Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas[2]
I hope to share with you and to discuss some important ideas in the field of
regional history, at this historic moment in which the national structures,
those structures that began to be created only a few centuries ago, in twelfth and thirteenth-century France, and
which are clearly a bourgeois creation, have already fulfilled their historical
cycle of life and are clearly out of date, at a time when these structures of
the nation-states are entering crisis, which allows us to hope they will soon
disappear. I think that looking critically at the region and regional history,
can be an important element that allows us to rebuild the world once we
eliminate capitalism, and with it all of its various legacies, and among them,
the stale and already anachronistic figure or creation of the nation-state.
Because I think the old structures of the nation no longer make much sense
today, and that very soon they will disappear to make us all, simply and happily,
citizens of the world.
On the subject of my lecture,
"Regional History and the Annales school
of Thought", I will first draw a line and then three clarifications that
seem important to me, before entering my topic fully. The demarcation is that I
am absolutely against the postmodern position, which has spread to a certain extent
among scholars in the field of regional history, because the term
"region" has been used and worn out by economists or historians more
than by sociologists and political scientists, who have quoted, manipulated,
defined and redefined it so many times that they have ended up creating a lot
of confusion about what is, strictly speaking, regional history. We even see it in some of the speeches and even
in the program of this symposium. Many times, for example, local history is
equated with regional history, as if they are the same, and they are not the
same, so I am against the use and great abuse of this term of regional history.
On the other hand, there are
serious authors who have said that they have worked all their lives in the
field of regional history, and then end up saying that in reality the region
does not exist, and that in fact, every historian when investigating his
subject specifically ' creates' or 'invents' their own region. But this
position seems to me to be unacceptable relativism, and it approaches the
postmodern perspectives that want to equate all points of view, and they want
to point out that any one of the various definitions of the region are equally
valid. Contrary to this point of view, the effort that I am going to make is to precisely to define the concept of region. And I want to
try to give some clues to understanding the contribution made by the so-called
'School' of the Annales, which is
really not a 'school' of thought, but rather a French current of historians,
with stages, orientations, perspectives and very diverse and heterogeneous
paradigms. For that, I now turn to the three explanations on the concept of
regional history.
The first clarification is that local history
has been confused with regional history, although they are not at all the same,
because local history is always the story of a particular point and location in
space, that is, precisely a locality. But the problem, and here I repeat the
ideas that Marc Bloch proposed to us in trying to define regional history in a
more precise way, is that in the vast majority of the cases of this local
history, the choice of the locality studied is taken from personal, or casual,
or random, or anecdotal criteria, that is to say from an extra-scientific or
extra-historical criterion. On the other hand, with a local history that has
real scientific pretensions, no locality can be chosen as an object of study,
and no locality is chosen, except one that from rigorous historical criteria,
presents a clear relevance for the historian, as one that is really significant
or revealing of those specific processes that the historian is studying or
analyzing in particular.
However, in the vast majority
of the current practitioners of local history it is done because the author was
born in that locality, or because they lived there, or because they were paid
to do a local monograph, or because they had anecdotes and personal stories
that happened in that locality, or because that locality is considered relevant
in political or administrative terms, but almost never because that locality is
important or fundamental from scientific, academic or proper historiographic
criteria. So, while there is an important relationship between local history
and regional history they should not be confused as they are not at all
identical or comparable.
A second clarification refers to
the also frequent confusion between the process of
spatializing a social or historical phenomenon, with the fact of making
regional history. But the best historians have taught us that any fact or
historical element, or any historical process or phenomenon that you want to
analyze, is from the most ancient past or the most actual present (because
history does not study only the facts of the past, despite this absurd but
reiterated definition of our field, but it also studies the facts of the most real
present), and has necessarily and inescapably certain temporal coordinates and certain
specific spatial coordinates. And then, for example, to understand what is
happening in Colombia and the peace dialogues taking place in Havana between
the Colombian government and the guerrillas, the first question that a
historian would have to ask is how far in time to go back to define the
specific temporality that corresponds to these peace dialogues, and also where
it will have to be projected into the future to see all the specific results of
this dialogue unfold.
In the same way as a singular temporality, every
historical phenomenon also has its specific spatiality, since all phenomena,
events and historical processes necessarily take place in a well-defined space.
However, to establish this spatiality that corresponds to a certain historical
fact or reality, does not mean that regional history is already being made, and
this is another very serious confusion, which is repeated over and over again,
and which is connected with the erroneous idea mentioned before that each
historian dedicated to making regional history 'invents' or 'builds' his own
region, the particular region he wants to study, and from which he develops his
own research. But to do this is to spatialize a historical phenomenon, to
define its unique spatial coordinates, but not to make regional history.
