Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-94fs2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-16T01:58:20.822Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In the Name of History: A Disciplinary Critique of Orlando Fals Bordás Historia doble de La costa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Charles Bergquist
Charles Bergquist*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda's recently completed major work, the four-volume Historia doble de la costa, presents historians and social scientists studying Latin America with what the author calls a “revolutionary challenge.” In Fals's view, the Historia doble offers a way of researching, writing, and disseminating a history capable of stimulating the democratic transformation of Third World societies. This essay will take that challenge seriously and explore its implications from the perspective of the discipline of history. The first section will survey Fals Borda's intellectual and political development and his evolving critique of his own methods and results. The second section will develop a critique of the Historia doble in terms of the “internal logic” of history as a discipline. The essay will conclude by arguing that Fals's democratic goals are paradoxically subverted by his chosen means and that historians would do well to reconsider the democratic promise of their own methodology.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , 1990 , pp. 156 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association of Colombianists in Cartagena, 1-5 August 1988.

References

Notes

1. Orlando Fals Borda, Historia doble de la costa, 4 vols. (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1980–1986).

2. See Fals Borda, Peasant Society in the Colombian Andes (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1955).

3. Orlando Fals Borda, Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (Bogotá: Editorial Punta de Lanza, 1987), 122.

4. Ibid., 56.

5. La Violencia en Colombia (Bogotá: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1963).

6. Mompox y Loba, 166B-67B.

7. Ibid., “Advertencias.”

8. This material comes from a talk given at the Tercer Congreso Nacional de Sociología in Bogotá in 1980, published as “La ciencia y el pueblo: nuevas reflecciones” in Ciencia propia, chap. 9. The quotations appear on pages 113 and 114. See also El Presidente Nieto, 59B-61B.

9. El Presidente Nieto, “Advertencias.”

10. Zamosc's judicious analytical treatment of the agrarian movement of the early 1970s, published in English as The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), provides a revealing counterpoint to Fals's more descriptive and ideological treatment of the same subject in Volume 4 of the Historia doble.

11. Retorno a la tierra, 192B.

12. The study begins with a vivid description of a regional culture that Fals calls “anfibia” y “triétnica,” which evolved through the pre-Columbian and colonial eras to meet human needs in the watery land mass known as the depresión momposina (vol. 1). The study includes descriptions of the violent formation and evolving labor systems of the great estates (mostly cattle) in different parts of coastal Colombia during the colonial and national periods. It emphasizes the chronic struggle, passive and overt, for the land and for access to water resources by subsistence farmers and fishermen marginalized by that process (vols. 1, 3, and 4). The study also makes an excursion into biography and political history that focuses on the career of a mid-nineteenth-century coastal “caudillo” (vol. 2). Sprinkled throughout all four volumes is an extraordinary amount of detail on regional themes (flora, fauna, architecture, poetry, music, and dance) and regional personages, elite as well as popular. Also found throughout are a variety of historical hypotheses and interpretations ranging from theories on the origins of particular coastal cultural traits (nonviolence) and myths (el hombre-caimán) to explanations of the ebb and flow of land concentration, capital investment, elite cohesion, and popular resistance. Finally, the study places great emphasis on social science concepts and European social theory.

13. Those seeking a comprehensive summary and a thoughtful critique of the work can turn to the extensive reviews by historian Mauricio Archila, which appeared in the Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico 2 (1984):111–14 and 7 (1986):107–11.

14. This exhaustive mastery of a primary field is then complemented by a more cursory, but still considerable, amount of reading in the historiography of related fields.

15. In contrast, budding social scientists are trained first in a branch of social theory (such as rural sociology or macro-economics), and once they are judged to have mastered it, they can begin to produce “case studies” to test “universal theory” that may range across the cultural areas of the globe and backward in time. As noted at the outset of this essay, these differences in training are profound and reflect radically different assumptions about the nature of social inquiry. They produce scholarship that exhibits different strengths and weaknesses. The resulting intellectual trade-offs imply that the social sciences and history should exist in a symbiotic relationship, that fruitful discourse across the disciplines is enhanced by full appreciation of the logical wellsprings of disciplinary practice, and that the most valuable work in history may be that which comes closest to approximating the logic of the social sciences without compromising history's own logic. The converse may also be true. For fuller discussion, see Charles Bergquist, “Literatura e historia: ¿cordura o locura?” Revista de Estudios Colombianos 4 (1987):15–23.

16. See Mauricio Archila's review cited in note 11.

17. At one point in Ciencia propia, Fals reveals that he is aware of the existence of the “study of the study of history” (p. 127), but nowhere in this book or others I have read does he discuss or come to terms with the concept of historiography as it is understood by historians.

18. Obviously, such novels are particularly suspect as historical sources, not only because they derive their historical information largely from the oral tradition to which Fals accords such importance but also because novelists give themselves license to imagine the past.

19. For a standard bibliography on the Colombian leaders and a synthesis of historical knowledge on this era of Colombian history see the second volume of Manual de historia de Colombia, edited by Jaime Jaramillo (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1986).

