NI LO UNO NI LO OTRO, SINO TODO LO CONTRARIO: Las Limitaciones del Dualismo Rural-Urbano en el Abordaje de la Región Costera del Río de la Plata y Algunas Propuestas de Reconceptualización

Abstract

The opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that laid the groundwork for the agendas of social sciences brought forth a research program that, opposing “the urban” to “the rural”, understands the urban in terms of the modern, anonymous metropolis focused on industry and services and the rural in terms of a traditional community built on face-to-face relationships and tightly knit, involved in agricultural and cattle-raising activities. The persistence of this program obliterated our capability of understanding a series of complex scenarios that cannot be cast into ordinary dualisms. On this basis, the following paper presents a series of theoretical and methodological operations we have reached through research on a region in which we find the coexistence of settings and sites of diverse scale, purpose and orientation – small and medium-sized settlements, small agricultural exploitations, technological, aerospatial, military and industrial poles, natural preserves and touristic sites – whose complexity invites us to reconsider and replace several conceptual and methodological sterile atavisms, sedimented throughout the history of the social sciences.