Latin American Scholarship Research Articles

Against decolonial reductionism: The impact of Latin American thinking on the data decolonization project

This essay argues that Latin American scholarship and movement practice are key to understanding the dynamics of the datafied society and countering its inequities. Examining the sources of inspiration of a frontrunner seeking to decolonize the datafied society – the Big Data from the South Initiative ( BigDataSur) – we review Martín-Barbero's ontological shift from media to mediations, Freire's methodology centring individual agency and empowerment as a structural task of society, Mignolo's invite to take decoloniality as a praxis rather than merely an idea, Rodríguez's first-hand engagement with technology at the margins, Escobar's autonomous design for the pluriverse, and the critical ecology of eco-social movements. We engage with a new generation of Latin American thinkers who turn their gaze to core problems of today's systems of knowledge production, be they media or academia. Learning from these scholars, we warn against decolonial reductionism, namely the trend to evoke decolonial ideas and theories without fully committing to putting them into practice. We maintain that to decolonize datafication, we ought to also change how we generate knowledge about the datafied society. We outline three practical strategies that foster an open-ended dialogue on alternative approaches to datafication and scientific practice: multilingualism, public scholarship, and mentorship.

Emancipatory Communication: A Critical Reflection on Communication Sciences in the Post-Pandemic Era1

ABSTRACT In an era of uncertainty, where epistemic freedoms are challenged and where many people feel excluded, how can communication – both as a discipline and a practice – serve to combat these uncertainties and feelings of exclusion? What epistemology can guide us and orient our communication science to ensure the right of all to produce knowledge on equal terms? What communication practice ensures inclusion and participation for all? Based upon a review of recent African lines of thought and their links to Latin American scholarship, this text advances an intellectual agenda that in the post-pandemic era can inform the development of theories and practices of communication that transcend the limitations of the dominant Western episteme when facing the current challenges of planetary transformations.

Conceptualising praxis, agency and learning: A postabyssal exploration to strengthen the struggle over alternative futures

Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as ‘dangerous’ – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, established frameworks that dangerously address praxis, agency and learning. Adopting a postabyssal approach, contributions from the Global South and East are drawn on to develop an epistemologically plural basis for thinking differently about praxis, agency and learning. Recent Latin American scholarship reinvigorates Freirean ideas through connections with Fals Borda and contemporary feminist pedagogues, centred on a notion of feeling-thinking. Luitel’s interpretations of Vedic philosophy provide radically different ideas of negative dialectics, chaos, responsibility and liberation. An open-minded, open-hearted, open-ended approach is crucial to making these ideas more useful in the struggle over alternative, more equitable and just futures.

Territorial subjectivities. The missing link between political subjectivity and territorialization

Political subjectivity and territorialization often appear disconnected in recent debates. We propose a fresh approach based on Latin American scholarship to understand subjects and territories as relational: Subjects are (de)stabilized in processes of territorialization, while territories are (de)stabilized in processes of subject formation. We introduce the concept of territorial subjectivities and use examples from the literature to show how these emerge in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Dresden. Placing an analytical focus on becoming rather than being, the contingency of territorial subjectivities is key to this novel conceptual link that supports a differentiated reading of socio-territorial struggles in diverse geographical contexts.

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Training of Agricultural Specialists for Latin America: a Profile of Scholars from Latin American Scholarship Program in Agriculture (1951-1962)

Between 1951 and 1962, the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) maintained a scholarship program, the Latin American Scholarships program in agriculture (LAS), which financed the training of 226 Latin American students and researchers who, together, received 297 scholarships for short study periods at leading research centers in countries in the region. These centers were, above all, structures linked to the Office of Special Studies (OSS), a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government, and North American universities. The LAS provided the training and circulation of Latin American scholars in a period of great technological advancement in agricultural research and sought to give continental scope to RF’s main and most successful laboratory in the area: Mexico. The profile analysis of 226 LAS scholars is made from a database of 9057 minibiographies of scholars available in the Directory of Fellowships and Scholarships published by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1970s.

