Much international and intercultural discourse about historiography is influenced by a way of historical thinking deeply rooted in human historical consciousness and that works throughout all cultures and in all times: ethnocentrism. Ethnocentric history conceives of identity in terms of “master-narratives” that define togetherness and difference as essential for identity in a way that causes tension and struggle. These narratives conceive of history in terms of “clashes of civilizations,” and they reinforce the idea that international and intercultural relations are merely (...) struggles for power. The main elements of ethnocentrism are: asymmetrical evaluation, teleological continuity, and centralized perspective. This essay articulates possibilities for overcoming these three elements by replacing asymmetrical evaluation with normative equality; teleological continuity with reconstructive concepts of development that emphasize contingency and discontinuity; and centralized perspectives with multi-perspectivity and polycentric approaches to historical experience. Adopting these possibilities would lead to a new mode of universal history rooted in a concept of humankind that can help solve the problem of ethnocentrism. This idea of humankind conceptualizes the unity of the human species as being manifest in a variety of cultures and historical developments. This is in fact the traditional concept of historicism, which can be further developed towards a historiography that responds to the challenges of globalization and cultural differences. The essay outlines theoretical and methodological means in historical studies that bring this idea of humankind into the work of historians, thus enabling them to contribute to a new culture of recognition. The article is based on the assumption that the creation of such a culture is the most important task of scholarly work in the humanities in general, and historical studies in particular, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, concepts of historical thinking and historical consciousness have received increasing attention in the field of history education and history didactics. This new orientation in the teaching of history has involved the need to take into account the complexity of the historical discourse and more generally the multiple ways in which people relate to their individual and collective pasts. It has also implied the need to consider the diversity of "places" where history occurs. In this article, (...) I will take a closer look at the relationships between the concepts of historical consciousness and memory, which, to a certain extent, seem to be neglected and misunderstood in the teaching of history and history education in general. More specifically, I will frame what I call a ‘third way’ for history education in relation to Ricoeur’s theories and the connections and nuances he establishes between epistemology of history and phenomenology of memory. (shrink)