READING IMMIGRANT LETTERS AND BRIDGING THE MICRO-MACRO DIVIDE

• Authors: Ursula Lehmkuhl
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The early 1980s were characterized by a paradigm change in history. The premises, research methods and research goals of the dominant paradigm of "social and structural history" were challenged by the “subjective turn” in history contesting the logocentrist and linear way of historical thinking, the established techniques of history writing and the systems of historical knowledge production. The emerging new fields of research and research approaches – oral history, life histories, historical anthropology and history and memory – were closely interconnected, methodologically and with regard to their theoretical foundations. Going back to some of the arguments put forward in the discussion about the linguistic turn in the 1980s, I will argue that in order to be able to "read" and understand immigrant letters historians have to approach them as "texts" and not just as illustrative historical source material. It is necessary to not only look at content but also at the way the content is presented, i.e. the narration and the narrative structure of the letters. In order to elucidate the methodological bridging function of these two approaches and their contribution to overcome the micro-macro divide, I will in a first step contextualize the specific theoretical value of life history research by putting it in the context of arguments developed by historical anthropology. In a second step, I will apply the developed research framework to reconstruct the structural properties and historical sequences of life course processes as represented by the narratives of the letters of Ernst and Marie Kuchenbecker written between 1891 and 1932.

Keywords

EN

ORAL HISTORY; LIFE HISTORY; NARRATOLOGY; IMMIGRANT LETTERS

• Publisher: Wydział Studiów Międzynarodowych i Politycznych Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego oraz Polska Akademia Umiejętności
• Journal: Studia Migracyjne - Przegląd Polonijny
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 1 (151)
• Pages: 9-30

Contributors

author

Ursula Lehmkuhl

• Universität Trier