ICOM International Council of Museums - Museo Estancia Jesuitica ...

Museología, historia social y microhistoria
Investigación en los Museo Jesuítico nacional de
Jesús María y rural de la posta de sinsacate. Aportes
de las nuevas perspectives teórico-metodológicas
Abstract
Inés María Belén Domínguez 1
The methodological theoretical statements of the recent social historiography are tools that
are articulated in the investigative task of the museum, looking to the interpretation in order to
the patrimony. The information and the knowledge produced as a result of the investigation
contextualize, offer clues, provide meanings and a vivid experience for the visitor.
The social history from end of the 70s, suffered mutations by the decadence of the
structuralist paradigm, based on long explanations and the almost exclusive use of
quantitative methods. The return of the subjects meant the building up at sensitive history
al prominence of the individuals, where the historic-social phenomena should be
explored in its experimental and subjective dimensions. The social life is a construction of
the individuals, the phenomena are not observed exteriorly as a spectacle that develops
with a necessary and irreversible orientation, but they have to show the reasons that lead
that orient the individual or collective strategies that, at the same time, they condition the
production of the phenomena and historic processes. We try to understand the
relationship among the personal actions- the practices and representations that guide
them- and the social structures product of a historic construction.
The displacement of the totality to the individual facts, conducted towards a focus that
illuminates the macrosocial processes from a microanalitical scale. The displacement
of the group towards the individual, the quantification to individual example, to lighten
the internal developments of the societys, focus that is externalized in the boom of the
microanalitic studies. These intend to elucidate the causation historic to level of the
small groups where the majority of the life takes place, through practices, indications,
signs and symptoms. The microhistoric scale does not offer a variant one reduced,
partial or mutilated of the totality, does neither intend to be a mere verification of the
macrohistoric rules. Its purpose is the reconstruction what is exhumed by means of the
names of the subjects that star in the social life.
In front of this renewal, the historians experienced the need to use a variety of sources
that reintroduced the tensions and the breaks, permitting to build a complex and diverse
history. The documentation used is varied and of different type, the documents of
government, the judicial cases, the parochial registrations, the testaments, the buying
and selling of rural properties, the stories of protagonists, all they can offer us information
about the worries, beliefs and practices of the individuals in a determined social context.
It is due to the investigator, to find the traces and tracks of the individual presence.
The theoretical-methodological turns present criticisms and discussions by virtue of
that is a matter of a process that is in construction. The thematic enlargement can
conduct to a fragmentation inabled to offer a coherent vision of the historic processes,
converting the historian in an incapable specialist of communicating with the society.
And, at the same time, to produce lineal descriptions of local customs and manners,
dismantled of the cultural, economical, political, and social dimensions.
1 Lic. Inés María Belén Domínguez
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