De las parroquias al mapa digital

This text reconstructs a historiographical journey that is simultaneously individual, collective, networked, and generational. It traces a trajectory that has sought to study the Catholic Church—its institutions, beliefs, and practices—moving away from a traditional ecclesiastical history focused on elites, corporate interests, and apologetics, to propose one more deeply integrated into the social, political, and cultural history of Argentina. The analysis I propose seeks to critically revisit certain moments and vantage points to highlight their potential for reconstructing singular social and political dynamics. Our path has been shaped by a series of shifts and turns. The first moved us from rural and economic history toward the study of priests as mediators—key figures in local governance and social control. Building on this groundwork, we then returned to more classical questions concerning the political intervention of the clergy, their role as pillars of change during the May Revolution and the War of Independence, the ecclesiastical reforms of the nineteenth century, and, to a lesser extent, the Rosas regime. Our adoption of a broad temporal framework (from the eighteenth to the twentieth century) sought to trace both continuities and changes in clerical leadership, while also identifying how the histories of these clerics shaped a Catholic political culture whose resonances remain visible even today. And, although the question of the role played by Catholic institutions and agents in the construction of institutional order was present from the outset of our research, it is only more recently that we have incorporated digital mapping to investigate the specific ways in which ecclesiastical territories were configured and to restore the full thickness of diocesan jurisdiction.

Historiography · Intervention (counseling) · Local History · Order (exchange) · Political history · Politics · Social history (medicine) · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Argentine historical studies · Historical Studies in Latin America · Indigenous Cultures and History