The sociologists of the University of Buenos Aires faced to local and foreign intellectual production. A socio-historical account

Abstract

This article seeks to carry out a sociohistorical account of the changing relationships of sociologists affiliated with UBA with local and foreign intellectual production since the middle of the last century. As it will be shown, the tension arising in peripheral intellectual spaces between encouraging greater openness towards the production of the most dynamic centers, or promoting the vindication of local traditions of thought, took the form of a strong opposition between the supporters of a sociology that tried to "professionalized" itself through the adherence to the canons of the international mainstream and the supporters of a sociology that defended the importance of local traditions of thought based on a "essayist" and "anti-academic" matrix. In addition to the examination of the main explicit controversies about the type of relations that sociologists should have with the world centers of the discipline, particular attention will be paid to the orientations that prevailed at the UBA course with the intention of capturing the frames in which new generations were formed. The corpus under examination includes different materials: publications of important figures of the discipline, notes in newspapers and magazines of mass circulation, curricula and syllabi, as well as interviews with relevant actors.