Latin American Studies Association Research Articles

Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets ed. by Enrique Desmond Arias, and Thomas Grisaffi

Reviewed by: Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets ed. by Enrique Desmond Arias, and Thomas Grisaffi Jane Rausch, Emerita Arias, Enrique Desmond, and Thomas Grisaffi, eds. Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Bookended by editor Enrique Desmond Arias's introduction and conclusion, this volume is a collection of eleven essays written by scholars who participated in a series of panels at a Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Congress in 2016 to discuss the effects of drug trafficking in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, and Brazil. Setting their observations within the framework of moral economy, these researchers acknowledge the effect of global drug markets on the nations they examined, and they show how [End Page 225] drug trafficking has developed via a complex process of self-regulation in the shadow of a state power that formally seeks to destroy it. They review the interconnection between sites along cocaine's global supply chain; the implications of those interconnections for social, political, and economic experiences in places affected by the trade; and, conversely, how those interconnections affect the cocaine trade (3). Taken collectively, these essays demonstrate that entire ways of life are built around cocaine commodification and show how state authority is coupled with the self-regulating practices of drug producers, traffickers, and dealers. Their authors also suggest more progressive policies that acknowledge the important role drugs play in the lives of individuals at the urban and rural margins. Since the essays are all high quality, a brief comparison of just two of them will provide an idea of their collective value. In her article, "Drug Crops, Twisted Motorcycles, and Cultural Loss in Indigenous Colombia," Autumn Zellers-Leon notes that Colombian Law 30 of 1986 allows indigenous people to grow up to thirty coca plants for local traditional use and exchange, yet these farmers are also active participants in the illegal drug trade that began in the 1970s. Although the drugs they produce make up a crucial part of the drug commodity chain, they receive only 2 percent of the profits. Nevertheless, Zellers-Leon notes that rather than disrupt the traditional economy, the drug trade has promoted development of a cash-based economy in rural areas that has helped indigenous families meet their basic needs. One of the most basic changes has been the abandonment of horse-drawn vehicles for motorcycles. Drug gangs introduced these probably stolen motorcycles and then dumped them in remote places such as rural Cauca. Their presence promoted road building and the expansion of municipal town centers, but they also contributed to the breakdown of traditional community values. In this one example, indigenous families' increasing dependence on global commodities challenges their identity models rooted in past lifeways. In fact, many of Cauca's indigenous communities could not sustain themselves today without the availability of motorcycles for transport. Thus, in this way, the drug trade has helped to mitigate the effects of class inequalities in rural indigenous regions. Zeilers-Leon concludes that to resolve the situation, the state must prioritize the needs of indigenous farmers in both long-term agricultural development projects and policies that favor indigenous agricultural goods (114). [End Page 226] By contrast, Taniele Rui's essay compares drug consumption between 1990 and 2017 in two of Brazil's largest cities—São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Her case studies reveal that the illegal drug trade produces and regulates user scenes in both cities, but in different ways. In São Paulo, a single criminal faction manages conflicts that the trade generates, and illicit markets are not necessarily violent. Drug users concentrate in the downtown area, and the government's repressive efforts to repress drug use have not only increased the number of crack users in prison but also strengthen the criminal organization by providing new recruits. In Rio de Janeiro, state policies have displaced drug users to different parts of the city. This strategy has encouraged activities by illegally armed actors in the favelas and hides the problem from the view of tourists who do not see the consumption sites. Rui concludes that since the crack trade is not the same everywhere in Brazil and does...

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Erasing race in the migration waves from the northern triangle: the Guatemala case

ABSTRACT This text is a copyedited version of the 13 September 2019 presentation the author made at the conference of the Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP, a section of the Latin American Studies Association [LASA]), which took place at Gonzaga University, in the state of Washington, in the U.S.

Report from the Editor (2021)

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association Virtual Congress, May 26–29, 2021.

Contributors

Contributors

Report from the Editor (2020)

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association (online session), May 22–23, 2020.

