Search

Although the study of religious phenomena from the perspective of lived religion was born in the North Atlantic countries, several researchers have adopted this approach in the Latin American context to account for the religious fact and its evolution. This orientation responds to the dissatisfaction with the conclusions reached by classical sociological theories when they try to explain the place and meaning of religion in the context of Latin American modernity, as in the case of the theories on secularization. This approach has proved promising, insofar as it offers evidence of the presence of the religious phenomenon in contemporary society that has not been sufficiently taken into account before. But, at the same time, it presents aspects that need to be clarified and/or developed. One of them is the relationship between lived religion and the theoretical frameworks that, from the different social sciences, are intended to explain the religious phenomenon. This article offers some considerations on the fruitful relationship that can be established between lived religion and the phenomenology of religion. It identifies aspects in which both disciplines complement and enrich each other, as well as critical issues to be taken into account. Specifically, it proposes a phenomenological approach to two distinct and, at the same time, intertwined fields of analysis: lived religion and lived spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and the 55 years of the Theory of the Unit in 2019, this essay aims to show the impact that this revolution had on the emergence of Latin American social sciences based on a critical thinking that questions the hegemonic paradigms characteristic of scientific positivism with Eurocentric and colonial inspiration. Although the essay considers some other elements of explanatory context of the emergence of critical social sciences, it highlights and focuses on the impact that this continental historical event had, not only on Latin American revolutionary movements, but also on intellectuality and academia, especially in the sixties of the last century. To do this, it briefly presents the political and ideological scope of the revolution and the "spirit of the age" that it generates, with the intention of showing the way in which some of its postulates were received, enriched and developed by the social sciences of the region in the early sixties of the twentieth century, all of which goes through a brief review of the hegemonic theories up to that point in the social sciences of Latin America. The essay is not historical, which is why it does not stop at the construction of a story of events and actors; but rather of a theoretical nature, insofar as it tries to move in the plane of categories and concepts typical of the acquis of these disciplines and ways of thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to develop a critical reflection based on Latin American Geography and the Social Sciences, about the relationship between regional dynamics and the categories Latin America and the Caribbean. The objective is to analyze the possible insufficiency of European universalism on the Latin American and Caribbean nomenclatures in the face of cultural and territorial specificities and counter-hegemonic social processes. The qualitative method will guide the methodology, based on the interpretation of classic and contemporary bibliographic materials to analyze other alternatives of regionalization displaced from the economic, colonial and imperialist essentialism of traditional cartography. We believe in other possible languages of different cartographies according to different regions of the continent, based on historical aspects, theoretical critiques, migratory flows, ethnic-racial populations, socio-spatial distribution of economic groups and political-ideological aspects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the change of perspectives and narratives about national borders, the circulation of people and the political definitions of the limits of the National State in the social sciences since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, to the most recent outcomes of the international geopolitics. The place occupied by the transnational perspective of migration is questioned, inquiring its role in the formation of critical anthropological reflections that, in the last two decades, have allowed a re-oxygenation of the classical categories of analysis in the social sciences. The discussion also sediments the questioning about the possible outcomes of this anthropological reflection in a context of profound international political changes regarding human mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 40 years, investigations have shown the discipline of International Relations to reproduce the American influence on its methods, paradigms, and institutional dynamics. This article explores the case for the Latin American community, based on the survey data from the Teaching, Research, and International Politics project (TRIP) 2014 developed by the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations of the College of William and Mary, Virginia (USA). TRIP evaluated International Relations communities in 32 countries around the world. The article aims to answer two main questions: (i) is American influence still dominant over epistemological, methodological, paradigmatic, and institutional representative terms in Latin American International Relations communities, as has been considered in the past? (ii) Is there in the region any contestation to this supposed influence? Primarily, the present article shows an affirmative answer for the first issue. Therefore, and most importantly, the data analysis shows upcoming local pressures rooted in American influence, especially on its epistemic and paradigmatic terms. The data strengthens the miscegenation tendency on its epistemological and paradigmatic aspects, which underlines a lack of consensus over the structure of American dominance over the discipline of International Relations in Latin America, especially if one observes the most numerous and structured group in the region: the Brazilian International Relations community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the central role of cultural distances in social sciences, literature is surprisingly scarce in quantitatively measuring and graphically representing this concept in Latin America. This study addresses this issue calculating a cultural distance index using the nine cultural dimensions measured by House et al. (2004) for ten Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela. Also, this study graphically presents the cultural distances calculated. The relevance of this study is the ability to incorporate cultural indicators that allow comparing the current situation and prospects in Latin America. In order to illustrate the implications of this study, the case of cultural distances of Mexico with other nine Latin American countries is analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows that, despite the importance of the Soviet model in the Latin American imaginary, the latter's relations with Moscow during the Cold War have not been a topic of frequent research. The sixties saw the rise of the first studies on the subject, which expanded in the early seventies, and again in the late eighties after a phase of "silence," but which were strongly impregnated by the typical prejudices of their context. Other than punctual interpretations, however, the end of the conflict has not stimulated the academic renovation that was expected, and an evaluation of the "state of the art" shows that, In the area of Soviet-Latin American ties, the social sciences are still In debt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]