Bartolomé Mitre and the philology. Linguistic approaches to American history

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of a series of contributions among which we identify the philological work of Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906). He was a historian, journalist, military officer and politician —he would come to be president of Argentina—, who combined public service with his intellectual queries. His perspective deepened the adoption of a condemnatory and ideologized view of the American native. He postulated unfathomable differences between the American pre-Columbian civilizations and the European society. He supported the idea that American history circumscribed itself to the occupied territory and condemned the philological constructions based on hypothetical and/or fallacious migratory flows. Whilst Mitre coined the very interesting notion of "idiomatic ideology" (1894), when he studied American languages, he tried to impose an idea that would be scientifically unsustainable under current standards: the precarity of the American native thought process, their "congenital barbarity" and their civic and moral development hardships.