CULTURE AND REGIONALITIES
The area of concentration emerges from the comprehensive articulation of two interconnected concepts that underpin the area itself: culture and regionalities; the first as a perceptive matrix of phenomena woven between values and meanings that organize social life over time and the second derived from the notion of region, problematizing it, understood as a procedure and perspective that perceives the objects of analysis in their multiple relationships. The
epistemological proposal based on regionality aims to overcome and criticize the common notion of the region as merely a territorial cut-out or naturalized locus, a receptacle where socio-cultural relations take place. It is a concept that is tributary to the concept of space as a social, cultural and historical construction that is produced and reproduced by the social and political practices of the groups that shape it. What the concept of region adds to the notion of space as a social construct are the relational and interactional perspectives in permanent transformation. With this conception, the articulation of the concepts of culture and regionality seeks to emphasize the complexity of an approach that recognizes and problematizes the intrinsic intertwining of time and space. Understanding how historical processes are regionalized based on the experiences and representations of the different individuals, groups, classes and cultures that make them up aims to counter the universalizing and hegemonic metanarratives
metanarratives that homogenize historical experience. Thus, a study focused on how discursive constructions, the production and configuration of meanings and identity processes intertwine and manifest themselves in a given time/space is fundamental both for understanding the specific and varied social relations that characterize human life, as well as for formulating a historiography that is effectively committed to understanding
experiences and alternatives for social organization.
By articulating culture and regionalities, we propose an integrated and inseparable approach to the material, symbolic and ideological dimensions of the objects and themes investigated, a multidimensional and open construction that highlights the idea of a multiple spatiality in the same or multiple temporal dynamics. But we also take the position that the spaces in question are not reduced to their physical dimension, as they are also dimensional arrangements between subjects and objects, including epistemological, referential, virtual, social and other regionalities: subjects, objects, themes and approaches are defined and thought of relationally in terms of references that establish a regionality in which the elements are arranged and signified from their place, thus avoiding approaching them per se or in themselves or resorting to essentialist concepts.
By taking the complexity of spatio-temporal perspectives as the focus of the themes and objects of research, what is innovative is not the thematic choice – since all the themes of analysis are inserted in spatial and temporal dimensions – but the emphasis on the complexity of local and regional logics of social and cultural production rather than generalist simplifications.
In short, the articulation of the concepts of culture and regionalities as the epistemological foundation of a research program points to a notion of open history, inherently constituted in the multiplicity of points of view that arise from different experiences and positions. The emphasis on regionalities echoes the relevance of the Program, highlighting the importance of the regional context, thus enriching historical research by considering the intricate local dynamics in the construction of historiography.