The Arena of Memory: Travelers, Historians and Cultural Frontiers

Thank you for the invitation. It is an honour and a pleasure to be coming back to the United States after some time away, to share with you a handful of reflections on some historiographical questions linked to my own line of research, my doubts about the practice of our metier and a little of my personal biography. I shall speak, then, as a Latin American historian, and, of course, as an Argentinean.

Some time ago, in the course of my studies at the University of Columbia, I was accused of exercising a certain fanaticism, characteristic of my nationality, for Marxism, psychoanalysis and what has been called history from below. Very theoretical!—as my principal put it. From that time onwards, the collapse of all paradigms of social action has left me on the threshold of a conceptually hybrid itinerary.

However, this hybridism simultaneously acknowledges the central importance of Marx as the pioneer of what is known as 'discursive practice,' a group of social, economic and political activities governed by a series of rules of exclusion and delimitation that have had real historical effects. Clearly, it is impossible to write history in the present day without referring to large number of concepts linked either directly or indirectly to the ideas of Marx (Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 53).

With this frail baggage I began to restructure my ideas and my archival practices regarding social history. Also, in one of those coincidences of the time capsules in which our own life unfolds, this was the time of my extended professional trips: New York, Barcelona, Mexico City, London, Havana, Jerusalem, Berlin, Stockholm, Moscow, Auckland, and so on.

Nor was it by chance that I set aside my work on Family History, always a metaphor for the home, for other objects of study. My own family upheaval was entirely detached from this . . . epistemological decision. So I decided to break loose from the memorable Tamara Haraven. What interested me now were the cultural forms to be found in the tales of modernity and nineteenth-century European expansion. Influenced by the beautiful traces that Robert Darnton and Roger Chartier left on the world of reading, I turned my attention to literature from an historical perspective, and within that field on travel literature. Of course, I was also working on a biography. Who isn't?

From reading and studying the travel writers of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries: Cook, Bougainville, Humboldt, Van Martius, Darwin, Foucauld, among others, I learned a lesson comprising the following points:

1. The point of departure of the observation is very important.
2. The theoretical terms of reference change.
3. There is always a point of view.
4. Circumstances cause events and practices.
5. Relationships in frontier territories are dynamic and binding.
6. The accounts are the result of intertextuality.

These conclusions established my focus on the ways of going about historiography rather than theoretical considerations and I must confess that this was a relief, and the end to my anti-functionalist fundamentalism. Moreover, I believe that if we understand this about the conditions of scientific production, as things stand the world today greatly shackles ingenuity. I can give an example of the 'coarseness' of recent theoretical debates. Just a little over three years ago, detractors and defenders of the 'New Cultural History' within Mexican historiography had the chance to battle it out in the pages of the Hispanic American Historical Review (79:2, May 1999). The former affirmed, and I quote: "The new cultural history constitutes a strongly subjectivist epistemology that is fundamentally flawed in its ability to advance knowledge." Let me tell you what is the problem about subjectivity and what knowledge means from this objective point of view? From the other side of the ring came a misappropriation of the idea of hegemony and counter-hegemony, in my opinion the historical analysis was extraordinarily reductionist.

I then devoted my time...