The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto de Campos

Research Article| March 01 2020 The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto de Campos Adam Joseph Shellhorse Adam Joseph Shellhorse Temple University, Philadelphia Adam Joseph Shellhorse (PhD, University of California, Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Global Studies and Director of Latin American Studies at Temple University, where he serves as the advisor of the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Program. His research examines modern and contemporary Latin American literature and poetics, visual culture, critical theory, and women’s writing, with particular emphasis on comparative Inter-American studies and the relationship between aesthetics, affect, and politics. He is the author of Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, Illuminations, Cultural Formations of the Americas, 2017), which is currently being translated into Portuguese by Editora Perspectiva (Estudos Series) and into Spanish by Santiago Arcos Editor with anticipated publication dates of 2020. His recent work has or soon will appear in Luso-Brazilian Review, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Política Común, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, and Dictionary of Literary Biography. He is currently working on a second book that examines the problem of affect, multimedia, and politics in Brazilian and Spanish American experimental writings. Shellhorse serves as co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Brazilian Section. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2020) 20 (1): 147–184. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.1.0147 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Adam Joseph Shellhorse; The Verbivocovisual Revolution: Anti-Literature, Affect, Politics, and World Literature in Augusto de Campos. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 March 2020; 20 (1): 147–184. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.20.1.0147 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Benchmarking and Beyond: CLAG's Role in Evaluating Research Agendas, 1970–2020

Benchmarking and Beyond:CLAG's Role in Evaluating Research Agendas, 1970–2020 Gregory Knapp introduction The Conference of Latin American Geography (CLAG; originally, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers) began as an actual conference in 1970, convened to assess the current state of research themes on the region. The resulting proceedings were published as a Benchmark volume in 1971 (see Carmin, Martinson, & Lentnek, 1971). Many organizations have produced benchmark or inventory and prospect volumes to stimulate future research (James & Jones, 1954), but CLAG went further than most by starting with one and producing them on a regular basis. After the end of that conference it was decided to create an organization by the same name, which went on to organize many additional meetings and publications that have continued through the present. The idea of benchmarking continued in decadal meetings in 1980 and 1990, resulting in special publications. A final effort took place in a publication in 2002 (Knapp, 2002), but after that interest in systematic evaluations waned, as the new Journal of Latin American Geography (JLAG) was published more frequently, covering diverse topics, sometimes in themed issues such as this one. What was accomplished by the Benchmark meetings and volumes? What were their strengths and weaknesses? Critical research of academic and scientific organizations is important for evaluating organizational effectiveness and best practices, and also issues of inclusion and diversity. Organizations often do a good job of celebrating their successes but may not do so well at diagnosing problems (Lutz & Collins, 1993). CLAG has recently changed its name from Latin Americanist Geographers to Latin American Geography as one gesture to enhance inclusion. How does the trajectory of benchmarking relate to issues of diversity? the first benchmark: challenges of diversity As is well known, the idea for a conference on Latin America was discussed at a private meeting of fifteen geographers during the 1969 meeting of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History in Washington, D.C. The meeting was held at the Cosmos Club at the invitation of Preston James; participants were all from the United States, and included mostly U.S. faculty (including John Augelli, president of the Latin American Studies Association), but also geographers from the Organization of American States (Wolfram Drewes) and the State Department (Arthur Burt) (Martinson, 1996). Founded by John Wesley Powell [End Page 38] in 1878, the Cosmos Club was also where the National Geographic Society was founded. This members-only club became racially integrated in 1962 and open to women in 1988, due to public pressure. While CLAG itself never formally refused participation to women and minorities, or Latin Americans, their participation was similarly limited in its early years. This is something the organization needs to continue to recognize as it broadens its commitment to diversity. The preface to the 1970 Benchmark volume (Carmin et al., 1971) provides a discussion of the context of the first conference. Originally the conference was to be small and restricted to a few North American participants, due to funding and timing concerns, as well as to the vision that the conference would be national and primarily for North American geographers. However, as funding was obtained (from the National Science Foundation [NSF] and the Social Science Research Council [SSRC]), interest expanded until it grew to 150 total participants, including fiftyone invited presenters and eight discussants. Planning meetings were held at Michigan State University (chaired by Barry Lentnek) in October 1969, and at Ohio State University in January 1970, and the first conference was held in Muncie, Indiana, funded by the NSF and SSRC with cochairmen Tom Martinson and Robert Carmin of Ball State University, from April 30 to May 3, 1970 (Martinson, 1996). At this point Martinson was not a board member, but would later join the board and become executive secretary from 1978 to 1992. Invited, funded observers from Latin America at the 1970 meeting included Pedro Pinchas Geiger (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, Brazil), Silvana Levi de López (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico), and Carlos Merida (Guatemala) (Carmin et al., 1971). The final published volume—Volume 1 of the CLAG Publication Series—included forty articles, among them twelve on urban, spatial, and...

