From justice to historiographical approach: nineteenth-century criminal court records of the Chilean Historical National Archive

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Chilean historiography has addressed, in the last three decades, the issue of evidential value in the judicial criminal records made in the 19^th century and stored in the National Historical Archive. The study aims to analyze the historical dynamics that converged in the manufacture of documents, in structuring a fragmentary and mediated material, thus deducing the challenges of using them as a primary source. Therefore, it provides an assessment of the relevance of methodologies focused on those conditions of possibility, rescuing the heuristic potential of "reading against the grain" and "culturalist" approaches able to address the phenomenon of scriptural mediation between witness and record. The diagnosis of the assimilation that national historiography has had on these approaches allows us to conclude the number of outstanding tasks on the problematization and hermeneutics over this documentation of increased use.