Concepciones y representaciones de la naturaleza y la ciencia en América Latina

This edited collection helps update treatment of Costa Rican science history of the last decade by Marshall C. Eakin and Sterling Evans, as well as broader Latin American surveys by Juan José Saldaña, Hebe Vessuri, and more recently María M. Portuondo. This work proceeds beyond science history to encompass transdisciplinary considerations “to build a bridge between the so-called ‘two cultures’ ” (p. 9). Emerging from the third meeting (2006) of the Programa de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia, la Técnica y el Medio Ambiente, the work represents collaborative efforts among physicists, historians, and social scientists at the University of Costa Rica along with other conference attendees.Geographically, the work explores nature and science in Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Paraguay. The editors organize the collection in two sections, the first on Latin America and the second focusing on Costa Rica. Varying widely in format, the chapters fall into three broad areas: science history (almost half the essays), social sciences, and the environmental/physical sciences, all anchored in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The two dozen contributors are primarily social scientists or historians of science, with a quarter of the number practicing scientists and the others political scientists or pedagogical scholars. Some of the authors provide extensive notes, replete with primary source indications, while others argue principally from secondary sources. There is no index.The Latin American section (six essays) presents science history topics as well as two nonhistorical chapters, one exploring observations on pedagogy for biology students in Colombia and the other assessing basic science research networks at the University of Costa Rica. Of particular interest to science historians are the two treatments of Mexico’s nineteenth-century Comisión de Pachuca (1864). Consuelo Cuevas considers environmental questions expressed by geographers and naturalists on this scientific expedition, while Luz Fernanda Azuela compares that effort to others in the century, arguing that a number of nongovernmental actors also engaged in mapping Mexican science. The remaining two essays consider South American scientific societies and their technical journals. Celina Lértora focuses on La Sociedad Argentina de Ciencia Naturales and the early years of its journal Physis (1912 – 35), arguing that close examination reveals new insights regarding the era’s scientific elite and their early efforts toward an Argentine national science, a program with internationalist aspirations based on the European model. Julio Rafael Contreras considers nearby Paraguay’s Sociedad Científica del Paraguay and its resurrection in 1921 of the Revista del Instituto Paraguay (1896 – 1909). The Revista met obstacles in a nation suffering the legacy of the War of the Triple Alliance, with publication later interrupted by the Chaco War and 1947 civil war.The larger Costa Rican section (14 essays) tracks the three general areas closely, though with 70 percent of the collected essays directed to Costa Rican science, perhaps the Latin American volume title is too broad. Even so, the Costa Rican contributions are important in addressing questions raised a decade earlier by Marshall C. Eakin on the origins and future of Costa Rican science. Editor Ronny Viales and Patricia Clare explore earlier scientific societies and analyze political, social, cultural, and economic processes in shaping a scientific policy for the nation. They show that various levels and actors were at play during the positivist era of 1870 – 1930, such as the state, semiofficial groups (scientific societies), and individuals (like Minor Keith and his laboratories at the United Fruit Company). Despite challenges for Latin American agro-export economies, the authors suggest that development of science resulted from the emergence of an extra-governmental scientific consciousness or “rule” (p. 109) encouraged by nonstate actors.This work, primarily focused on Costa Rica and diluted in focus by its cross-disciplinary approach, does not substantially contribute to the broader science history of Latin America, despite its hopeful title. There is certainly a need for additional studies to survey the breadth of that history. Further, many important themes are little addressed, such as cultural issues of gender and race, disease, the impact of the Cold War on science, or even dimensions of Costa Rican exceptionalism. The volume does help fill a gap in coverage from the independence era to the present, considering that much recent scholarship is skewed toward the earlier Spanish Empire. The book achieves the editors’ stated goal of a conversation among scientists, historians, and social scientists around Latin American nature and science.

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