Modernismo, Spiritualism, and Science in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This chapter analyzes the uses and appropriations of scientific discourse in Argentine magazines from the fin de siècle: a period in which literary modernism coincided with the development of spiritualisms that aspired to the status of science (or “occult sciences”) like Spiritism and Theosophy. The aim is to examine concrete examples that relativize the sharp division between science, art, and spiritualism in the culture of this period. The main sources explored are La Quincena. Revista de letras (1893–1899), Philadelphia (1898–1902), La Verdad (1905–1911), and Constancia (1890–1905). In addition, the chapter focuses on how the astonishing growth of science in Argentina, as well as the social legitimation of scientific discourses, influenced other fields, giving shape to new literary expressions, beliefs, and utopian projections that synthesized the material and the spiritual.

Beyond Empiricism

Argentine Rolando García was one of the earliest world-leading specialists on climate change. Forced to leave his country after the 1966 military coup, García became a nomadic thinker, living in various countries and moving from the study of the atmosphere to addressing larger questions of epistemology. In collaboration with Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, García developed a “theory of complex systems” (TCS) to model and understand social behaviours in uncertain, nonlinear milieus. This chapter discusses García’s TCS as not just an epistemological but also an ontological turning point in the production of knowledge in Latin America. It also describes García’s role in the rise of socio-cybernetic research, an arguably post-humanist area of study and practice that effectively imagines new “modes of existence” on the basis of an ecological and non-empiricist theory of knowledge.

The Science of Reading Fiction

This chapter explores the relationship between fiction and science outlined in the theories of reading developed by Jorge Volpi and Marcelo Cohen, in which cognitive philosophies and neuroscience are used to support claims of the unique role played by literature in the operations of intersubjectivity that underpin the development of human society and culture. In their narrative projects (fiction and essays), Volpi and Cohen develop theories of reading that intersect with recent advances in cognitive science and revisions to Darwin models of evolution. Reflecting on Catherine Malabou’s work on the relationship between neuroplasticity and late capitalism, this chapter also questions the extent to which these new theories of reading align themselves with, or challenge, those neoliberal ideals of flexibility and self-development are often subjected to critique in recent Latin American fiction.

Postcolonial Social Sciences of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals believed science could diagnose, treat, and excise an array of “colonial legacies” left in the wake of Spanish monarchical rule. Drawing on New Granada as a case in point, this chapter considers two revealing examples of how Spanish American contributions to emerging social sciences challenged prevailing European and North Atlantic ideas about race well before the late nineteenth century adoption and adaptation of eugenics. The first example emerges from an 1830s land-surveying catechism by noted New Granadan educator and publicist, Lorenzo María Lleras. The catechism sought to ensure equitable land surveys of indigenous communal land holding. The second example spotlights José María Samper’s mid-century invention of comparative political sociology. Spanish American intellectuals like Lleras and Samper ultimately believed that the deployment of sciences in society would produce a new “race” of democratic republicans.

Empathy, Patients’ Needs, and Therapeutic Innovation in the Medical Literature of Early Viceregal Mexico

Agustín Farfán’s Tractado breve de anothomia y chirvgia (1579) stands out as one of the most widely read medical texts of sixteenth-century colonial Mexico, printed more times than any other local source on health and the body during the period. Despite its popularity then, it has not received as much attention from scholars as projects by other medical authors of the colonial era who either wrote before Farfán did, or were better positioned in European circles, or whose work is seen as having tapped into cutting-edge scientific debates. This chapter proposes a new entry point into the Tractado, highlighting its singular connection with the readers of New Spain, and taking as a point of departure the revisions between the first and second editions: a series of context-driven changes that reveal shifting attitudes toward patients’ needs and indigenous medical knowledge.

Introduction

The transnational transfers of ideas, technologies, materials, and people that have shaped the history of science in Latin America are marked, as in any region, by asymmetries of power. These are often replicated or even magnified in the narratives we have forged about that history. The journeys to Latin America of some of Europe’s most famous naturalists (Humboldt and Darwin, for example) are often depicted as the heroic overcoming by European science of savage local terrains and ways of life. Those epic explorers are recast, in other narratives, as the forerunners of (neo)colonial exploitation in the history of the ransacking of Latin America’s mineral riches to pay for European imperial ventures, repeated in the often-illegal plundering of the region’s dinosaur fossils to swell museum collections in Europe and North America. In such accounts, Latin America becomes the arena for European adventures, the testing ground for new scientific theories, or the passive victim of colonial profiteering, but rarely a place of innovation. It is certainly the case that over the centuries the flow of natural resources, data, and expertise from Latin America to more developed regions has generally been to the benefit of those regions and has not reduced an imbalance of power that dates back to the colonial period.

Introduction to Section V

In Latin America, the construction of science as an analogue of modernity was cemented in the late nineteenth century with the appropriation of positivism by ruling liberal elites to promote their modernizing agendas. Positivism—itself a reaction against the conservative, colonial, and Catholic consensus that had previously dominated intellectual life in Latin America—provided the justification for Comtean doctrines of “order and progress” that advocated economic liberalism while shoring up social hierarchies. The belief that human society could be perfected through the application of scientific methods underpinned a series of modernizing projects around the turn of the century, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Science and modernity patently created the conditions for their mutual advancement; even the speed with which scientific theories were radiating across the globe seemed in itself to create a new vision of the interconnectedness of the modern world....

Introduction to Section III

As outlined in the introduction to this volume, one of the characteristic qualities of Latin American science is its close and complex imbrication with politics in the region. Among other spaces, eighteenth-century criollo critiques of metropolitan political power in the Americas were also played out in the theater of science. This is evident, as Antonio Lafuente has demonstrated, in such examples as the botanical study carried out in Mexico between 1801 and 1804 by Mariano Mociño and Luis Montaña to test the validity of each plant’s medicinal qualities; this set of experiments became a platform on which local scientists contested the imposition of European methods and theories by the metropolis....

The Politics of Relativity

This chapter focuses on the key role played by fundamental science and, in particular, by Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Mariátegui’s thought. Despite his limited grasp of fundamental physics, Mariátegui was deeply interested in the change of scientific paradigm brought about by Einsteinian physics. For the Peruvian Marxist, the Theory of Relativity demonstrated the contingency of truth (scientific or otherwise) as a historically bound discursive construct devoid of any universal validity. Taking Einstein’s scientific revolution as a source of inspiration for revolutionary politics, Mariátegui reclaimed in his journalistic essays the value of scientific inquiry to the development of a revolutionary conscience. In doing so, he transforms the Theory of Relativity into a tool of ideological critique, capable of subverting the contemporary logic of coloniality and the strong links between scientific positivism and the projects of modernity designed by the Latin American ruling elites at the turn of the century.

Laboratories of Universality

Carlos Fonseca Suárez read Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “El Aleph” as a reflection upon the limits of technological universalism as well as a reconfiguration of modern cosmopolitanism. Carlos Fonseca Suárez then explores the figure of José Arcadio Buendía—founder of Macondo in Cien años de soledad (1967)—who in his obsession with scientific innovation takes Borges’s exploration of technological modernity and the impasses of modern progressivism even further, proposing instead a new dialectical model of universalism. Finally, Carlos Fonseca Suárez concludes by adding a final star to this constellation by exploring how the character of Luca Belladona in Ricardo Piglia’s 2010 novel Blanco nocturno allows for a rereading of this Humboldt’s plainsman scene in the contemporary socioeconomic context, where the relation between the global and the local, center and periphery, becomes intertwined in the elusive informational networks of global capital.