Amit TUBI, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Lee MORDECHAI, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
In light of the challenges posed by contemporary environmental changes, interest in past environmental impacts and societies’ responses to them is burgeoning. The main strength of such research lies in its ability to analyze ‘complete experiments’ of society-environment interactions. Scholars, many of which are geographers, have argued that such analyses can improve our understanding of present challenges and offer useful lessons to guide adaptation responses. Yet despite considerable differences between past and present societies, our inherently limited knowledge of the past and our changing understanding of it, much of this research uses historical antecedents uncritically, assuming that past societal impacts and responses are directly analogous to contemporary ones. We argue that this approach risks drawing erroneous insights.
To illustrate the challenges in drawing historical analogies, we outline several fundamental differences between past and present societies as well as broader limitations of historical research. Based on these points, we argue that scholars who apply historical inference in their work should do so critically while reflecting on their objectives as well as the analogies they use and their limitations. We suggest a number of ways to improve the robustness of past-present analogies, such as defining more explicitly what we can learn from the past, reducing the number of variables compared between past and present, or alternatively, identifying patterns of generalized social responses to environmental stress.
Mots clés : Historical analogies|Environmental change|Adaptation|Vulnerability|Temporality
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