Report from the Editor (2019)

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Boston, Massachusetts, on May 22, 2019.

Interview with Aníbal Pérez-Liñán (University of Notre Dame)

Anibal Perez-Linan is Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on democratization, the rule of law, political stability, and institutional performance among new democracies. He is currently researching the political conditions that preclude judicial independence in developing countries and the consequences of political radicalization for democratic survival. His publications include Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America (2007); and, with Scott Mainwaring, the award-winning Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall (2013). He is Editor-in-chief of the Latin American Research Review, the scholarly journal of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and co-editor with Kellogg Institute Director, Paolo Carozza, of the Kellogg Series on Democracy and Development at the University of Notre Dame Press. This interview is divided into three main sections. The first section addresses current research and the challenges to judicial politics field of study. The second section targets Brazilian and Latin American politics focusing on the potential inter-branch crisis. Moreover, the last section summarizes practical suggestions for Brazilian researchers that want to publish in international journals, besides some inspiring reflections about the future of academic research in a global and tech-based society.

The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom

Research Article| October 01 2018 The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom Daniel Nemser Daniel Nemser Daniel Nemser is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities Book Award in 2018. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2018) 8 (2): 117–139. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.8.2.0117 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Daniel Nemser; The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom. History of the Present 1 October 2018; 8 (2): 117–139. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.8.2.0117 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 University of Illinois Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Report from the Editor (2018)

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Barcelona, Spain, on May 20, 2018.

Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self by Sergio R. Franco (review)

Reviewed by: Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self by Sergio R. Franco Tim Conrad Sergio R. Franco. Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self. Translated by Andrew Asscheri. Amherst, New York: Cambria, 2017. 286 p. Sergio R. Franco researches and writes about contemporary Latin American literature at Temple University and has published a new book: Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self. The Spanish version, Pliegues del yo, was awarded a 2017 Premio Iberoamericano by the Latin American Studies Association. The author sees autobiography as inter-connected processes of self-writing, Western subjectivity, and the Latin American experience: "the social and ontological folds through which a person becomes who he or she is." He explores autobiography not only in its traditional genre as people telling their life stories, but also through modalities he refers to as "avatars" of the writing of the self: "causeries, diaries, memoirs, and reminiscences of various kinds." For example, the causerie, from the French word for talk or chat, is a unique form of personal reflection, like the Latin American tertulia, with writers informally meeting and talking about their work, literary observations and experiences in open-ended, unfinished ways. We observe this in written form in El Libro de los Embraces, in which Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano tells curious stories about his own experiences and the people he encounters throughout Latin America, such as Fernando Silva, the director of a children's hospital in Managua, Nicaragua, who was walking out of the hospital late at night on a Christmas Eve when he noticed that a sick boy near death was following him and reaching for his hand, then whispering up to him, "Tell someone … tell someone I'm here." Four essays or chapters develop this theoretically pluralistic analysis of Latin American autobiography. Chapter One questions why autobiographical discourse emerged in the continent, and why anyone would want to read another's autobiography. To answer this question, Franco suggests that an audience base gradually increased, motivated by curiosity, aesthetic interest, or the longing for self-recognition when identifying with an author's life story. He touches on the indigenous origins of Peru's Comentarios Reales, stories told in the early 1600s by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the illegitimate son of a Spanish conqueror and royal Inca mother. Women including Sor [End Page 202] Juana Inés de la Cruz of Mexico were also early contributors to the genre, disguising their complex self-expressions in confessional forms acceptable to the Church. Other possible reasons for the emergence of autobiographical writing include a return to individualism, the renewed importance of the author, opportunities to sell one's stories, contemporary narcissism, and the desire for self-examination. The following chapter describes how autobiographies often dialogue with photography, using the example of a photograph on the dustjacket of Vivir para contarla, the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez that depicts the highly successful and famous author as a sweet, innocent one-year old child. Consequently, readers may subconsciously transfer those qualities into their interpretations of the text of Marquez's story. Two other ways that photography combines with text produce meaning: by serving as a "supplement to writing" or as "a comparison between the photographic act and the act of writing." Chapter Three extensively reviews the "precocious autobiographies" of young Mexican writers, a unique project carried out from 1966–1968 for the purpose of getting new writers to narrate their lives in short texts. Chapter Four examines from multiple angles the famous diary of Peruvian Julio Ramón Ribeyro called La tentación del fracaso [The temptation of failure], and its varying purposes, topics, themes, and expressions. Ribeyro's diary becomes both a writer's notebook through which he experiments with many modalities of self-expression as well as a collection of life experiences and observations. As a result, the diary has become a unique literary product in its own right. Autobiographical Writing in Latin America: Folds of the Self enhances our understanding both of autobiographical writing in the Latin American experience and of how the genre is influenced by authors, readers, and the forces of Western subjectivity. Missing from his research...

