Structure, Agency, Temporality: Revisiting Historical Analyses to Study the Contemporary

The pandemic brought forth issues of health, economy, and the state in a way that it became imperative to delve into the past to analyse the present and ascertain the bleak future. In this essay, I will discuss a few methodological issues that can help us understand the year 2020, the sufferings of the working population, the crisis in the economy, and the varied social, political, economic, and epidemiological responses that we encountered. These are methods that historians have used to analyse various moments of the past—be it collective action, everyday situation, common mentality at times of war, famine, or epidemic. I suggest that an understanding of these methodological issues may help us grapple with the complexities of the ongoing crises and situate them in a historical context. As a historian, I want to hesitantly propose certain ways through which we can try and make meaning of the events that unfolded during the last year and a half; events or issues which are still making headlines today. Needless to say, these are nothing but tentative theoretical propositions to analyse contemporary issues. To situate 2020 in a historical frame, I will focus on three crucial elements that historians and social scientists have dealt with in great detail regarding their craft. These are: (a) the question of structure, event, and agency; (b) the question of time and temporality; and (c) the question of everyday life in history and relating it to the concerns of state, politics, and bio-power in the present context.