The Cliometric Imagination: A narrativist reading of "Coercion and Market" by E. Tandeter

Abstract

This article aims to consider the historiographical operation, the question on who and how historiy can be written, taking as its theoretical frame -with some reformulations and developments - the narrativist theory of historiographical discourse proposed by Hayden White in his masterpiece Metahistory. The proposal here is to apply the narrativist framework to a textual base which represents, to some extent, the paradigm of the "professional" historiographical work of the late twentieth century in Argentina: the book Coacción y Mercado. La minería de la plata en el Potosí colonial, 1692-1826, by Enrique Tandeter. The purpose is twofold: to illuminate some aspects of the historiographical operation at stake in Coacción [...] and at the same time to point out some of the limitations of whitean narrativist approach