The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

entextualised in diverse ways”, creating a context that would facilitate or even hinder
“later extraction, rearrangement, and re‐presentation”. 39
Here we have an approach, which moves beyond a framework of seamlessness and
authentic voice, demanding an examination of the “character of life history/story as
verbal communication”, and an approach to lives as “method, testimony and creative
process”. 40 For Kratz, the entire “structure of the overall exchange” should be reflected
on in order to understand “what any life history/story is and how it came to be told as it
was”. 41 Reflexive possibilities along lines as suggested by Kratz have begun to emerge
from within the discipline of anthropology, as an outgrowth of earlier intonations of a
concern for reflexivity and textual attention to ethnographic production.
Such theoretical attention to lives and their production has rarely been achieved within
the disciplinary boundaries of history. One of the supposedly great issues of
historiography concerns the problem of the individual in history and the place of the
individual, and even ‘the great man’, in historical explanation. It is this question that has
influenced the place of biography in the discipline of history. As E.H. Carr framed the
problem in his enduringly famous 1961 Cambridge lectures: what has been “the weight
of the individual and social elements on both sides of the equation?” 42 And related to
this: “Is the object of the historian’s inquiry the behaviour of individuals or the action of
social forces?” 43
Carr has surveyed the “long pedigree” of the view that it is the “character and
behaviour of individuals” that matters in history rather than “vast impersonal forces”,
and that “history is the biography of great men”. This genealogy is traced back to the
ancient Greeks who attributed responsibility for the achievements of the past to the
39 Corinne Kratz, ‘Conversations and Lives’, pp 136‐138.
40 Corinne Kratz, ‘Conversations and Lives’, pp 129‐130.
41 Corinne Kratz, ‘Conversations and Lives’ (revised draft), quoted from passages erroneously omitted
from the published version on p138, paragraph 2.
42Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p 35.
43 Edward Hallett Carr, What is History?, p 44.
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