Autores UNAM:
JUAN JOSE SALDAÑA GONZALEZ;

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Autores externos:

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Idioma:
Inglés

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Año de publicación:
2006

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Resumen:

This volume collects for the fi rst time a history of science as a whole in the geographical and cultural region known as Latin America. The authors are historians of science and discuss, among other issues, what, at different moments and under different circumstances, has been understood as science in Latin America, the forms scientifi c activity has taken, the settings responsible for the autochthonous peculiarities of science in the region, and the adoption of European science and its evolution in Latin America. This is a local history of how geographical accidents, individuals and groups of individuals, institutions, ideologies, concepts, and scientifi c theories affect one another in a specifi c social and cultural context. This social history of science by no means scorns the intellectual aspects of science. On the contrary, it helps us understand the nature and behavior of social groups (the scientists) that created, developed, or incorporated concepts and theories in a particular social context and always as a consequence of it. Equal attention is paid to the general aspects of society and regional geography (the social order, culture, natural resources, geographical location, etc.) that are responsible for attitudes toward science and that have imposed a particular style on it. The authors in this volume use new analytical perspectives (forms of approaching the history of science) and offer a novel image of the Latin American scientifi c past. Why has no such history been written before? Have we not had, for centuries, the most varied testimony that original experiments in science and technique were developed on this section of the planet? In addition, in practically the whole of Latin America, there have been signifi cant efforts to record the history of moments, people, institutions, achievements, and other aspects of the scientifi c activity that has taken place there. There have even been histories that present science as formulating an entire national vision.1 Nevertheless, it apparently has not been understood that science is one of many shared threads that will surely continue to tie together even more tightly the framework of Latin American history. Science, by being intertwined with other aspects of social and cultural life, has been the cause as well as the effect of important regional historical events and is viewed as such in the chapters that make up this book. Certainly, there are also national differences to be taken into account, dating back many centuries and developed in unequal circumstances. The premise of the authors of the studies gathered here is that Latin America is a region. In the American geography of science, nontrivial aspects can be distinguished by understanding their nature and organization, since they are what makes this region different from others. Topographic relief, the nature of the terrain, the climate, the wide diversity of fl ora and fauna in some areas, the types of mineral deposits, and so on, create very defi ned and characteristic geographical areas, such as the Amazon region, the Mesoamerican lowlands, the Andean and Mexican highlands. The cultural and scientifi c patterns in the region depend on these material conditions.2 Clear examples include Amerindian science and technology (herbalism, astronomy, agricultural techniques, medicine) and natural history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries (botany, zoology, paleontology, mineralogy), as will be seen. Likewise, characteristic collective features have sprung up throughout the historical dynamics of the region. Examples include highly developed autochthonous cultures and civilizations in the Andes and in Mesoamerica, which imposed, and still impose, particular features on those regions' social life. This circumstance determined, for instance, the European conquerors' decision to establish their main viceroyalties in Peru and Mexico-places where socially, politically, and culturally advanced societies already existed. In contrast, the Anglo-Saxon colonization of the northeastern portion of North America followed a totally different pattern. With an indigenous population that may be called scarcely developed from a cultural and social point of view, the social organization developed in that area imitated that of Europe and differed from that developed in indigenous-Hispanic- Portuguese America. Nevertheless, we should note that a particular style of scientifi c tradition also developed in the original thirteen British colonies through time and across social dynamics.3 Styles in science reveal the diverse sociohistorical and geographical conditions to which it has been subjected. Such is the case of Spanish America, where, as the Conquest and the imposition of Western civilization truncated native social and cultural processes, syncretism between old local knowledge and new knowledge imposed by Europeans, the cross-fertilization of those systems, and nontypical forms of European and Amerindian traditional scientifi c practice emerged. Proof lies in the survival of signifi cant indigenous communities that possess a solid culture with elements of their traditional science and techniques. The new societies that began to develop in the Americas in the sixteenth century led to historically unprecedented social and cultural evolution. New social characteristics derived both from the imposed social and cultural order and from the native one. For our purposes, the settlers' gradual creation of their own Latin American identity (by "Indianizing" the natives and through miscegenation and Creolization [criollismo]) during three hundred years of colonial life is especially signifi cant. These social and cultural facts were expressed in the science that developed in the region. That science had a propensity to use established knowledge to understand the immediate natural and human reality or to develop it if necessary. A territorial, or telluric, feeling and a zeal for having their know

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Entidades citadas de la UNAM:

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