INVESTIGADORES
BORTZ Gabriela Mijal
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Social hygiene as technology policy in Argentina. The intervention on childhood as a state policy in the Journal of Child Hygiene (1892-1902)
Autor/es:
BORTZ, GABRIELA; BORTZ, JAIME ELÍAS; AGÜERO, LUIS ABEL
Lugar:
Padua
Reunión:
Congreso; 43rd Congress of the International Society for the History of Medicine; 2012
Institución organizadora:
International Society for the History of Medicine
Resumen:
In Argentina, children and childhood became after 1880 -and under the influence of the hygienist?s movement- a focus of state intervention from various fields: medical intervention, immunization, mental health, nutrition and education (intellectual, moral, physical). Thus, the fledgling state through its various agencies came to promote knowledge generation and technology development (process technologies, organizational technologies and artifacts) for the intervention on individual bodies and the social body as a whole. The development and promotion of these technologies at a national level could be thought of as a case of development and implementation of strategic technologies: cognitive and technological fields identified as priorities by nation-states and signified as key instruments to promote strategies for economic development, state legitimacy and geostrategic position, aligning and coordinating around them material and human resources and creating networks linking heterogeneous elements (knowledge, technologies, ideologies, regulatory frameworks, institutions, funding, practices). One may ask: what was the discourse from which the state legitimated intervention technologies on children?s health? Which were the motivations for such intervention? In a context of large immigration flows arriving to the country at the end of the 19th century and major concerns on the construction of a homogeneous national identity from the heterogeneity, what place was assigned to children and children?s health in the discourse about ?nation?? This paper aims to explore the construction of state intervention on children?s health in Argentina as a technology policy in the discourse of the Journal of Child Hygiene - Annals of the Children?s Committee (1892-1902), in the first decade of its founding. Through document analysis on primary sources, this study incorporates theoretical and methodological tools of sociology of technology to the socio-historical-political analysis of the intervention on child?s health, and explores how, in the process of construction of the ?national being?, technologies and knowledge are politically built.