also often intersect with each other...Ithink that [the] sides
carry a kind of stereotype of each other. I definitely see myself as
somebody who is negotiating, though. I think I’m a strong disci-
plinarian in that sense. I think history as a discipline has a lot to
offer and what it offers is a kind of careful archival work. But at
the same time, I’m not naive enough to believe that empiricism is
not a theory, so I also want to be more theoretically informed in
my archival work.The decline of social history and the hegemony of cultural his-
tory after 1980 have been detailed by intellectual historians, notably
in analyses of the emergence of “new cultural historians” (exemplified
by the work of the French historians Robert Darnton and Natalie
Zemon Davis); the growing influence of Clifford Geertz, Norbert Elias,
Pierre Bourdieu, and others; and the effects of post-structuralism.^41
Postmodern theory has been particularly polarizing, but as a South
Asian specialist argues, consensus is again gaining strength:
Maybe certain kinds of consensus are evolving. There was a
pitched kind of life-and-death battle for a while between people
who felt that the post-moderns had taken over everything and
were operating in some kind of gangster fashion, to only promote
themselves and keep everybody else out, and wanted everybody to
wear black, and all that. People’s sense of desperation about that
[has] passed, and I think people [have] kind of calmed down a bit... The people who really did the thinking about post-modern-
ism were very important and they’re always present in everything
that I read or write or think about. But as for the jargonizing and
the credentializing, that’s a bit passé.
A very senior scholar sees generational tensions as overlapping
substantive points of contention:
84 / On Disciplinary Cultures