162.4
Brazilian Social Scientists in the United States of America: Conversion Paths (1970-1990).
Lidiane Soares Rodrigues
Universidade Federal de São Carlos/Brazil
In the global sphere, economic and political inequalities structure the geopolitical order as well as the cultural and symbolic exchanges, although in this scope, the latter take specific forms and dynamics. The cultural experience and scientific production of the countries that became independent after the three centuries of modern-time colonization (XV-XVIII), are structured on the basis of an asymmetric relationship with foreign matrixes of symbolic domains, which political elites desire to give their societies. Concerning social sciences, it could not be different.
Johan Heilbron suggests that a transnational history of sciences should focus on the structuring mechanisms of a “global field”. The present paper adopts this point of view and is divided into three parts. Firstly, it presents two different types of “peripheral internationalization” of Brazilian social scientists. Secondly, it addresses the convergence of interests of the three main agents of the Political Science genesis. They were: the American patronage (the Ford Foundation); the elites (who negotiated the political license for institutional enterprises, since it could not be done otherwise due to the fact that the country was ruled by a military dictatorship); and the creators of the new academic subject (young militants of radical left-oriented organizations that resisted the military dictatorship of the 1960’s). Thirdly, the analytical focus shifts to the topics and issues related to the research conducted by them. We want to emphasize the selective principles that drove this import process, characterized, at a given moment in time, by the reconversion of militant activity into scientific life (while they were in the USA) and, at a later stage, by coming back to Brazil, which favored some innovation and posed barriers to others.