Tracing Taint: Three Case Studies with Implications for Historical Methodology

In her Academy project, Case points out how the war in Ukraine highlights the question of “taint” in historical and contemporary narratives. When can we presume that an idea is “tainted” such that no good can come of it? Vladimir Putin argued that the Russian aim was to “demilitarize and de-Nazify” Ukraine, and predicted that Ukraine and its supporters would “kill innocent people just as members of the punitive units of Ukrainian nationalists and Hitler’s accomplices did.” Meanwhile, in Ukraine and elsewhere, commentators insisted that Ukraine’s WWII past was not identical with its current resistance to Russian aggression; subsequent events, including the Euromaidan Protests of 2013-14, had transformed Ukrainian nationalism. “Tracing tainted structures and ideas across time is a necessary and important feature of historical inquiry, but it is also fraught with dangers and open to manipulation,” Case cautions. Through three case studies in taint tracing – WWII symbolic politics as they relate to the war in Ukraine, and the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia, and the case of “dirty data” in machine learning – she seeks to illuminate the shared mechanisms and assumptions behind taint-tracing claims: assumptions about proximal and distant causes, about how structures and scales operate in time and space, and about taint as carried by terminology and language. Case thus reveals how and why taint-tracing narratives often aspire towards universal applicability by emphasizing types of knowledge rather than specific content.