Latin American perspectives on datafication and artificial intelligence: Traditions, interventions and possibilities

This introductory essay illustrates the context, clarifies the relevance, and outlines the key themes of this Special Issue on “Latin American Perspectives on Datafication and Artificial intelligence”. It starts pointing out that so far, the engagement of Latin American scholarship in the exploration of data technologies and the rise of intelligent systems has been limited. However, it is argued, Latin American traditions in both research and praxis have much to offer to our understanding of the evolution of the information ecosystem. We propose to map different Latin American perspectives on datafication and AI using an analytical matrix structured along two theme lines, that is three building blocks (infrastructure, imaginaries, practices) and three interpretative lenses (decoloniality and race, feminist theory, pluriversal thinking). Then, we reflect on two procedural issues: the need to consider this Special Issue as a conversation-starter, and the importance of having this conversation in multiple languages and in an open access format. We conclude providing an outline of the various contributions of the Special Issue. Authors address algorithms from the south and coloniality, datafication and corruption, data activism, AI and journalism, and platform labor in the context of Latin America and drawing on Latin American theoretical contributions

Introduction: Intersections of Activism and Academia

Introduction: Intersections of Activism and Academia

Imagining Alternatives? Latin American Scholarship on International Economic Law and the Global Economic Order

Author(s): Perrone, Nicolas M. | Abstract: This Article analyzes the role of Latin American international economic law scholarship within the global economic order. Many of the problems that Latin Americans face today relate to the global economy, such as labor conditions, access to medicine, and the use of natural resources, among others. The discussion of these problems, however, seldom recognizes the role of international economic law scholarship. Although the knowledge created by this scholarship may not completely explain why States actively behave in a certain way, it can serve to explain why they may refrain from certain actions. This Article argues that scholarship on international economic law plays a crucial role in the creation and reproduction of the current global economic order. If this claim is correct, regional scholarship can do more for Latin America than serving the advisory and litigation needs of States. By recognizing its role in constituting the global economic order, international economic law scholarship can promote alternative theories and practices that may help Latin America and its people find their place in the global economy.

Health, environment and colonial legacies: Situating the science of pesticides, bananas and bodies in Ecuador

Pesticide-related health impacts in Ecuador's banana industry illustrate the need to understand science's social production in the context of major North-South inequities. This paper explores colonialism's ongoing context-specific relationships to science, and what these imply for population health inquiry and praxis. Themes in postcolonial science and technology studies and critical Latin American scholarship guide this exploration, oriented around an ethnographic case study of bananas, pesticides and health in Ecuador. The challenge of explaining these impacts prompts us to explore discursive and contextual dynamics of pesticide toxicology and phytopathology, two disciplines integral to understanding pesticide-health linkages. The evolution of banana phytopathology reflects patterns of banana production and plant science in settings made accessible to scientists by European colonialism and American military interventions. Similarly, American foreign policy in Cold War-era Latin America created conditions for widespread pesticide exposures and accompanying health science research. Neocolonial representations of the global South interacted with these material realities in fostering generation of scientific knowledge. Implications for health praxis include troubling celebratory portrayals of global interconnectedness in the field of global health, motivating critical political economy and radical community-based approaches in their place. Another implication is a challenge to conciliatory corporate engagement approaches in health research, given banana production's symbiosis of scientifically ‘productive’ military and corporate initiatives. Similarly, the origins and evolution of toxicology should promote humility and precautionary approaches in addressing environmental injustices such as pesticide toxicity, given the role of corporate actors in promoting systematic underestimation of risk to vulnerable populations. Perhaps most unsettlingly, the very structures and processes that drive health inequities in Ecuador's banana industry simultaneously shape production of knowledge about those inequities. Public health scholars should thus move beyond simply carrying out more, or better, studies, and pursue the structural changes needed to redress historical and ongoing injustices.

Rediscovering other geographical traditions

AbstractIn the last few years, a vibrant interdisciplinary and international literature is rediscovering those sectors of the geographical tradition whose exponents did not match the classical stereotype of the Western academic geographer directly or indirectly contributing to colonialism, warfare, and social conservatism. Ongoing research on primary sources has shown that early progressive, dissident, and unorthodox tendencies in the history of the discipline were more pervasive and influential than what has been believed. In this paper, I define this movement as the rediscovery of “Other Geographical Traditions” (OGTs) arguing that this notion can enlarge our understanding of geography as a plural and contested field. While a great deal of this literature is constituted by studies on early anarchist and critical geographies, I argue that this concept should be extended to scholarly production from the Global South in languages other than English, which is likewise providing important contributions to the discovery of different geographical traditions, politically and culturally. For that, I address the case of recent Latin American scholarship, in Spanish and Portuguese, on the history and philosophy of critical geographies. Moreover, the fact that these “Southern” scholars are rereading and translating classical figures of “Northern” geographers constitutes a reversal of the former colonial gaze from the North–South to the South–North direction. This suggests that the study of OGTs should also consider different cultural and linguistic traditions, challenging monolingualism in both literature reviews and sources' selection.