Another widespread confusion,
and this is a third important clarification in relation to our subject, is
linked to the fact that we can also create the history of a previously defined
region. This may be an economic region, or a social region, or a political or
cultural region, which is however, still distinct from making the history of a
true historical region, since a historical region is not the same as an
economic region, or political region, or cultural region. Marc Bloch is also
the one who has clearly made this distinction, and says that it is pertinent to
first define an economic, political or cultural region, and then try to
historicize that region, reconstructing the specific history of that region,
for example, political, social or cultural. That would be making regional
history but in its broader or lax sense. Although another regional history,
conceived in a narrower and more precise way would, according to Marc Bloch, be
able to reconstruct the historical evolution, in a scientific way, of a region
that is itself a true historical region, that would
then be to create regional history in its strictest sense.
Bloch distinguishes between these
two ways of making regional history in scientific terms, reconstructing, on the
one hand, the historical evolution of a certain region that can be economic,
social, cultural, or political, and on the other side recreating the evolution
in time of a strict historical region
as such. Taking these three explanations into account, we can move forward by
looking more closely at this Blochian definition, which states that making
regional history is to scientifically reconstruct the historical evolution of a
given region, in order to first ask how we should define the ' region ', be it
economic, social, etc., or a strictly historical region. Secondly, how this
'historical evolution' of that region is reconstructed, and third, to try to
specify what it means to reconstruct that evolution in a 'scientific way'.
To solve these three questions, I will recover
some of the main lessons of the French historiographical tradition of the
so-called 'School' of the Annales.
And here I explain that this term of 'School' of the Annales seems to me incorrect, because it presupposes that there is
an obvious unity between all the stages that this current of French historians
has traveled, which undoubtedly is the most important French historiographical
current of the twentieth century and even today. On the other hand, what really
happens is that throughout their 85 years of life, the Annales have gone through four different stages, and when analyzing
them with care it is very clear, for example, that between the first and second
Annales, and on the other side of the
third Annales, there is no unity but
rather an absolute and radical rupture. And then, between the third and fourth Annales, what also predominates
are rather several fundamental divergences, much more than a false and supposed
unity.
On the other hand, I share only partially the
opinion of Fernand Braudel that the best Annales,
the most innovative and critical, and the most heuristic and revolutionary of
historical theory and practice, were the first Annales, by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre,
to which I would add that along with the second Annales or Annales Braudelianos, that which I am going to
try to do now is to specifically rescue the lessons and contributions of these
first and second Annales and of the
three authors just mentioned.
For I believe that the first and
second Annales give us important
elements to solve these three questions, and also to give a more serious and
more scientific foundation to what regional history is doing, while I consider
that the third generation of Annales
did not do much more for this field of regional history. And unfortunately, the
fourth Annales were finally a failed
project, which was undertaken by a great historian who was Bernard Lepetit, but who died prematurely before his fiftieth
birthday in 1996, which made that fourth generation or stage of the Annales be today like a dead star, like
those stars of which you still see the light, which only just comes to us, but
which is from stars from long ago, which no longer exist but were located
thousands of light years away. We still see them in the sky. Their light is
reaching us even now, even though those stars have already collapsed and became
nova and supernovae long ago. So I think that today the misnamed 'School' of
the Annales or fourth stage of the Annales is already a finished project, a
kind of dead star, which still radiates its last light and agonizing glow to
Latin America or to other parts of the planet.
If we wish to recover the
contributions of this tradition of the French current of the Annales, in its first and second stages,
we have to start from the matrix that nurtured this current, in relation to
this complex subject of the definition of "region" and "regional
history", and which is the matrix of the geography of Paul Vidal de La Blache, who was called the 'Father of French Geography',
despite the paradox that he was not a geographer but a historian. But it is
true that Vidal de La Blache founded geography in France and conceived the term Human Geography,
giving us a first definition of what the 'region' is, a definition that will be
criticized and surpassed by the members of the first and second stage of the Annales.
But this criticism and overcoming does
not eliminate the fact that they are also going to recover a fundamental and
worthy element to take into account, and that stems from the situation that the
geography of Paul Vidal de La Blache raised in its
beginnings criticizing the anthropogeography of Ratzel,
who wrote a book on Political Geography
and another on Anthropogeography, in
which he reproduces a geographical
determinism that was very similar to the one posed in his time, for
example, Montesquieu, in The Spirit of
the Laws.
For, if you have read this last
work, you will remember that Montesquieu asks why Europeans are much more
developed than Africans, and gives an answer that is characteristic of a clear geographical determinism, linear and
immediate, when he says that this greater development is explained by the
climate. According to him, the climate explains why the black populations of Africa
are less developed than the European ones, since to live in a temperate climate
like that in Europe, produces a white race that is more motivated for the
development of economic activities, for commerce, etc., while the hottest and
most difficult climate in Africa produces an apathy, laziness, and an attitude
of only seeing life pass, and therefore a lower development in agricultural and
industrial terms.
