Ian Hesketh (Centre for the History of European Discourse, University of Queensland) will give an STS Colloquium Talk on Thursday, November 27 at 4 PM in Buchanan Tower Room 1197. Hesketh’s talk is titled “The Story of Big History.”
Dr. Hesketh will be circulating this paper in advance. If you plan to attend please contact Monica Brown for a copy: mm2brown@interchange.ubc.ca
Abstract
Big History is an intriguing new interdisciplinary approach that seeks to bridge the humanities–natural science divide by constructing a grand historical narrative that places human history within the context of the origins of the universe by combining the recent findings of astrophysics, cosmology, geology, geography, biology, archaeology, anthropology, and, of course, human history. Much has been made of this incredible interdisciplinarity as well as the epistemological connections that have been established between big history and the historical and empirical dimensions of science. What has largely been ignored by practitioners when they describe the emergence of their sub-discipline, however, is the aesthetic nature of their endeavour, an aesthetic that is so powerfully displayed in their simple and elegant narrative of ultimate origins. Thus, this article seeks to contextualise the form of the big history narrative in order to understand the aesthetic and therefore moral choices that have been made in constructing this grand anthropocentric tale. From this perspective, it argues that there is little to distinguish big history from popular science literature, most notably the subgenre known as the “evolutional epic,” a subgenre that also seeks to tell a synthetic anthropocentric cosmic history of everything. Not only are big historians appropriating the science told in these portrayals, they are also appropriating the literary and genre conventions, which explains some of big history’s seemingly peculiar rhetorical strategies such as the appeal to myth, the epic mode of emplotment, and the futuristic, moralistic, and compensatory conclusions. By considering big history as a genre of literature, and by historicizing the narrative choices made by big historians, we will come to a fuller understanding of big history as both a form of historical writing and as a science.
