Rodrigo Martinez Baracs
Doctor en Historia y Etnohistoria por la Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) del INAH, profesor-investigador en la Dirección de Estudios Históricos, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia
The Conquest through the lens of Braudel’s three temporalities
Abstract:
I would like to propose an overview of some of the different perspectives of analysis that are needed to study and comprehend the complex and fraught historical event that was the conquest of Mexico. One possible way to encompass the different approaches would be to employ as categories the three historical temporalities used by Fernand Braudel in his Méditerranée: the longue durée (thousand of years and more), the durée moyenne (decades and centuries), and the courte durée (the history of events). In the long duration can be included the kind of reflections on the primary similarities and differences between the Old World (Eurasiafrica) and the New World (America) as well as their encounter (León-Portilla), first of all at an epidemiological level (Borah) and at a technological level (Lockhart and Schwartz) that became determinant in the outcome of the Conquest and in its consequences. In the medium duration can be included the very rich and growing academic studies on demography, epidemics, economy, politics, religion, language, culture, alimentation, bibliography, etc. In the short duration can be included the main stream of the studies on the conquest (beginning with the writings of Cortés, Mártir, Oviedo… up to the work of José Luis Martinez, Hugh Thomas and María del Carmen Martínez Martínez), that has grown in complexity and richness not as much with new ideas as with the new sources that are being included in the analysis, and laid before the reader’s eyes to allow them to make their own deductions. An important improvement was the inclusion of documents written in indigenous languages, began in the fifties by the work of such scholars as Dibble and Anderson, Garibay and León-Portilla, and Jim Lockhart and his colleagues, that included the Indian perspective in the analysis.
Rodrigo Martínez Baracs was born on October 8th, 1954 in Mexico City. He has a PhD in History and Ethnohistory from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. He is Professor-Investigador in the Dirección de Estudios Históricos of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. He is the President of the Sociedad Mexicana de Historiografía Lingüística and member of the Academia Mexicana de la Historia and the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua. He has mainly worked on colonial Mexico, dealing with religious history, the Conquest, Michoacán, historiography, bibliography, and linguistics.