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.