If Writers (could) Have Pills For Writer's Block, What Would Historians Do With A Time Machine?

Time to put another 'X' on the calendar.  See yesterday's post if you are confused.  Today's topic deals with an idea I had while reading Laura Miller's recent Salon article on Writer's Block.  Using the recently debuted movie 'Limitless', about a writer named Eddie who overcomes his crippling bout with writer's block via advanced pharmaceuticals, Miller explores the fascination and actual cause of writers who find themselves unable to summon the muse and engage in verbal flights of fancy.  Here is a selection from her article:

Most cases of writer's block are not, however, the result of a biochemical imbalance. Those not caused by being, as Eddie puts it, "depressed off my ass," are more likely to be rooted in fear. It's here that something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law applies. First proposed by two psychologists in 1908, this principle holds that the more "aroused" (i.e., engaged and challenged) a person is by a task, the better he or she performs, up to the point that the arousal becomes anxiety or worry, at which point performance declines. 

In other words, beyond a certain point, the more difficult a writing task, and the more you think it matters, the more likely you are to become blocked. This may explain why journalists with, say, two deadlines per week almost never get blocked: no individual story ever has to carry that much weight. (The paycheck helps a lot, too. Not long ago, a woman sitting next to me on a plane asked if I had a trick for getting past writer's block, and I replied, "Yes. It's called a mortgage.") 

This made me think- what if a 'blocked' Historian was suddenly offered a test-ride in a prototype time machine?  Here's the deal: I study, generally, Russian peasants of the first-half of the nineteenth century.  While certainly canny, many peasants were illiterate- meaning they left behind precious little in the form of documentary evidence for budding students like me to analyze.  Instead, I have to use elements of peasant culture to probe into the deeper meanings behind actions taken in response to, say, rent hikes or labor demands.  For example, if I want an approximation of how peasants conceived of ideas like 'justice' one source I can turn to for context would be folklore.  There are several tales of the peasant receiving just compensation from the tsar, or the peasant outwitting an 'evil boyar', a derogatory term for members of the Russian nobility.  Maureen Perrie suggested that analyzing folklore would bring greater depth to the social history of Russian peasants, allowing the careful and conscious observer to, in effect, acquire a framework of the peasant worldview.  

Fascinating work for sure- but what if I had a time machine?  What if I could just see, first hand, the actual behaviors of Russian peasants?  

I think it would be terrible.

That sounds counter-intuitive, even blasphemous to some, but I really think a time-machine would only hurt my studies of Russian peasants, not help.  To begin, there is the problem, often encountered by anthropologists, of becoming to close to one's subject.  Vine Deloria Jr. famously remarked that anthropologists have produced reams of useless knowledge when it comes to observing Indian culture.  This ties into the second problem- bringing ones present into the past.  I am very interested in how knowledge is produced and transported, undergoing mutations as new locales take in the knowledge and make it their own.  As a result, I find the operation of peasant 'networks' to be fascinating- but would my questions make sense to a peasant in the 19th century?  Would my Western bias creep in and alter my perceptions of a society if that society was presented up close and in actual reality?

In a very real sense, when historians read documents from the past it is akin to stepping into a time machine and going back in time.  We try to abandon our modern day preconceptions and look at the document as an artifact made up of several forces and inspirations.  We attempt to draw out the separate threads in order to place the document in its proper setting as a means to escape the tyranny of the written word and, instead, produce insightful commentary.  While it might be nice to have first-person observations, ultimately  detachment from the era we study provides a space in which more objective thoughts can emerge.  This alone is one of the reasons I love studying history- you can immerse yourself in a culture from the past, yet the unique perspective hindsight brings allows one to see the greater impact speeches, reports, articles, etc... produced in their time.  

However, having said all that, I still might be tempted to take a quick peak at the past.  I mean, come on- who could resist a real-life time machine?  Especially if it looked like this:

Photo by Stefan