Q: Julio asks, “what is the origin of the term gaucho?”

A: According to www.paginadogaucho.com, a Brazilian site, the word comes from Guarani – guahu, “the howl of a dog” with the pronoun, che, “ my,” resulting in “people who sing sadly.” I think this translates to melancholy, a supposedly gaucho characteristic. Another theory links it to the Guarani mispronunciation of garrocha, a kind of scythe. Some have argued that it is a corruption of the French word “gauche,” (farfetched to my mind). Wikipedia attributes the etymology of gaucho to the Quechua huachu (orphan, vagabond) or the Arabic chaucho (a type of whip used in herding animals). An online dictionary claims it derives from Araucanian (a Southern Cone indigenous language) cauchu “wanderer.” (www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gaucho)

If you are completely confused by this point, you are not alone. The ever-helpful pagina do gaucho informs us that in 1925, an Argentine journal sponsored a roundtable to clarify the term’s definition. Thirty intellectuals debated the matter and failed to arrive at a consensus. The term with its present meaning first appeared in Spanish texts and dictionaries in the 1780s, signifying a wandering cattleman (presumed a rustler or thief) of the pampas.

I love the Internet. Thanks to Google I did not have to go to the library to check out Richard Slatta’s Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (U. of Nebraska, 1983). However, if you would like more information, it’s a decent social history of Buenos Aires.

As an aside, if you google “gaucho” and “etymology” you will come up with a link that takes you to a very intriguing short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” that might change how you think about history. It may be found at aegis.ateneo.net/fted/tlontext.htm

Got a question? General advice column for students

Here is a place to post general questions about course content, about research, and about academic life in general. For topics that might be of general interest, I will start a new thread. My office is always open but if you get struck by a random thought and want a quick answer, or if you want advice about a general issue but prefer to remain anonymous, here’s your opportunity.

Q: How did Spain get away with expelling the Jesuits in 1767?

A: This question was posed by David after class. So here goes (with the caveat that religious history is not one of my main areas of specialization). Three issues come to mind – the first is the right of royal patronage, or Patronato Real. This was a privilege that both the Crowns of Spain and Portugal had secured from the Papacy prior to the era of expansion into the Americas. Simply put, it enabled the Spanish and Portuguese states to wield power over the church in their dominions. They enjoyed the right to appoint and dismiss secular clergy at all levels, maintained control over the Inquisition, and could selectively enforce or suppress Papal decrees within their respective empires.

The second was the increasingly secular political climate in Europe in the mid 18th century. Prior to the Spanish expulsion, Jesuits had already been ousted by France, Portugal and parts of present-day Italy. Pope Clement XIV, in an effort to improve relations between the Papacy and secularizing political leaders, ceded to pressure and suppressed the order throughout Europe in 1773 (except in Russia where Catherine the Great refused to abide by the decree). So the Papacy was hardly putting up a fight. The Jesuits were eventually restored in 1814 and today constitute the largest of the remaining monastic orders.

The third has to do with imperialist dynamics in Latin America that I alluded to in class – the Jesuits were economically very successful, as missionaries they wielded a great deal of influence over their indigenous converts, in many regions they dominated in higher education, and as confessors, they had the ear of well placed bureaucratic authorities. This was considered problematic by states wishing to centralize their power and become more economically efficient. Expelling the order achieved many objectives – the economic windfall realized by exproporiating their estates and enterprises, increased access to indigenous labor, and the elimination of potential political rivals. Rather sordid, really.

Stuff

Over the last month or two I have been thinking a lot about stuff. This was prompted initially by discussions about whether our household needed more storage space or less stuff to store. I opted for the latter and began wading through a decade’s worth of unfiled or poorly filed paper, mementos, cassette tapes of dubious musical merit, VHS tapes filled with antiquated network programming, ill considered clothing, books I will never reread, and the like. Most of it was surprisingly easy to pitch except for the time it took to wade through it all. This process is still ongoing. But it has been liberating thus far.

