Cambio e Historia: necesidades y posibilidades del análisis historiográfico a través de las "experiencias de transformación"

Abstract

The main objective of this present paper is to review some methodological problems of the historical analysis of social change; the aim is to overcome the idea that postulates that social transformations adopt forms of transitions be­tween models of society. This works seeks to em­phasize the complexity of mutations and try to claim an examination through a micro dissection of changes. With this aims, it is proposed what has been called «experiences of transformation» as a way to investigate the processes of change and as a means to address the complexity of the fac­tors that were playing. This means studying social changes through the micro episodes of social life; that is, analyzing all the moments that individu­als lived in relation to certain social mutations in specific contexts and the ways in which they re­acted, perceived, managed, negotiated, promoted or even resisted changes. Although the work does not address a specific chronology, much of the re­flections come from the problems that emerge in the study of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen­turies.