Heritage and historiography: the document hypothesis in Brazilian national heritage practices during the 80’s

Abstract

In the 1980s, technicians from the Institute for National Artistic and Historical Heritage (Iphan) began to look to the academic discipline of History for arguments to support the selection of heritage assets that went beyond the grandiose. Engaging actors and concepts from France’s historiography they justified listing buildings and urban ensembles with characteristics that did not fit into the colonial-based national identity narratives used by the institution in its early decades. During this time, sites such as Laguna (in Santa Catarina State), Cuiabá (in Mato Grosso State), Morro da Conceição and XV de Novembro Square (in the City of Rio de Janeiro), among others, were preserved not only for the historical value of their buildings, but also for their potential as a source of history. New preservation rationales for immovable assets were developed; these sought to circumvent the concepts set out in the provisions of Decree-Law No. 25/37, striving instead to protect sites and places according to their documental value. This article aims to discuss the city as a document, retrieving the concepts of document from Social History and Brazilian historiographical practices in their relationship with the preservation of built heritage. We will seek to examine how cities and their architecture were treated as sources by the field of preservation in Brazil, as well as to understand the theoretical discourse and the authors mentioned herein, such as Marc Bloch and Jacques Le Goff, and the studies of the urban centers where such rationale was put to practice, most notably Laguna, in Santa Catarina.