Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Philanthropy, Science and University, a book compiled by Juan Morales Martin, is reviewed to visit the deployment of academic diplomacy in Latin America. The work combines historical and sociological perspectives to investigate the formation of academic and institutional networks that were key to Latin American development. It features analyses of the impact of international philanthropies on the professionalization of the social sciences and the sustenance of academic elites that strove to generate democratic alternatives to the authoritarianism that plagued the region. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations stand out, linked to academic centers through various policies characterized by philanthropic domination.

This article questions and partially refutes three arguments about the history of international relations (IR) as a discipline. The first argument has been raised in the literature about global IR, which argues that the discipline mirrors the power gap that characterizes international politics. The second argument is that classical realist IR theory reached the zenith of its influence in the 1950s thanks to the support that Hans J. Morgenthau and his likes received from the Rockefeller Foundation. The third is that the history of the social sciences in Latin America can be told without considering foreign donors. This article shows that the patronage granted by the Rockefeller Foundation as the International Studies Center at the Colegio de México opened its doors in 1960 explains the division between IR and political science and its emphasis on realist IR theory and area studies. Two explanations account for the donor’s impact: the dexter use of conditionality and the legitimacy that those conditions had from in the recipient’s point of view. The donor changed Mexican and possibly Latin American IR.

As part of its support programs for Latin American development within the so-called “Cultural Cold War”, the United States initiated educational cooperation projects to train technical staff in different areas. We discuss here the role of a giant of international philanthropy – the Ford Foundation – in the creation of the Brazilian community of academic economists. USAID and the Ford Foundation designed an agreement with Vanderbilt University, an institution that already had some tradition in Latin American studies and economic development. The political context of repression after the 1964 military coup in Brazil convinced the Ford Foundation of the need to defend intellectual tolerance and pluralism in its activities in the country.

The development of sociology in Argentina in mid-20th century was the product of the interaction between local and international actors. While the first undergraduate program was created at the University of Buenos Aires, the deployment of an ambitious research agenda, as well as the arrival of foreign visiting professors, were inseparable from the funding which was offered by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. However, it did not take long for the American influence to come under severe scrutiny. As the number of enrolments increased, the quest for a “national sociology” gained popularity. Based on a wide empirical corpus, the article examines the tensions between the orientations awarded by philanthropic foundations and those encouraged by a massifying university.  

Guillermo Palacios’s book, Conquista y pérdida de Yucatán, approaches us to a period of the modern history of Chichén Itzá, between the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Besides, in the exploration of the archaeological site the stories of the emergence of American archaeology, the formation of the "Mayan area", the reformulation of state regulations over the past and the nation’s goods, and the history of tourism interweave each other.

This research note introduces some of the ideas discussed in the book The World that Latin America Created (Harvard University Press, 2022) regarding the role of international organizations in Latin America’s intellectual and political domains. The United Nations, an international organization frequently associated with the interests of the United States and the global North, in Latin America, became the center of a self-defined regional social scientific endeavor with worldwide impact. The note and the book focus on the intellectual movement anchored in the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) and on the political impact of cepalinos and dependentistas, one of their outmost critics.

This article explores cross-national variation in funding for social science research by analyzing original bibliometric and survey data from Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. We identify three models of research based on whether foreign, domestic-public, or domestic-private funding prevails: foreign-sponsored, state-sponsored and mixed economy. We further find that each model is associated with distinct patterns of access to funding, the kind of knowledge produced, and researcher perceptions of their autonomy.

The this review seeks to describe and highlight some of the most important contributions of Efrén Sandoval’s most recent book. The book provides a robust, in-depth anthropological study of the trade in goods clients can find in  the flea markets of Monterrey. These goods are often purchased in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, forming part of the historical trade between the South Texas region and the northeast of Mexico. The research conducted by Sandoval over more than two decades is a key component of the literature on  globalization from below.

A través de una serie de casos históricos y análisis cuantitativos, los trabajos presentados en este número de Estudios Sociológicos abordan cuestiones fundamentales sobre las consecuencias políticas del financiamiento extranjero de las ciencias sociales. En conjunto, estos trabajos ilustran la paradoja inherente a la financiación de la vida intelectual: el poder de los donantes depende de la legitimidad y, por lo tanto, de la independencia de los donatarios. La cuestión es compleja porque los beneficiarios, que pueden operar como “Estados tapón”, tienen objetivos distintos de los de los donantes. En este marco, los donantes que financiaron proyectos en América Latina tuvieron dificultades para encontrar socios que consideraran fiables, así como para cooptar instituciones influyentes. Asimismo, se toparon con variadas resistencias. Los donantes practicaron por ello dos estrategias básicas para adaptarse a las circunstancias locales: el apoyo a instituciones ya existentes preferido por la Fundación Rockefeller, por un lado, y el desarrollo de think tanks elegido por la Fundación Ford, por el otro. Aun cuando los objetivos de los donantes reflejaban, en parte, las preocupaciones de la Guerra Fría, el resultado de su accionar fue un cierto pluralismo intelectual.  

This book is composed of eight chapters by leading authors in the study of educational trajectories and transitions and aims to understand how and what factors shape and diversify academic paths during the passage between grades and educational levels. The book itself is organized as a trajectory: it begins with a chapter that addresses the transition through secondary education and ends with a paper that explores the relationship between university education and placement in the labor market. This review presents the contribution of the whole book and its chapters, based on the plurality of methodological and analytical perspectives from which educational transitions and trajectories are observed.