Attending to Researcher Positionality in Geographic Fieldwork on Health in Latin America: Lessons from La Costa Ecuatoriana

Attending to Researcher Positionality in Geographic Fieldwork on Health in Latin America: Lessons from La Costa Ecuatoriana Ben W. Brisbois and Patricia Polo Almeida Introduction Geographers have comprehensively argued that the process of generating knowledge through fieldwork is inevitably affected by the social location of the researcher in question: his or her gender, age, ability, discipline, profession, class, race, and national identity (Faria and Mollett 2016; Hunter 2009; Jackson and Neely 2015; Sundberg 2005). As Sundberg (2003) demonstrates using the example of her fieldwork in Guatemala, scholarship that ignores its own situated nature perpetuates “masculinist” epistemologies that obscure imperialist power relations allowing the generation of knowledge about Latin America. In this commentary we draw on our experiences carrying out fieldwork in Ecuador’s coastal region (la Costa) to extend such arguments to the context of geographic research on health in Latin America. Such an extension is timely for multiple reasons. As health geography attempts to engage with the field of global health (Herrick 2016), geographers will be increasingly drawn into global health projects in Latin America. Geographers in global health projects will likely experience the field’s sense of urgency to forego inconvenient critical reflection and simply ‘do something’ about pressing global health issues (cf. Pigg 2013). This dismissal of critical scholarship is consistent with imaginative geographies of global health – a field defined and largely controlled by the global North – that elide histories of colonialism and present Latin America and other global South regions as inexplicably or constitutionally disadvantaged (Brisbois 2014; Sparke 2009). Furthermore, in addition to such North-South concerns, geographical fieldwork on health in rural Latin America frequently involves researchers and theories originating in Latin American metropolitan centres, suggesting a need to examine how those researchers and theories are themselves situated. Indeed, analyses of Eurocentric and North American footprints in Latin American scholarship, and of the relationships between knowledge production and regional inequities, make such reflexivity particularly pressing (Castro-Gómez 2003; De la Cadena 2007; Lander 2000; Porto-Gonçalves 2006). We are two early-career researchers – one Ecuadorian, one Canadian – who have carried out qualitative fieldwork on health implications of banana production in Ecuador. We have in common critical geographic approaches and a desire for engaged scholarship. [End Page 194] We begin by describing our fieldwork experiences, using first-person voice to characterize our respective social locations, which we interpret as including our different institutional and theoretical homes. We then discuss these experiences in light of scholarship on imaginative geographies and their relationship to political economic inequities, and reflect on implications for geographical fieldwork on health in Latin America. Fieldwork experiences El Oro: A gringo “doctor” in the banana capital of the world My (Ben Brisbois) doctoral research examined narratives of pesticide risk among banana farmers and workers in the coastal Ecuadorian province of El Oro, whose capital Machala is the self-described ‘banana capital of the world’ (Brisbois 2016). I worked within a global health research program at a Canadian university, using social scientific theories – especially human geographic work on scale and political ecology – to challenge global health’s apolitical, biomedical framing of problems such as agricultural pesticide exposure (cf. Brisbois 2014). I employed an ethnographic approach to investigate how Orenses (residents of El Oro) understand the causes and health effects of pesticide exposure in banana production. I was especially interested in their preferred solutions to this challenge, and harboured ambitions of engaged scholarship. I am white, male, university-educated, and Canadian (a gringo, in Ecuador). In the field, these factors affected my reception and therefore the data I collected. Responding to my home in a school of public health, for example, both a physician and a high school teacher in the provincial capital of Machala facilitated my access to rural communities where they thought I should “educate” banana farm workers in pesticide safety and nutrition. When speaking with the farm workers in question, I was mistakenly identified as a physician – I am not – and was subsequently asked to help provide healthcare to the community. Both my sampling strategy and responses to my interview questions were therefore conditioned by my perceived profession. In addition, my presence in El Oro evoked geographic imaginaries involving the global...

