Historia e historiadores en el Uruguay del siglo XX

Bibliographic Data

ID2841597
AuthorsGerardo Leibner (0000-0002-0875-1154, Tel Aviv University, corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume85
Issue1
Pages177-179
Publication date2005-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-85-1-177
OpenAlexW1985848726
LanguageES
Citations received10

Uruguay is perhaps the South American country least known and studied by foreign scholars, and most Latin Americanist historians are not familiar with the country’s historiography. Zubillaga’s book is thus a rare opportunity to encounter, in one text, most of the names and titles that together comprise the nation’s rich historiographic production. However, this was certainly not the book’s main purpose.The author, a well-known social and political historian and chair of the Departamento de Historiología of the Universidad de la República, describes and analyzes the development of history as a profession in Uruguay and its practices in institutional contexts. The emphasis on the discipline’s institutional processes, from its founding moments through its conflicts and transformations, allows him to over-come most of the usual temptations of “meta-history.” Zubillaga goes well beyond the classification of historians according to his own subjective views. In most of the chapters, he displays real historical research on the “historiography communities” of twentieth-century Uruguay. The historian applies his research methods to his own profession, the field in which he operates, the institutions in which he worked and still works, and toward himself as one of the subjects studied.His methodological choices—to approach the history of the profession and its practitioners through institutions and professional communities, inspired by central authors of French contemporary historiography and sociology—seem justified in the context of a highly institutionalized society such as Uruguay was during the twentieth century. The history of the institutions where the profession was practiced seems to be fundamental to understanding the developments in all the other aspects of historiography. Many of Zubillaga’s primary sources are formal documents, minutes, and letters from various archives at the Universidad de la República. Since its decision-making processes were relatively participative and transparent, most of the important conflicts and debates of the discipline can be followed by reading the university’s formal records.The Uruguayan university benefited from the purgings of academic institutions in Argentina during the Perón regime, gaining the collaboration of two important Argentinean historians, Emilio Ravignani and José Luis Romero. The description of Romero’s innovative impulse, and the institutional changes and conflicts promoted by some of his students in order to consolidate his Seminario de Historia de la Cultura, are particularly interesting.The dictatorship established by the 1973 coup intervened in the university, forcing many scholars out. Those who were not imprisoned or exiled found refuge in new independent research institutions established with foreign funds. This was a new phenomenon in Uruguay; until then it had been a country with only one university, in contrast to most of the other Latin American republics, which boasted Catholic, regional, and provincial institutions.For part of chapter 5, Zubillaga ceases to function as a historian examining the development of the profession and turns into a citizen and professional, with opinions and interests concerning the reality and the desirability of his profession in Uruguay. This is a legitimate and interesting point of view, regardless of whether one agrees with the author’s positions or not. However, in the blistering and important discussions on the research and writing of history, the assumptions and motivations of the historian, the relationship between commitment to values and to ideology, or commitment to the profession and market activities, and in what the relationship between the Universidad de la República and the independent institutions should be, the historian Zubillaga necessarily loses his neutral stance. His subjective location in the field under study, which previously was a relative advantage in allowing access to insider information about the development of specific communities of historians, in these pages makes the author’s evaluations one-sided.The author portrays the following stages in the development of history in Uruguay. First, official institutions were founded with political and ideological intentions, and history was conceived as serving nationalist functions. The establishment of the first university frameworks dedicated to history during the 1940s and early 1950 s was followed in the 1960s by the development of professional processes, along with ideological commitment to social change, now detached from the political establishment. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a paradoxical increase in professionalism as a result of the repressive conditions of the dictatorship and the creation of independent scholarly research communities. Finally, the post-dictatorship era presents new dilemmas.In a number of aspects, and not just the division into the above-mentioned periods, the development of the discipline was different in Uruguay from that in the other countries of Latin America. A comparative perspective could contribute a great deal to the attempt at interpreting the interesting process that Zubillaga has set out before us

Art · Context (archaeology) · Field (mathematics) · Historiography · Humanities · Latin Americans · Political history · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Argentine historical studies · Classics · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law · Memory, violence, and history

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