Roger Chartier y la historia de la cultura popular

Abstract

Desde sus inicios, Roger Chartier ha demostrado un particular interés hacia la historia de la “cultura popular”, concepto que comenzará a redefinir a partir de la década de 1980. Sin embargo, su enfoque no estuvo exento de contradicciones ni contramarchas, propias, por otra parte, de la inherente ambigüedad del concepto “cultura”. Partiendo del cruce entre una carrera y un concepto, se aborda aquí un período que podría considerarse como fase intermedia de su derrotero intelectual donde incorporó la cultura popular en diversas investigaciones que tuvieron como escenario la temprana modernidad europea, ya sea en el marco de la historia urbana o en la historia de la cultura escrita. Del mismo modo, se analiza el tipo de historia cultural que Chartier ha practicado frente a la tradicional historial social, una opción que culmina con un interrogante abierto y una comparación historiográfica entre dos trayectorias: la de Chartier como historiador cultural de lo social con la del propio autor quien se asume como historiador sociocultural.

From the beginning, Roger Chartier has shown a particular interest in the history of “popular culture”, a concept that he began to redefine in the 1980s. However, his approach has not been free of contradictions and countermarches, typical, moreover, of the inherent ambiguity of the concept of “culture”. Starting from the crossover between a career and a concept, this paper deals with a period that could be considered as an intermediate phase of his intellectual path where he incorporated popular culture in various investigations that took place in early European modernity, either in the framework of urban history or in the history of written culture. In the same way, the type of cultural history that Chartier has practiced as opposed to the traditional social history is analyzed, an option that culminates with an open question and a historiographical comparison between two trajectories: that of Chartier as a cultural historian of the social and that of the author, who assumes himself as a sociocultural historian.