Caring for the Missing: Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Responses to Disappearance and Enforced Disappearance

Enforced disappearance in Latin America is simultaneously an ongoing reality; an emblematic crime of past authoritarian regimes, and a significant component of the human toll of internal armed conflict in some Central American and Andean countries. Recent accountability developments in Latin America and beyond have called on forensic science to trace, unearth and restore the remains of the disappeared: as part of a judicial process, or as a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Some consider that a distinctive Latin American approach to forensic work as human rights work has emerged, with experts from the region increasingly called upon to assist international tribunals or perform exhumations of mass graves. Technical-scientific forensic interventions are however only part of the story. Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice require exploration of the intersection between international legal norms, regional human rights systems, and domestic criminal justice. While Latin America was a pioneer in originating a regional Convention against Enforced Disappearance, and the Inter-American Human Rights system has been active around the issue since the 1970s, the tensions inherent in retrospective application of those principles to historic crimes have been addressed in varied ways around the region. Activists, relatives’ associations, and cause lawyers have been key actors in navigating domestic impunity, reinterpreting domestic amnesty legislation, and attempting to establish individual accountability for collective, institutional criminality. Meanwhile, democratization and legal reforms have produced state structures at least theoretically more open to complying with ex officio duties in truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition. Prosecutions of past perpetrators, both military and civilian, have however provoked social and political controversy. The entire enterprise of seeking remains is meanwhile inimical to historical demands for ‘aparicion con vida’. Some relatives’ associations, and associated political groups, accordingly refuse to recognize the search for remains or certification of death, whether by state or non-state actors. The existence in some countries of a generation of appropriated children, stolen from their forcibly disappeared parents and brought up under false identities, has added weight to these refusals and produced specific scientific innovation in the use of DNA mapping to trace even indirect biological relationships. Cultural, ethnic and religious cleavages that were often at the heart of conflict dynamics of conflict moreover complicate processes of truthtelling, reparation, and even physical identification. Attempts to trace and identify the disappeared therefore give rise to conflicts between ‘civic trust’ and scientific certainty, compounded by a legacy of mistrust between citizens and previously collusive or directly repressive states. This working paper collates and synthesises the results of three events stimulating dialogue between law, social science and forensic (natural) sciences around the issue of disappearance and enforced disappearance in contexts of past political violence. This dialogue, focused principally on Latin American experiences, took the form of two workshops and a set of academic panels carried out in January and April 2017, in Santiago de Chile and Lima, Peru. The events were designed, timed and targeted to contribute to ongoing policy processes in Chile and Peru, as both countries are in the process of designing national mechanisms or search plans in accordance with the terms of the 2006 International Convention against Enforced Disappearance. They also sought to inform ongoing academic and policy debates in and about El Salvador and Sri Lanka, to provide a platform for interaction with relatives’ associations - whose participation is key for successful national design processes - and to highlight the potential resource represented by key international and regional actors such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Latin American Forensic Anthropology Association (ALAF), and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH). The events, and subsequent academic and policy publications, were supported by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) through the LASA-Ford Special Grant ‘Caring for the Missing: Respuestas Humanitarias, Juridicas a la Desaparicion de Personas’, 2017; and in part through the Ulster University Research Challenge Fund project ‘Enforced and Involuntary Disappearance – Scoping Study’ (2017).

