Historia de la vida privada en la Argentina (review)

Historia de la vida privada en la Argentina. By RICARDO CICERCHIA. Buenos Aires: Editorial Troquel, 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. 281 pp. Paper.

Ricardo Cicerchia has provided a very useful introduction to a provocative topic. Based both on original archival research and a thoughtful reading of secondary sources, Historia de la vida privada en la Argentina opens to inquiry the shadowy topic of private life. I say shadowy topic because the term private life has apparent conceptual and experiential solidity that dissipates quickly upon close examination. We, like our ancestors, are social animals and nearly all aspects of our lives are shared with others. Moreover, this process of sharing almost always has the calculated intention of mediating some relationship of power. Sexual intimacy, as President Clinton's public distress reminds us, is not narrowly a private experience. Family and household, the most common venues explored by historians of private life, are always tied to external social contexts by complex webs of association and interdependence. As a result, the internal dramas of family or household life are often exported to the courts or less formal public arenas, such as network of friends or more casual acquaintances, by individuals seeking solace or justification or redress.

During the last decade, the proliferating enthusiasm of historians for the theoretical work of Habermas and other social scientists has reinvigorated women's history and gender studies in rewarding ways. However, our desire to illuminate the private, a desire charged with political meaning, may have led us to establish too clear a border between the public and private aspects of individual and family experience. One result of this problem of delineation is that sources and questions tend to drift unpredictably in and out of the literature on private life. Could it be that the attractive simplicity of the nomenclature--the public and the private--is itself an obstacle to conceptual rigor?

Despite these problems, the exciting breadth and reach of this new field provides us with very real compensations, as illustrated by Ricardo Cicerchia's recent book. Cicerchia focuses on the period that begins with the creation of the viceroyalty in 1776 and ends with the fall of Rosas in 1852. His topics range from emotions to material culture and from work and entertainment to diet and medicine. There are very few diaries or collections of private correspondence for this period in Argentine history and, as a result, ingenuity is required of modern investigators interested in private life. Cicerchia interrogates historical sources created to serve political or administrative ends in rewarding ways to illuminate the interior spaces of individual life and household. Criminal records, census counts, and administrative archives all yield a surprising store of new information. He also demonstrates the utility of maps, paintings, travelers' accounts, and works of nineteenth-century novelists. Because Cicerchia's primary objective was to illuminate this topic's rich potential for future inquiry and to tempt us to follow this pathbreaking initiative, he does not exhaust the full potential of these topics and sources.

Given the range of topics explored and the absence of an overarching argument, this review can only suggest this book's rich content. The chapter entitled "Vivir en familia" offers both an intriguing summary of the author's impressive research on family conflict as well as a review of topics concerning abandonment of children, infidelity, family law, and family size. Despite the efforts of Bourbon-era bureaucrats and the politicians of the newly independent nation to force order on what they regarded as a chaotic moral landscape, Argentine sexuality, family organization and household discipline all proved resistant to political command. In the following chapters, Cicerchia explores continuities and changes in diet, fashion, hygiene, and medicine. He is particularly informative and interesting in his discussion of women's experiences and the place of women in the nation's cultural imagination.

Cicerchia also applies the novel concerns of this new area of cultural history to...