Latin American Scholars Research Articles

Open access resources for Mexican art

Free and unrestricted access to online educational or scholarly material, without subscription or registration requirements, seeks to eliminate traditional financial, legal and technical barriers. Indeed it provides greater accessibility to scholarly materials, substantially increasing the visibility of research. This article introduces the Mexican open access journals that specialize in art and culture, and analyzes their visibility in the databases of Latin American scholarly journals.

Las políticas para la infancia y el enfoque de derechos en América Latina: algunas reflexiones sobre su abordaje teórico

En la academia latinoamericana tiende a tratarse al "campo de politicas de infancia" como compuesto por instituciones tradicionalmente orientadas a la minoridad, reconfiguradas por la Convención Internacional de Derechos del Niño (CDN). Esta posición, rica como ha sido en presentar las modalidades de regulación social de que la infancia latinoamericana ha sido objeto, no considera en profundidad las tensiones en la implementación de la CDN como instrumento de derechos humanos y marco de especificación de la ciudadanía infantil. Así, revisaremos tal proceso en Argentina, identificando aquellos nudos que permiten considerar mejor las operaciones de institucionalización, identificando especificidades y desafíos investigativos.

Garantismo y neoconstitucionalismo frente a frente: algunas claves para su distinción

En este ensayo se sostiene la pertinencia teórica de distinguir entre el neoconstitucionalismo y el garantismo. Ambas aproximaciones teóricas estudian el mismo modelo de organización político/jurídica: el constitucionalismo democrático. Esto ha provocado que diversos estudiosos europeos y latinoamericanos confundan las dos aproximaciones y utilicen ambas categorías de manera indistinta. Sin embargo, en el texto se sostiene que el garantismo es una teoría que debe adscribirse al positivismo jurídico mientras el neoconstitucionalismo (que, en realidad, es una categoría que conjuga diferentes teorías) tiene una tendencia iusnaturalista. Esta diferencia fundamental tiene implicaciones teóricas relevantes y también consecuencias prácticas sobre todo en el ámbito de la justicia constitucional.

(Towards) decoloniality and diversality in global citizenship education

This article focuses on the geo- and body-politics of knowledge production related to global citizenship education. It introduces a set of concepts and questions, developed in the work of (mainly) Latin American scholars, that problematise Eurocentric conceptualisations of modernity, globalisation, knowledge and ‘being’ with several implications for education. Through conceptual tools that engage the ‘darker side of modernity’, the ‘coloniality of power/being’, ‘epistemic racism’ and ‘abyssal thinking’, the ideas presented in this article aim to pluralise possibilities for global citizenship education in ways that address ethnocentrism, ahistoricism, depoliticisation and paternalism in educational agendas, upholding possibilities for decoloniality, diversality and ‘ecologies of knowledge’ in educational research, policy and pedagogy.

Waves of Change Within Civil Society in Latin America

For the past half a century, Latin American scholars have been pointing toward the emergence of new social actors as agents of social and political democratization. The first wave of actors was characterized by the emergence of novel agents—mainly, new popular movements—of social transformation. At first, the second wave, epitomized by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), was celebrated as the upsurge of a new civil society, but later on, it was the target of harsh criticism. The literature often portrays this development in Latin American civil society as a displacement trend of actors of the first wave by the second wave—“NGOization”—and even denounces new civil society as rootless, depoliticized, and functional to retrenchment. Thus, supposedly, NGOization encumbers social change. The authors argue that NGOization diagnosis is a flawed depiction of change within civil society. Rather than NGOization related to the depoliticization and neoliberalization of civil society, in Mexico City and São Paulo, there has been modernization of organizational ecologies, changes in the functional status of civil society, and interestingly, specialization aimed at shaping public agenda. The authors argue that such specialization, instead of encumbering social change, brings about different repertoires of strategies and skills purposively developed for influencing policy and politics. Their argument relies on comparative systematic evidence. Through network analysis, they examine the organizational ecology of civil society in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Diagnóstico diferencial entre experiências espirituais e psicóticas não patológicas e transtornos mentais: uma contribuição de estudos latino-americanos para o CID-11

