Michel de Certeau: Historiography, Revolution, and Christianity. An Epistemological Displacement from Latin America

Abstract

What is the connection between the writing of history and the social position inhabited by the historian? What is the link between doing theology and the institutional place of the theologian? These epistemological questions highlight the unavoidable consequences of social and political involvement in the production of any scientific discourse. Michel de Certeau delves into these issues, developing his categories on the writing of history and the historiographical operation through dialogue with his anthropological, political, social, and theological analyses of the changing realities in France and Latin America. His interest in this continent, particularly in cultural and ecclesial developments, is not merely an appendix to his work. On the contrary, his extensive body of articles and reviews on Latin America demonstrates not only his engagement with these developments but also reveals the extent to which this engagement was fundamental in shaping his own theoretical frameworks. The cultural space of the continent, where the mystical, the popular, orality, and the political converge, becomes interwoven in the work of the French Jesuit to rethink certain categories of European modernity. Thus, this geographical shift transforms, in turn, into an epistemological displacement above all, revealing another way of doing history by incorporating a sharp reflection on revolution in connection with the current polycentrism of Christianity. To carry out this inquiry, primary reliance has been placed on The Writing of History and The Practice of Everyday Life, particularly the chapter "The Scriptural Economy."