Sociology and Epistemology in Studies on Social Movements in Latin America

SCRIBANO ADRIAN

Umea University, Sweden

Congreso; ISA Research Committee on History of Sociology Interim conference Perspectives from the Periphery; 2008

ISA

ISA Research Committee on History of Sociology Interim conferencePerspectives from the PeripheryUmea University, SwedenAugust 21-24, 2008 Andreas Hess, RC08 Secretary, a.hess@ucd.ie Sociology and Epistemology in Studies on Social Movements in Latin America Adrian Scribano[1]             Social Movements and Protest are a central topic for Latin American Social Science. Since the 19th century, scientists and social thinkers have elaborated various approaches to understand the relationship between conflict, collective actions and social structure. From Martí, Ingenieros and Mariátegui, to Germani, Florestan Fernandez and González Casanova, the central issue was to make comprehensible the particularity of Latin American social forces. Also, from Development Theory to Marxist approaches, the central issue was social change. Theories of collective action became important to analyze social movement and protest in the early 80’s2.             The epistemology of Social Science underwent a great transformation for the last three decades of the 20th Century. From the 70’s to the 90’s the “received view” was broken as the orthodox consensus of social science, and a more pluralist paradigm of the philosophy of social science emerged. The importance of the relationship of epistemology, sociology and history of science appears in this context.             The epistemological task is now understood, as an articulation among history, sociology and the philosophy of science. In this sense, the evaluation and analysis of social theory are complex activities that involve the reconstruction of the social and academic context in which they were elaborated.             The history of natural science developed in two main directions: to explain the internal factors of the construction of theory like a reconstruction of “moments of experiments” and to show how external features of scientific endeavor impact the process of exploring the validity of theories.             In the social science field the situation was and is very different. The philosophy of social science does not pay much attention to topics like internal or external constraints on social research. Conversely, social theorists wrote about the influence of “historical and social context” on the production of theories. Foucault, Bhaskar, Bourdieu, Habermas, and others, despite their differences, showed how social structures determine social and scientific knowledge. In Latin American social sciences the situation is similar. We have good work from the history of ideas and intellectual history, but not very much research on social science to understand the impact of the time-space context on scientific explanations of society. The work of Latin American sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists are deficient in the way that the histories of their own academic disciplines are related to concrete sociohistorical processes.             One example of this situation is in the studies of social movements or collective actions. Although South America has been wholly involved in social and economic changes since at least the 19th century, social scientists have not given an explanation of how scientific knowledge of protests and collective behavior was constructed. However, since the 80’s, many studies of social movements have been done, and the challenge now is to try to understand the connections between social conditions, theory production, and the paradigms used by social scientists.             Social phenomena such as the reconstitution of the labor movement in context of the neo-liberal policies produced a change within a specific profile about relations between state and working class. Social reality is present in our conceptual reading of social world.  Social phenomena mark and involve some epistemic and methodological commitments, such as the decision to take class analysis into consideration in order to explain social conflict.             The delicate and multifaceted relation among the weight of social features and analytical approaches is a complex question and it is very ambitious for this paper to try to give a response. In any case, we can think about it, to attempt to show what kind of agenda we will have in the near future in this social scientific field.             This paper aims to show the changes of social scientific approaches to explain and understand social protest and movements in the Latin American scientific context. We pretend to point out the possibilities of getting lost in the logics of a reason geo-politically centered .             To achieve this goal I will make the following argument: First, I Hill summarize the social context of the different social movements and protest forms since the 60s. Second, I will present a synthesis of the theoretical perspectives on social protest and movements. Third, I will underline some epistemological and methodological issues of collective action studies. And finally I will explore the connection between historical context and the studies of collective action in Latin America today, in order to identify a current agenda for such studies.             An agenda that must be alert to absences, symptoms and messages written in the same Latin-American focus which does not pay attention to shrewdness of the academic reason, so as to not be dissolved in the look of the Other. [1]  Researchers CONICET. Centre for Advanced Studies. Executing Unit. National University of Cordoba. Argentina. Secretary of Latin American Association of Sociology ALAS.