Annales School: slow time and deep structure

Most people learn history as a sequence of events — battles, elections, deaths, treaties. The Annales school, launched in France in the 1920s by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, treated that surface-level story as the least interesting part of the past.

The school developed an interdisciplinary methodology that integrates historical, archaeological, and scientific evidence to examine human society as a hybrid of cultural and natural elements. Geography, material culture, climate, and the mentalités — the psychological frameworks of an epoch — all became legitimate historical evidence. The aim was to reveal slow, often imperceptible effects of space, climate, and technology on human action. (Cambridge Core)

Fernand Braudel formalized this into an explicit temporal architecture. He proposed three layers of historical time:

Fig 1

The deepest layer — the longue durée — is nearly immobile environmental and geographic time: mountains, trade routes, climates, coastlines. It determines the range of possible human action over centuries. On top of that sit the conjonctures: medium-term economic and social cycles. The uppermost layer, événement, is the short-term surface of discrete events. Braudel's hierarchy subordinates surface events to deep structural continuities — the event becomes legible only once you understand the structure beneath it. (Wikipedia: Longue durée, Britannica)

In The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), Braudel put this to work. The book's opening section is not about Philip II — it is about the mountains, plains, and seas of the Mediterranean basin and the slow-changing trade routes that human action had to navigate. Political events, however decisive they seemed at the time, are interpreted as expressions of that underlying geography. (Indian Ocean World Centre)

E.P. Thompson and history from below

The Annales shift toward social structures gave later historians methodological permission to move away from elite political narrative — but the school itself did not politicize that move. E.P. Thompson did. His "history from below" built on the Annales emphasis on longue durée and material conditions, then combined those insights with Marxist historical materialism and a specific commitment to recovering working-class consciousness and agency. Where Annales moved away from elite politics toward broader social structures, Thompson explicitly politicized that shift by centering subordinate groups as active historical agents rather than passive products of forces. (History from Below — Institute of Historical Research)

Microhistory: turning the lens on the small

A different reaction to Annales macro-history came from Italian historians in the 1970s. Carlo Ginzburg and his contemporaries developed microhistory as an explicit methodological and epistemological counter-move — not against the Annales ambition to widen history, but against its quantitative and macro-scale methods. They also rejected the Foucauldian approach that read power through administrative regulations and discursive forms rather than lived experience. (MIT Press Reader, eScholarship)

The key methodological insight of microhistory is that reducing the scale of analysis — focusing on a single village, trial, or individual — is not a retreat into anecdote. It is an analytical tool that can reveal historical processes and social structures invisible at aggregate scale. In The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg used the trial records of a sixteenth-century Friulian miller to reconstruct a cosmological worldview that no institutional source had set out to preserve. The miller's heterodox ideas appear in the record only because the Inquisition wanted to condemn them.

That leads to the core archival practice of both microhistory and Subaltern Studies: reading against the grain.

Subaltern Studies: the archive as counter-insurgency record

Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies collective (emerging 1982–1985) reframed the critique of elite historiography as a problem of archive interpretation, not just source expansion. Guha argued that colonial state archives themselves functioned as instruments of counter-insurgency. They were produced by the state to manage, suppress, and normalize subaltern populations — not to preserve their voices. Reading those records "against the grain," against their stated intentions, could recover subaltern agency that elite-centered historiography had consistently erased. (Emory Postcolonial Studies, Warwick University)

The methodological practice of reading against the grain — examining archives for marginal, overlooked, or anomalous details within documents produced for administrative, judicial, or repressive purposes — treats lacunae, marginalia, inconsistencies, and textual anomalies as crucial evidence. Inquisitorial records, judicial transcripts, and notarial records all become sources precisely because they were produced to suppress, normalize, or condemn the people they describe. (ResearchGate)

Itihasa-purana: history as ethical instruction

South Asian traditions developed their own system for preserving and transmitting knowledge of the past — one that Western historiography has repeatedly misread by applying inappropriate criteria.