To review research articles in psychiatry and psychology involving Latin American populations and/or produced by Latin American scholars to investigate the differential diagnosis between spiritual/anomalous experiences and mental disorders in order to contribute to the validity of the International Classification of Diseases towards its 11th edition in this area. We searched electronic databases (PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus, and SciELO) using relevant keywords (possession, trance, religious experience, spiritual experience, latin, Brazil) for articles with original psychiatric and psychological data on spiritual experiences. We also analyzed the references of the articles found and contacted authors for additional references and data. There is strong evidence that psychotic and anomalous experiences are frequent in the general population and that most of them are not related to psychotic disorders. Often, spiritual experiences involve non-pathological dissociative and psychotic experiences. Although spiritual experiences are not usually related to mental disorders, they may cause transient distress and are commonly reported by psychotic patients. We propose some features that suggest the non-pathological nature of a spiritual experience: lack of suffering, lack of social or functional impairment, compatibility with the patient's cultural background and recognition by others, absence of psychiatric comorbidities, control over the experience, and personal growth over time.

O ofício do historiador hoje: entrevista com Stuart B. Schwartz

Stuart Schwartz concedeu essa entrevista durante sua última visita a São Paulo em agosto de 2009, à época do lançamento da edição brasileira de seu livro Cada um na sua lei: Tolerância religiosa e salvação no mundo atlântico. Schwarzt discute, entre outros assuntos, as transformações no mundo acadêmico latino-americano e o novo papel dos "brasilianistas" nas últimas décadas, tanto nas universidades brasileiras quanto nas americanas.

Special Issue Introduction

Special Issue Introduction Les Field (bio) and Joanne Rappaport (bio) Collaborative research methods have a long history in Latin America, one that is particularly oriented toward explicit, specific, and wide-ranging projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge. In pursuit of that end, the various Latin American authors whose work is showcased in this special issue of Collaborative Anthropologies develop and deploy collaborative research methods, epistemologies, and ontologies that to some degree resemble those of North American scholars and, to an important degree, break new ground in refashioning collaborative research as a decolonizing methodology. In order to comprehend what they are doing, we must begin with a consideration of the notions of colonialism, coloniality, and colonial difference. Coloniality, a concept recently developed by postcolonial scholar Walter Mignolo (2002: 61), drawing on the work of Aníbal Quijano (1997, 2000) and Enrique Dussel (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999), can be understood as the entire ensemble of conditions created by colonialism, itself the aggregate phenomenon of the consolidation of colonial regimes over the past five hundred years. In those areas of the world that experienced colonial regimes in the wake of European conquest, coloniality is an outcome that is coterminous with the nature of modernity: coloniality creates sharply perceptible divergences between modernities in those countries that were the colonizing powers and modernities in colonized areas of the world. Mignolo calls this "colonial difference" and argues that it has structured and shaped the creation, understanding, interpretation, and representation of knowledge about modernity worldwide (2002: 61-62). In a planetary geography shaped [End Page 3] by colonialism, in which coloniality is pervasive, Mignolo discerns a "geopolitics of knowledge" that is always already unequal, because it is the outcome of colonialism and the condition of coloniality. Mignolo observes that just as the geopolitics of knowledge is the outcome of colonialism and coloniality, projects aimed at the decolonization of knowledge are also enmeshed in large-scale processes of political, economic, and social change. For example, he cites dependency theory's central role in defining national policies in Latin America in the aftermath of World War II up until the late 1970s and the corollary impact of dependency theory on the decolonization of knowledge during and following those decades (2002: 63-65). While each of the authors in this issue elaborates a particular concept of decolonization, drawing upon different literatures, they all acknowledge a common intellectual genealogy that ultimately goes back, at least in part, to the work of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda. In 1970 Fals Borda published an important volume titled Ciencia propia y colonialismo intelectual (Our Science and Intellectual Colonialism), which echoes a widespread and ongoing critique of the colonizing countries' monopoly control over the production of scientific knowledge among Asian, African, and Latin American scholars, and which ultimately inspired the methodology of participatory action research. The scenario Fals Borda lays out is simple: Western expansion takes place not only in the economic and political spheres but in the educational and intellectual arenas as well. The task of Latin American intellectuals, then, is to reframe theory and methodology so that they emanate from the colonial world, converting social research into a tool for liberation. In 1971, together with other politically committed Colombian scholars, Fals Borda made concrete proposals toward such ends in Causa popular, ciencia popular (Popular Cause, Popular Science), published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action), a network of Colombian social scientists and journalists advocating activist research alongside popular movements (Bonilla et al. 1971). La Rosca proposed inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and regional struggles, in order to establish research priorities in conjunction with local activists. Their collaborative work would focus on the identification of local cultural, social, and political forms that could prove useful in supporting organizations with whom La Rosca worked closely in indigenous regions of southwestern [End Page 4] highland Colombia and among peasants of Colombia's Atlantic coast. In other words, Fals Borda and his associates developed a critique of the Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge that would lead to its decolonization through an alliance of scholars and grassroots activists. Since the 1970s, Latin American scholars writing both...

