In 1967, Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso published their classic work Dependency and Development in Latin America. "Western" investment, far from placing Latin American nations on a path to progress, had created dependent nations struggling to chart their own path, stunting attempts at autonomous development. At the same moment, Science published George Basalla's "The Spread of Western Science." "Colonial science has its drawbacks," Basalla wrote, "but it is in the fortunate position of being able to utilize the resources of existing scientific traditions while it slowly develops a scientific tradition of its own."
In this panel, we hope to better elucidate the relationship between the politics of development and "Science at the Periphery." We underscore the unique nature of scientific enterprise in the twentieth century, stemming from processes of negotiation between "Western Science" and local actors: the stories we tell about a diverse range of Latin American experiences show that science has not been the product of a graft, but of centuries of coevolution between foreign and local epistemological traditions. We hope our answer to this traditional debate advances an understanding of the developmentalist role of science in the region. How did the priorities for applied science set by the region’s various actors speak to their anxieties and hopes about the prospect of becoming culturally, economically, and politically independent polities in the twentieth century? How did debates in the scientific arena resonate with broader debates about national representation and citizenship, market and state interactions, and regional self-determination?
