gillpolack (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gillpolack) wrote,@ 2008-03-20 12:16:00 |
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Lots of deeply influential people have died this week. I keep telling myself that I won't post about them because the world doesn't need yet another blogger talking about how Arthur C Clarke influenced their lives. I also keep opening LJ to post. Except it isn't about Arthur C Clarke specifically, it's about how some people influence us so deeply that they can change our life trajectory.
Greg Dening died the other day. I knew he was ill, so the death wasn't a surprise. It was, however, a vast sadness. Without Greg's single archiving unit in my honours year, it would have taken me a lot longer to work out how things fitted together and to acknowledge my own obsession with cultural constructs and with their dynamics. He gave me a bunch of tools and an outlook on sources that has been invaluable for over twenty years.
If Greg hadn't taught me, I might have done normal history until my brain caught up with the rest of me. I might have tried to be fashionable or ordinary. Instead, I simply followed evidence and consequences and wrote my kind of history.
I know I would have been more publishable without this. I rather suspect I would have been more employable. I know for certain that I would have been less happy. For me history has never really been about the academic job trail - it's always been about learning and understanding. Ethnographic approaches to history were as big a gift to me in this respect as learning historiography.
I've seen a couple of academic tributes to Greg. They talk about his amazing scholarship and his lovely personality. They don't talk about his brilliance as a teacher. I don't know many teachers who could introduce a whole, brand-new discipline as a sideline to a course on using archives.
When I get some quiet time I'll remind myself of his work by looking again at his book on Bligh's bad language. While I read, I shall hope that every history student gets a teacher as good and generous as Greg, just as I'm hoping now that every potential SF writer finds an Arthur C Clarke or a Ray Bradbury to read in their formative years.
Greg Dening died the other day. I knew he was ill, so the death wasn't a surprise. It was, however, a vast sadness. Without Greg's single archiving unit in my honours year, it would have taken me a lot longer to work out how things fitted together and to acknowledge my own obsession with cultural constructs and with their dynamics. He gave me a bunch of tools and an outlook on sources that has been invaluable for over twenty years.
If Greg hadn't taught me, I might have done normal history until my brain caught up with the rest of me. I might have tried to be fashionable or ordinary. Instead, I simply followed evidence and consequences and wrote my kind of history.
I know I would have been more publishable without this. I rather suspect I would have been more employable. I know for certain that I would have been less happy. For me history has never really been about the academic job trail - it's always been about learning and understanding. Ethnographic approaches to history were as big a gift to me in this respect as learning historiography.
I've seen a couple of academic tributes to Greg. They talk about his amazing scholarship and his lovely personality. They don't talk about his brilliance as a teacher. I don't know many teachers who could introduce a whole, brand-new discipline as a sideline to a course on using archives.
When I get some quiet time I'll remind myself of his work by looking again at his book on Bligh's bad language. While I read, I shall hope that every history student gets a teacher as good and generous as Greg, just as I'm hoping now that every potential SF writer finds an Arthur C Clarke or a Ray Bradbury to read in their formative years.
