Scarcity and Latin America Abundance - Pre-and Postconquest Thought, Modernization And The Ideology Of Science, The Radical Critique Of Modernization
ideas
Abundance and scarcity are crucial to Latin America because of the sharp disparities between the wealth produced in this region and the impoverishment of people and environment. Though ideas about causes differ sharply, Latin American social thought has revolved in substantial part around this axis. This entry begins with ideas from before the Spanish conquest, proceeds to key debates among the conquerors, moves then to ideas of progress and modernization, and finishes with recent, critical perspectives.
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One risks overgeneralization in speaking of "pre-Hispanic" ideas as a unified entity since this covers so many cultures and geographic settings, but two themes stand out: to maintain abundance, communities engage in reciprocal exchanges with deities of particular places, set in broader spatial orders such as the four compass directions; and societies undergo great cycles of creation,…
From the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, a broadly Sepúlvedan position held sway. After independence, political fragmentation and the decline of the colonial economy resulted in Latin America falling visibly behind industrializing western Europe and the United States. Capitalist pioneers from those areas after 1850 began to invest in Latin America in alliance with lo…
In the 1960s and 1970s "dependency" theorists (including, among others, Teotonio Dos Santos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Anibal Quijano, and Andre Gunder Frank) argued that as Latin America entered into relationships with dominant economies like Spain and Portugal, and later Britain and the United States, it became poorer rather than richer. Various enterprises, from sugar plantations…
The nationalist-capitalist project collapsed in the 1980s due to corruption and inequity in which enormous debts to foreign (mostly U.S.) banks resulted in retrenchment, job loss, and impoverishment. Neoliberalism is the intellectual movement that corresponds to the dismal era of economic retrenchment and return of U.S. domination in the period from 1982 to the twenty-first century. As a set of id…
Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds. Cultures of Politics/Politics of Cultures: Re-Visioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998. A compilation of work on modern Latin American radicalism. Arguedas, José María. Yawar Fiesta. Translated by Frances Horning Barraclough. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. A characteristic anthro…
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