Sphinx

About twenty years ago, I would guess, I started writing Theories, Models and Concepts in Ancient History. I had two main motives – or three, if you count the fact that I was supposed to be writing a book about ancient trade and had absolutely no idea what to say about it. Firstly, I wanted to write it for my students; I’d by now been teaching an ‘Approaches to Ancient History’ course for five years, which I’d stealthily reorientated in directions that suited my interests and intellectual commitments, and I was somewhat conscious of the lack of accessible introductory reading. Writing a suitable book myself seemed preferable to changing the module topics back to the previous version – and it offered the possibility of a kind of primitive flipped classroom, insofar as if everyone read the relevant sections of the book we could focus on debates, issues and freeform discussion, rather than having to devote lots of class time to covering the basics of the topic.

My second main motive was of course the overweening arrogance and polemical bloody-mindedness of youth – the discipline should be theoretically sophisticated and methodologically self-conscious, and what better way of trying to force it down my preferred path then to attempt to subvert the as yet unformed minds of students, even the ones I couldn’t influence directly? It was undoubtedly ambitious to try to cover all the different topics, from class and status to cultural anthropology via feminism – there’s a good reason why similar books in historical studies tend to be multi-author collections – but I was already doing that in the classes, offering a broad introduction to key issues and debates and a synthesis of some recent research rather than claiming to be comprehensive. No, the really over-ambitious bit was the idea that the whole book could subtly convey the importance, necessity and even joy of taking a theoretical approach to historical studies, so that even if a reader rejected one or all of the theories discussed they were still nevertheless having to engage with theoretical issues, and this might rub off on them despite themselves.

This reflected my typical teaching experience, that a student who absolutely hated the course but was willing to articulate this and engage in discussion could be enormously useful for the overall success of the class, and might well come to look back on it as useful a few years later – the problem students were the ones who went for silent resistance. I’m sure my biases are obvious, but with a few exceptions (the section on feminism being the stand-out example) I wasn’t setting out to promote a particular theory or ideology but to draw students/readers into thinking about the issues and asking their own questions – and reading around in more recent, more specialised scholarship. That, at least in theory, would also stop the book from dating too badly too quickly: the basic problems and dilemmas in making sense of human social organisation or comparing modern and pre-modern economies or thinking about ‘human nature’ would remain, even as the attempts at answering them changed with the times, so there would still be a need for an introduction to those problems and dilemmas.

And so, until very recently, I’ve been quite happy not to think about TMC, except on the rare but welcome occasions when someone mentions that it made an impression on them as a student. It might not sell any more as libraries all have their copies, it might be sliding into irrelevance as the discipline has generally become much more hospitable to theoretical and social-science approaches than it was back in the theory wars of the 1990s – and perhaps I could even imagine that I had some small part in that – but it was out there on shelves if anyone did want to read it, and it wouldn’t do them any harm if they did.

Well, that was then. Two events in short succession have changed my mind about this complacent attitude. The first was the recent event on Race: antiquity and its legacy organised by the Roman Society, with Zena Kamash, Denise McCoskey and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, which powerfully brought home how inadequate my discussion of race theory is by contemporary standards. This inadequacy is above all because the topic is not just about the past, but about the present, and the dialectic between the two; okay, I would make that claim about pretty well any aspect of ancient history, but whereas the implications of, say, the critique of modernity via antiquity were broadly established a century and a half ago, understanding of the relationship between classical studies and race is a much more recent development, still not universally accepted in the discipline, and a failure to address it properly in a book like mine starts to feel like a sin of commission rather than mere omission.

And then, barely a week later, we had the Twitter row about insensitivity in relation to trans issues, and I was left in the uncomfortable position of wondering whether after all my discussion of sex and gender in TMC might be worse than the discussion of race and ethnicity. I hope I will be excused for what I wrote then, given that it was, I think, a reasonable summary of debates about sex, gender and identity at the time. But actually the important thing is not my motive or intention, but how those words might be received today, and the fear that (1) what was then a reasonably neutral summary of the state of debate now looks like one of the entrenched positions in a rather different debate, and so the book might be claimed, anachronistically, as an endorsement of that position, or even read (by those unfamiliar with the details of the current debate, and maybe even seeking a way into it) as an authoritative account of things that then implicitly delegitimises alternative perspectives (yes, as someone commented on the Twitter, there’s loads of other stuff they could read – but what if they don’t?); (2) one of my students might be hurt or feel betrayed by what I wrote, and lose all trust in me as a teacher – and, though I don’t tend to think in these terms, actually for ‘students’ substitute ‘readers’.

The fact that this would be inadvertent, and can be explained (and even excused) by how much the debate has changed in the intervening time, doesn’t matter, if the book is read – as I hope it still would be – as something that’s supposed to be useful in the present, not just a historical curiosity. Having been progressive once doesn’t get you a lifetime pass; times and ideas both change, and sometimes that means positions need to be reviewed and reconsidered – but that is somewhat tricky when the position is established in print. I am, you could fairly say, hoist by the petard of my own over-confidence in making pronouncements on fields and topics on which I don’t regularly work, simply because I don’t then have many opportunities for later modifying or repudiating those pronouncements.

Assuming that it’s not really practical to sneak into every library where the book may be found to insert an ‘Errata/Apologies’ slip, my best hope for a clear conscience might be just to hope that no one bothers to read it any more. The problem with that is the absence of an alternative, and I don’t think it’s just my own sense of self-importance that makes it seem as if such an introductory work is potentially desirable. So, Plan B: the great thing about words is that they can be revised and rewritten, and the solution in this case is clearly Theories, Models and Concepts II: The Empiricists Strike Back. Or, TMC Second Edition, as apparently the publisher might prefer.

This is still in the early stages of planning, but at the moment I’m thinking in terms of a complete reworking, rather than just updating the bibliography: making sure that existing discussions of different theories and approaches are brought up to date to reflect current issues and debates, and considering what new intellectual developments need to be included – suggestions welcome! (Definitely something on big data and statistics; more on anthropology and environmental science; more on cognitive studies…).

Further: I am seriously considering developing this project as a collaboration – not because I think it would be less work for me, probably the opposite, but to temper some of my idiosyncrasies and identify blind spots, and try to ensure that the end result really does engage properly with the relevant debates in the right way. I’m not too old to admit that I have a lot to learn from other people… The thing is, I don’t actually have anyone specific in mind; indeed, I’m hoping that this blog post might serve as an advertisement for a potential co-author.

This is a rather different sort of academic project from most, requiring less specific research expertise and more a willingness to dabble in lots of different areas, a commitment to the basic aims of TMC as an end in itself (this probably isn’t the sort of thing to rank very highly in promotion criteria or research quality evaluation exercises, and the financial rewards are pretty negligible) and potentially a high level of patience and tolerance as I haven’t actually tried co-authorship properly before, and I suspect there is a hard core of stubborn arrogance beneath all the outward reasonableness. I am looking, I guess, for someone who is both very different from me, especially in research interests (preference for serious engagement with the themes identified above, as that’s where TMC Returns is most clearly in need of work), and at the same time shares a core belief in the importance of both engagement with theory and methodology and clear communication with a student audience.

So, who fancies themselves as the Pet Shop Boys to give a modern makeover to a has-been cult figure? (Yes, even my jokes about being dated are dated). I am, quite seriously, open to expressions of interest in exploring whether we could work together on this: n.d.g.morley@exeter.ac.uk.