Historical representations and conflicts about indigenous people as national identities Mario Carretero (original) (raw)
Related papers
Historical representations and conflicts about indigenous people as national identities
Culture & Psychology, 2011
The relation of 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. To this respect, a conflict has been found in the way students present the official narrative. This conflict consists of maintaining that natives are the first national inhabitants, while most of the students think their nation was created in 19 th century. Different reactions to this are analyzed, particularly students' efforts to justify this conflict and to find coherency in historical contents, which have been produced by school history and other sources, and consumed by college students. The most common justifications include cultural tools which 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.
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.
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.
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.
Este artículo aborda las visiones de la identidad nacional española y los modelos de narrativa nacional que asumen estudiantes de secundaria y docentes de historia en formación. Se examina en qué medida los modelos de los participantes corresponden a una representación social o narrativa maestra, o bien a una narrativa que entiende las identidades nacionales y las naciones como construcciones sociales. Se analiza la influencia de la educación histórica y de dimensiones de socialización extraescolares (medios) en la construcción de estos modelos. Se trata de un estudio cualitativo de corte fenomenológico basado en cuestionarios abiertos y producción de textos históricos sobre muestras de estudiantes y docentes en formación. El estudio se realiza en dos fases diferenciadas: una primera para explorar la representación subjetiva de la identidad nacional analizando diferencias por edad; y una segunda etapa que profundiza los discursos del profesorado en formación sobre la historia de España para indagar qué elementos que predominan en sus relatos. La metodología cualitativa se enmarca en la teoría fundamentada, empleando análisis del discurso. Los resultados muestran el predominio de representaciones esencialistas de la identidad nacional y el peso de una narrativa maestra. No se han encontrado diferencias significativas relacionadas con la edad ni con el nivel de formación histórica. El modelo predominante refleja similitudes con los de las series de televisión de contenido histórico. Palabras clave: Educación histórica, narrativa nacional, identidad nacional, formación de profesorado, Educación Primaria, Educación Secundaria. Abstract This article deals with the views on national identity and the models of national narrative which are assumed by secondary school pupils and trainee history teachers. We examine the degree to which the participants’ opinions correspond either to a social representation/master narrative or to a narrative which understands national identities and nations as social constructs. We analyse the influence of history teaching and extra-curricular dimensions of socialization (the media) on the construction of these opinions. This is a qualitative study of a phenomenological nature, based on open questionnaires and the writing of texts on the subject of history, carried out on samples of university students and trainee teachers. The study was carried out in two separate phases. The initial phase consisted of exploring the subjective representation of national identity by analysing differences according to age, whereas the second stage looked closely at the discourse of students undergoing initial teacher training regarding the history of Spain in order to investigate what elements were predominant in their narrative. The qualitative methodology is set in the context of grounded theory and employs discourse analysis. The results show the predominance of essentialist representations of national identity and the influence of a master narrative. No significant differences were found as far as age or the level of training in history is concerned. The predominant model reflects similarities with those shown in historically-based television series. Keywords: History education, national narrative, national identity, teacher training, primary education, secondary education.