Fortunately this racist and
simplistic view of Montesquieu was later surpassed, but it highly resembles the
one that Ratzel had in his text of Antropogeography,
in which using the terms of soil and society, is going to pose a determinism
that is the geographical configuration of a space, based on the theses of
natural borders, which determines the type of society that is built on that
space, and also determines the type of state that is there. And it should not
be forgotten that Ratzel was recovered by the Nazis
to justify the wars of German expansion over Europe in World War II, because
according to their theories the natural borders of Germany went far beyond
those that were in force and had been demarcated at the time of World War II,
and for that reason Germany had, for example, to expand to Poland, and had to
seize the Netherlands.
Because of this use of his
theories by the Nazis, Ratzel was discredited for
several decades and only began to be reread in the sixties and seventies. But
it is against this determinism of Ratzel and further
away from Montesquieu, that the bases of the French geography of Vidal de La Blache will be developed. Because he is going to elaborate
a more complex theory, around which human geography is the object of study,
answering that this object is the landscape.
And then how that landscape is configured will be defined, affirming that it is
nothing more than a complex synthesis of a whole series of elements, including
climate, relief, terrestrial morphology, terrestrial resources, and minerals,
to the mountains and subsoil, as well as plant resources or flora, and animal
resources or fauna. But Vidal de la Blache also says
that along with all these factors, the human factor must be included, and the
synthesis of all these resources, climatic, territorial, natural, vegetable,
animal, along with the human factor conforms the
landscape, which is precisely the object of study in human geography.
From
here, Vidal de La Blache, defines a concept of
'region' which is as follows: a region will be a complex synthesis between
diverse elements that are homogeneous and that make up a possible 'kind of life'.
That is to say, a homogeneous climate that extends within a certain space, with
a certain type of relief, also homogeneous, and with certain resources,
natural, vegetable and animal, which are the basis for the formation of certain
human groups, all elements that together precisely constitute the region. If we look carefully at this
definition, we will see that it expresses a clear 'geographical imperialism',
in which the geographical elements are the most relevant and those that
determine not only the specific configuration of human groups, and their
various 'kinds of life', but also the meaning of the actions that occur within these
human groups. And although Vidal argues that the mediating element between the
human and the set of geographical factors is the technique, nevertheless, the
fact that prevails is that the region is defined as the sum of various and
multiple elements, mainly geographical elements, together with one or two more
that derive from or rather are human elements.
What can we derive from this?
Before turning to the criticism that the authors of the Annales are going to carry out against this Vidalian
vision of a somewhat 'imperialist' geographical determinism, although
suggestive and interesting in certain points, it is necessary to underline a
fundamental reality, that it is not by chance that the concept of 'region' used
today by economists, sociologists or political scientists, was invented by geography.
What does this mean? It means that we could never define any possible concept
of region that does not take the geographical foundations into account. That is
to say that there cannot exist any possible region
that among its main elements does not include the geographical elements.
For if you are going to talk
about an economic region, you will have to talk about a configuration, an
economic unit that is constructed from certain geographic elements, and if you
want to talk about a cultural region, or a political region, or about a social
region, of a certain identity of customs, of a certain historical identity, it
will always have to be in relation to certain specific inescapable geographical
foundations. That is why it is no accident that the concept of region had to be
invented originally by geographers, and then loaned from them to all other
social sciences as a whole. For if you seriously study any region, defined as
economic, political, cultural, or social, you can never do so if you ignore its
geographical foundations.
But
here the distinction mentioned above reappears between just spatializing a
phenomenon or rather studying and actually defining a real region, because the
region is defined only from the recovery of the specific dialectic of certain
geographical foundations with certain realities and economic facts, or social,
or political, or with certain cultural acts and customs, etc. This idea is to
be recovered by the Annales
perspective, and constitutes a point of agreement with the work of Paul Vidal
de La Blache, in the sense that without the
consideration and systematic incorporation of the fundamentals and the
geographical elements, there is no possibility of scientifically defining any
type of region. Defining an economic region is therefore relatively easy, as is
defining a linguistic region, or a social region, where certain habits exist
and where there is a clear social coherence that refers to certain specific
geographical elements, which have been the point of departure and the clear
condition for the creation of certain habits of behavior which are easy to
establish and delimit, because they can be measured, touched, and perceived. As
in the case of the delimitation of a linguistic region, which
is based on the space in which a certain language is spoken and where the use
of certain idioms and certain forms of pronunciation are found, as well as the
use of very specific terms.