The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier

Reviewed by: The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier Anne Garland Mahler Birkenmaier, Anke. The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2016. 224 pp. In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier resituates discussions of race and culture in the 1930s-40s in Latin America within the rise of anthropology in the region. Spanning broad geography and texts published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, each of the four chapters centers on an anthropologist-writer: Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, French Americanist Paul Rivet, Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. The book considers not only the less frequently studied works of these writers but also the networks and debates within anthropology through which each writer formulated his notions of race and cultural contact. In this way, Birkenmaier introduces readers to a number of lesser-known figures within these heavyweights' broader professional milieus. The four writers that structure the study, as Birkenmaier points out, "were temporary or permanent exiles" in the interwar years, a condition that "instigated new reflections on one's own culture and that of 'others'" (9). They all participated in an exchange among Latin American, US, and French Americanist anthropologists that would forge the "Americanist years," a reference to Paul Rivet's French Société des Américanistes that would profoundly influence the development of the discipline in Latin America. These anthropologists engaged in a hemispheric and comparatist dialogue, employed a varied range of methods, and founded their approach in an anti-racist politics intended to undermine the rise of fascism. As transnational American studies continues to gain ground within our contemporary academic sphere, Birkenmaier's study details a deep history of interdisciplinary methodology and political engagement that undergirds contemporary hemispheric approaches to cultural studies and critical race theory. Through the meticulous tracing of the formation of Latin Americanist applied cultural anthropology in the interwar years––such as in the founding of museums, the creation of journals, critical editions, excavations, conferences, and lecture series––the book's intellectual history of anthropology informs its insightful readings of both well-known and understudied texts. The writers at the center of the book, Birkenmaier argues, practiced the discipline in unique ways, relying on linguistic analysis and the study of colonial chronicles and writing in a style that "straddled the pamphlet and the scientific essay, the novel and the political speech" (144). Their fusion of humanistic and scientific approaches requires an equally interdisciplinary critical lens, which Birkenmaier––who significantly is a literary and cultural studies scholar and not an anthropologist––readily provides. Known [End Page 693] for scholarship on Caribbean literature and Latin American avant-gardes in such studies as Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (2011, co-ed. Esther Whitfield) and Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Premio Iberoamericano from the Latin American Studies Association, Birkenmaier's recent book exhibits an innovative cultural studies approach to the intellectual history of a social science discipline. In this way, The Specter of Races pushes against an Area Studies model of Latin Americanist scholarship––in which humanities-based literature departments and social science programs are kept separate––returning to a moment of scholarly "synergy among literature, linguistics, the visual arts, anthropology, and history in regard to Latin America" (144). Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Rivet, the intellectual on which the book hinges, is also the least known of the four within Latin Americanism. Rivet's comparatist model of material cultures, or "diffusionism," through which he studied American "culture areas," greatly influenced the development of a Latin Americanist regionalist anthropology (17). Birkenmaier links Rivet's impact in Latin America to the study of Chaco indigenous people in 1930s Tucumán, Argentina by Rivet's student Alfred Métraux. The book also considers Rivet's exile in Mexico and Colombia, where politically-engaged indigenista intellectuals criticized Rivet for his tendency to relegate the study of indigenous cultures to a removed and forgotten past. Whereas Rivet is lesser known, the chapters on widely-studied writers Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz...

