[WikiEN-l] Primary sources

[Ray Saintonge]

Fastfission wrote:

>On 3/17/06, The Cunctator <cunctator at 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