PHILIP S. GORSKI, editor. Bourdieu and Historical Analysis.

the axis of evil, and both were convinced of the veracity of their judgments, which later events seriously brought into question. As Friedrich Nietzsche long ago warned, convictions are worse than lies. DAVID BOUCHER Cardiff University PHILIP S. GORSKI, editor. Bourdieu and Historical Anal- ysis. (Politics, History, and Culture.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013. Pp. 422. Cloth $99.95, pa- per $27.95. According to Philip S. Gorski, Pierre Bourdieu has mis- takenly been treated as a reproduction theorist rather than as a historical analyst concerned with explaining social change beyond the dualism of structure and event. This orientation, he argues, guided Bourdieu’s empirical studies of Algerian and French peasants, lit- erary fields, and May 1968; it was also built into his dy- namic concepts. But is this volume’s aim to revise our understanding of Bourdieu or to elaborate new ap- proaches to historical analysis? David L. Swartz contributes to the former by skill- fully elaborating Bourdieu’s “metaprinciples”: an activ- ist orientation, attention to material and symbolic forms of power, micro and macro levels of analysis, re- lational thinking, breaking with conventional under- standings of objects, and self-reflexivity about the po- sitions and dispositions that link analyst to object. Unfortunately, Swartz does not directly discuss what these principles might mean for historical analysis. In contrast, Craig Calhoun insightfully treats Bourdieu as a historical sociologist whose interest in change was itself forged through experiences of histor- ical transformation, including Algerian colonialism, the postwar economic boom, and neoliberal anti-welfarism. He contends that Bourdieu’s concepts (i.e., field, hab- itus, and capital) grasp the historical specificity of mod- ern society as differentiated into distinct spheres with their own logics and values. He also identifies Bourdieu’s method of historicizing a field, its corre- sponding habitus, and the analyst’s categories in order to counteract the “tendency [of scholars] to project their own . . . relation to the social world into the minds of the people they observe” (p. 43). The third framing essay by Christophe Charle makes interesting points about comparative and transnational histories of Eu- ropean intellectual networks, but offers little new about Bourdieu or his historical analysis. In a section that gathers historical cases, Robert Nye uses Bourdieu’s claims about gendered habitus to dis- cuss masculinity in early modern France. Chad Alan Goldberg uses Bourdieu’s concept of classification struggles to examine citizenship and the early United States welfare state. And Gorski employs this concept for a “Bourdieusian theory of nationalism” (p. 242). But none of these fine accounts demonstrate that their historical understanding depend centrally on Bourdieu’s theory. The French historical accounts by Gisèle Sapiro, of the World War II literary field, and Jacques Defrance, of the twentieth-century sports field, employ Bourdieu’s concepts and historical claims more systematically. But they neither question his theory nor indicate explicitly how it might generate alternative his- tories. Another section includes pieces that seek directly to correct Bourdieu’s thinking. Ivan Ermakoff tests whether Bourdieu’s claims about rational choice during historical crises are borne out by his own account of May 1968. The others are less mechanical and more Bourdieusian. George Steinmetz argues that Lacanian psychoanalysis may buttress Bourdieu’s understanding of symbolic capital, habitus, and subjectivity. Mustafa Emirbayer and Erik Schneiderhan indicate how Bourdieu’s thinking about practice, fields, and domi- nation and John Dewey’s insights about democracy, publics, and judgment may deepen one another. Gil Eyal discusses Israeli scientific knowledge and military intelligence to argue that Bruno Latour (on networks and translation) can illuminate the underspecified spaces between Bourdieu’s fields. Charles Camic shows that Bourdieu’s empirical sociologies of knowledge em- ploy a more nuanced model of nested and intersecting fields than that offered in his programmatic statements. These essays contribute to debates about the theoret- ical and empirical adequacy of Bourdieu’s thinking. They engage historical issues indirectly through crises, creativity, and changes within or across fields. But they do not explicitly explore the Bourdieusian approach to historical analysis invoked by the introduction. Gorski’s excellent conclusion does show that because field, capital, and habitus are each internally dynamic and mutually influential, they are useful tools for map- ping change. He adds that Bourdieu’s relational, self- reflexive, and conjunctural thinking can also explain change as a result of interfield interactions, interdepen- dent causality, and unintended consequences. He shows that Bourdieu’s theory does not only point be- yond humanist voluntarism, nomological determinism, and postmodern subjectivism, but it also challenges the narrativist norms of conventional historiography where “to explain an event or action simply means to identify the sequence of events that preceded it or a complex of motives that animated it” (p. 357). Such unreflective history, he argues, becomes “sophisticated . . . folk practice” (p. 357). Surprisingly, Gorski does not discuss Bourdieu’s many reflections on temporal processes, which could inform a new historiography concerned with linking reproduction to transformation, analyst to object, and past to present. The volume may not cohere as promised. But it offers a useful synoptic view of how Bourdieu is currently dis- cussed among historical sociologists. It underscores the importance of integrating empirical research and the- oretical reflection. And, however indirectly, it identifies as indispensable a relation between a self-reflexive the- ory of practice and the practice of critical history, as condensed in Bourdieu’s visionary call for “a unified social science, in which history would be a historical so- ciology of the past and sociology . . . a social history of Methods and Theory 1643 