historical field

is the object of the historian's interest which consist of macro and micro-level events corresponding to strategies of macro information and macro comprehension.

Levi-Strauss suggests that 'the historical field,' the general object of the historian's interest, consist of a field of events which dissolves, at the micro-level, into a congeries of physico-chemical impulses and, at the macro-level into the tidal rhythms of the rise and fall of whole civilizations. In his schema, the micro and macro levels correspond to the limits of a set of explanatory strategies which range from the mere chronicling of particular events, on the one side, to the appeal to comprehensive cosmologies, on the other. The relation between the micro and the macro levels he characterizes in terms of a dyad: information-comprehension. And he states the relation between them in the form of a paradox: the more information we seek to register about any given field of occurrence, the less comprehension we can provide for that field... and the more comprehension we claim to offer of it, the less the information covered by the generalizations intended to explain it.8

historical field, n.All

historical field