The Sugar in the Milk and the Augmented Historian

Abstract

In a seaside village in India I met a Parsi who told me the story of the Sugar in the Milk. The story began with his religion of Zoroastrianism and the grandeur of their ancient Iranian empires. Then tragedy struck as his ancestors were defeated and persecuted by Muslims, prompting their escape by boat to India. They arrived not far along the beach from where we were standing, at a port called Sanjan, and sought refuge from the local Hindu king. Fearful of these strangers the king presented a Zoroastrian priest with a bowl of milk to signify that the land was full. The priest replied by stirring sugar into the milk, explaining that they would mix in and sweeten society without causing the bowl to overflow. The king accepted them and allowed the building of a Zoroastrian fire temple. To this day, the fire is maintained by Parsi priests not far from where they first landed. It is called the Iranshah, or the King of Iran.

This story is one amongst a number of historical revisions of the Parsi origin story produced using a variety of media over more than four hundred years. I argue that these revisions express different forms of historical consciousness, or different ways of knowing the past and representing it in narrative form. I examine four exemplary revisions, beginning with the oldest manuscript version from 1599, through to two print histories published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and finally a web-based revision produced in 2014. I use these revisions as a case study to understand how history is revised and new forms of historical consciousness are produced.

I propose an interdisciplinary theory of historiographical agency that draws upon insights from history, media studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, literary studies, and the philosophy of mind. I argue that we must decentre the individual historian from the production of history and instead focus on the space between the historian and shifts in power relations, historical conventions, and media. In this space we find a historian who is augmented by relationships of power, different methods of knowing the past, and the varying capabilities of sources and narrative media to transmit what happened in the past through time to the future. All historians are augmented historians, but how they are augmented differs. In this thesis I examine a series of hybrid agents and the histories they produced, ranging from the oral-history-human to the script-history-human, the print-history-human, the column-history-human, and the web-history-human.

Using the revisions, I then reflect upon shifts in historical consciousness between three different epochs: the Mughal, the modern, and the global. I attribute the varying forms of historical consciousness in these epochs to differently augmented historians. I conclude that key aspects of the historical thinking of the oral-history-human and the script-history-human are being restored by the web-history-human. The era of the print-history-human appears as a mere interlude, which is now coming to an end and being replaced by the augmented orality of the cyborg. Show more