Fernand Braudel’s “great deep Story”

On Thursday, May 30th, at 5.00 pm, in the Conference Room, the guests of the MArRC will be accompanied on an extraordinary journey of knowledge in the “great deep history”, supported by the fascinating suggestions offered by Pasquale Amato, professor at the University for Foreigners “Dante Alighieri” and responsible for the Global History Cycle of the International Writers’ Center of Calabria, which will speak on the theme: “Times, spaces and cultures of the world in Fernand Braudel’s long history”.

Speakers: the director of the MArRC Carmelo Malacrino and the president of CIS Calabria Loreley Rosita Borruto.

Braudel is a fundamental figure for Western culture: he has revolutionized the style and methods of historiography. “I pretend to explain to you the facts present beyond contingent facts and current life”, Braudel has written. “Great story, but also a deep story. By this definition I mean a history of men seen in its collective realities, in the slow evolution of structures: structures of states, economies, societies and civilizations”. The 20th Century intellectual was among the “revolutionaries” of contemporary historiography, by the Parisian school of the Annales together with Lucien Fevre and Marc Block, giving a twist to the interpretation of the past through research into the “great history” of civilizations. A “deep” story, “capable of extrapolating details, overcoming learning and grasping all that is life”.

Braudel explained: “I have great faith in history as an instrument of knowledge and measure of things. The history that uses the riches of the nearby social sciences to renew itself: a story that has made significant progress in the very intelligence of life”.