The itihasa-purana genre served simultaneously as historiographical record (documenting genealogies and dynastic descent), ethical pedagogy (prescribing dharma, the right way to live), and political legitimation (establishing the authority of ruling lineages). These functions are inseparable within the epistemic system. Reading itihasa-purana historiographically requires recognizing that ethical instruction is constitutive of historical knowledge — not a bias to be corrected for. (Pune University, History Journal)

The temporal framework is equally distinct. Puranic historiography organizes time into cyclical yugas (cosmic ages) spanning millions of years rather than the linear chronology privileged by post-Enlightenment Western historiography. Crucially, this cyclical temporality is not a deficiency — it is a feature of a distinct epistemic system rooted in cosmological understanding rather than teleological progress. The colonial and Enlightenment historiography that pathologized cyclical time as incompatible with "historical consciousness" was expressing a methodological bias, not identifying a factual gap. Inscriptions across India demonstrate clear chronological consciousness that corroborates genealogical information in Puranic literature. (UNESCO, History Journal)

Cyclical time is not the absence of historical consciousness. It is a different architecture of time — one built for cosmological understanding rather than teleological progress.

Chinese biographical historiography: the liezhuan and its silences

Chinese dynastic historiography developed a distinct formal structure for organizing historical knowledge. The Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), compiled by Sima Qian in the first century BCE, established a template that shaped Chinese historical writing for two millennia. Of its 130 chapters, 70 were devoted to the liezhuan — ranked biographies organized by social category: emperors, hereditary nobles, generals, officials, and groups (empresses, magicians, eunuchs, foreign peoples, merchants). (Wikipedia: Shiji chapters)

The liezhuan form embedded Confucian moral epistemology directly into historical structure. Biographies were organized around the "exemplary character" of the subject — those whose deeds could be read as moral instruction merited historical registration. The principle of "exposing the wicked and promoting the good" shaped what appeared and how. This means that entire categories of lived experience — popular religious practice, women's domestic and economic labor, merchants' actual commercial operations — remained invisible unless they could be narrativized as either exemplary virtue or cautionary transgression. The silences in the liezhuan are as historically significant as its inclusions. (NouahsArk, EBSCO)

Multispecies history: non-human actors, non-human time

The most recent challenge to conventional historiography extends the critique of who counts as a historical agent beyond subordinate human groups to non-human entities entirely.

Posthuman historiography reframes animals, microbes, plants, and ecosystems as historical actors whose behaviors and evolutionary trajectories actively shape human pasts. This moves beyond treating nature as backdrop or resource. Human agency, in this framing, is "permeated by and circulates within vast causal relationships" with non-human actors — not steering history autonomously but co-constituted with ecological partners. (UAB Digital Commons)

Donna Haraway's framework of multispecies storytelling positions human history as fundamentally entangled with non-human actors through "sympoiesis" — making-with rather than making-alone. Her concept of the "Chthulucene" directly challenges linear progress narratives by foregrounding multispecies collaboration and challenging the human exceptionalism embedded in imperial and colonial historical traditions. (Duke University Press)

Anna Tsing's work takes a different entry point. Her book The Mushroom at the End of the World treats matsutake-producing forests — and the fungi themselves — as protagonists whose "unruly edges" resist linear historical narratives. Multiple historical trajectories (human and non-human) interrupt and interfere with each other in ways that require new temporal schemas — her "Fungal Clock" — to represent multispecies coordinations. Tsing's methodology treats species entanglements as both storytellers and evidence of how capitalism and colonialism operate through more-than-human relations. (Princeton University Press, Duke Environmental Humanities)

Compare & Contrast

The table below maps each tradition across four dimensions that matter for evaluating historiographic frameworks:

Framework	Who/what counts as historical actor	Temporal structure	Primary evidence	Key critique it makes
Annales (Braudel)	Populations, environments, trade networks	Tripartite: longue durée / conjuncture / événement	Geography, climate, material culture, archaeology	Event-history misses deep structural causation
History from below (Thompson)	Subordinate human groups as conscious agents	Linear, but class-differentiated	Working-class culture, consciousness, experience	Elite historiography erases subaltern agency
Microhistory (Ginzburg)	Individuals, especially marginal or deviant ones	Compressed scale (a trial, a life)	Inquisitorial, judicial, notarial records	Macro-quantitative methods suppress individual complexity
Subaltern Studies (Guha)	Colonial subordinates, peasants, workers	Linear but anti-teleological	Colonial archives read against their grain	Both colonial and nationalist historiography are elite-centered
Itihasa-purana	Dynastic lineages, cosmic actors, moral exemplars	Cyclical yugas spanning millions of years	Genealogies, epics, Puranic literature	Western criteria for "historical consciousness" are parochial
Chinese liezhuan	Morally exemplary or cautionary individuals by rank	Dynastic / reign-based linear chronology	Official biographies, court records	Confucian moral selection determines who enters the historical record
Multispecies / posthuman	Non-human actors (fungi, microbes, animals, ecosystems)	Multiple overlapping, non-synchronous species-time	Ecology, evolutionary biology, environmental data	Anthropocentric historiography is structurally incomplete

Annotated Case Study

Reading a single trial across three frameworks

The case: In 1583–1584, a miller from Montereale in the Friuli region of Italy — Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio — was tried by the Inquisition for heresy. His cosmological ideas, which he had developed by reading a handful of books and synthesizing them with popular oral culture, did not conform to either orthodox Catholicism or mainstream Lutheranism. He was executed in 1599.

The Inquisitorial trial records survive. Ginzburg used them in The Cheese and the Worms (1976). The same archival event can be read through multiple historiographic lenses, each of which recovers something different.

Through Braudel's longue durée:

The Friuli is a mountainous border region — geographically marginal, linguistically mixed, exposed to trade routes connecting the Italian peninsula with Central Europe. The structural conditions of the region — its transhumance economies, its position as a cultural threshold — created conditions in which heterodox ideas could circulate among people who were not attached to any dominant urban intellectual center. Menocchio's cosmology is partly a product of geography.

What this reveals: The deep structural context that made a particular kind of peasant heresy possible in this location and not elsewhere.

What it misses: Menocchio as a thinking subject with his own intellectual project.

Through Ginzburg's microhistory:

Ginzburg reads the trial records against their grain. The Inquisitors' goal was to extract a confession of heresy and locate Menocchio within a known heretical tradition. What the records actually reveal — read carefully — is something more interesting: a peasant cosmology that did not fit any established heretical template. Menocchio believed that the world had originally been formed from chaos "just as cheese is made from milk," and that angels emerged from it "just as worms are born from cheese." This is not Lutheran. It is not Cathar. It is something reconstructed from popular oral culture and a few half-digested books.

What this reveals: The active, creative intellectual life of a person whom no historiography designed to preserve the lives of the literate elite would have recorded.

What it misses: The structural conditions that made this type of consciousness available to a miller in the Friuli.

Through Subaltern Studies:

Guha's framework asks: what does the archive want from this record? The Inquisitorial transcript exists because the state wanted to eliminate a deviant and document its own correctness. Menocchio's voice appears only because the institution needed to document what it was suppressing. Every statement attributed to him was mediated by a scribe, a translator (the trial was conducted in Latin; Menocchio spoke Friulian), and an institutional framework that converted his statements into the categories of heresy law.

Reading against the grain means asking: what can we learn from the gaps — the moments where Menocchio's answers don't quite fit the question, where the record seems uncertain about how to categorize what he said?

What this reveals: The archival mediation that shapes all "recovered" subaltern voices; the structural impossibility of transparent access to subordinate consciousness through elite institutional records.

What it misses: It risks dissolving the individual into an archival problem.

The point of the comparison:

These three readings are not contradictory — they are complementary. The same archival source yields different historical knowledge depending on the framework brought to it. Having multiple historiographic vocabularies means being able to choose the analytical tool appropriate to the question being asked.