20. On Colombian liberalism, see, among others, Jaime Jaramillo, El pensamiento colombiano en el siglo XIX (Bogotá: Editorial Temis, 1964); Gerardo Molina, Las ideas liberales en Colombia, 1849-1914 (Bogotá: Editorial Tercer Mundo, 1973); and William McGreevey, An Economic History of Colombia, 1845-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

21. For example, Brazilian historiography emphasizes several points: that Brazil won its independence without engaging in a long and bloody war; that the ability of Brazilian elites to engage in compromise avoided fragmentation of the nation and the frequent civil wars that plagued the republics of Spanish America during the nineteenth century; that Brazil managed to abolish slavery without a civil war of the kind that occurred in the United States; and that in the twentieth century, Brazil has witnessed neither social revolutions like those occurring in Mexico nor chronic violence like that in Colombia, while its experience with authoritarianism under the “populist” regime of Getúlio Vargas and later under the military regimes of the post-1964 period has been “softer” and “milder” than those in Argentina, Uruguay, or Chile. The best-known work in this historiographical tradition is sociologist Gilberto Freyre's classic, The Masters and the Slaves. Among historians, the most systematic and prolific writer in the tradition is José Honorio Rodríguez. Lately, however, this whole tradition has been challenged by a new generation of Brazilian historians who emphasize the class origins and mythical dimensions of so-called Brazilian national character. See, for example, the nineteenth-century synthesis by Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

22. One good example among many is the material collected in Retorno a la tierra, chap. 5. The most thorough work on Núñez and regional politics during this period is James Park, Rafael Núñez and the Politics of Colombian Regionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985).

23. This assumption, at least, is the thesis advanced in my own work: Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976) and Labor in Latin America (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), chap. 5. Fals's efforts to conceptualize this period seem confused and contradictory. He posits a process of “autodestrucción” of the regional ruling class (vol. 3, chap. 6, chan. B, sec. B), one that reaches “su climax a finales del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX” (vol. 3, p. 146B). That effort is followed by a “combinación de funciones económicos en grupos dominantes” (vol. 3, chap. 6, chan. B, sec. C, p. 153B), an “época” that apparently extends all the way up to the violence of the mid-twentieth century (vol. 3, p. 157B). Symptomatic of Fals's difficulties in conceptualizing the whole period (1865-1930) is his extraordinary decision (vol. 3, chap. 5) to abandon temporarily the conceptual Channel B of his two-channel format and “combinar aquí la teoría con la descripción” (vol. 3, p. 96).

24. Good examples are Marco Palacios, El café en Colombia, 1850-1930 (Bogotá: El Ancora, 1983); and Roger Brew, El desarrollo económico de Antioquia desde la independencia hasta 1920 (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1977).

25. See, for example, Ciencia propia, 106–7.

26. Descriptions of these procedures appear often in Fals's work (for example, Resistencia en el San Jorge, 29B-31B), but their implications for the rendering of oral sources are perhaps most fully revealed in the following passage: “Hay, pues, en la tradición y cultura campesinas elementos positivos y negativos hacia el cambio social que abren posibilidades para transformaciones revolucionarias en el conocimiento y en la acción. … En muchos casos es fácil determinar algunas de las fuentes y canales de la alienación que impiden una acción consecuente campesina, aquella proveniente de la difusión de valores burgueses. Se puede, por tanto, equilibrar el peso de estos valores alienantes mediante una devolución enriquecida del mismo conocimiento campesino, especialmente de su historia y realizaciones, que vaya llevando a nuevos niveles de conciencia política en los grupos. Así se va transformando el sentido común de éstos para hacerlo más receptivo al cambio radical de la sociedad… .” See Ciencia propia, p. 113.

27. Retorno a la tierra, chap. 8.

28. See, for example, the critique by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese, “The Political Crisis of Social History,” Journal of Social History 10 (Winter 1976):204–20.

29. For a systematic presentation of Fals's political philosophy translated into these methodological procedures, see Ciencia propia, chap. 9.

30. Even on its own terms, moreover, Fals's two-channel discourse appears to be seriously flawed in both conceptual and mechanical terms. These problems seriously undermine the desired effect on its audience and thus tend to subvert Fals's stated political goal. First, it is not really clear whether Fals thought some readers would actually want to, or be able to, read only one channel or whether he thought they could and should read both, although it seems that he hoped all would eventually read both so that their information “would be more complete.” Second, whether trying to read either channel or both, one immediately confronts the problem of inconsistency. Channel A contains analysis, as well as the other things Fals promises (see the analytical “informes” produced in Channel A in vols. 1 and 2). Channel B includes not only discussions of theory and concepts but what Fals calls summaries of “facts.” When this theoretical material does not fill the allotted pages, Channel B serves as a repository for most of the hundreds of photographs in the book, all of which would be expected to form part of Channel A. In short, the static in both channels makes their separate voices indistinct and confused. If one tries to read both channels (either simultaneously, as Fals originally intended, or separately within chapters, as he suggests at the beginning of vol. 2), one encounters new problems and questions. As Fals seems to admit tacitly at the start of that volume, reading simultaneously presents so many mechanical and conceptual problems (as one flips back and forth, delves alternately into two supposedly different discourses and loses the thread of the argument in the process) that it seems better to read the channels separately within chapters. But this approach involves so much repetition that the reader begins to question the concept and mechanics of the two-channel format itself. Moreover, if the two channels are to be read sequentially, why not order them sequentially, eliminate the repetition, and thereby save everyone the time and material cost entailed in the two-channel format?

31. See Charles Bergquist, “Latin American Labor History in Comparative Perspective: Notes on the Insidiousness of Cultural Imperialism,” forthcoming in the Canadian journal Labour/Travail.