The Middle Period in Latin America: Values and Attitudes in the 17th-19th Centuries Open Access

Collections of essays deriving from conferences are not often as stimulating as this one. Seven of the nine essays gathered here try (all intelligently and interestingly, though with differing degrees of success) to apply the concept of mentalités to specific places and peoples in Latin America, from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. The kind of pioneering research on display here (Manuel Burga on Peru, Murdo MacLeod and Eric Van Young on Mexico, Alida Metcalf on Brazil, John Chasteen on the Brazil-Uruguay borderlands, Mark Szuchman on Argentina, Teresita Martínez-Vergne on Puerto Rico) is both warmly welcome and intrinsically exciting, whatever the ambiguities of the concept itself may be. These ambiguities are examined in a good opening essay by the medievalist Howard Kaminsky, who appreciates the value of the approach while recognizing its infuriating slipperiness. He rightly maintains that a “pure” investigation of mentalités is impossible, if mentalité is taken to mean “a habit of mind below the level of self-conscious thought, characteristic of a socially definable collectivity, and tending to persist over a longue durée” (pp. 22-23). I would prefer a less rigorous definition. Mentalités cannot in practice be easily separated from other historical factors— social, economic, institutional, ideological, or whatever. (None of the historians represented here tries to do so.) One small quibble: in his thought-provoking introduction, Szuchman is far too dismissive (with the help of an outrageous statement by R. G. Collingwood) about Enlightenment historiography (p. 5). After all, in a strange sort of way, was not one of the unwitting pioneers of the study of mentalités the Voltaire of the Essai sur les moeurs?