Escenas de la vida conyugal: Los conflictos matrimoniales en la sociedad colonial virreinal rioplatense

Abstract

Historians understand that in the midst of “fighting the good fight” for history, in which we are often confronted with unequal forces, one finds, almost inevitably, the impulse to desert, to flee, to disappear. This impulse to give up, to abandon the eventual encounter with the past, is more or less hidden in the composition of a type of account of the familiar, inscribed in the reconstruction of the traces of the mentality of an era.Many years after having been initiated into the field of Latin American family history by the pioneering works of Asunción Lavrín and the impulse of the Journal of Family History, edited by Tamara Hareven, attempts to explain this resistant social organization now demonstrate a certain tiredness. Today there are few theoretical innovations within a collective social subject constructed by means of structures, intimacy, and imagination. Escenas de la vida conyugal is a late arrival in this itinerary. The dilemma between models and practices cannot be resolved by means of a pseudotheory concerning matrimonial rights and duties, as the author proposes. It is a matter, instead, of an analytical operation already known to all: that of deciphering the specific conditions of possibility and the dynamic of different meanings of family. This is a task certainly completed by the historiography that oriented its questions toward matters connected to the idea of family at its cultural aspects, in a line of interpretation initiated by Donzelot and continued by Foucault and Bourdieu.In my opinion, this is a line of analysis that has been fully explored, and the book in question is evidence of this statement. This is not a matter of some specific problems within Escenas: a lack of basic historiographic references, the narrow concept of “social history” the author employs, or her curious way of incorporating opinions, citations, and contemporary testimony into a single narrative plane. No, I refer more broadly to the fact that the best of family history in recent decades, and that which has breathed fresh air into the field, has been that which incorporates two perspectives completely unknown to the author. The first rests in the deepening of an anthropological vision of the various family types and grounded in a long-range interpretive perspective in which demographic phenomena are converted into the subject of analysis. This perspective is notable in the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Barbara Todd, and Joan Bestard. The second perspective involves the application of the model of social networks capable of situationally describing the articulation of family behaviors in invisible strips of social domination, invisible to the analytic eye following traditional functionalist approaches. This excellent approach has been consolidated by regional economic history.My comments thus reflect my discomfort with finding here a holistic story, with little specific to the Río de la Plata, traditional in the sense of rewarding that magical perspective of justice so particular to legal historians, and believing to have found something called “reality,” stripped of all discursive operation. Books such as Kluger’s invite us to reaffirm some ideas. The historical account of marital conflict during the viceroyalty is the same thing as with the history of derecho indiano. Archival work must in something more than the mere rescue of valuable documents. And, of course, it under-scores the ominous conditions of intellectual production imposed by the current tragedy facing Argentina. Allow me a brief final commentary. Knowing firsthand the challenge implied in conducting research and publishing in Argentina today, where any academic work finds itself goaded by the crisis of the universities, the lack of libraries, and the monopoly exerted by Spanish publishing houses who exist solely to produce future best-sellers, Escenas deserves recognition for the effort the author must surely have made in bringing forth these reflections.