A MENTALIDADE PRIMITIVA E A HISTÓRIA DAS MENTALIDADES: APROPRIAÇÕES E USOS DE LÉVYBRUHL PELA NOUVELLE HISTOIRE

Abstract

In 1970, Jacques Le Goff, wrote an article for the collection Faire de l’Histoire, whose title seemed to evoke a contradiction: “Mentalities: A History of Ambiguities”. The article was inserted in a collection which defined the program of these “new historians”. Why associate the movement Nouvelle Histoire with a term as “ambiguous” as “mentality”? We argue that the key to understanding this choice is found in Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s The Primitive Mentality. For Lévy-Bruhl, the forms of experience and relationship with the world, i.e. “mentalities”, would not be unique to all humanity. There would even be mentalities impossible to penetrate, such an alterity. The ethnologist could only describe them. The concept of mentality represented a limit for both natives and researchers. For the natives, limit of the thinkable, for researchers, limit of the explainable. The Nouvelle Histoire movement, or history of mentalities, will appropriate this “limit” to face the success of structural anthropology.