Fastfission wrote:
On 3/17/06, The Cunctator <cunctator(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Primary sources are *by definition* preferable to
secondary sources in most
cases.
No way. Aside from our lovely NOR policy, let me just say that the
worst annoyance is some yahoo with a primary source who thinks that he
now knows how to write history (and I am sure the specialists in other
fields as well have run into this a million times over).
A small example: periodically you get people quoting passages
selectively out of Darwin's _Descent of Man_ to prove that Darwin was
a racist (by modern standards). They appeal to the original and say
that they are as good as anyone else at interpretting such things. In
reality, Darwin's take on race (so says the historian) needs to be
highly contextualized (he is actually considerably less racist than
most of his anthropological contemporaries, though just racist enough
to not be considered an ethnologist) and is considerably more complex
than just reading _Descent of Man_ (you can't really understand
_Descent of Man_ unless you read the works to which Darwin is
implicitly responding to).
If Darwin was responding to the work of others than his book can no
longer be considered a primary source.
But none of that depth, context, and
richness is clear from the primary source alone -- the work of a
historian is to draw all of these things together, to make the primary
source more than the text it is printed upon.
And so historians have done this, and so it is easy to write an
article about _Descent of Man_ or Darwin's views on race, because most
of that synthesis has already been done by others and can be easily
found and referenced. Sure, pairing the synthetic approach *along*
with the primary source is a great idea and for good effect. But in
this case the primary source serves primarily to add luster and
authenticity to the secondary interpretation, which is considerably
harder to get than just reading the original.
I think you have it all backwards. I do agree that reading the original
is often much more difficult, and that secondary works fulfill a
simplifying function. But any secondary interpretation imposes
additional views, or creates distortions of the original material, or
begins the cherry-picking process.
Perhaps I sound a little territorial, here (of course
the historian
claims that being a historian is not easy), but I suspect that other
people with other backgrounds will agree a bit on this. I'd rather
have people write an encyclopedia based on secondary accounts than
primary accounts -- the former will prove to be a collection of the
current state of the knowledge (an encyclopedia), the latter will
prove to be a collection of off-beat, missing-the-point, and
thoroughly unaware and uninformed amateurisms.
Oh! It seems as though this approach only reinforces the socally
acceptable POV.
I've run into this time and time again, when some
self-styled
researcher attempts to forge new ground on Wikipedia using their
original sources, and refuses to acknowledge the difficulty of using
primary sources, even after it being patiently explained more than a
few times. I have to admit, it drives me a little batty -- as such I
apologize for the lengthy reply!
What you are seeking is more than a simple acknowledgement of the
difficulty of using primary sources. When you put this in terms of
patient explanations you are going much further and presuming him to be
wrong.
Ec