EGO-DOCUMENTS: POTENTIALS and LIMITATIONS as a SOURCE for HISTORICAL RESEARCH

In 1958, Dutch historian Jacques Presser proposed a new term, “egodocument,” for materials such as diary, memoir and autobiography. Some research groups, especially in the Netherlands, have accepted the term and incorporated it in their books and articles. In other parts of the world, “self-narrative,” or “selbstzeugnis” has gained wider circulation even though some historians outside the Netherlands have adopted the term ego-document. After being initiatied by Presser, the term took different paths in regard to meaning and content. Some historians interpreted the term very broadly. In today’s transnational and global historiographical agenda, there is a concern to include non-Western ego-documents. In other words, current historiographical pattern is far from seeing ego-documents as a tool of mere individualization, or as the rise of the individual, let alone using it to reflect modernity, secularism, western identity and the like. My aim in this article is to create an awareness of and provide an agenda for a study on ego-documents in our country where a visible body of related material has already been discovered, transcribed and published, but has not been properly connected with related world- literature