Abstract
The social sciences were institutionalized in Latin America in a process that was simultaneously national and regional: from the 1950s to 1970s, regionalization paralleled the development of university institutionalization in the major countries of the area. As evidenced by the proliferation of professional organizations, regional centres of education and training, research projects, journals and book series on Latin America, regionalization was a prominent strategy in the search for scientific autonomy in this peripheral part of the world. In this chapter we examine the regionalization process of SSH, its timeline and effects, centring on two dimensions: the internal dimension of science and academia (institutional milestones; the main agents and resources involved in regionalization; research experiences and findings); and another external dimension (book publishing field as a catalyst for the SSH). Our analysis also highlights how regionalization allowed Latin America to be constructed as a topic for thought and research. As part of this construction, a transnational collaborative space formed to foster debates and theoretical formulations of global trends, as evidenced by the works of Raúl Prebisch, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto.
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Notes
- 1.
The first draft of José Martí’s essay “Nuestra América” (Our America) was published on January 10, 1891 in the New York Illustrated Magazine. The first edition of Ariel by José Enrique Rodó was published in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1900, by Imprenta Dornaleche y Reyes.
- 2.
The Monroe Doctrine refers to the policy of foreign relations that the United States defined from the 1820s to prevent the nations of the New World from being again the object of European colonization. Despite the multiple colonialist interventions of England, France , and Spain over Latin America throughout the nineteenth century, the Monroe Doctrine was actually applied after the triumph of the USA against Spain for the possession of Cuba (1898). This revealed the imperialist character of the phrase that synthesized that doctrine “America for the Americans.” At the political level, almost all Latin American states succumbed to American political hegemony. But from the cultural point of view, the words of José Martí were taken up again, and an anti-imperialist intellectual tradition was founded, which among other things disputed the very use of the term America.
- 3.
On the current state of internationalization of SSH in Argentina , see other Interco-SSH project publications like Beigel and Sorá 2018, Blanco and Wilkis in this volume.
- 4.
A comparative study of five sociology journals, including three from Latin America: Revista Mexicana de Sociología, América latina and Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología, one from the United States American Sociological Review and one European journal Revue Francaise de Sociologie, revealed that the Latin American journals had something in common that others lacked: an ongoing dialogue with the fields of economics and social history (Herrera 1970).
- 5.
Paradoxically, this “Latin American” professional association was both planned and founded outside the region, more specifically in Zurich during the first World Congress of Sociology organized by the International Sociological Association (ISA).
- 6.
Ironically, the “regional” (“Latin American”) identity and the alliance among the members of this new generation of social scientists both came together in the United States during the Inter-American Conference on Research and Training in Sociology held in Palo Alto, California and organized by the Social Science Research Council.
- 7.
Torcuato Di Tella, Lucien Brams, Jean-Daniel Reynaud, Alain Touraine. 1966. Huachipato et Lota: Étude sur la conscience ouvriére dans deux entreprises chiliennes. Paris: CNRS.
- 8.
Afrânio Garcia (2005) has provided a thorough summary of the 25-year period in which Santiago was a hub for national and international production in the social sciences, describing how those involved experienced the city as “a school of Latin American thought.”
- 9.
Mexico was the first country to officially recognize the Spanish Republic and ever since the administration of Álvaro Obregón (1920–24), the government had systematically forged international alliances with anti-imperialist factions.
- 10.
The 1944 Spanish translation of Max Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economía y Sociedad) merits special mention. Translated by a team headed by Medina Echavarría, the first edition in Spanish was released 24 years before the English language version (1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster Press) and 27 years before it appeared in French (1971. Économie et société, Paris: Plon, translation supervised by Jacques Chavy and Éric de Dampierre).
- 11.
The countries located in the southernmost area of the Americas: Brazil , Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay.
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Sorá, G., Blanco, A. (2018). Unity and Fragmentation in the Social Sciences in Latin America. In: Heilbron, J., Sorá, G., Boncourt, T. (eds) The Social and Human Sciences in Global Power Relations. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73299-2_5
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