Historiographical balance on Ecuador’s liberal revolution: Alternative readings and divergent sociological meanings

Abstract

History is presented to us at the bifurcation of knowledge and reality. However, the most appropriate way to know a transcendental phenomenon within a particular society is through historiography, as the highest expression of historical-scientific knowledge; the problem is given by the fact that historiography is not, in any known case, a totally objective and neutral knowledge, but, on the contrary, it is always conditioned by the biases, tastes, interests, ideologies and political positioning of the historian, as a subject conditioned by the burden of the time and space in which he/she lives. In this sense, the objective of the research was to describe the main narratives that have been produced in Ecuador about the liberal revolution that took place in the late nineteenth century, narratives that acquire divergent meanings and, definitely, are susceptible to alternative readings of the events. Methodologically, the research was possible thanks to the technique of historiographic balance, which allows determining hermeneutically what has been written about a topic and how it has been written, that is, from which perspectives. It is concluded that, in terms of discursivity, the Liberal Revolution left a lasting symbolic impact on Ecuador, shaping its political landscape and social norms.