Academic autonomy and social sciences: the Chilean circuit (1957-1973)

BEIGEL, FERNANDA

India

Workshop; Coping with academic dependence: how?, Technical Session Papers; 2008

SEPHIS-ADRI

The role played by the United States and France in the cultural dynamics of the second post-war period is quite well known, and the role of international organizations, cooperation agencies and foundations in the internationalization processes of the academic field has also been explored. However, the emergence of Chile as a centre of internationalization of social knowledge has not received so much attention, even though it became the articulatory axis of a Latin American academic circuit between the end of the 1950´s until 1973. The most recent studies on the history of social sciences in Latin America recognize the role played by Chile, although it is presented as a “favourable context” for the settlement of a sort of academic “cosmopolis”, stimulated by the plenty of international organizations present in Santiago (Garretón et alia. 2005; Ansaldi and Calderón, 1989). Some studies analytically present the Chilean field of the social sciences as freestanding with respect to the “cosmopolis”. Thus, “Chilean sociology” as a field or the “Chilean social and economic thinking" of the time is distinguished from “Latin American knowledge” which was supposedly created at the international organizations or by the South American exiles settled in Chile since 1964 (Devés Valdés, 2003; Brunner, 1986). The intense overlapping of international and national processes which became related in this period is overlooked. A whole set of regional conditions enabled the Chilean field of the social sciences to become the laboratory for new social knowledge and academic practices which were already at work in the region. It is the aim of this paper to demonstrate that the Chilean state and Chilean universities played a decisive role in the creation of an autonomous regional academic circuit. Also, that a number of situations, at the national and international level, explain why Chile made its way at that time as a “meridian” for the peripheral consecration of Latin American social sciences in the international academic system (Beigel, 2005).