Anachronism: The Queer Pragmatics of Understanding the Past in the Present

How are contemporary researchers “present” in investigating the past, and how do they conduct research that acknowledges the reconstruction of the past without reducing it to what they already wanted to find? These perennial questions have become central to literature at the intersection of historical hermeneutics and sociological methodology. This paper provides a novel perspective on these questions by interrogating the notion of “anachronism” with the help of queer historiography and pragmatism. Queer historiographers make a case for how the present is experienced as multiple temporalities, how the sense of anachronism is dependent on dynamics of bodily identification with historical others, and how this sense may become a provocative hermeneutic strategy rather than a topic to be avoided. Pragmatists show how anachronism emerges as the socially-situated and embodied sense of surprise in encountering particular traces of the past in the actor’s present, and how this surprise may prompt analyses into the past that utilize the researcher’s value-commitments as a resource in sociological inquiry. The paper seeks to build conceptual tools for a pragmatic hermeneutics that can strengthen both the accuracy of our investigations into particular historical events and our democratically-inclusive ethical and political projects to reconstruct usable histories.