À la quête du passé des autres: les expéditions des voyageurs Dupaix et Waldeck à Palenque (Mexique) dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle // In search of the past of the ‘Others’: archæological expeditions to Palenque in nineteenth-century Mexico

Abstract

This study analyzes the discursive constructions which underlay the descriptions of the ruins of Palenque (Mexico). It is focused on the question of how history of non-European people is constructed by taking into account the example of the two European voyagers Guillaume Dupaix and Jean Frédérique Waldeck, who described the ruins discovered in the rainforest of Mexico. While Dupaix and Waldeck as scholars of a trans-cultural diffusion still rejected the idea that the indigenous could have built this impressive site of temples and houses, John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, two explorers from North America, promoted the opposite thesis that the ruins had been built by the Maya of the region. It is obvious that the century of Latin American independence is confronted with a paradigmatic change: the center of the world’s history no longer focuses on the Mediterranean past as imagined by the Europeans for a long period of time.