La reestructuracion de las ciencias sociales en America Latina (review)

Santiago Castro-Gómez, ed. La reestructuración de las ciencias sociales en América Latina . Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, Instituto Pensar, Centro Editorial. Javeriano. 2000. 426 pp.

Rather than answers, this text offers tools for drawing a map whose terrain is perpetually reconfiguring itself: the map of the social sciences. La reestructuración de las ciencias sociales en América Latina presents a multiform panorama where different disciplines dialogue with, complement, oppose, or exclude each other, all in the framework of a critical analysis of society that gives an account of the social sciences' necessary transformations. Using Latin America as a geopolitical referent and approaching it from the various disciplines, Latin Americanist thinkers from Colombia, Argentina, the United States, Venezuela, and Ecuador open the spectrum of their frames of analysis in order to reflect on the restructuring of the social sciences.

First of all it needs to be said that this text, which grew out of the seminar “La reestructuración de las ciencias sociales en los paises andinos” held in Bogotá at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in October 1999 (one of a series of encounters that also included the “Knowledges and the Known” workshop at Duke University a year later), is very diverse. But in all its multiplicity the collection has a common referent: each of the articles rethinks the epistemological borders of the social sciences from the various disciplinary perspectives that compose the social sciences. In different ways what is being questioned are the theory, practice, methods, and results of the social sciences in a Latin American context. Throughout its pages, La reestructuración challenges the suppositions that have sustained the social sciences until now, in particular the adequacy of those suppositions in the face of the present global society.

The urgency with which the contributors address the reformulation of the social sciences is inspired by their recognition that the cognitive maps used by the social sciences to represent the world have radically changed. Although national states and territorial societies continue to exist, they are no longer the sites of political and cultural hegemony. As Santiago Castro-Gómez and Oscar Guardiola-Rivera argue in their introduction, the overwhelming force now configuring the social is an ensemble of postnational and posttraditional relations supported by new information technologies. This context makes evident the need to resignify the social sciences' scenes of action. Immanuel Wallerstein explains how the social sciences now play a fundamental role in the project of organizing and controlling human life; more precisely, they have become a constitutive part of the political framework defined by the nation-state. Nevertheless, the social world is no longer configured by governmental politics and state sovereignty—characteristics of a Eurocentric conceptual apparatus that forged the social sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; rather, it is shaped by a network of global relations that do not recognize national, juridical, or traditional borders. It has fallen to the social sciences to plot routes of signification that permit an understanding of a global society characterized by multiculturalism and a multitude of perspectives. This panorama obliges the social sciences to detach themselves from Enlightenment binaries, which until now have defined conceptual work, in order to better articulate the reconstruction of their disciplinary objects, an epistemologically more viable alternative in the current crisis of disciplinary foundations.

What is at stake in a restructuring of the social sciences is not only territorial or spatial but also disciplinarily multidimensional; that is to say, the effort puts into play not only general theoretical paradigms, but also the imbrication of different fields: politics, economics, history, anthropology, sociology, law, literary studies, communication studies, music, and philosophy. It is from these angles that the essays gathered here illuminate the changing map of the social sciences, and they go even further by rethinking the epistemological models from which each discipline produces and reproduces its practices. I approach the heterogeneity of this text...