But the interesting thing is
that when we move away from the geographic dimension, things get complicated,
because it is no longer so simple to establish how a political region can be
defined, or how we could delimit a religious region. So the more we move away
from the geographical foundations, the more complicated the establishment of
the dialectic between the order of the phenomena we are studying and that
geographical basis, which is, as we have already mentioned, a precondition of
any possible definition of a region, be it economic, social, cultural,
religious, etc. The dialectic between geographical foundations and economic
phenomena is quite evident, just as the dialectic between geographic elements
and some social processes is also very direct. But the dialectic between
geographical foundations and religious facts and processes is not so obvious,
since it is mediated by other realities and is in general much more remote and
indirect. For example, the dialectic between political processes and geographic
foundations does not seem to be something obvious or immediate and direct at
all, but rather complex and mediated. And I leave this problem open, although I
clarify that I am not saying that we cannot talk about political regions, or
cultural or religious regions, but I say that I think it is more difficult to
learn, perceive and know the latter than the same geographical regions, or economic
regions or certain social regions.
I now turn to Lucien Febvre's position in his classic book The Earth and human evolution, which he wrote for the collection of
The evolution of humanity overseen by Henri
Berr. There and with respect to the above-mentioned vidalian
'geographical imperialism', Febvre is going to
propose that as we are historians, we have to reverse
the conceptual scheme of Vidal de la Blache, and that
if he then proposes a scheme in which the object of study of human geography is
the landscape, where there are five
geographic elements and a sixth element, which is human, and where that human
is subordinated or incorporated marginally to the set of geographical elements,
then the historians of Annales, and
first Lucien Febvre himself, are going to assert that
it is not true that history or the human is a small part of geography, but, on
the contrary, that geography is one of several auxiliary sciences of historical
analysis itself.
From here Febvre
derives a possibilist
position to face the position of determinism of Vidal de La Blache,
and this has repercussions on the concept of region, be it economic, political,
cultural, etc., and even on his own historical region. For what Lucien Febvre will say in The
Earth and human evolution, and thus criticizing both Ratzel
and Vidal de La Blache, is that although the geographical
foundations are indeed fundamental, they are not decisive, much less unambiguous determinants, but rather are
'fields of possibility', that is to say, specific frameworks that limit and enclose
the possible 'human responses' that may arise to their pressures, but without
limiting to a single and obligate human response by societies subjected to said
pressures or located within said frames. That is to say, that within the same
framework of certain geographical foundations, different configurations of different
human responses can be elaborated, a thesis from which
the aforementioned term of 'possibilism' derives.
So the possible 'geographic
determinism' would only be valid if it assumes that a certain geographic base
does not obligate or correspond, univocally, with one and only one form of
human civilizing configuration, or form of social response to that base, but
this base is a framework of possibilities, open though not infinite or
unlimited, which accepts as its correlate several and various possible social
and civilizing figures. Expanding and surpassing this thesis of Febvre, there is Marc Bloch's definition of a region,
either defined in economic, social or political terms, or what for him and
strictly speaking, is a historical
region. This definition is included in a very illuminating Bloch text that is
not yet translated into Spanish, L'Ile-de-France. Le
pays autor de Paris, which is a one-hundred-page
monograph that studies the region of Ile de France, the region that unfolds
around the city of Paris, and where Marc Bloch is going to give his definition
of what a historical region is, beyond the economic, linguistic, social, political
or cultural region.
In order to understand this Blochian
definition properly, it is worth remembering that the first Annales defined as their main
methodological contribution a whole series of historiographic paradigms, which
include the paradigm of the comparative method, or of multidetermined history,
or of the history-problem, paradigms applied in their diverse historical and historiographical
analyses. And among these paradigms, they also defended the paradigm of global
history, that is, the idea that the complex problems faced by historians are
not watertight compartments but are always part and are deeply linked to all
the various dimensions of the social whole.
That is why it is a terrible
mistake to believe that economic phenomena can be explained only by economics,
or that we can understand religious problems without departing from the limited
scope of religion, or to think that in order to understand political problems
it is enough to analyze only structures and political realities, which is
erroneous and absurd. This paradigm of global history is by no means far from
the idea of Marx, of constructing history from the point of view of totality.
Marx, as Jean-Paul Sartre later explained, proposed that in investigating any
social phenomena we had to carry out a movement of 'progressive totalisation', that is, to link and reconstruct the nexus
of the specific problem under investigation, with more and successive and
global totalities that frame it, explain it and give it its sense of existence
as such a singular problem or phenomenon.
So, in the face of this paradigm
of global history, who would still defend the idea that regional history can be
made, for example out of a religious region, without taking into account
certain economic, social, cultural and political aspects of a more general order?
