Opening the Social Sciences: Historical Sociology from Latin America

Abstract

Latin American Sociology has been characterized since the last century by offering a range of theories and methodologies to study the social experiences of our continent. Most sociologists in Latin America have had a heterogeneous, hybrid training that ranges from the fields of Economics, Political Science, Anthropology, Historiography, and Demography (what I will generally call Social Sciences). In this article, I propose to make a general presentation of concepts and themes such as the definition of Latin America, the current debate on 'situations of dependency', the role of intellectuals, and the question of democracy. The methodological approach I develop is Historical Sociology, which has been a pioneering practice in classical intellectuals of Latin America, either explicitly or implicitly when studying social changes and making comparisons at different scales (national, continental, and planetary). It is from this methodological proposal that I have made a series of problematizations that revolve around the conceptualization of Latin America, the academic institutionalization of sociology within the social sciences, the theory of dependency, and the ups and downs of the long 20th century that it has oscillated in a large part of Latin American territory between authoritarianism, democracies, and military-bourgeois dictatorships.