On Deep History and the Brain
by Daniel Lord Smail
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Book Summary Information
Author: Daniel Lord SmailEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-18
ISBN: 0520258126
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: University of California Press
Book Reviews of On Deep History and the Brain
Book Review: Disappointing
Summary: 2 Stars
You know how when some popular musician or movie star comments on a subject out of his field of expertise (say, on politics or some scientific field) and says something ridiculous and the intelligentsia pokes fun at him? It turns out that when a Harvard professor does the same thing, those intelligentsia are too intimidated to criticize him.
I originally read this book for two reasons. First, I'd heard of Dr. Smail (as a historian of late medieval Spain) but had never read any of his work. Second, in spite of reading reviews of this book in both the NY Times and The Economist, I still had little idea what this book was really about. I was intrigued.
Dr. Smail makes two basic points. The first is wholly uncontroversial but still very much worth making--that historians would benefit from updating the psychological models of human behavior they use in their analyses. He illustrates his point nicely by providing two examples from his own field of research where recent psychological models shed light on behavior that would otherwise be difficult to explain. While few historians would dispute this point, Dr. Smail still does the field a service by reminding them (and all of us) that the models of behavior that we make our analyses with may be outdated.
The second point is the one that has created the stir. Dr. Smail claims that historians should somehow look into writing histories of the time before the invention of written records (what he calls "deep history"). He makes this claim although (1) that time period is already well-studied by archaeologists, paleontologists, evolutionary developmental biologists, and others, and (2) historians lack the training to add very much to the discussion among those fields.
Dr. Smail criticizes historians' traditional focus on texts as the primary raw materials for analysis, pointing out (rightly) that inscriptions, oral history, historical linguistics, and archaeology can provide us with insights into the history of a time period. Of that list, of course, when it comes to "deep history", only archaeology is truly useful (though historical linguistics may provide some insights). But trained experts have already been hard at work at these problems for quite a long time. What exactly can historians add to this?
Most damningly, Dr. Smail does not provide a single example of what such a history would look like. While it's true this book is an exploratory work, it seems unreasonable to me to fail to provide even ONE solid example of what he's talking about. Readers are left wondering what exactly he's proposing, and we get incomprehensible reviews like those in the NY Times and The Economist.
My own personal view is that historians lack the training to contribute to the study of "deep history". They are primarily trained to read historical texts (often in multiple languages), and use them to tell a story. It's very difficult and important work, and we're all indebted to them for what they do. But if a scholar were to want to study "deep history", she'd be far better off going to one of the academic fields that has developed tools to understand it. Historians simply have very little to add to this field, just like evolutionary developmental biologists would have very little to say about Dr. Smail's own field of late medieval Catalonia.
In fact, by encouraging historians to focus on a time period that is not amenable to their core competencies, Dr. Smail unwittingly illustrates why this is such a bad idea. When discussing the value of using updated psychological models, he is able to provide two insightful examples from his own field, but he is unable to do the same when discussing "deep history". If even Dr. Smail cannot do what he proposes, how can other historians do it? It's unfortunate that the intelligentsia is too intimidated to make this obvious point.
Summary of On Deep History and the Brain
When does history begin? What characterizes it? This brilliant and beautifully written book dissolves the logic of a beginning based on writing, civilization, or historical consciousness and offers a model for a history that escapes the continuing grip of the Judeo-Christian time frame. Daniel Lord Smail argues that in the wake of the Decade of the Brain and the best-selling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.Neuropsychology Books
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