The Idea of Cultural Imputation and its Limits

Abstract

In my paper I try to indicate several limits of cultural imputation considered by Wojciech Wrzosek as a model of both historical thinking and historiographical practice. It seems that, contrary to Wrzosek’s suggestions, the most important
components of that model do not allow to grasp and fathom out specific aspects and diversity of historical studies. The so called fundamental ideas of culture represented by a historian—such as the law of contradiction, concepts of development and genesis, temporal and spatial qualities of the world etc.—are present within the culture under study, when the researcher reconstructs the history of Europe. In that case the translation from one culture’s language to another does not take place, because on the fundamental level both cultural systems use the same ideas resp. concepts. In the second part of my paper I discuss a problem of relations between historical thinking and crucial concepts of changeability and development. According to Wrzosek, without these ideas both historical thinking and historical discourse are impossible. I suggest that some historians (e.g. Paul Veyne) do not take into account the diachronic and genetic aspects of past phenomena that they analyze, yet their thinking and discourse are still historical. Finally, I point out some dangers arising from comparison between anthropologist’s and historian’s perspectives, which is fundamental for the idea of cultural imputation.