Sociology in Latin America: Epistemological and epistemic turns

Abstract

This article proposes to highlight the emergence of a general sociology in Latin America organized from three different sociological perspectives: That “about” Latin America, that “from” Latin America and that “in” Latin America. These diverse fields of meanings were organized from the intellectual readings on the gaps between capitalist colonization in the region and anticolonial reactions from the nineteenth century to the present. A great novelty in this debate is to understand that the emergence of a transnational general sociology marking the traits of a regional sociology, is an unprecedented fact when one observes that the dominant tendencies of the twentieth century were between the defense of a Eurocentric, on the one hand, and of a nativist or national sociology, on the other. The directions of the general sociology of Latin America today are central to think the advances of a critical theory of coloniality that contributes to deconstruct the new coloniality that has been diffused by neoliberalism.