Eurocentrism and Colonialism in Latin American Social Thought

Political and social thought regarding Latin America has been historically characterized by a tension between the search for its specific attributes and an external view that has seen these lands from the narrow perspective of European experience. There has also been an opposition between the challenge of the rich potentialities of this New World and distress over its difference, which stands in contrast with the ideal represented by European culture and racial composition. Nonetheless, external colonial views and regrets because of the difference have been widely hegemonic. A brief revision of the texts of the first republican constitutions is enough to illustrate how liberals, in their attempt to transplant and install a replica of their understanding of the European or North American experience, almost completely ignore the specific cultural and historical conditions of the societies about which they legislate. When these conditions are considered, it is with the express purpose of doing away with them.

The affliction because of the difference—the awkwardness of living in a continent that is not white, urban, cosmopolitan, and civilized—finds its best expression in positivism. Sharing the main assumptions and prejudices of nineteenth-century European thought (scientific racism, patriarchy, the idea of progress), positivism reaffirms the colonial discourse. The continent is imagined from a single voice, with a single subject: white, masculine, urban, cosmopolitan. The rest, the majority, is the “other,” barbarian, primitive, black, Indian, who has nothing to contribute to the future of these societies. It would be imperative to whiten, westernize, or exterminate that majority.

The Institutionalization of the Social Sciences

The institutionalization of the social sciences in Latin American universities in the twentieth century only partially altered the hegemony of this colonial discourse. The liberal dogmas of progress and the binary backwardness-modernization were incorporated as premises of an understanding that consequentially made few concessions to the particularities of the reality under study. The sociology of modernization has been the clearest expression of this twentieth-century scientific colonial positivism.¹ In spite of vigorous and original critiques of this tradition by Juan Carlos Mariátegui and others, the hegemonic trends within Latin American Marxism—both in the academy and in politics—remained within Eurocentric confines.

It is not necessary to attempt a global assessment of the contributions and limitations of the structuralism of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and of the ample scope of approaches and theories globally known as the dependency perspective, to assert that these have been the most significant collective efforts to explain these socities, their past, present, and potential for the future, from an original Latin American outlook.

In the social sciences of the sixties and seventies, there is a strong trend that departs from metropolitan practices, not only in content and problems, but also in intellectual style. Rigid demarcations between fact and value judgments, typical of positivistic science, are not presumed. An association between the creation of knowledge and political commitment is not feared. The barriers between the disciplinary compartments especially typical of the North American social sciences become extremely porous. More than interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approximations, the tendency is to give little consideration to those demarcations. Global interpretative efforts that seek to recognize Latin American and global historical, political, social, and cultural processes as a reality that cannot be decomposed into static compartments are favored over empirical research and quantification. The most important conceptual categories of that period, many of them original to Latin American social sciences, illustrate the richness of the quests that characterized that particular intellectual endeavor: dependency, internal colonialism, structural heterogeneity, pedagogy of the oppressed, marginality, exploitation, research-action, intellectual colonialism, imperialism, liberation. No doubt as a consequence of the international political context, particularly decolonization and the rise of the third world, Latin American social sciences interrupt their exclusive dialogue with the central countries and—for once—feed on, and what is more important, enrich the production of the other...