The Historian as Translator: Applying Pierre Bourdieu to the Translation of History
- Gisella Vorderobermeier (coord.)
Editorial: Rodopi
ISBN: 978-94-012-1086-7, 978-90-420-3842-4
Año de publicación: 2014
Páginas: 203-217
Tipo: Capítulo de Libro
Resumen
The starting point of this essay is the presupposition that “objective” history is never anything but a signifier protected by the apparent omnipotence of the referent, that facts do not have meaning by themselves, but are given one from a determined ideology, and that therefore history and translation are meaning systems through which we construct the meaning of the past. In this essay I will apply Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and symbolic capital to demonstrate that history is a way to translate reality which selects documents and facts by means of maneuvers charged with ideological implications. The historian thus becomes a rewriter and history turns out to be an act of translation. All this is exemplified by the historian Luis Suárez’s entry on Francisco Franco in the Diccionario biográfico español published by the Spanish Real Academia de la Historia.