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Ciencia social en Costa Rica:
experiencias de vida e investigación
La voluntad radiante:
cultura impresa, magia y medicina en Costa Rica, 1897-1932
Lucha electoral y sistema político en Costa Rica, 1948-1998
National Period
Ciencia social en Costa Rica: experiencias de vida e investigación. By Marc Edelman et al. San José: Universidad de Costa Rica, 1998. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 156 pp. Paper. La voluntad radiante: cultura impresa, magia y medicina en Costa Rica, 1897-1932. By Iván Molina Jiménez and Steven Palmer. San José: Editorial Porvenir; Antigua: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 1996. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. 159 pp. Paper.
Lucha electoral y sistema político en Costa Rica, 1948-1998. By fabrice lehoucq. San José: Editorial Porvenir, 1997. Photographs. Bibliography. 77 pp. Paper.
Costa Rica has a long history of beguiling foreigners with its natural beauty, its political stability, and the congeniality of its people. The books under review were written by three North American scholars and a Costa Rican writer, who came of age intellectually and professionally in Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s. They offer an overview of the historiography of Costa Rica over the last 30 years, primarily from the perspective of foreign scholars.
Ciencia social en Costa Rica is an engrossing and entertaining set of essays by two U.S. scholars (Edelman and Lehoucq), a Canadian (Palmer), and a Costa Rican (Molina). These four autobiographical essays highlight the attractions and the difficulties of studying Costa Rica. They also convey the extremely accidental paths that led these four scholars to the country, their expertise, and the academic world. I was continually struck by how these "accidental scholars" stumbled into their professional careers, and [End Page 205] how ignorant the North Americans were of scholarship on Costa Rica when they began their dissertation research in the country. (Unfortunately, their experiences are probably not atypical of many foreign scholars arriving in Latin America to begin their fieldwork.) The career paths of all four were profoundly shaped by the impact of the civil wars and insurrections in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. The political unrest attracted their attention to the region and eventually made research in the other Central American countries extremely difficult, if not impossible. Palmer, a native of Newfoundland, engagingly describes how he stumbled onto Costa Rica via the history department at Columbia University. Edelman, a native New Yorker, arrived via the anthropology department at Columbia and Lehoucq via the political science department at Duke University.
Although their love for Costa Rica comes across clearly in the essays, all four also provide honest and biting critiques of contemporary tico society, politics, and academia. They provide frank discussions of their collaborations and friendships with tico scholars, as well as the difficulties of establishing ties of friendship in a socially conservative society built around strong family networks. Molina, in particular, offers a no-holds-barred survey of his education at the Universidad de Costa Rica and the academic and ideological battles in the institution over the last 30 years. All four scholars provide personal surveys of the social science and historical literature on Costa Rica. Palmer, especially, should be commended for bluntly deploring in print the "cantidad de basura seudoacadémica que generaron los centroamericanistas instantáneos en los Estados Unidos durante la década revolucionaria de 1980" (p. 72).
One of the most fruitful collaborations to result from the intellectual and professional trajectories of these scholars is a series of volumes on Costa Rican cultural history edited (and sometimes authored) by Molina and Palmer. La voluntad radiante is the third volume in a trilogy that includes Héroes al gusto y libros de moda (1992) and El paso del cometa (1994). The first two volumes consisted of essays by Costa Rican and foreign scholars. La voluntad radiante contains two long...
Lucha electoral y sistema politico en Costa Rica, 1948-1998 (review)
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