Much more recently, my friend had her house burglarized. It was what you might expect – the sense of violation, the loss of items of great sentimental value, and the unmistakable stench of tobacco lingering in what had been a smoke-free home. As I toured local pawn shops with her in an attempt to recover her possessions, I naturally reflected on how a like experience would affect me. It has been a long time since I was robbed and, having been younger and poorer at the time, I had a lot less to lose. Having recently reviewed the bulk of my personal possessions, I asked myself, of what I retained what would be unbearable to lose? Obviously the health and safety of my loved ones comes first. Take my stuff, leave them the f— alone. But in the material realm, it boiled down to historical documents in myriad forms: family photos, letters, recipes, my Girl Scout sash (all those merit badges), my great-grandmother’s cookie iron, my kids’ artwork, my undergraduate papers, countless academic notes, my computerized data (yes, that’s backed up). Unique artifacts associated with my identity and intellectual formation would be the hardest to lose, especially those that are capable of reviving memories that have been buried beneath layers of more recent experience. However, as objects of consumption, most of what embodies my own personal history has little or no monetary value. The market values least what I value most. I find that strangely comforting.

And as a practical matter, I found a less conspicuous place to stash my earrings.

What is history?

What is history?

I ask this question every time I begin teaching historiography, not because I think there is an answer but to determine if the students think that there is one. If, by the end of the class, they report that they thought they knew what history is but have become completely confused, then I feel that I have done my job well. To claim to have pinned history down with certitude would likely involve complacency, arrogance, reductionism, or some combination of the three. I would like to believe that I am neither complacent, arrogant nor reductionist; however, my failure to come up with a conclusive definition of history is not proof of that.

Perhaps it is easier to begin by identifying what history is not. It is not objective truth with either a lower or upper case “T.” It does not repeat itself. It is not a science and, contrary to what the German philologist and historian Leopold von Ranke asserted, it does not “show what really happened.” The facts do not speak for themselves. Rather, historians piece together incomplete, often opaque, fragments of the human past in an attempt to make that past intelligible to their present. In so doing, history says as much, if not more, about the concerns of the individual historian than the past.

One response to the reality of historical contingency and/or relativism has been to reduce it to its simplest terms. For Herodotus, history simply meant “inquiry.” Carl Becker simplified history as “the memory of things said and done.” The British philosopher of history, C. G. Collingwood maintained it was simply “thought about thought,” the relationship between thought and its object. These statements are so simple that it is difficult to argue with them. However, they all suggest history’s inherently subjective nature.

Does subjectivity invalidate historical inquiry? One student cogently posed the following challenge to the discipline. He argued that historians still maintain the fiction that some degree of objectivity is possible in historical writing. However, we are deluding ourselves: “objectivity” is really no more than a consensus of subjectivities, or as he phrased it “an orgy of subjectivities.” The idea of “rationality” is also subjectively constructed. Therefore, historians should abandon any claims to being a social science or rational form of inquiry. History thus becomes a form of fiction, no less and no more.

This critique, pursued to its logical conclusion, could apply to many other branches of human inquiry as well, particularly those that style themselves as “scientific.” Does subjectivity preclude us from investigating the human past? I say, “ no.” I believe that human beings order their existence historically (borrowing again from Carl Becker’s commonsensical approach), that much of our identity is constructed in relation to our idea of the past (real or imagined), and that we are inescapably subjective. We cannot fully know the bases of our subjectivity but by writing about the present or about the past through the eyes of the present, people in the future may be able to discern, however dimly, what gave our lives meaning. So maybe we are writing for the future, not in an obvious and futile attempt to “learn from the past” or avoid its “ mistakes,” but to provide idiosyncratic, particularistic suggestions about how we searched for meaning in the human past.

On a lighter note, piecing together a narrative version of the human past by using disparate bits of physical evidence that have been preserved is a lot of fun. If you can present your interpretation artfully, all the better. And there’s a certain voyeuristic thrill to be had by prying into the past of people who are no longer around to defend themselves.