School of Latin American Studies in its own time-stream. 60 years of ILA RAS

Abstract

The path of six decades traversed by the Institute of Latin America, born and matured in the bosom of the three-hundred-year-old Academy of Sciences, suggests that a world-class scientific school has developed in Russia in the field of Latin American studies. Step by step, by the steps of decades, the article examines the main milestones in the formation of the school of Latin American studies in the organizational forms of an academic institute. The author refuses the jubilee stencil and formalistic chronicle of "publication activity". The professional trajectory of the institute is presented not as a “thing in itself”, but as an involuntary product of its historical time (Soviet and post-Soviet) with all its metamorphoses and experiments, on the one hand. On the other hand, as a reaction (analytical and emotional) to turning events in the countries of the studied macroregion and its Iberian alma mater along the line of European kinship, as a reaction to periodic changes in the political and economic climate here, to transformations in the zone of cultural genesis. In other words, the Russian school of Latin American studies appears not only as a subject of research, but also as an object of influence from the “external environment”.