Abstract

FERNANDEZ SEBASTIAN, Javier. How Do We Classify The People From The Past? Social Cathegories, Classes And Anachronic Identities. Hist. graf [online]. 2015, n.45, pp.13-55.  Epub Nov 22, 2019. ISSN 1405-0927.

This article offers a methodological reflection upon the historicity of the categories that we use to classify the people of the past. It provides a broad analysis of some of the academic debates regarding the analytical tools used by social scientists to this end (estates, classes, identities, etcetera.), debates which, since the 1960s, have seen the participation, amongst others, of a series of French historians from the second generation of Annales to the present day. After a critical analysis of Karl Marx’s stance on the subject, the author highlights the threats to an adequate knowledge of the past posed by the projection upon earlier social formations of the classificatory categories of another age, and underlines the usefulness of conceptual history in order historically to conceive of extinct worlds in which people were governed by principles, structures and criteria of group division which were very different from those of today. According to the author, the historical-conceptual approach allows to elude the insidious “chronocentrism” inherent to Western modernity.

Keywords : classifications; categories; identities; historiography; time; historicity; anachronism; modernity; classes.

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