What Marc Bloch is going to propose is that from this horizon of global
history, to define the historical region in its strictest sense, would imply
conceiving of this historical region as a complex synthesis of the geographical,
territorial, economic, technological, social, cultural, religious, artistic
elements, etc., that is, that the region in rigorous historical terms is
defined in part as that complex synthesis of the totality of the social
dimensions. However, this is only in part, for Bloch still adds other elements
in his definition of what is a strictly historical region.
On this point, Marc Bloch affirms
that the historical region is a 'historical individuality in motion', that has
been able to be conformed from a dialectic with the geographical foundations to
reproduce a historical region as much as in the social, political, economic and
cultural planes. This is Marc Bloch's definition of what is a historical
region, which he conceives as a 'historical individuality', which means that it
is a homogeneous and coherent entity that has acquired its own dynamics. But we
must emphasize that the use of this metaphor that also defines a historical
region as a historical individuality, implies that the latter is conceived as a
reality or element that forms historically, that is born at a certain moment,
that then develops, to reach a stage of maturity and a period of boom, after
which a phase of decay and eventually a final disappearance will occur.
Although things are more complex in the historical reality, and this itinerary
can be combined with ephemeral declines or setbacks, and new booms or
relaunches, but maintaining the fact that, as in the case of historical
individuals, there is a beginning, a certain development and a clear end.
This is the definition that Marc Bloch
will give us for what he considers to be a historical region in the strict
sense. And from this definition, Fernand Braudel goes on to introduce new
elements that further complicate his definition, by postulating that this
historical region is not only a 'historical individuality in motion', but
rather a 'geo-historical
individuality in motion'. And it is not a simple terminological change, but an
important conceptual modification.
But before moving on to this Braudelian
conception of the geo-historical region, it is worthwhile to dwell a little on
the implications of Marc Bloch's definition of the historical region for the
definition of what could be a truly scientifically conceived regional history.
From this perspective, regional history would be the scientific reconstruction
of the historical evolution of a region, that is to say of a certain historical
individuality in motion or displaying certain dynamics, starting from the
complex dialectic between certain geographic foundations and certain economic, political,
cultural, social or historical phenomena, depending on the type of region
studied or approached. One of the many implications of this definition is
related to the fact that regions, like everything in life, are born, grow,
develop, have one or more climaxes and also one or several decadences, for some
time begin to decay and wear out until they die. And it is important to insist
on this idea, since many scholars of the region and regional history
seem to believe that regions are eternal, which is naturally a big
mistake.
On this point I will recall an
instructive anecdote, always linked to the French current of the Annales. When Marc Bloch was a young historian,
in the year 1910, and the Annales
magazine had not yet been founded, there was not, of course, the current of the
Annales, the historian Henri Berr, who was coordinating a vast collective work on all
the regions of France proposed to Lucien Febvre to
write a history text of the Franche-Comté region, which Febvre
did. He also proposed to Marc Bloch, who at the time was doing his PhD thesis
on the relations of servitude and a vassalage in
Paris, to carry out a study of the history of the Ile de France region, that is
to say the territorial region that completely envelops the city of Paris. Bloch,
who had been reviewing and working in all the Paris archives and in l'Ile de France for years, accepted the commitment to write
a historical-geographical monograph of that region.
Then, guided by the paradigm of global
history that we have already mentioned, Bloch reviewed how geologists defined
that region of l'Ile de France, and then how people
from different disciplines outlined it, geographers, economists, sociologists, political
scientists, and linguists, thinking that from combining and at the same time
surpassing and enriching all these definitions, they could establish the
necessary synthesis to define that historic region of l'Ile
de France at the beginning of the chronological twentieth century. Thus, in
1911, his monograph was published, but with a really surprising conclusion,
both for that time, and even for ours. What Bloch affirms in his shocking
conclusion is that, after carrying out his exhaustive work of reviewing all the
archives, and comparing all the definitions and studies of geologists,
geographers, economists, linguists, sociologists, etc., is that this region of l’Ile de France does
not exist as such as a historical region.
And it is important to note that with this
conclusion, Marc Bloch put into question the very collective project in which
he participated, and to which Henri Berr had invited
him. But his scientific probity was so great that, with all clarity and honesty,
he affirmed that the 'object of study' he was entrusted to study, the
historical region of l'Ile de France, is simply an
object that does not exist. Bloch adds that in the past this historical region
did exist, but that later on and by virtue of the general development of the
city of Paris itself, and of France itself, that region decayed and eventually
disappeared.
