The historiography of Américo Castro

This paper is written from a particular, and perhaps rather limited, perspective. I am not a historian, but, together with many other anthropologists, I have been drawn to the study of history and those who write it. The reasons are several, and they all have a bearing on why an anthropologist should concern himself with the historiography of a leading Spanish scholar. In the first place, as contemporary anthropology has steadily turned its attention to the institutions of change and to models that emphasize process, it has become apparent that equilibrium models of society based on the assumption that a social system necessarily, and almost automatically, operates to maintain a steady state, badly distort social reality. Homeo-static social models are based on biological analogy (especially physiology) and assume that social systems are closed systems, closed to external influences and essentially unchanging over time. However, the totally closed society is little more than a sociological fiction, and ov

Archaeology · Historiography · Linguistics · History · Latin American history and culture · Philosophy

• Elites and Noncorporate Groups in the European Mediterranean

  Open Access•Oriol Pi-Sunyer, Oriol Pi‐sunyer•Comparative Studies in Society…•1974

  Add to list