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Concept
History of mentalities
Summary
The history of mentalities, from the French term histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), is an approach to cultural history which aims to describe and analyze the ways in which historical people thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them, as opposed to the history of particular events, or economic trends. The history of mentalities has been used as a historical tool by several historians and scholars from various schools of history. Notably, the historians of the Annales School helped to develop the history of mentalities and construct a methodology from which to operate. In establishing this methodology, they sought to limit their analysis to a particular place and a particular time. This approach lends itself to the intensive study that characterizes microhistory, another field which adopted the history of mentalities as a tool of historical analysis.
The origin of the concept of a history of mentalities lies in the writings of the 1st Annales historian Marc Bloch with the concept then taken up by later theorists such as Georges Duby and Roger Chartier. In seeking to create works of total history, Annales historians tended not to simply rely on the political or event-oriented history of past generations. Michael Harsgor points out in that the challenge of the Annales historians was not to create this deterministic history that appeared to rely heavily on teleological conclusions, such as the Marxist forms of history being written at the time. Rather, Harsgor writes that the Annales historians tasked themselves with the creation of social structures, "which means covering the skeleton of the basic economic analysis with the flesh of demographic, cultural, mental, and event psychoanalytical data." It has also been said that Annales historians, in their attempts at the creation of total history, considered the history of mentalities a single aspect in the creation of that history. Simply put, they were attempting to reconstruct the world of whatever time period they were examining.
Official source
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