The micro-story version 'tapuia'
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Full Body Wax Santa Barbara
emphasis on empiricism and the 'rescue' of experience away from the Brazilian consciousness narrative and Levi Ginzburg by Andrea Daher
After more than thirty years experience of Italian historians around the micro-history gets a new visibility.
This, firstly, because the target hindsight always provides new perspective and, secondly, because the uses of the disclosure of a vast production generated several products.
This diversity is assumed to mark volume of the "Exercises of micro-history", a collection that brings together works - unedited, in Brazil - the Brazilian and Italian historians, presented by Monica R . Carla de Oliveira and Maria C. Almeida and preface by Giovanni Levi.
The first and strongest attestation of the different experiences presented in this book can be spotted in the preface of Levi. By scanning
"Les Fleurs Bleues" ("The Blue Flowers") Raymond Queneau, the motivation of the name "micro-history," Levi inserts the production of Italians not only in the intellectual environment of the '60s and '70s, but in the midst of experie ncias most important literary twentieth century.
Queneau's quote does not arise, so, just for balance of terminology, but past experience by introducing a network of Italian historians (literary) composite among others, by Italo Calvino who translated carefully "Les Fleurs Bleues," in 1967.
(There was neglect of the Brazilian publication in translation of the passage from "Les Fleurs Bleues," Levi said in the preface, which compromises, unfortunately, an important reference.)
It is clear that the experimental nature of the work of Italian historians should not be construed as a transfer in the field of history, processes of literary creation - like the group Oulipo, Ouvroir of Litterature Potentielle - but, above all, narrative as an investment. The erudition of each was invested side by side with the consciousness of most categories of attrition manipulated by the social sciences at that time. The results were not insignificant: the setting of a new lexicon historiography; renewal of analytic categories; extension of disciplinary boundaries; search for regularities and rationalities in unprecedented experie ; ncias past.
This became the private capital to micro-history, since the 80 available to be appropriated. The Brazilian
appropriations may have nothing to do with the use of intellectual resources - far beyond the historiographical - they had the Italian historians. Times and different contexts, of course, but, above all, very different investments. In
collection of Brazilian architecture, a first part presents Levi and Grenda as "precursors", thus introducing a teleology or a character model for micro-Italian history. Then, as "dialogue with the history and historiography," the second part brings a solid chapter on Cassio Fernandes Cantimore Delio's work - although only by a wire connected to Carlo Ginzburg - and a serious analysis of Henry Sword that does not escape the limits of historiography through a weight rating of relations with social history, in Europe and Brazil. After
Grenda, the mapping of the Sword is necessary to understand different aspects of the Italian experience - such as the Ginzburg microanalysis that ends, I believe, a macroantropologia - and in conversely, the precedence of a methodological approach (cultural anthropology) to empirical research in the initial program of micro history.
the last four chapters, the "exercises" are Brazilians, coherently, to crown the idea of the value of the inheritance of socioeconomic history (and historical demography) of historiography.
In view of the earlier chapters, are the result of experiments and various objects and exercises historiographically comparable.
The distance from the Brazilian historiography in relation to intellectual motivation and formal devices of micro history generators Italian became the mainstay of empiricism still a little theorized. This empiricism of "exercises" Brazilian befits the affirmative on the micro history of Levi be modeled on a method and a set of practices rather than a theory.
position has always been the most lucid of John Fragoso, the historian, there are times, has called the micro-history, as the practice of "tapuia" - the other Tupinambá literally "ugly people" - paying attention to the characteristic of incomplete documentation available and the scarce resources of specific conceptual discussion in Brazil. Self-criticism points out, once again, for the positive character assigned to empirical historical research in general and in micro-history in particular. If the adjective has allowed greater freedom in the uses of the supposed model, ended up signing the most radical difference between the "Brazilian way" and the "Italian way", since "micro-history tapuia & rdquo ; already know fruits, including with noticeable variation in the volume now published.
As much as there remains a comparative reflection on the changes in procedures Italians and Brazilians, the words "tapuias" for her strength positivante finish to have the advantage heure stica the elimination of any possibility of forming a micro history of Italian model. If
Levi, seconded by Ginzburg, had every reason to assert that the micro history (Italian) "is a self-portrait, not a group portrait, "among Brazilian historians the proposition is reversed.
That does not mean any cohesion, homegeneidade nor a norm of procedures, but a common difference which puts them in via the "rescue" of experience - individual and collective - & ldquo ; empirically, "as one can read in the presentation of the organizers of the book. This is indeed the lexicon "Brazilian" of micro history, "redemption" and "empirical" are terms that appear, moreover, repeatedly in the same presentation.
turn, Levi says in the preface, the role of micro history of "recovering the complexity of the analysis" (and supposedly nãoa empirical equivalence in a forced "experience"). Admittedly, the book goes to show how the power of research empirical Brazilian historians is endowed with value, although it could mistakenly convey, as said, the belief in redemption of the experience of the players of the past.
Therein shows the most radical of the specificities of Italian micro history, based on clear statements of how much of Levi Ginzburg: its exercise is narrative. The first states, output, even in the preface to the anthology, it is telling, "without hiding the rules of the historian." The second quash the belief in the rescue, saying that "The Cheese and the Worms" is not limited to reconstruct an individual story, tells it. " The literary experiments of the Oulipo are apparent as well, with strength in both the research hypotheses regarding the experience of writing of the Italian historians.
It is noticed how the "exercises of style" of these propositions are omnipresent Queneau, including the choice of title Volume Brazil, "Exercises micro-history "- although it should read the emphasis on the Brazilian side, in the exercises (method), and the Italian side, the equivalence of micro history investment style (narrative).
If the reader has, in fact, as Levi says, the true story of the excluded, it can return to this book, not as repressed, but as an integral part of these "exercises" the most diverse, whose convergence is not central, as you might think, the set of scales, the inclusion of subjective agents, and with it, the refusal of the macro-structural models.
What these exercises and Brazilians of Italian micro-history have in common is the exposure of historiographical rules of the game, which allows the adhesion of the reader in understanding not exactly what happened but how you can organize the possible meanings of what a day it was.
is Professor of Theory and Methodology of History at UFRJ, where he coordinates the Research Laboratory Practice in the History of Letters (Pehla), and author of "The French Brazil" (Columbia University Press) (Published 05/06/2010, Prose & Verse in the supplement of the newspaper O Globo.)
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