Historical representations and conflicts about indigenous people as national identities (original) (raw)
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The relation between history learning processes, in and out of school, and the construction of national identities is nowadays an increasingly important topic, being studied through the appropriation of historical narratives, which are frequently based on the official history of any nation state. In this paper, college students' historical representations of their nation's origin are studied. We compared specific quantitative answers about who the first inhabitants of Argentina were with more in depth qualitative answers about their nation's political origin. In this respect, a conflict has been found in the way students present the official narrative. This conflict consists of maintaining that natives were the first national inhabitants, while most of the students think their nation was created in the 19th century. Different reactions to this are analyzed, particularly students' efforts to justify this conflict and to find coherency in historical content which has been produced by school history teaching and other sources and consumed by college students. The most common justifications include cultural tools that conceal the violence historically suffered by the natives, and at the same time an unreal conciliation between natives' rights and the interests of western founders of the national state. These tensions are considered in light of sociocultural discussions about the differences between production and consumption of historical narratives and their appropriation. We uphold that consumed historical narratives are based on an ontological and ahistorical concept of one's own nation, which prevents understanding a possible counternarrative based on natives as historical agents.
Cultura y Educación, 2018
Different studies have shown that national groups construct a positive social identity through the appropriation of heroic narratives about the national past. Within this framework, this research studied the narratives of Argentine university students (n = 27), without specific training in history about a historical process in which their national state carried out morally questionable actions. Specifically, we analysed their narratives on the ‘Conquest of the Desert’, a military campaign carried out in the late nineteenth century which entailed the genocide of the indigenous peoples who inhabited most of what is today Argentina. Through semi-structured interviews, it was revealed that although the grammar of the participants’ narratives is generally poor, it is possible to identify in them two clashing groups as agents of that historical process. Furthermore, the participants did not use the pronouns we/us to refer to any of these groups, so they did not identify with them. We conclude that the poverty of the participants’ narratives may reveal a collective attempt to forget this morally condemnable historical process, which would also have been expressed in the shift of responsibility from the Argentine state to other social groups in most of the narratives analysed. Likewise, failure to identify with the victims, even in cases in which it was considered to be the national state, shows the implementation of cognitive strategies to preserve a positive identity.
Conquest or Reconquest? Students’ Conceptions of Nation Embedded in a Historical Narrative
Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2014
This article focuses on university students' understanding of the concept of nation. First an analysis of this concept from a historiographical point of view is presented. This allows for distinguishing between different conceptions of the nation related to 3 main approaches: the romantic, the modernist, and the ethnosymbolic approaches. Based on this analysis and also taking into account present research about history education and the construction of national identities, 5 different dimensions of the concept are presented: (a) historical subject, (b) identification, (c) territory, (d) legitimate claim, and (e) general concept scheme. Qualitative individual interviews were carried out with 31 Spanish college students about a Spanish foundational historical narrative, embedding the concept of nation, called the Reconquest (711 AD-1495 AD). Results indicated that although students showed tensions in their narratives, romantic conceptions dominated most of them.
Historical narratives and arguments in the context of identity conflicts.
In this paper, emotional and identity preferences regarding the foundational historical narratives of 240 Latin American adolescents and adults from Argentina, Chile, and Spain are analyzed. Also the arguments used to justify their preferences are studied. This is part of a broader study where specific analyses of subjects’ historical narratives were undertaken. Narratives and arguments are asked in relation to a very well known engraving representing the so-called Discovery of America. A substantial part of the subjects express a conflict between their identification and emotional preferences. This conflict is interpreted in terms of the culturally historical arguments provided.
Historical Narratives and the Tension between National Identities, Colonialism and Citizenship
Researching History Education. International Perspectives and Disciplinary Traditions, 2019
In this chapter, we reflect upon the narrative construction of school history and the intersections between history, national identity, and citizenship in education. We aim to contribute to advancing history education research from the discussion of the current approaches in the field, based on the studies we have conducted in Latin America and Spain. These studies’ findings especially evince the influence of nationalism and colonialism in the students’ ideas of history, in tension with their new realities and subjective processes of historical meaning-making. We also point out the main challenges in history education, as well as understudied issues and promising fields that may enhance history teaching towards effective teaching, meaningful historical understanding, and socially relevant history education.
International Journal of Human Sciences Research
The article starts from the disputes over memory and school history in the contemporary world to investigate the representations of the indigenous population in the teaching of Brazilian History. Significant examples of approaches to the theme are presented in 20th century didactic works that express the conflict between a homogeneous national identity, a clear derogatory view of indigenous peoples and, more recently, the struggle for spaces and other representations of the histories of this population in School history. It seeks to show that this dispute reflects the very dynamics of the construction of colonial society and internal colonialism that was perpetuated with the formation of the Brazilian National State. Finally, it is proposed, as an example, a possibility of overcoming, using excerpts from narratives that address the political struggle of indigenous women leaders for the demarcation of lands and for the recognition of their cultural production, as a way of making visible the clashes in relation to coloniality, taking advantage of and expanding gaps and interstices that can, in the medium term, infer transformations in collective memories and interpretations about Brazilian society represented in school history teaching.
Learning history through textbooks: are Mexican and Spanish students taught the same story
Learning and Instruction, 2002
Teaching history, compared to other school subjects is characterised from country to country by widely varying content. This has been commented on by both historians ( and ) and psychologists (J of Narrative and Life History 4 (1994) 295). In this paper, some of the events that occurred in 1492 and their representation in history textbooks have been selected in order to analyse the content of Mexican and Spanish textbooks. These two countries have been selected because it is anticipated that they will offer very different views about these controversial historical topics and some of the characters involved, such as Columbus. The analysis of textbook content indeed showed two different views of the same event by Mexico and Spain. This paper discusses the influence of these views in the formation of different national identities.
Telling a national narrative that is not your own. Does it enable critical historical consumption?
National narratives are a key element in the process of history consumption and production. These master narratives have been analyzed in both theoretical and empirical studies as general schematic templates producing an essentialist and nationalist representation of the own past. The majority of studies examining historical representations of national narratives have used historical content of the students’ own nation. This study, on the other hand, analyzed the historical understanding of 34 Spanish university students concerning three dimensions of historical narratives about a nation other than their own. These dimensions were: the establishment of the historical subject, the moral judgment about the national group actions, and the legitimacy of the ownership of the territory. The distinction among three different dimensions is presented as providing a better both theoretical and empirical comprehension of master narratives as sociocultural devices. Our results indicated that participants had a more critical representation about the second and third mentioned features, whereas they had a romantic conception about the first one, suggesting then that the establishment of the historical subject could be the core dimension of the master narrative. Finally, some considerations about the process of history consumption and its relations to national identity are presented.