Disruption, yet community reconstitution: subverting the privatization of Latin American plazas

Latin American scholars have recently discussed the privatization of urban public space. A fundamental aspect of this process is the disintegration of communities because it often targets and affects a peculiarly Latin American kind of public space: the plaza. Plazas have traditionally functioned as cultural centres in Latin American cites. They are central meeting points for political groups, sites of civic expression and public resistance, as well as places to purchase relatively cheap goods and services. Plazas are, therefore, sites in which families, neighbours, and political organizations mingle, interact, and also challenge authority. This paper uses these sorts of insights on public space in Latin America to develop a conceptualization of the plaza as a community centre. However, the multiple practices and interactions that occur in these forms of public space have been disrupted by state-led strategies which seek to privatize and sanitize public space, thereby disrupting—or even destroying—the community centre. I use primary materials on Mexico City’s Historic centre and its plaza to explore the ways in which this specific type of urban public space has been affected physically and symbolically by a regeneration scheme known as the Programa de Rescate.

Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century

The Global Administrative Law Project: A Review from Brazil

This brief article intends to introduce a few lines on the GAL project and to address a couple of ideas on the potentialities of the dialogue that has been established with Latin American scholars, with an emphasis on the Brazilian context. On this basis, its main purpose is to improve the understanding about the current status of GAL debate, in Latin America, as well as to favor a better understanding on the contribution the region is likely to make to GAL analysis, both with empirical cases and academic production in the region and/or in Brazil. I make references mainly to administrative law and international law materials, as well as eventual cross-analysis in these fields.

Latin American posters: public aesthetics and mass politics

Illustrated with 100+ political posters made between 1960 and 1990, this book documents the sociopolitical history of Latin America during a period of intense radicalism and upheaval. Essays by leading Latin American scholars discuss how these icons of popular struggle united the masses and influenced political and social reform.

Rumors of Muslim Zapatistas are Just that, Rumors

There is much fascination among Middle Eastern and Latin American scholars to find links to the ongoing global war against radical Islam, and radical Islam are spread in throughout the Western Hemisphere. Of particular interest is radical Islam's presence in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). While doing research on the presence, or lack thereof, of radical Islamic movements throughout the Western Hemisphere, I found the following interesting nugget on Mexican Separatist movement leader, Subcomandante Marcos. The U.S. and regional allies must monitor groups such as the Zapatistas, Tupac Amaru, Sendero Luminoso, the political party being started in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchu, the Sandinistas, the Bolivarian Alternative Axis countries, and other points of access throughout the Hemisphere such as Cuba and Venezuela because they share a common bond with radical Islam: anathema toward the U.S. Indeed, if not breeding or conversion ground for Islam, the mutual hate for the West and the U.S. in particular could create dangerous synergies impacting U.S. interests and allies throughout the Hemisphere.

