Los inicios de la profesionalización de la historia en Honduras y la Carrera de Historia (1976-1990)

Abstract

Abstract

The research aims to examine the institutional and political processes of Honduran society from the 1950s to the 1980s that are related to the emergence of the History Career at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) in 1976. It details some institutional aspects of the University and relates them to a broader social context in which the phenomena of social mobilization, State reform policies and the threat of authoritarian reaction that always hung over the period are important. The aim is to provide a social view of an institutional phenomenon such as the organization of the History Career. I consulted journalistic sources, internal documents of the University (memoirs, projects, aide-memoires) and recorded some testimonies of actors who participated in the organization and first years of operation. In the end, it is notable that the professors and officials who gave rise to the career had a clear intention to make history one more resource for the transformation of society. This would be done through a contribution of critical knowledge that would question the official discourses on the nation, something considered vital for the creation of a popular national conscience. This knowledge, however, would also be based on ideas of the academy in vogue at the time on the structural study of social phenomena. The originality resided in the fact that this was joined to a particular idea of scientific work as collective labor, field work and social projection that transcended the university classrooms. Historiography in Central America has few reflections on the processes of institutionalization of history. This article seeks to keep alive a very unusual discussion: the relationship between the professionalization of history and the social and political context.

Keywords: historiography, institutionalization, university, politics, science, academia, Central American history.