Regional History, Rationality, and Culture: On the Inclusion of the Cultural Variable in the Definition of Regions

Abstract

In recent years, reflections on the principles underlying regional historiographical reconstructions have become frequent. The reconstruction considered here arises from the intention to integrate the cultural dimension of social processes into regional-level analysis. From our perspective, the operative value of the concept of “region” may lie in its capacity to demarcate the horizon traversed by the multiple relations that define social experience. The region would thus mark the upper limit of the historical-cultural context to which practices may initially be referred, providing integrative keys in terms of the action/structure duality.

Microhistory explicitly enters the debate generated by the current shift of interest toward the conceptual and methodological issues of the discipline. The meaning experienced by actors in their practices is captured through strong contextualization, oriented toward the historical framework and the cultural system within which the rationality involved in action becomes intelligible. Following this theoretical-methodological proposal, we postulate here that the framework of this intensive historical-cultural contextualization could be defined in regional terms.