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility in Latin America: A Critical Standpoint

Strategic management researchers in Europe challenged the historical concern of the field with economic performance. As a result corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been transformed into a key strategic issue. Given the large amount of social problems in Latin America, much of them related to the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows over the last decade, the growing literature on strategic corporate social responsibility (SCSR) produced in the US has been reproduced in the region by consulting firms, big corporations firms and strategic management researchers. Drawing upon critical arguments of Latin American scholars on the dominance of the US literature in the region and on problematic outcomes of the large amount of foreign direct investments inflows this paper develops a critical analysis on the so‐called SCSR. The vantage point construed by big corporations within the fields of strategic management and organization studies, the increasing dependence of the field of strategic management on corporate resources, and the decreasing power of the state and civil society in relation to big corporations are pointed out as key issues for the development of a critical approach on SCSR in Latin America. In the end the author argues that the responsibilities of big corporations, especially in Latin America, are too important to be addressed only by the field of strategic management.

Nem Tarzan, nem Emília: as aventuras do Jeca Tatu na tecnosfera

The synchronicity made possible by the media: between the global and the local, allows us today the convergence of two moments. It could suggest to us that the dream of setting the clock right with contemporarity was accomplished by periferic countries. Nevertheless, one aspect has been recurrent in the texts of Latin-american scholars and has fed the cinematoghraphic imagery: the abysm generated by the accelerated imposition of technological news coming from abroad associated to the fact that these countries do not know the secrets to manage these technologies. This article is a study on the motives that make the subject of anachronism a constant reference among us. Also, it is a study on how our nonsynchronism applied to hegemonic countries is understood by authors in different times. We promote the dialog among the texts of Oswald de Andrade, Octavio Paz, Martín-Barbero, Néstor García Canclini, Miltom Santos and also recent brazilian movies.

Culturas imperiales: Experiencia y representación en América, Asia y África

Ricardo Salvatore did an excellent job on this ambitious volume that gathers the works of 12 renowned scholars from various disciplines to discuss issues regarding “imperial cultures” on three continents. The volume helps reconceptualize the relationship between imperialism and culture, and it is especially strong in repositioning the study of imperialism among historians, cultural critics, and social scientists in Latin America. For Latin Americanists, the book triumphs not only in its language of publication but also in its ambitious thematic approach. The compilation includes seven original essays and five works previously published between 1998 and 2002.The chapters are not organized in sections, even though the first four articles written by Renato Ortiz, Walter D. Mignolo, Gilbert M. Joseph, and Ileana Rodríguez share an interest for conceptualization. Of these four, readers may be familiar with Gilbert M. Joseph’s introduction to Close Encounters of Empire (Duke Univ. Press, 1999) and Walter D. Mignolo’s article in Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales (Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, 2002), which reassesses his previous ideas calling for the emergence of a “pensam-iento fronterizo” to leave aside Eurocentrism in studies about culture and empire. Renato Ortiz’s work questions cultural imperialism as an explanatory tool of analysis, due to processes of transculturation and the increasing influx of cultural goods in this globalized era. Ileana Rodríguez’s study of the “mayística” discusses how Mayanists engage in more self-reflection about themselves than about the culture they are studying; her essay borrows considerably from Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, which makes her article less suggestive.The themes in the remaining essays are more varied. Zeynep Çelik reminds the reader about the importance of continuity in the intersections between colonialism and postcolonialism. Her wonderful analysis of Argel discusses the reassignment of meaning to sites of memory after the end of colonialism in both public and private spheres. Arcadio Quiñones, using symbolism to link culture and imperialism, explores the War of 1898 by stressing the importance of photography as a form of symbolic possession, in a process that transcended the war itself. He does not, however, explore much about the reception or consumption of photography in the United States. James R. Ryan also examines photography, reflecting on alternative uses of photography in imperial enterprises, showing specifically how Congo photographs were used both to propagate imperial ideology and (by Christian missionaries) to protest King Leopold’s imperial atrocities.This volume has several articles that will appeal to those interested in Latin Amer-ica’s relationship with the United States. Lauren Derby’s essay examines the 1990s chupacabras phenomenon, linking it to the economic changes after NAFTA. Oscar Terán’s literary analysis deals with Latin American intellectuals’ skepticism of U.S. imperial advances around 1900. Andrea Giunta examines how Nelson Rockefeller used exhibi tions and images to promote the Good Neighbor policy. The question not resolved in this article, however, is what the Latin American public thought of these exhibitions. Exploring a different vein, Ricardo Salvatore’s wonderful article explores the process of consumer conquest. North American businessmen and leaders linked to the Unión Panamericana became ethnographers who tried to capture the essence of Latin Ameri-can consumers by developing an imperial strategy where the consumption of technology became crucial for U.S. predominance in the region. This article reminds us how close imperial “metropolis” and dominated cultures usually are and how sensible informal empires must be about dominated cultures to be efficient in their nonmilitary enterprises. Like Ricardo Salvatore, John M. MacKenzie also puts an emphasis on travel guides, but published for the general public in an attempt to indicate and miniaturize the vast British Empire. Of particular interest are his considerations about the continuity of the imperial ethos expressed in these kinds of guides prior to the 1950s.Even though not all of the articles are suggestive and innovative, a good portion of them are, which helps make this work a valuable volume for Latin American scholars interested in culture and imperialism. Additionally, the writing is clear, with good translations by Ada Solari and Horacio Pons. However, photographs and illustrations are of poor quality, thus diminishing the quality of the book, especially in Zeynep Çelik’s and James R. Ryan’s chapters.Historians, despite their particular region and period of specialization, interested in imperialism, globalization, and their cultural aspects will find this volume very interesting, especially within the Spanish-reading audience. Specific articles of this volume may interest a broad range of scholars, including historians, anthropologists, literary critics, architects, and cultural geographers.