Abordajes teóricos sobre las juventudes indígenas en Latinoamérica

Una dificultad al proponer una sistematización de la información sobre juventud indígena en Latinoamérica tiene que ver con que las categorías "juventud" e "indígena" no emergen como datos directos de la realidad, sino que son construidas a partir de definiciones. Para contribuir al análisis de este entramado, esta investigación se focaliza en las definiciones con las que la academia latinoamericana ha contribuido en los últimos años. Finalmente, se propone el abordaje de edad y etnicidad como clivajes que definen la movilidad estructurada de subjetividades, identidades y agencias cuya trama debe leerse situada en cada contexto sociopolítico e histórico particular.

Mapping Cult Cinema in Latin American Film Cultures

Mapping Cult Cinema in Latin American Film Cultures Dolores Tierney (bio) In 2011 the Cuban-Spanish coproduction Juan of the Dead (Juan de los muertos; Alejandro Brugués, 2011) was received by Carlos Eduardo Maristany of Cuba Art News as a “cult film hit.”1 The use of the term cult to describe Juan of the Dead was genre based, referencing its use of the zombie film rather than any of the other myriad elements that Barry K. Grant and others have suggested define cult cinema (e.g., a “devoted audience” built up over time; some form of “transgression” at the level of subject matter, attitude, or style; an “alternative mode of distribution and exhibition”).2 Most tellingly, Juan of the Dead’s position within a tradition of cult cinema was determined solely in relation to Anglo zombie films (George A. Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead and, more specifically, Edgar Wright’s 2004 British “zom com” Shaun of the Dead) and by the political and social commentary that goes with these films rather than in relation to any Cuban, or indeed Latin American, antecedents.3 If Maristany had wished to cite continental antecedents, he could have chosen from a number of contemporary or past Latin American zombie films, including the Argentinean film Zombie Plague (Plaga zombie; Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez, 1997), the Mexican film Santo vs. the Zombies (Santo contra los zombies; Benito Alazraki, 1961), and the larger tradition of Mexican and Argentine horror of which these films are a part. If he had wished to position Juan of the Dead—or other recent Latin American films that have also been given this “cult” label, such as The Silent House (La casa muda; Gustavo Hernández, Uruguay, 2010) and Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, Mexico, 1993)—within a continental history of cult film, things would have been a little bit more difficult. This history has, for reasons this essay explores, yet to be written. But he could still have gestured toward a growing body of work in this emerging and other adjacent research areas. [End Page 129] In this essay I map recent critical work on Latin American cult cinema, its adjacent research areas, and other non–Latin American scholarship, which bring useful perspectives and address the problems that cult, as a term of US and European film scholarship, presents to the very different contexts of Latin America’s national filmmaking endeavors. I look at the ways cult cinema clashes with what were the earlier dominant vectors of Latin American film studies—the (prescriptive) paradigms of a realist and engaged “[third] world cinema”—but also point toward how cult cinema fits in with new ways of conceiving the region’s cinema. Although a history of cult cinema in Latin America has yet to be written, the term cult is increasingly used in recent English- and Spanish-language scholarship on the region’s cinema as a descriptive for a broader spectrum of paracinematic practices (e.g., trash, exploitation, horror). Several essays in the anthology Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America, edited by myself and Victoria Ruétalo, use the term cult.4 Kirsten Strayer identifies Mexican filmmaker Juan López Moctezuma’s The Mansion of Madness (1973) as a “cult object.”5 Rosana Díaz-Zambrana, in the introduction to the very useful and timely Horrorfílmico: Aproximaciones al cine de terror en Latinoamérica y el Caribe, calls The Vampire (El vampiro; Fernando Méndez, Mexico, 1957) “el primer largometraje de culto” (“the first cult feature”).6 The essays in Latsploitation in particular are conscious of the necessary reworking of the paradigms of exploitation as established by US scholars Eric Schaefer, Jeffrey Sconce, and others for the varied economic, cultural, social, political, and film industry specificities of filmmaking across the region.7 With this (re)definition of cult cinema for Latin America, a more complex reworking becomes necessary, because, as Mark Jancovich and his coeditors have pointed out in Defining Cult Cinema, “‘the cult movie’ is an essentially eclectic category” whose most salient element is not a film’s institutional position (hence the number of Hollywood films that have subsequently become cult texts) or...

Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures

Contact, Mediation, and Myth in Early Latin American Literatures Joanne van der Woude (bio) Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Rolena Adorno. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 148 pp. Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico. Mónica Díaz. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2010. 229 pp. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Sabine MacCormack. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 320 pp. The Art of Being In-Between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Yanna Yannakakis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 290 pp. Michel de Certeau wrote: "By an art of being in-between, he draws unexpected results from his situation"—an intriguing expression that opens Yanna Yannakakis's book. In her work, the citation applies to Native intermediaries, but it seems just as pertinent to scholars and teachers who (seek to) work comparatively. They, too, must distance themselves from their monolingual training and expertise in order to tackle new fields in the hope of "unexpected," or even enlightening, "results." This is true not only for those who work across languages but also for anyone who cultivates [End Page 201] a transatlantic, transcultural, or transhistorical perspective on early America—and so, suddenly, nearly everyone can be called a comparativist, in some sense of the word. I make this point in order to argue for the importance of Latin American scholarship to North American studies. The flourishing field of Latin American literature and history should be taken into account not just out of a sense of duty but because it offers real methodological and theoretical advantages. For those who still wonder why they should care, this review begins by pointing out specific genres and themes that are shared across the colonial Americas, and that would benefit from comparative consideration in criticism as well as in the classroom. Teaching, to be honest, is still complicated: there are few, good, affordable editions and translations of Latin American sources that can be assigned to undergraduate classes and professors harbor an understandable reluctance to assign many texts in translation or are simply hesitant to change time-tested syllabi. Rather than add another voice to the extensive debate about whether early American culture is best taught transatlantically, hemispherically, or both—let alone try to convince or castigate anyone about the need to assign more diverse texts—this overview begins by delineating productive pairings of Spanish writings with more canonical (and therefore usually English) texts. The idea behind this arrangement, which is followed by brief summaries and reviews of the four listed books, is to spark interest instead of inducing guilt, stressing the relevance of Latin American texts to current perspectives on North American literature and history. Fictional dialogues are a popular genre across the American colonies. John Eliot's Indian Dialogues (1671) comes most immediately to mind, as well as its scholarly readings by Kristina Bross, David Murray, and Thomas Scanlan. Although this tract was purportedly written to aid future missionaries, Eliot uses the opportunity to stage wishful exchanges that speedily convert Native leaders while also assuaging the fears of "a colonial audience concerned about the outbreaks of violence with coastal Algonquians" (Bross 119). (For the sake of realism, this piece is perhaps best read alongside another less fictional Eliot tract, though its obvious fakery also, arguably, constitutes its charm.) Christoph Saur's A Dialogue between a Newcomer and a Settler in Pennsylvania (1751), translated from the German by Patrick Erben for Carla Mulford's Oxford anthology (735-44), is a promotional piece for the Middle Colonies, which contains a wealth of information [End Page 202] on colonial Pennsylvania as well as on eighteenth-century Europe. It includes a spirited defense of Pietism, alongside such endearingly honest questions as: "If it would happen to me as it has happened to many people in this country [Germany], and I could not pay everything in cash and had to go into debt, would that be a big issue?" (Mulford 739). Helpful additions to this pair might be Manuel da Nóbrega's Dialogue for the Conversion of the Indians (Castillo and Schweitzer 1556-57) and the dialogue written by Fray Bernardino de...

Between West and non-West: Latin American Contributions to International Thought

This article seeks to highlight the significant contribution of Latin American scholarship to the further promotion and understanding of more ‘global’ approaches to International Relations. It focuses on the immediate post-independence period and explores the internationalist perspective of Andres Bello, an enormously influential continental scholar, publicist, and political figure, whose work is little known outside South America. It argues that his contribution to International Relations broadly conceived, part of a wider regional contribution, cannot be neatly accommodated within either accounts of the expansion of international society or revisionist post-colonial thought. As such it is neither fully ‘Western’ nor ‘non-Western’. Analysing his contribution under three interrelated headings - international law, the problem of order and international co-operation - it argues that Bello's work needs to be examined on its own terms. Above all it provides an illustration of why we need to take more seriously Latin American thought as part of a wider movement to internationalise International Relations.

