Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

One of the problems in humanities research is that the use of methodologies belonging to specific schools of thought frequently yields opposite conclusions about the same object under study. This phenomenon often appears in the field of historical research and cultural studies, where the interpretation of processes from the viewpoint of historical materialism, deconstructivism, positivism, and various other scholarly trends at times create different and often incompatible histories or models of culture. One of the striking examples of this state of affairs is the research on nationalism which attracted a noticeable scholarly attention from the second half of the 20th century. Its history, aspects of its development, and its other features have become the subject of investigation by numerous scholars. Their conclusions contradict one another about the same aspects related to the phenomenon of nationalism, sometimes presenting black and white picture. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate major factors for the methodological pitfalls of historical research in the case of the study of nationalism, and to suggest possible ways of avoiding them.