The lesson of the stone: uses of the past and material culture

Abstract

By proposing certain divisions between past and present, modern history writing also articulates various connections between what is real and what is not real. A viable historiographical approach is exactly the study of the way these connections are structured and legitimized. Therefore, this article investigates the uses of the past in historical culture as experienced by Gustavo Barroso. Based on theoretical and methodological insights by Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães, it relates Barroso’s writing to the production of other intellectuals. The paper aims at illustrating the significant role material culture has in the shaping of certain ways of giving meaning to the past, more specifically through the transformation of marks and traces into vestiges of the passage of time.