Comparative Community Law: Latin American Scholarship on Regional Integration and the Peril of Legal Functionalism

COMPARATIVE COMMUNITY LAW: LATIN AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP ON REGIONAL INTEGRATION AND THE PERIL OF LEGAL FUNCTIONALISM Osvaldo Saldiasti INTRODUCTION The governing leaders of several regions worldwide have de- clared the goal of matching the impressive degree of regional in- tegration achieved by the European Community. 2 One such regional integration attempt is the Andean Community (for- merly the Andean Pact), which undertook massive legal reform by incorporating the design of the European polity. Beginning in the 1980s, the Andean Community made use of European Com- munity rules, institutions, and principles. For instance, the An- dean Court of Justice (ACJ) borrowed its structure, competences, and procedures from its European counterpart, the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Even its case law was fertil- ized by the ECJ. This systematic borrowing from Europe led Andean jurists to take pride in their regional integration scheme as being the most advanced in the world. t I am indebted to the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the School of Law of Humboldt University in Berlin. I am also grateful to the American Bar Foundation for the superb research environment that I found in Chicago. 1. Research Fellow Humboldt University in Berlin, Visiting Scholar American Bar Foundation 2. The European Communities were founded by virtue of the Treaty of Rome. The Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, created the European Union. Which en- compasses the European Community (EC), Justice and Home Affaire (JHA), and the Common Foreign & Security Policy (CFSP). I will use the term European Com- munity (EC) to refer to the polity that existed from 1957-1992, since in this period of time, the judicial doctrines relevant to this article were established. 3. For an overview of the legal and institutional reform that transformed the Andean Pact into the Andean Community, see RENATA MARWEGE, Der Andenger- ichtshof. Das Rechtsschutzsystem des Andenpaktes mit vergleichenden Bezigen zum Recht der Europdischen Gemeinschaft. (M. et al. Hilf ed., Duncker & Hum- blot. 1995).

The European Union at 50: What Europe Can Learn from Latin American Social Science After 5 Decades of European Integration - An Essay in Honor of Osvaldo Sunkel

One of the most famous pieces of Latin American scholarship, the article Sunkel, Osvaldo 1973 Transnational capitalism and national disintegration in Latin America. Social and. Economic Studies 22 (1): 156-171, published originally in 1969 and having appeared in many translations and editions around the globe ever since, proposed the still provocative thought that transnational investment and integration might go hand in hand, under certain conditions, with an increasing relative social polarization between rich and poor in the host countries of the evolving transnational system and on the international level. In 1998, the present author published an essay at the electronic archive of the University of California at Riverside, which was - as a reference to Osvaldo Sunkel - entitled Transnational integration and national disintegration. Preparing for the festivities of at 50, I came to the conclusion to republish this essay as it was published in 1998, with an afterword, which will show how right Sunkel was and how much the European decision makers can learn from Latin American social sciences. In 1998; I stated: faces three very important decisions about the future: east-ward expansion of the European Union, European monetary union, and the structural internal reform of the Union. Faced with these decisions, an intellectual battle rages across the continent between Euro-skeptics and integrationists, between federalists and nationalists, between centralists and regionalists. World systems research and development research provides radical, fascinating and novel answers to these old controversies. With the latest data, we can show that Europe's crisis indeed is not caused by what the neo-liberals term a lack of world economic but rather, on the contrary, by the enormous amount of passive globalization that - together with Latin America - experienced over recent years. Our combined measure of the velocity of the globalization process is based on the increases of capital penetration over time, on the increases of economic openness over time, and on the decreases of the comparative price level over time: the United States, Mexico, larger parts of Africa and large sections of West and South Asia escaped from the combined pressures of globalization, while Eastern and Southern Latin America, very large parts of Europe, Russia and China were characterized by a specially high tempo of globalization. The wider Europe of the EU-25 is not too distantly away from the social realities of the more advanced Latin American countries. From the viewpoint of world systems theory such tendencies are not a coincidental movement along the historic ups and downs of social indicators, but the very symptom of a much more deep-rooted crisis, which is the beginning of the real re-marginalization and re-peripherization of the European continent.

