Cultural history and political history, encounters and misunderstandings.

Abstract

Although it lacks a specific field and an object of study of its own and is conceived as a reformulation of the questions and the place from which to explore the keys to the past, cultural history is not content to be just one more among the many branches of historiography. On the contrary, it proclaims that every historiographical account - political, economic, social - requires its gaze in order to recover aspects of the past that would otherwise remain hidden or silenced. If cultural history is or should be everywhere, it is very likely that its presence will end up being diluted or become a random appendix of other gazes. The French version of this process configures an itinerary apt to account for a significant parallelism that links the rebirth of a political history that today looks rejuvenated with the birth of a cultural history. Finally, what does the most current Uruguayan historiography have to say about these issues? Heir to our own paradigms in transition, since the 1980s local historiography has found one of its keys in the processes of accumulation and renewal that can be observed in both political and cultural history. It is about this cultural history and its relations, which in a short time has reached a considerable development, that we intend to report here.