So historians who specialize in
regional history must not only be clear about the fact that the region always
refers to a dialectic of certain elements with
geographical foundations, but also that the situation of the region is a
changing and ephemeral reality. That is why the historian has to be able to
detect whether the historical region he or she is addressing is really a
coherent individuality with clear current dynamics, but also whether it is
flourishing, or declining, or is only in the process of formation, or whether
it simply does not even exist in such a region. I return to my general
argument, to recover how Fernand Braudel assumes and at the same time
complicates the definition of historical region by Marc Bloch, introducing the
nuance of asserting that the region, rather than being a moving historical
individuality, is a geo-historical
individuality in motion. And you know that one of the fundamental contributions
of Fernand Braudel was precisely to invent this term of 'geo-history', and with
it, a novel theoretical proposal on the complex relations between the
geographical historical base and the human civilizational processes that unfold
on it.
To define geo-history, Braudel reminds
us of those historians who always begin their books with a chapter called the
"geographical framework", and that, for example, a history of Italy
will include that chapter on the geographical framework, which will describe the
whole Italian peninsula, with its northern provinces and regions, its central
regions and its southern regions, and the Apennine mountain range, and its
adjacent coasts and seas, and so on. But when we go to chapter two, we
completely forget what was said in chapter one, and the whole geographical
argument of chapter one has no relation to the rest of the work. On the
contrary, and in the antipodes of this position, what Braudel proposed and what
he successfully accomplished in his great book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the time of Philip II,
was to demonstrate how the geographical
elements themselves are active historical protagonists of the historical and
civilizing drama being studied.
That is why in this work of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in
the time of Philip II, the object of study is not the diplomatic policy of
Philip II in the Mediterranean Sea, nor Spain in the second half of the
sixteenth century, but the object of study is the Mediterranean Sea itself, and
what Braudel wants to see is the concrete protagonism of this unpublished
character that is the Mediterranean Sea, and how it influences politics,
society, culture, and the economy, daily life and civilization, not only
Spanish and not only European, but of all the civilizations that encircled that
Mediterranean sea during the 'long historical 16th century’, running
from about 1450 to 1650. And in investigating this logic of the Mediterranean
Sea, Braudel discovers that in the sixteenth century, which is the same as the
planetary emergence of the terrible and destructive global capitalist society
which we still have today in Colombia, or in Mexico, or around the world, we
are going to witness a real long-lasting
mutation, which consists of a 'center of the world' that has been in force for
centuries and centuries, and which was a fundamental and structuring space of
diverse historical flows coming from the vast set of what was to be called the
old world, which will be displaced by an emerging new 'center of the world', by
an immense liquid mass that exceeds that Mediterranean Sea quantitatively by
five or six times , which is none other than the Atlantic Ocean.
So one of the strong theses of The Mediterranean ... is this story of
how the historical primacy of the Mediterranean sea and world was displaced,
which was a point where historical currents flowed from distant China,
traversing the famous 'Silk Road' that reached the sea from the Nordic Europe
of the Germanic peoples, but also the flows that came from the other far East, coming
from India and through the route of Islam that flowed into the Anatolian peninsula,
modern-day Turkey, along with the flows that were came from Africa, and that by
the ivory trade routes and crossing the Sahara desert, they also reached the
Mediterranean Sea, from the latter to move again and redistribute again to all
the spaces of the old world.
But
that Mediterranean Sea, which was both the receiving center and radiating
center of all the history of the old world, from the year 5000 B.C.E. until the
sixteenth century, is to be displaced, precisely in the time of Philip II by
the new also radiating and receiving center that is the Atlantic Ocean. Since
the sixteenth century, Europe was going to conquer America first, then India,
then Russia, and Africa, at the same time as it attempted to take over China
and penetrate Australia completely, to create the capitalist planet that we
know today. And from that start of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the
various 'Atlantics' that make up the Atlantic Ocean, will become the new center
of world, of the reception and radiation of historical flows, now globally,
that accompany the history of capitalism in the last half of the previous millennium.
Braudelian
geo-history thus carefully claims and reconstructs this fundamental historical
role of geographical dimensions and facts, showing its real impact and concrete
influence on the historical course studied. This geo-historical perspective of
Fernand Braudel, will also influence his way of
conceiving and defining the historical region and its own regional history.
Therefore, before we see how this influence on regional history is concretized,
we must specify a little more what Braudel means by this geo-history. It is,
besides the aforementioned, also an attempt to solve an old problem that goes
back at least to Hegel, and perhaps even earlier. Hegel, in his book Lessons on the Philosophy of Universal
History, includes a 'Special Introduction' in which he approaches the theme
of the geographical foundations of universal history, and where he states that
this geographical base plays a fundamental role within the whole of all
historical processes covered by universal history.
