Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68340-387-6
Verlag: University of Florida Press

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 540 g

Highlighting the relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history

Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history.

Scholars from a variety of fields including literature, sociology, and geography bring to light many of the cultural exchanges that have produced and spread scientific knowledge from the early colonial period to the present day. Among many topics, these essays describe ideas on health and anatomy in a medical text from sixteenth-century Mexico, how fossil discoveries in Patagonia inspired new interpretations of the South American landscape, and how Argentinian physicist Rolando García influenced climate change research and the field of epistemology. 

 Through its interdisciplinary approach, Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America shows that such scientific advancements fueled a series of visionary utopian projects throughout the region, as countries grappling with the legacy of colonialism sought to modernize and to build national and regional identities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blanco, María del Pilar

Page, Joanna

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- I. Latin America's scientific landscapes
- Introduction
- María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page
- 1. Bone Tales: Patagonian Monsters and the Paleontological Imagination Gabriela Nouzeilles
- 2. Nation as Laboratory: Rethinking Science Writing in Mexico's República Restaurada (1868-1876) María del Pilar Blanco
- 3. Natural Histories of the Anthropocene: Santiago del Estero, Argentina, in the 1930s Jens Andermann
- II. Latin America as the site of knowledge production Introduction
- 4. Empathy, Patients' Needs and Therapeutic Innovation in the Medical Literature of Early Viceregal Mexico Yarí Pérez Marín
- 5. Between Potosí and Nuevo Potosí: Mineral Riches and Observations of Nature in the Colonial Andes, ca. 1596-1797 Heidi V. Scott
- 6. Indigenous Medicine and Nation-Building: Hermilio Valdizán's Medical Project Edward Chauca
- III. Science and the modern nation
- Introduction
- 7. Postcolonial Social Sciences of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America: Land Surveys, Comparative Political Sociology, and the Malleability of Race Lina del Castillo
- 8. "Una nueva y gloriosa nación": Patriotic Lyrics and Scientific Culture in the Forging of Political Emancipation in Río de la Plata Miguel de Asúa
- 9. Inventions and Discoveries in Letters to Perón: Dialogue and Autonomy in the Popular Technical Imagination in Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s Hernán ComastriI
- V. Utopian convergences between science and the artsIntroduction
- 10. Modernismo, Spiritualism, and Science in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of National Magazines Soledad Quereilhac
- 11. Doing Poetry with Science: Unthinking Knowledge in Sarduy, Perlongher, and Eielson Julio Prieto
- 12. The Science of Reading Fiction: New (Post-Darwinian) Metaphors to Live ByJoanna Page
- V. Science, epistemology, and the critique of modernity
- Introduction
- 13. Laboratories of Universality: A Genealogy of Solitary Latin American Inventors Carlos Fonseca Suárez
- 14. The Politics of Relativity: Radical Epistemologies and the Revolutionary Potential of the Scientific Imaginary in José Carlos Mariátegui Brais Outes-León
- 15. Beyond Empiricism: Rolando García's Theory of Complex Systems and the Epistemological Consequences of a Non-linear Universe Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra
- Bibliography
- Index

Über Autor(innen)

María del Pilar Blanco is associate professor of Spanish American literature and fellow and tutor in Spanish at Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination.

Joanna Page is a Reader in Latin American literature and visual culture at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several books, including Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism.