Modernization, dependency, and the global in Mexican critiques of anthropology

Abstract

This articles examines the links between Mexican anthropologists who – as part of a 1960s-era revolt, rejected prior anthropological approaches, which they labelled imperialist – and social science currents in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. They also took inspiration from anti-colonial movements. They spurned modernization theories that focused on the multiple economic, cultural, and psychological factors that might spur US-style capitalist economic growth and that sought to overcome the internal, national brakes on progress. Instead, they embraced dependency theories that linked the ‘internal’ (national) to the ‘external’ (global) and privileged revolutionary changes that implied a radically changed relation to the global capitalist world system. Yet dependency and modernization theories emerged within a shared intellectual space. Even as many intellectuals rejected US models of economic development, they accepted the primacy accorded to economics and technology and the notion that science was a global enterprise aimed at generating universal knowledge.

Imagining Latin American Social Science from the Global South: Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research

“…In response to a hardening of the effects of capitalist development, United States foreign policy, and the success of the Cuban Revolution, many prominent Latin American thinkers inspired by Marxism developed methodologies that fused activism with empirical research and effectively detached the locus of research from its traditional academic home. While many members of this intellectual vanguard continued to interact productively with northern academic institutions and to engage in dialogue with northern scholars, they self-consciously created innovative theoretical and methodological vehicles whose origins were in the global South (Rosemblatt 2014).…”

Comunidade E Democracia Na Sociologia De T. Lynn Smith E José Arthur Rios*

“…E-mail: maio@fiocruz.br DOI: 10.17666/329516/2017 enfocando as conexões e a circulação de atores e ideias entre diferentes regiões do globo (Saunier, 2004;Secord, 2004), justifica-se quando se considera a importância que tem assumido, para a história das ciências contemporâneas, a revisão das leituras difusionistas, segundo as quais a ciência moderna teria sido um produto exclusivamente europeu e norte-americano, propagando-se posteriormente para o restante do mundo. 1 No âmbito da história das ciências sociais, em que pesem as assimetrias que marcaram a produção e a circulação das ideias sociológicas, expressas, desde o fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial, pela crescente hegemonia dos padrões organizacionais e cognitivos das ciências sociais norte-americanas, estudos transnacionais têm chamado a atenção para as fontes heterogêneas que constituíram diferentes tradições de conhecimento, não mais concebendo-as apenas a partir de enquadramentos nacionais estanques e autorreferidos (Heilbron et al, 2008), e para as ideias e os espaços de circulação compartilhados entre cientistas sociais de diversos países, tanto ao Norte como ao Sul do globo (Rosemblatt, 2014). No Brasil, não só o papel de agências multilaterais e de tradições disciplinares estrangeiras tem sido examinado no tocante ao desenvolvimento das ciências sociais (Maio, 1997;Villas Bôas, 2006a), mas também a produção sociológica local tem sido estudada com base em molduras históricas mais amplas, que indicam as trocas ou as similitudes com ideias gestadas em cenários igualmente periféricos (Brasil Jr., 2011;Maia, 2011).…”

Mexican Anthropology and Inter-American Knowledge

“…This emerging paradigm revises approaches that have characterized Latin America and the United States as fundamentally different. The dependentistas of the 1960s, for instance, argued that dependent capitalist societies could not develop like First World capitalist societies, and that First World scientific and technical knowledge could not serve Third World needs (Rosemblatt 2014). Edward Said's Orientalism (1994) made a similar point, arguing that intellectual pursuits buttressed colonial and imperial power by debasing and "othering" colonized peoples and characterizing them as inferior and backward-at a temporal as well as geographic distance from the West.…”