Wydarzenie historyczne jako czynnik strukturalny. Podbój Ameryki Południowej przez Hiszpanów w ujęciu Nathana Wachtela

Abstrakt

In this paper I ponder the methodological issue of historic event and historic structure and their mutual relations, which were especially brought up within the French historiography in the second half of the 20th century. Having mentioned the
main French ways of formulating and resolving it (e.g. Edgar Morin’s and Jacques Le Goff’s ideas as well as these of Paul Ricoeur or Paul Bois), I try to reconstruct one of the lesser known and strictly historical propositions that aim at connecting événementielwith structurel. It is Nathan Wachtel’s work on the Spanish conquest of South America in the 16th
century. According to Wachtel’s analysis, the conquest deconstructed the Indians’ traditional mental universe and at the same time, due to its traumatic feature, originated their efforts to reconstruct it by special dances. Thus, the historic event appears as an agent interfering in the structural dimension of history because it puts an end to one structure and is a source of another. Yet, this way of thinking about reciprocal relations between event and structure is not an exception within the French historiography as we can find it in various analyses made by some other historians.