Views from the “South”: Intellectual Hegemony and Postmodernism in Latin America

Euroamerican scholars mark Latin America as a site of utopian revolutions, foreign intervention, troubled economies, military repression, and a failed modernist paradigm of development. Four recent books critically assess this construction by addressing its source in the international imaginary. They advocate a subaltern perspective on colonial difference and argue that postmodernity as promulgated by Euroamerican scholars may become yet another intellectual trend ignorant of Latin America's particularities and complexities. Latin American scholars have embraced postmodernity far longer than their Euroamerican counterparts, whose relatively recent applications remain problematic. TIMOTHY J. SMITH is Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean at the University of South Florida. His research covers the anthropology of politics, ethnicity, democracy, and social movements in Guatemala and Mexico. He is co-editor of The Guatemala Reader and Kaqchikel Maya Authority and Government in Sololá. He has published in Ancient Mesoamerica and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures.

The Age of Insecurity: Violence and Social Disorder in the New Latin America

Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. Edited by John Bailey and Roy Godson. (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Pp. 271. $50.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.) Violencia Y Regulación De Conflictos En América Latina. Edited by Klaus Bodemer, Sabine Kurtenbach, and Klaus Meschkat. (Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 2001. Pp. 459.) Náyari History, Politics, and Violence: From Flowers To Ash. By Philip E. Coyle. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2001. Pp. 263.) Del Estrado A La Pantalla: Las Imágenes Del Juicio A Los Ex Comandantes En Argentina. By Claudia Feld. (Madrid, Spain: Siglo Veintiuno, 2002. Pp. 154.) Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities. By Martha K. Huggins, Mike Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip G. Zimbardo. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. 293.) Urban Poor Perceptions of Violence and Exclusion in Colombia. By Caroline Moser and Cathy McIlwaine. (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2002. Pp. 124. $22.00 paper.) Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. Edited By Susana Rotker. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. 265.) Sad as it is to say, violence could arguably be considered the central—if not defining—problem in contemporary Latin America as it faces the new millennium. If nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholarship was concerned with liberalism, civil war, and state formation, and if mid- to late-twentieth-century scholarship was marked by a preoccupation with dictatorship and democracy, then the current explosion of writings on everyday violence, public insecurity, and [End Page 178] deteriorating rule of law suggests that twenty-first century scholarship is about social disorder and disintegration, especially as produced by the routinization of violence and its expression in state practices and societal norms. Indeed, for scholars and residents of the region concerns about endemic violence and overall conditions of lawlessness are starting to crowd out the prior reigning preoccupations, including the renewed interest in formal politics and the strengthening of democracy and competitive party systems that resurged at century's end. To be sure, these general thematics often are linked to each other, either by those who see connections between the explosion of violence and criminality and the neo-liberal democratic transition or by those who suggest that untrammeled violence and mounting criminality are themselves undermining citizenship rights, and systemically reinforcing the "unrule of law," in ways that prevent democratic deepening. But the wave of violence and social disorder that appears to be sweeping the entire region has become so unsettling and alarming that it has captured widespread attention in and of itself, and from a variety of disciplinary corners. It has been a long time since a single subject