I've been thinking about this for about a day now and I think my relationship to theory comes down to two questions.

1. What is history as a discipline? What about as an artistic endeavor?
2. What do we think theory is?

It took me a long time to make peace with it. https://twitter.com/ASPertierra/status/1318040074739720192

My answer to question one is that I think history is a narrative, humanistic discipline, and that claims of scientific rigor are hubristic.

I try to write about individuals or collectives and what they tried to do. I try to write let that guide my prose.

I'm not the second coming of Ranke, but I think we need to think more expansively about what archives can do for us. We don't know much about, say, early Spanish Puerto Rico, but there are little hidden documents and parallel stories to build from.

At the same time, as I finished my dissertation, I found that I wanted to make some pretty broad claims about human experience, and that my declarations would be built on the framework of other ideas. Which is all theory.

So, what is theory (to Scott)?

As an early graduate student I thought the answer was "philosophy-adjacent books you don't enjoy" and "stuff that creates inelegant, abstract prose in histories of political movements."

I neither like nor care about political or intellectual history, and I have no deep love for philosophy. A lot of what is presented as "theory" in graduate school is precisely those things.

(I was also raised to be very conservative and am the first person in my family to go to college and had a bit of a complex)

I honestly didn't figure out theory until I took a seminar well outside of my field on Asian Borderlands. Over the course of the seminar, I realized that theory was, in fact, when you make broader claims about patterns in human affairs that can be used as tools.

When I presented on my research topic (the Spanish Philippines, and patterns of information gathering), the professor was very explicit about how I had created a theoretical framework.

I had never heard that! I thought I was just being a good, archive-driven, "normal" historian who was interested in patterns.

I realized I liked a lot of "theoretical" stuff, it was just James Scott's anarchist parables or Braudel's charts.

(Shout out to @DavidGAtwill)

So I made my peace with theory. I think of theory as a toolbox, and am more interested in what I can do with it than polishing my hammer or recreationally reading about wrenches.

I still try to write in a way that centers historical actors. I want to write something that I hope people enjoy reading. But it's good that I have the hammers and billhooks and backhoes of theory that are useful to me, and I'm a better historian for it.

So, my objections were about

1. aesthetics
2. what I thought history was
3. Not fully understanding theory was, partially because I have a very short attention span.

I still maintain the right to think all psychoanalysis is the silliest tool. Don't bring that horny quackery anywhere near me