The Two Churches: Catholicism and Capitalism in the World System. By Michael L. Budde. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. 172p. $29.95. - Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism. By Daniel H. Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 403p. $49.50 cloth, $18.95 paper. - The Church and Politics in the Chilean Countryside. By Hannah W. Stewart-Gambino. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. 200p. $49.95.

1993 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 511-514
Author(s):  
Timothy R. Scully
Author(s):  
Felipe Gaytán Alcalá

Latin America was considered for many years the main bastion of Catholicism in the world by the number of parishioners and the influence of the church in the social and political life of the región, but in recent times there has been a decrease in the catholicity index. This paper explores three variables that have modified the identity of Catholicism in Latin American countries. The first one refers to the conversion processes that have expanded the presence of Christian denominations, by analyzing the reasons that revolve around the sense of belonging that these communities offer and that prop up their expansion and growth. The second variable accounts for those Catholics who still belong to the Catholic Church but who in their practices and beliefs have incorporated other magical or esoteric scheme in the form of religious syncretisms, modifying their sense of being Catholics in the world. The third factor has a political reference and has to do with the concept of laicism, a concept that sets its objective, not only in the separation of the State from the Church, but for historical reasons in catholicity restraint in the public space which has led to the confinement of the Catholic to the private, leaving other religious groups to occupy that space.


Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo

This chapter outlines a map of the border of the empires whose tensions contributed to the fabrication of a homogeneous notion of Latin America in the colonial horizon of modernity. These conflicting homogeneous entities are part of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. They are the grounding of a system of geopolitical values, of racial configurations, and of hierarchical structures of meaning and knowledge. To think “Latin America” otherwise, in its heterogeneity rather than in its homogeneity, in the local histories of changing global designs is not to question a particular form of identification but all national/colonial forms of identification in the modern/colonial world system. These are precisely the forms of identification that contribute to the reproduction of the imaginary of the modern/colonial world system and the coloniality of power and knowledge implicit in the geopolitical articulation of the world.


Author(s):  
Christopher Chase-Dunn ◽  
Marilyn Grell-Brisk

The world-system perspective emerged during the world revolution of 1968 when social scientists contemplated the meaning of Latin American dependency theory for Africa. Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi developed slightly different versions of the world-system perspective in interaction with each other. The big idea was that the global system had a stratified structure on inequality based on institutionalized exploitation. This implied that the whole system was the proper unit of analysis, not national societies, and that development and underdevelopment had been structured by global power relations for centuries. The modern world-system is a self-contained entity based on a geographically differentiated division of labor and bound together by a world market. In Wallerstein’s version capitalism had become predominant in Europe and its peripheries in the long 16th century and had expanded and deepened in waves. The core states were able to concentrate the most profitable economic activities and they exploited the semi-peripheral and peripheral regions by means of colonialism and the emergent international division of labor, which relies on unequal exchange. The world-system analysts all focused on global inequalities, but their terminologies were somewhat different. Amin and Frank talked about center and periphery. Wallerstein proposed a three-tiered structure with an intermediate semiperiphery between the core and the periphery, and he used the term core to suggest a multicentric region containing a group of states rather than the term center, which implies a hierarchy with a single peak. When the world-system perspective emerged, the focus on the non-core (periphery and semiperiphery) was called Third Worldism. Current terminology refers to the Global North (the core) and the Global South (periphery and semiperiphery).


1979 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Dodson

After decades of neglect, interest in the political significance of Latin American Catholicism increased sharply in the late 1960s when it began to appear that the Church might have unimagined potential for promoting social change, particularly in a continent plagued by social upheaval and political instability (Drekonja, 1971: 59-65). In both word and deed, the postconciliar Church manifested a changing social orientation which entailed open involvement in political issues on behalf of the poor. In fact, by August 1968 and the convening of the Council of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in Medellín, Colombia, the Church seemed to be changing its social and political attitudes so profoundly that reports of a revolutionary Church began to accompany discussions of the political situation in Latin America. Since Medellín, an important literature has evolved from efforts to understand this change in Latin American Catholicism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 331-365
Author(s):  
Daniel A. Holly

This article is about the international relations of Latin America between 1950-1980. No systematic account of such history is attempted here. Rather attention is paid above all to the main thrust of such history. In this study it is argued that most dominated countries have very little capacity to affect the general and most fundamental structures of the World System. These countries tend to be mere object of history. There foreign policies to a very large extent contribute to the reproduction of the World System. Indeed it is one of the functions they must assume as far as the development of the system is concerned. But given the fact that underdeveloped countries are also subject of history, they do not submit passively to such a general law of social system. Their foreign policies are sometimes designed to modify the International Division of Labor "or their place within it" and with it the distribution of power without however drastically changing or upsetting the inner logic of the World System. It is within such an approach that one must study the international role of dominated countries in general and of the Latin American states in particular.


2006 ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuela Boatca

This paper claims that, since many of the concepts relevant to our analysis of systemic change were coined in and about the core, the potential with which solutions to world-systemic crisis are credited in the long run should be assessed differently depending on the structural location of their origin. In the periphery, such concepts as conservatism, socialism and even liberalism took forms that often retained nothing of the original model but the name, such that strategies of applying them to (semi)peripheral situations ranged from “stretching the ideology” to “discarding the (liberal) myth” altogether. In a first step, “the hypothesis of semiperipheral development” (Chase-Dunn and Hall), according to which the semiperiphery represents the most likely locus of political, economical, and institutional change, is amended to say that, at least for the late modern world-system, the strength of the semiperiphery resides primarily in the cultural and epistemic sphere. In a second step, this contention is illustrated with the help of major challenges that the Eastern European and Latin American (semi)peripheries have posed to the world-system’s political fields and institutional settings both in the past and to date—with different degrees of success corresponding to their respective structural position. In light of these examples, it is argued that a comparative analysis of continuities among political epistemologies developed in the semiperiphery can help us understand the ways in which similar attempts can become antisystemic today.


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