From the South to the North: The circulation of Latin American dependency theories in the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract

Sociological research into the transregional North–South circulation of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities has tended to have a unidirectional bias to date. The standard assumption is that as a result of globalization, theories and methods are spread from the global North to the global South. Based on this premise, many of the studies of circulation focus on the transfer of knowledge in terms of ideas, traditions, authors and concepts from the North to the South. Thus far, little attention has been paid to the transregional circulation of theoretical approaches from the South to the North and their impact on the transformation of the European social sciences and humanities. Analysing the circulation of the Latin American dependency theories in the Federal Republic of Germany, this article addresses precisely this gap. The focus is on processes of institutional consolidation of area studies, North–South mobility, the translation-process into German, application in empirical research, modification and rejection. Focusing on this little-explored orientation regarding the circulation of knowledge, this article is in keeping with the current attempt to analyse transregional entanglements within European social sciences.

Personal bonds in the internationalization of the social sciences: A view from the periphery

“…The networks woven by the Germans with Latin America during the 1960s and early 1970s and the institutional support for Latin American studies, accompanied by a new Third World perspective within social movements, achieved an unprecedented possibility of political and academic recognition of Latin American social sciences. (Ruvituso, 2019: 26)…”

Southern theories in Northern circulation: analyzing the translation of Latin American dependency theories into German

“…Alatas (2003) also points to the existence of an international division of laborbetween a recognized center as a producer of theories and a periphery as a producer or object of empirical researchwithin the framework of a long-term transregional "academic dependency." However, regarding the global circulation of Southern Theories there is a paradigmatic case: The dependency theories are considered the first scientific conceptual approach from "within the South" that significantly influenced the social sciences, especially the debate on development and underdevelopment in both the South-South and South-North directions, and which remains influential to this day (Dos Santos 2003;Beigel 2015;Svampa 2016;Ruvituso 2020). Emerging in the mid-1960s within a transnational and interdisciplinary network of social scientists with its regional epicenter in Chile (Beigel 2010), the debates around the concept of dependency produced innumerable contributions from the fields of political economy, sociology, political science, history, cultural criticism, and the sociology of knowledge.…”

“…Regarded as a Southern theory, dependency was one of the most influential responses arising from the colonial experience and its consequences in Latin America, and articulates the construction of social theory in the peripheries, which is mostly less or not recognized in the centers (Connell 2012). Some studies have analyzed the international circulation of dependency theories, especially in the English-speaking countries (Cardoso 1977;Blömstrom and Hettne 1984;Kay 2010) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) (Ruvituso 2020) and are investigating its South-South circulation (Devés Valdés 2008;Tshibambe 2018;Ross 2018). The present article is focused on the translation process as one of the key factors that reflects the circulation of dependency theories in the FRG and the mechanisms that influenced its publication in the prestigious Edition collection of the publishing house Suhrkamp between 1968 and 1980.…”

“…This unusual circulation developed within the framework of the long-term political and cultural transformations marked by the student movement of 1968. As a result of the international impact of the Cuban Revolution from 1959, and later the experience of Chilean popular unity (1970)(1971)(1972)(1973) and the triumph of Sandinismo in Nicaragua in 1979, Latin America underwent a period of unprecedented centrality in transregional political and cultural perception and recognition in Europe (Kuhn 2011;Kalter 2016;Ruvituso 2020).…”

In What Ways We Depend: Academic Dependency Theory and the Development of East Asian Sociology

“…The story of the Canadian‐ization campaign for sociology shows academic dependence cannot be simply attributed to the dichotomy between West and East, and the feeling of dependence takes place even in the Western societies. However, it is in former Western colonies (e.g., Africa and Latin America) where the discussion of academic dependency and decolonization gains footing (Keim, 2011; Onwuzuruigbo, 2018; Ruvituso, 2020). During the 1970s and 1980s, the idea of academic dependence was further developed and inspired by the dependent development theorists' efforts to theorize the central‐periphery model of dependency.…”