En alguna parte del mundo. Montevideo, Buenos Aires, París

Abstract

In this article the author discusses the language of writing of sociology. The work of the sociologist as situated practice, which is localized in part as a result of the language of writing. A number of problems arise in connection with the languages of scientific discussion, with independence of thought with respect to the social reality studied, and with the relationship between sociology's language of writing and the social practices that are the object of sociological reflection. The author points to a critical productivity effect brought about when one comes into contact with sociology written in a language different than one's own, an effect that makes it possible to take into account the frameworks and contexts of knowledge production. That productivity tends to evaporate with the conversion to a lingua franca. A methodological reflection triggered during a trip by the author through Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Paris, as he traveled between Spanish and French. A journey in which social trajectories are confused with the linguistic shifts of the researcher. In that reflection on his own social and linguistic movements, the author also tries to take into account the debt that the questions that guide research owe to the specific political junctures in which they emerge. This reflection imposes a consideration of the relationship between discursive and non-discursive practices as a problematic relationship, given that the one is not reducible to the other, and as the territories were both kinds of agency become confused.