Jiní
A source can be both primary and secondary depending on the intent of the historian or author. Thus, the uniting form of historical study is built with questions. The nature of the source changes identities with respect to questions asked, the scope of study. What nature, then, do the responses take in our project, whatever it might be? Objective truth in history is evasive, so our role, as Rael puts it, is to “make and justify decisions” about our source materials. Interaction with sources is the exercise of historical judgment.
As we learned in the last unit, secondary sources always involve the author providing an argument which they attempt to justify using their own historical thinking faculties, often removed from a direct experience of the subject matter. Thus, our evaluation and judgment of that source is conducted within an epistemological tension: my thought systems are interacting with the author’s, in more-or-less a unidirectional manner. My consciousness is constantly acting upon the argument and thoughts of the author. Of course, I must remain self-aware of my biases and presuppositions in this process, but being that the secondary source exists to further the author’s argument, I am constantly directing my questions at the author’s thinking.
Primary sources still involve relentless questions, or generating questions of the source, but because it is created through or by direct experience, those questions take on a more material character: why does the source exist? How did it come to be? Although primary sources can also pose arguments and certainly are colored by the biases of their creators, my questions more directly ask about what happened. Furthermore, because I am presumably interacting with the source in order to craft my own argument, it is imperative for me to be extremely self-aware of the presuppositions and biases I might be bringing to my understanding and theses.
No matter how deliberate I am in my questioning and investigation, neither primary nor secondary sources can tell me what actually happened. All historical materials are created with some degree of bias that makes objective truth nearly impossible to ascertain. In Trouillot’s words, we are reading “that which is said to have happened” and understanding this helps us to contextualize our source materials to the greater realities of the time period of interest. It seems to me that approaching an apprehension of “what happened” only occurs through tireless investigation of a diverse set of primary, secondary, and tertiary sources and the degree of success is the matter of a historian’s judgment.
Interestingly, in Diné, “it is said” is said when relaying an historical event, remark, or a teaching. Jiní is affixed to a statement to emphasize that this is what has been said to have happened and it can apply to both an individual and collective message.
