Maurice Halbwachs en España, reflexividad sobre una ausencia
ISSN: 1136-1700
Year of publication: 2009
Issue Title: Romper silencios
Issue: 41
Pages: 81-94
Type: Article
More publications in: Historia, antropología y fuentes orales
Abstract
Unlike other 19th and 20th century French historians and sociologists, who were widely acknowledged and profusely translated in Spain, in a clear proof of their influence, the same can not be said of Maurice Halbwachs. Not even the most striking part of his work -the theory of social memory, where he distances himself both from H. Bergson and from E. Durkheim- found an audience in Spain, Only Max Aub paid attention to it from his exile in Mexico. This omission, which is now beginning to be amended, has weighed negatively in the present debate on memory and history. Reading Halbwachs in Spain, far from being a futile erudition exercise, is on the contrary an endeavour of social hermeneutics which may remove from the immediacy of daily debate the polemic surrounding the notion of «historical memory».