On
the other hand, Marx is going to recover this Hegelian idea, stating that the
entire scientific history of mankind necessarily has to start from those
geographical foundations, to specify how they will be progressively humanized
and modified by the human species throughout what we call history. Fernand
Braudel is also going to try to solve this complex dialectic between the
geographic-natural basis and the human civilization process from a singular
scheme that, curiously, is shared by many other important authors of the
twentieth century within the French social sciences, for it also reappears in
the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, or in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, or in
the essays of François Perroux, as in the brilliant works of Michel Foucault,
or in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, among others. This scheme is that of
the specific dialectic that is established between a determined 'field of possibility' and on the
other hand the 'strategies of choice' by which human societies respond to those
fields.
In order to better understand
this scheme, it is useful to resort to a pedagogical artifice, proposing that
this dialectic between the field of possibility and strategies of choice, and
in our case of geo-history, the dialectic between the geographic-natural basis
and human civilizing process, is similar to the mode of operation of the game
of dominos, which is an interplay between the domain of pure chance and the
predominance of absolute determinism. For in the card game, for example, the
cards you receive depend entirely on chance, and in this case, it is only luck
that decides the whole game and its outcome. Faced with this total dominion of
chance, you cannot do anything, because if you get a bad hand and a combination
of cards without any relationship, you will surely lose, whereas instead if they
get four Aces and a King they will no doubt beat all their rivals.
Faced with this option, the opposing
end is that of the game of chess, where the pieces move according to strict
rules, and each play or each response decisively determines the next, and in
which literally the one who is more skillful and intelligent wins, whoever
employs the most rational and appropriate strategy to beat the other. Faced
with these two extremes, the domain of pure chance, or the predominance of the strictest
determinism, the game of dominoes is interesting because it presents itself as
an intermediate point between the two extremes, combining, in a complex way,
elements of both chance and determinism. For, receiving the seven dominoes, the
complete domain of chance is given, but at the moment of constructing the possible
strategy of play, the course of the game begins to depend also on intelligence,
the ability to organize the chips themselves, the concrete ways of promoting
the strategy itself, and of responding in particular to the different
strategies of the enemy.
The French thinkers mentioned above will apply this scheme to multiple
fields and problems of the social sciences of the twentieth century, assuming
that the field that they analyze is determined by chance, but that the choice strategies
that the different social actors construct, utilize their intelligence,
capacity, skills and unique characteristics. Because no one chooses or can
choose whether or not there are fish where they were born, this is a result of
chance, as it is that in certain places there are rivers and in others not, or
that the Amazon jungle accounts for 80% of the biotic resources of the whole
planet, or that in the southern part of Colombia, 12% of these same biotic
resources are present all over the world. Thus, these different geographic
bases in Brazil or Colombia, with these important biotic reserves, are simply
the result of chance, as a kind of gift of destiny to Colombians or Brazilians,
while for example Senegal was not lucky enough to have an Amazon itself, and
with it the resources of the two South American nations mentioned.
The field of
possibilities is thus established, in terms of the dimension of geo-history,
through the configuration of a specific geographic base in which different human
peoples will have to be developed, giving some of them rivers, to others
deserts and mountains, to others fertile valleys, and to some more: pastures,
steppes, islands, coasts, mines, fish, abundant fauna, scarce flora, salt
fields, lakes, etc., from which these different peoples and human societies
will construct diverse strategies for their choice of civilization, which may
be more or less successful and more or less beneficial to these human groups in
the short, medium and long term. So the field of possibility is not infinite
and you cannot do anything anywhere on the planet, but neither is it univocal
or determinant in a direct way. Facing these, each different configuration of
geographic and natural elements and resources, each town located in each
geographical space will be able to choose and organize several different
strategies of a civilizing choice, thus forming a specific and unique geo-historical
dialectic.
From this more precise notion of
geo-history, one can better understand how Fernand Braudel redefines,
qualifies, and surpasses Marc Bloch's definition of the region as a moving
historical individuality, which, from a certain dialectic with geographic
foundations, determines the configuration of a series of elements of the economic,
social, cultural, political or historical dimensions. Braudel would agree with this
definition, but add that it is a geo-historical individuality in motion. This
implies that the analysis of the dialectic with the geographical foundations is
reconstructed from the referred scheme of the specific configuration of the
field of possibilities, before the constitution of the social realities determined
by the definite civilizing choices. It may be realized that this definition of
the geo-historical region: a geo-historical individuality in motion,
is not simple, but rather complex and charged with multiple theoretical,
conceptual and historiographic consequences. I think that this is, in general
terms, the fundamental contribution of the historiographic current of the Annales, and naturally and especially of
the first and second Annales, in the
attempt to more rigorously define that difficult reality that is that of the
region.
I will conclude my exposition,
going on to point out how we can define regional history from this conception
of the geo-historical region, as previously explained. If regional history was
the scientific reconstruction of the historical evolution of a given region, a
region we have already defined as a geo-historical individuality in motion,
then we must ask ourselves precisely what this scientific reconstruction means,
and by keeping within the horizons of the French current of the Annales, we can go back to Marc Bloch's
response when he questioned himself about the relevance and scientific value of
the work of local historians and regional historians of the same period.
