Crisis and the social desire for history

The Annual Report for the University published recently has an article on crisis and the social desire for History written by Dr John Chircop, a local historian.

Dr Chircop lectures on economic and social history in the Department of History, Faculty of Arts. He is also founder of the Oral History Centre and Archive, which is still under his care. His main research interests are: the economic and social history of the Maltese Islands during the 19th and early 20th centuries; history of welfare, social assistance and healthcare; survival strategies and forms of resistance of the poor.

In the last annual report he wrote that global restructuring of the market economies has been accompanied by the present crisis in the social welfare system and the exhaustion of the traditional managing role that the state occupied in Western Europe.

The wide political consent which had been created in European politics, in support of what was taken to be the state's principal responsibility to direct a heavily institutionalised welfare system, is now severely weakened and apparently unsustainable. As a consequence, rapid and erratic changes in society are amplifying unemployment, intensifying varying types of poverty and family instability, leading to the breakdown of customary forms of social solidarity and diffusing a sense of individualist disorientation and anomie.

Correspondingly, attempts to legitimise this disintegration of the state's social assistance system in mainstream cultural discourse has largely, though not exclusively, been represented by endist postmodernist arguments, mainly by the end-of-history thesis.

Initially, this seemed capable of damaging history as an academic discipline crucial to theme cultural discourse of modernity, before it received an exhaustive critique as exemplified by Jacques Derrida's scathing deconstruction of Fukuyama's claim, that "the triumph of market liberalism" has brought an "end of history", as a pure ideological hoax.

Dr Chircop states that "as it comes to present previously suppressed voices, hidden daily records and personal effects, hitherto considered insignificant to the writing of history, this new research method requires social historians with a critical-pluralistic aptitude and trained to discern, to examine, work with and discuss, the multiple levels - oral, written and visual - forming historical reality."

And it was with this main purpose in mind that the Oral History Centre (OHC) and Archive was founded some three years ago within the Department of History. During its relatively short period of existence, the OHC has proved successful in many ways as can be gauged by the growing number of audio and video recorded interviews deposited in its archive and their increasing popularity with researchers, as well as by the long list of elderly people who are waiting to record their own recollections.

This brief extract from Dr Chicop's article does not do justice to his contribution. Readers are referred to further information about the Oral History Centre and Archive which may be found on the website: http://home.um.edu.mt/history/oralhistorycentre.pdf