Categories, Classes and Identities in Time. Escaping Chronocentric Modernity

Abstract

In this article I will mainly explore some questions related to the ways in which historians and other social scientists usually identify, distinguish and classify people from the past, grouping them according to different criteria: economic-social, political, ethnic, territorial, etc. Typical historians, far from creating the classificatory systems with which they operate, generally make do with the large frameworks provided by the historiographic tradition within which they evolved. Precisely for this reason, we are well advised to pause now and then in order to reflect upon these underlying structures, which we have inherited by way of a valuable legacy from our masters and which profoundly shape our work without our being conscious of it.