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This article highlights some of Joan W. Scott’s theoretical challenges to historical studies over the past two decades. This period has seen not only a theoretical and conceptual renovation of historical research, but also the increasing visibility of a new movement in historiography. Scott has been one of its most important architects because of her challenge to the way we approach such basic concepts as experience, objectivity, causality, and the subject of history. The paradigm of social history used to be based on the assumption that reality is an objective entity and that therefore the consciousness, identity, and actions of historical subjects are determined by the material conditions of their existence. From that point of view, the subjectivity and behavior of people are the expression and effect of their experience of reality, which means that the subject is conscious of meanings already embedded in reality. According to this view, the language people use to refer to the world they inhabit and even to their place in that world—indeed, the language by which they define their identities and interests and give expressive form to their beliefs—is a means of recognizing and enunciating an objective reality. Affirming the objective nature of social reality, considering consciousness and culture as representations and reflections of an objective world, and explaining the signifying practice of historical subjects as the result of a causal determination of that reality, have served as fundamental theoretical assumptions of social history. Nevertheless, in recent years each one of these theoretical assumptions, so rooted in the common sense of historiography, has been subject to ongoing CHAPTER TWO Language, Experience, and Identity JoanW.Scott’sTheoretical Challenge to Historical Studies MIGUEL A. CABRERA Translated by María Constanza Guzmán and Joshua Martin Price 32 | MIGUEL A. CABRERA discussion and critical revision; as a result, an alternative explanatory model, based on new theoretical premises, has begun to take shape.1 This new postsocial history questions the notion that social and material reality is an objective entity on the model outlined above and can, therefore, causally determine the conduct of historical actors. In this account, language is not merely a means of representing reality, but also operates as a system of signification that intervenes actively in the production of meanings attributed to the real world and through which practice is organized and its meanings established. Language is not merely a repertoire or set of resources from which a subject draws, but it is also discourse, that is, a series of culturally bound conceptual means of perceiving , apprehending, and making intelligible the very notion of historical context. Consequently, linguistic concepts not only designate reality in a way that is presumptively referential, but also contribute to constructing our image of that reality, making that image inseparable from the reality itself. Therefore, they influence the way in which we experience the world and the place we have in it. Joan Scott’s work has been seminal in compelling a critical revision of the objectivist paradigm and in reconstructing theoretically the field of history. Her main contribution lies in particular in problematizing and reformulating three cornerstone notions of historical research: language, experience, and identity. Regarding the first notion, Scott argues that language is not simply a means for the transmission and representation of reality, but that it is an effective system of signification. In her view, it is crucial to avoid any confusion between “language” and “words,” because language is not to be understood as mere vocabulary or as a codifiable set of grammatical rules; rather, language is a system that constitutes meanings.2 It is a system “through which meaning is constructed and cultural practices organized and by which, accordingly, people represent and understand their world, including who they are and how they relate to others.”3 Such a notion of language, Scott underscores, cannot be grasped through the conventional opposition between idealism, concerned solely with ideas we may have about social relations, and materialism, understood as the relations themselves, for it refers to the way in which social relations themselves are maintained and conceived. Given that to understand how these relations are conceived entails a comprehension of how they work, language becomes a starting point to understand “how institutions are organized , how relations of production are experienced, and how collective identity is established.”4 For this reason, argues Scott, if in historical inquiry we consider words as mere literary embellishments, we lose the chance to understand how meaning is constructed; such an inquiry may...

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