Culture, Power, and Identity: Negotiating between Catholic Orthodoxy and Popular Practice

Culture, Power, and IdentityNegotiating between Catholic Orthodoxy and Popular Practice* Christopher L. Chiappari (bio) Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New. By Daniel T. Reff . (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 304. $60.00 Cloth, $21.99 paper.) False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico. By Nora E. Jaffary . (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Pp. 258. $49.95 Cloth.) Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent. By Rebecca J. Lester (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. 358. $50.00 Cloth, $21.95 Paper.) Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas. By Linda B. Hall . (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Pp. 382. $65.00 Cloth, $24.95 Paper.) Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the "New Evangelization." By Andrew Orta . (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. 376. $74.00 Cloth, $28.00 Paper.) From Fanatics to Folk: Brazilian Millenarianism and Popular Culture. By Patricia R. Pessar . (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 288. $79.95 Cloth, $22.95 Paper.) Mad Jesus: The Final Testament of a Huichol Messiah from Northwest Mexico. By Timothy J. Knab . (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Pp. 287. $19.95 Cloth.) Religious practice involves both religious institutions and individual actors, as well as one or more official and popular versions within particular traditions. In reflecting on trends in religious research, one obviously looks to changes in how religion is practiced in the context of a complex set of historical and political circumstances, and how it sheds light on the dynamic of cultural identity and the power relations between institutions [End Page 282] and social actors. Perhaps the most significant recent sea change in Latin American scholarship on religion began in 1990, with the publication of David Stoll's and David Martin's books on the growth of Protestantism and its potential implications for the region.1 Given the extensive and ongoing research on this topic, this trend in scholarship was significant for reasons beyond the actual growth of Protestantism itself, which in Guatemala had already leveled off at about 10 percent a year by the mid-1980s (Garrard-Burnett 1998, 162), decreasing further and perhaps even becoming negative by the year these books were published (Gooren 2001, 190). In any case, Protestantism has become an established part of Latin American studies, and deservedly so. Of course other changes in the religious landscape have been taking place in recent decades, probably the most significant of which are the growth of the Catholic Church and of indigenous religions—as well as syntheses of these—in Guatemala (Garrard-Burnett 1998, 168–169) and elsewhere, as Orta's and Lester's books illustrate.2 While the works here address diverse topics, several themes link them together. Foremost, perhaps, is the absolutely central importance of popular understandings and appropriations of official religious doctrine and practice, for religious, political, social, and cultural reasons. Related to this is the extent to which the Catholic Church has always had to adapt to local contexts and popular practice, even when attempting to eliminate the latter. A third theme is the link between religion and various types of identity, and how these interact with and confront the antinomies of modernity. Finally, reflecting the institutionalization of Protestantism within academic research on Latin America, and the resurgence of Catholicism in the region, the institutional religious backdrop, if not central actor, in all of the works reviewed here is the Catholic Church, with Protestantism only mentioned here and there as part of the background. Daniel Reff's Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New is a fascinating study of the parallels between the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire and in colonial Mexico. While these are two very different historical and cultural settings, they share two important features: both saw the significant growth and spread of Christianity where it had not existed before, and this happened in the context of dramatic social, cultural, political and demographic change. The book thus implicitly answers the question, What accounted [End Page 283] for the tremendous growth...

Community/identity: Latin Americans in Australia: An introduction

This special section is dedicated to the dual issues of community and identity and their impact on Latin Americans in Australia. Academic research on Latin American migrants in Australia is scarce and this special section will shed light on this important, yet relatively neglected, aspect of Latin American scholarship. Issues related to migration are quintessential in exploring the historical, cultural and political intersections of Latin American studies on a global scale. The Australian multicultural context provides a fascinating social milieu to investigate such intersections.

Work, Identity, and Protest in 20th Century Latin America. VINCENT PELOSO (ed.): Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003.

Vincent Peloso's new edited volume, with thirteen empirical essays and three synthetic chapters, positions itself in an ongoing debate within labor history. Peloso argues in the introduction that using identity as an organizing theme springs from "the historian's turn from economics to culture in the study of Latin American labor history" (xiii). In a 1990 article Ronald Chilcote lamented that "classes and class struggle are being displaced by an emphasis on political pluralism, political organizations, and interest groups." However, as political scientist Kenneth Roberts observes in the volume's final chapter, recent years have seen "a modest revival of interest in class relations and class actors in Latin American scholarship" (324).