In this regard, Bloch affirms that
local or regional historians reconstruct the history of a particular locality
or region but without asking, which Bloch does in a very provocative way, who
will then be interested in that particular local or regional history. Following
the Blochian reasoning, we could suppose that a historian investigates and then
writes a history of the region of Boyacá, supposing that Boyacá is a real geo-historical
and effective region, and would then ask who would be interested in reading
this history about the region of Boyacá. Or we could think of the local history
of the town of Sogamoso, and ask ourselves who might
be interested in that history of Sogamoso.
And in turn with questions similar
to these, although not referring to either Boyacá or Sogamoso,
Bloch responds that naturally the history of a locality or any region will
undoubtedly be of interest to the inhabitants of that locality or region, but
the true challenge of the regional or local historian is not simply to interest
the inhabitants in their place or region, but to interest the whole corporation
of the cultivators of the muse Clio in their work. For Marc Bloch, writing these
stories is not making a scientific
reconstruction of the historical evolution of that locality or that region,
since a real scientific regional or local history can only be done if the
history is explicitly correlated, with
deep insight and complexity regarding the general
history that frames it. This is the provocative Blochian answer to this
problem.
For the real challenge consists, in
this field of regional or local history, of making sure that a work on the
history of Sogamoso or Boyacá would be equally
interesting to a Mexican historian, or Turkish, or French, or Chinese, in the
same wat it is for the people from Sogamoso, Boyaca or Colombians in general. What Marc Bloch says is
only achieved if that regional or local history functions as a laboratory that,
from local and regional documents and elements, is able to give questions and
then answers regarding general history. For if we do not always correlate that
regional or local history with the general history, we do not make truly scientific history, since we are not
making a regional history that scientifically
reconstructs the historical evolution of a certain region, because the only
history that has meaning for all historians is history that at the same time
recovers the specific and the general, the unique and unrepeatable dimensions
of historical facts and processes, but also their universal and general
elements and characteristics.
And
do not think that general history is equal to the so-called universal history,
which is now conceived only as the sum of national histories, just as national
history is not the simple sum of regional histories. Rather, they are much more
complex and subtle articulations than these simple summaries mentioned. That is
why Marc Bloch points out that general history is the one that raises general
problems, for example, the problem of state formation, which in our opinion is
a problem of general history. Since Bloch postulates that a truly scientific
regional history is one that is capable of posing problems of general history,
and of solving them with documentation and with the elements provided by a
particular locality or region, then it is easy to understand the different
criticisms of most of the multiple monographs of regional and local history
that he reviewed for years. These criticisms were that these monographs were
plunged into the detailed treatment of extremely local or regional problems,
very limited and constrained, and that had no significance and did not
establish any link or bridge with the problems of general history, and that he
was interested only in his own author or in a very limited universe of people
from that locality or region.
Finally, and trying to condense all our previous
arguments about a possible more precise definition of how, from the perspective
of the first and second Annales, to
make a really scientific and rigorous regional history, we can pose that to
make that regional history is to scientifically reconstruct and address
problems of a general nature and resolve them from documents and with the
elements that contribute to the geo-historical region studied: the complex
itinerary of its historical evolution, from birth, development, booms and
decadences, until its disappearance, to show its dynamics as a geo-historical
individuality in motion, and that from the dialectic between the geographic
foundations and the historical and civilizational elements, the unique singular
configuration of that same geo-historical region investigated is defined. I conclude
by asking to you, young students, and also my university colleagues and researchers,
in the light of this rich definition of what regional history should be in the outlook
of an analytical critical perspective, who is encouraged and dares to make
regional history? Thank you very much for your kind attention!
[1] This text is the partially corrected version of the Conferencia Magistral
Inaugural del X Simposio de Historia
Regional, (Inaugural Magisterial Conference of the 10th Regional
History Symposium), organized in the city of Tunja,
Colombia, by the Master’s degree in History of the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de
Colombia, in October, 2014. Here I would like to publicly thank the invitation
from Doctor Lina Parra, to give this magisterial conference, as well as to the
students and colleagues who attended this symposium for their diverse
commentaries.
[2] Mexican social
scientist, theorist and researcher. Doctor of Economics from UNAM and with a
Post-Doctorate in History from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de París (School for Advanced Studies in
the Social Sciences). Currently a
tenured researcher in the Instituto de
Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and
professor in the Escuela Nacional de
Antropología e Historia. He is the editor of the
prestigious magazine Contrahistorias and also a member of the Mexican and
global movement known as La Sexta, founded by the Mexican Neo-Zapatist movement.