has drawn Latin American scholars from fields as diverse as political science, literary criticism, sociology, economics, criminology, history, anthropology, and media studies into a common pursuit. The inter-disciplinary breadth of the contemporary scholarship on this topic is nothing short of remarkable. But so too is the phenomenon itself, which has transformed fundamental power relations, the underpinnings of market economies, the legitimacy of longstanding political institutions, the basis for collective social order, and the psychological and social infrastructure of people's everyday lives and livelihoods. The fact that scholars from such a large number of disciplinary home-bases are studying the topics of violence, lawlessness, and public insecurity has had a direct impact on the depth of our understanding of the widespread significance of the problem, even as it underscores the overall precariousness of the situation in Latin America. Studies show how and why citizens live in constant fear, how their governments react to or reinforce these and other problems related to lawlessness and violence, how individuals behave and communities organize in response to these problems, and how political and economic elites (both private and public sector-based) accommodate or challenge the principal...

E-Journal Proliferation in Emerging Economies: The Case of Latin America

In recent years, Latin America has been one of the world's fastest growing areas for Internet connectivity. While numerous studies have examined the factors contributing to this communications explosion, this article concentrates upon one of its effects—the proliferation of freely available, scholarly, peer-reviewed electronic journals in the fields of literary, cultural and area studies. This article argues that in the field of Latin American studies, the majority of e-journals are being produced in Latin American countries, rather than in the US or the UK for example. It is Latin American academics, rather than their US and UK counterparts, who are embracing new technologies and the opportunities facilitated for effective dissemination of research. In order to understand this marked move towards electronic scholarly journals, this article outlines the state of Internet connectivity in the region, the financial and material constraints and other restrictions placed upon academic publication, and the lack of international visibility of Latin American scholarly print journals. While questions need to be addressed as to the future sustainability and preservation of these free journals, many of them managed by individual academics and funded by their universities, this article argues that electronic publishing offers Latin American academics an unprecedented opportunity to disseminate their research. Furthermore, this model gives international academics immediate, free access to important research that is emerging from the continent, which is the subject of study. Such access has the potential to revolutionize the way that international academics approach Latin American studies and to encourage a greater degree of international academic debate.

América Latina en las revistas europeas de antropología, desde los inicios hasta 1880. De la presencia temática a la participación académica

The institutionalization of Anthropology as a science was achieved in the second half of the 19th Century. This process was accompanied by the appearance of specialized media destined to the publication of research papers, debates, and all type of disciplinary information. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the presence of Latin America in three particularly influential European reviews in the first decade of their existence: the «Journal of the Anthropological Institute» (London, founded in 1869); the «Revue d’Anthropologie» (Paris, founded in 1872), and the «Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie» (Berlin, founded in 1872). It is aimed to evaluate 1) the presence of Latin America as an object of study, and the interest of European anthropologists in Latin American topics; and 2) the presence in those reviews of anthropological research carried out by Latin American nationals or scholars currently residing there.