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2014 at U niversity of C alifornia, San Francisco on D ecem ber 19, 2014 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ the present” (p. 67). It thus invites a discussion that is all but absent within disciplinary history. GARY WILDER The Graduate Center, City University of New York ROBERT C. POST. Who Owns America’s Past? The Smith- sonian and the Problem of History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. xxvi, 370. $29.95. Each weekday, a share of Washington, D.C.’s daily rush of trench-coated, running-shoed, badge-laden desk workers pushes through the doors of a glass-fronted of- fice building located just outside the north exit of the L’Enfant Plaza Metro Station. On the third floor of 600 Maryland Avenue, SW, un- seen even by most of those daily tenants—let alone by the tourists wandering outside in search of the Smith- sonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM)— there awaits a treasure worthy of the reverence nor- mally accorded the objects lining the galleries of the museums along the nearby Mall, one block north. These are the Smithsonian Institution’s archives; the records of the men and women charged, for more than 150 years, with providing for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” necessary to maintain a free society. Robert C. Post knows these records, and his own name surely appears among them. For more than two decades a curator at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), for much of that time the editor of Technology and Culture, Post has been a leading light of the field that that museum (chartered as the National Museum of History and Technology) helped to foster. His new book reads in part as the history of an insti- tution, in part as the memoir of a professional life. As such, Who Owns America’s Past? The Smithsonian and the Problem of History proves in the end to be both more and less than the sum of its parts. Readers led by its ambitious title to expect in Post’s book a suggestion for a new route through the familiar impasse that separates professional prerogative from shared historical authority may come away disap- pointed. The author offers no answer to his own ques- tion; nor does he engage much of the scholarly litera- ture of the contentious 1990s culture wars—including notably Edward T. Linenthal’s analysis of NASM’s can- celed exhibition on the Enola Gay—or of the new museological practice whose origins we might trace in the work of writer/practitioners such as Ivan Karp and Stephen E. Weil. For those who feel that they have al- ready attended enough rehearsals of this familiar drama, however, Post’s work lends the added value of a backstage pass. Here is an eyewitness account of many of the personalities, controversies, artifacts, and inter- pretations that most of us know only in their final, bur- nished form, upon the walls of the nation’s greatest his- tory museum. Who Owns America’s Past? is a needed book. How- ever much NMAH and NASM’s exhibitions lend them- selves to a general narrative of changing American his- torical consciousness—with its growing sensitivity to the evidence left by women, laborers, and immigrants; an increasing sophistication with material culture; a willingness to take multiple perspectives on the past— they still bear the imprint of singular institutional and personal histories. In this sense, any judicious appraisal of “America’s attic” requires recourse to the level of detail that, arguably, only a perceptive insider like Post can bring forth from the Smithsonian’s archives. As Post reminds us, those personal and institutional stories stem from benefactor James Smithson’s call for an institution dedicated to both “increase” and “diffu- sion.” The two quite distinct directions in which this reasonable-sounding charge would lead found their personification at the start in the tension between Jo- seph Henry, the Smithsonian’s first secretary and an ad- vocate for a research mission, and his successor, Spen- cer Baird, who built the institution into a place devoted to public education. From this bumpy start, the tension of increase and diffusion found its way into the collections, exhibitions, and even personal relationships of the growing Smith- sonian. While Post touches upon a number of the in- stitution’s eventual outlets—including most notably the NASM, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Museum of Natural History—his real interest and expertise lie in his former workplace, NMAH. Details of that building’s construction and eventual renovations, of its signature artifacts—includ- ing the John Bull locomotive and, of course, the Star- Spangled Banner—and of its many notable exhibitions fill Post’s text. Profiles of some of the institution’s most notable leaders—including a suave but forceful S. Dil- lon Ripley, the patrician Daniel J. Boorstin, and the blustery Lawrence M. Small—add dimension to what we know of these influential figures, but the reader seeking them out will not avoid making the acquain- tance of Silvio A. Bedini, Melvin Kranzberg, and a host of other colleagues or predecessors whose contribu- tions Post finds worthy of note. This long cast list yields some interesting anecdotes but occasionally risks send- ing the book over the line that separates historical monograph from diaristic recollection. In the end, however, Post the historian gains the up- per hand on Post the memoirist. History remains a “problem”—as one turns the last page, it is true, but has it ever been otherwise? If the book’s goals—like those of the Smithsonian itself—are never quite met, Who Owns America’s Past? has still established itself as an indispensable resource to students of the American ef- fort to build a useable past in service to a shared na- tional future. ERIC SANDWEISS Indiana University Bloomington COMPARATIVE/WORLD/TRANSNATIONAL BENJAMIN LIEBERMAN. Remaking Identities: God, Nation, and Race in World History. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and 1644 Reviews of Books AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2014 at U niversity of C alifornia, San Francisco on D ecem ber 19, 2014 http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/