Report from the Editor (2017)

Report presented at the meeting of the Executive Council of the Latin American Studies Association in Lima, Peru, April 27, 2017.

Ann S. Blum (1950–2015)

Ann S. Blum (1950–2015)

Action Research in the Convergence of Disciplines

Introductory wordsI wish to begin by a personal revelation and a respectful request. Last May 18, at the splendid closing session of the World Congress on ActionResearch, held at the Universidad de La Salle in Bogota, delegates from Australia, Great Britain and the United States informed the audience that I had just been awarded one of the most prized honors of the world of social sciences: the Malinowski Award, of the Society for Applied Anthropology, and that I had been chosen as the Martin Diskin Oxfam America Commemorative Conference Speaker of LASA, Latin American Studies Association.It was unusual in that those decisions were taken concomitantly. They were as two sparks that fell at one time on a single lightning rod. You may believe me that one of them alone would have been enough to burn me to ashes, so much the more taking into account that both citations referred equally to the origin and dissemination of Participatory Action Research (PAR), taking distance from the first psycho-social school of Kurt Lewin. This was now a more complex level of academic, social and political participation. Even so, they were inviting me to remember and explain the story of a process of continuity and dissent in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, a process that certainly deserved such great international recognition.My first concern was how to share this task between the Society of Applied Anthropology and LASA. As you know it was interrupted by a severe illness that would have prevented me from having the pleasure of seeing you in person and shaking your hands at Montreal. I began to decide how I would have done it in my young years as a doctoral student: apply division of labour pragmatically. For LASA, because of the interesting Diskin tradition with activist researchers in Central America, I could use a more cognitive and descriptive treatment of experiences in field work, which would make me doubly happy and very satisfied, because it fitted in with that important work by Diskin in El Salvador. For the Society of Applied Anthropology and its venerable journal Human Organization, I would present an interpretative digression on the possibly phenomenological experience, with a view to exploring the possibilities of an alternative paradigm. This is therefore what I am doing.Forgive me if this unexpected double task becomes somewhat repetitive, because I will try to harmonise both works. But I fear that, in future, these reports will have to be consulted complementarily. I hope thus to fulfill the expectations of both institutions, and to receive your indulgence, my colleagues and friends of LASA, to begin the debate here in Spanish.I feel very moved and honoured to have been selected as the Martin Diskin Oxfam America Commemorative Conference Speaker of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and I extend my heartfelt thanks to Mrs. Diskin, who is present here, and to the distinguished Evaluation Committee, coordinated by Brinton Lykes, which made the decision, as well as the Board of Directors of the Association. Very special thanks to Professors Milagros Pereyra, Charlie Hale, Maria Claudia Duque and Arturo Escobar for their encouragement and support. Also to Professor Kevin Yelvington, who had the kindness and energy to propose and document my name before the authorities. I appreciate the presence of so many Colombians in this room, and of my families, Fais and Samper: I feel the warmth of my country and my people in these cold, although welcoming plains of dynamic Quebec. Thank you, thank you all very much.And now I will present the thesis on the functions of PAR (Participatory Action-Research) in the convergence of disciplines, as an interesting expression of postmodernity.Beginnings and convergencesLet us remember how my colleagues and I, from Third World countries, began to articulate our thinking and action in the 1970s, combining, as we said, heart and mind to propose techniques and procedures that would satisfy our anxieties as citizens and as social scientists. …

Elizabeth “Betsy” Winchell Kiddy (1957–2014)

Elizabeth “Betsy” Winchell Kiddy (1957–2014)

Waiting for Marcel Orphüls: The Literature of Authoritarian Rule and Resistance in Latin America

In 2010, at the XXIX Latin American Studies Association Congress in Toronto, the historian Steve Stern called 1970s stated-sponsored terror in Argentina a “dirty war.” An audience member self-identified as an “Argentine”, speaking for “Argentines” scolded him. “Dirty war”, he told Stern, was a term invented by the Argentine dictatorship, and as such, should never be used. Stern, perhaps the most authoritative analyst of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, apologized, conceding implicitly that policing ...