RECLASIFICACION ENTRE CATEGORÍAS Y VENTA DE INVERSIONES

Studying citizenship from a historical perspective requires two distinct, but related, approaches. The first is the examination of how citizenship has come to be what it is today within particular social contexts, tracing the complex pathways and contentious interactions that have shaped it throughout time into its current form. The second approach, usually less explored, is the analysis of the ways in which the production of citizenship in the present is achieved through invoking and making use of the past. This second approach follows the “historical turn” in anthropology in its calls to carefully consider how human beings produce, organize,

communicate through, and are affected by different “historical devices” and “versions of historical time and transformation” (Rockwell 2011, 68). Examining citizenship in this way is coherent with an understanding of learning as always rooted in social practice (Lave 1996; Lave and Wenger 1991). It is also consistent with an approach to citizenship education, not as a process by which students are socialized into pre-existent political communities, but rather in which students politically build these communities in the present by both taking into account their past and making bids for possible futures (Varenne 2008; Varenne and McDermott 1998).

The concept of historical consciousness developed by Peter Seixas and his colleagues is particularly useful for this second analytical stance. While theorists like Gadamer, Koselleck and Lukacs considered historical consciousness to be a particular way of thinking about time, directly linked with modernity (Friedrich, 2010), Seixas (2006) expanded the concept in order to include the different ways in which people understand and relate with their own and others’ pasts. Seixas’ insight that people establish different relationships with the past and its products – and

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that even the same individuals can do this in different moments of their life – highlights the importance of examining this relevant dimension of historical production.

The study of historical consciousness has not yet coalesced into a particular subfield within history or anthropology. The work done in this area tends to fall into two main strands. The first has a psychological slant, focusing on how people “think of” and “feel about” history, often utilizing research methods that attempt to understand these constructs empirically through tests and surveys (Kölbl and Straub 2001; Rosenzweig and Thelen 1998; Rüsen 2004). A second strand, more aligned with anthropology, assumes that historical consciousness can only become observable – and therefore, consequential – when individuals or collectives use it to do

something. As Nordgren (2016) puts it: “…use of history is a performative historical

consciousness. In communication, emotive and cognitive conceptions are expressed of how the past, present, and future are interrelated.” (484) Following this second approach to historical consciousness, in this study I will demonstrate the usefulness of the ethnographic lens in examining the different ways in which human beings make use of history.

The ways in which individuals relate to and make use of history also depends on the processes by which this history is made available to them. These processes are mediated by power relations, as Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has demonstrated. Studying the history of his country, Trouillot examined in detail how silences in history are fabricated and “reflect differential control of the means of historical production.” (49) Other scholars have emphasized that archives need to be studied more ethnographically in order to reveal the power relations behind them and how these relations impact the crafting of narratives about the past (Schwartz and Cook 2002; Stoler 2002). In order to study people’s historical consciousness, one must also carefully consider the ways in which power imbalances are

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intertwined with social relations and interactions, as well as their impact on the ways in which people understand, imagine, and take into account what they consider their own history and that of others.

A nascent body of literature has started to ask questions about the relations between historical consciousness, citizenship and citizenship education. Trevor Stack’s (2012)

ethnography, for example, delves not only into how history is produced as a particular kind of knowledge in rural Mexico but, more important, how displaying this knowledge allows people to perform “good citizenship” in front of others. Moreover, Stack illustrates how different

relationships between individuals and local and national histories can reflect similar differences between their relationship with local and national citizenship, illuminating the ways in which belonging is produced at different spatial and temporal levels (90).

The idea that dissimilar ways of relating to history can affect how people learn and enact their citizenship has also been explored in detail by Michelle Bellino. In her ethnography of four schools in postwar Guatemala (2017), the author studied the different ways in which Guatemalan youth attribute historical significance to their own experiences of democratic disjunctures, and how school contexts and practices mediate this process. Her work not only delved into the different ways the same past can be narrated in a postwar context like that of Guatemala, but into how youth “do not simply inherit memories of violence and visions of peace from their parents and teachers; they actively interpret, reconstruct and place themselves within these narratives, even when they are intentionally silenced.” (8)

Finally, social researchers have also explored how social movements’ relationships with the state are mediated by their members’ historical consciousness and uses of history. They have asked how historical devices and narratives can be used by social movements as political

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resources in the present (Servigna 2015; Taft 2011), and how “historical scripts” can become sites of contestation in the context of contentious politics, active social movements, and state repression (Coronil and Skurski 1991; Lazar 2010). Together, these works emphasize the need to understand citizenship relationally, not only in social but in historical terms, and remind us that when studying citizenship, it is not only important to ask what, how, and who, but also, when (Mayorga 2017).