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Ecuadorian Sociology or the Institutionalization of a Strange Discipline

La sociologie équatorienne ou l'institutionnalisation d'une discipline étrange
Philipp Altmann
p. 123-144

Résumés

En Équateur, la sociologie existe en tant que discipline universitaire depuis 1915 et depuis les années 1960 en tant que programme diplômant. Ces plus de 100 années ont été marquées par plusieurs ruptures brutales et des changements moins visibles dans les tendances générales. L'un des principaux facteurs liés aux ruptures et aux tendances est constitué par les institutions et l'institutionnalisation de la sociologie et de disciplines situées à ses alentours. Il s'agit des universités, des associations professionnelles ou culturelles, des revues, de l'État, mais aussi des événements nationaux et internationaux et des activités des sociologues en dehors du monde universitaire. Elles ont créé les conditions de la sociologie positiviste initiale avec ses différentes perspectives, leur influence a permis une certaine professionnalisation et internationalisation dans les années 1950 et 1960 - et la rupture presque totale avec les sociologies antérieures dans les années 1970 qui a produit un nouveau style d'institutionnalisation qui reste d’actualité jusqu'à aujourd'hui.

Ce texte révise la relation entre la recherche sociologique et les réflexions publiées et les différentes institutionnalisations dans lesquelles elles se sont produites. L'accent est mis sur la facilitation ou l'empêchement d'une pensée sociologique cohérente par rapport aux tendances internationales et au débat académique en Equateur même. Les principaux textes des sociologues les plus importants seront analysés en relation avec les institutionnalisations qui ont rendu leur production possible ou qui ont favorisé un certain style de sociologie.

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Texte intégral

1Sociology in Ecuador has always been a strange discipline, a discipline that does not fit, that tends to be incomprehensible, and that is more political activism than systematic study of society. In short, a misplaced discipline without institutional integration. Unlike other disciplines, sociology had no prior history, no debates to which it connects, and no classics before its institutionalization. Instead of a prior history, it developed in political debates, first between the liberal and the conservative party, later between the revolutionary left and what they considered “bourgeoisie”. This text will argue that this strangeness could not be overcome precisely due to the mechanisms of institutionalization that happened in sociology and several important breaks in institutionalization that brought Ecuadorian sociology back to zero.

  • 1 North, 1994, 359-360.
  • 2 Berger and Luckmann, 1990.
  • 3 North, 1994, 361.

2Institutionalization will be understood as a relatively coherent and stable set of rules that go beyond single organizations and that guide behavior, including types of wanted and unwanted behavior and mechanisms to sanction both. In this sense, we can understand institutions as “the incentive structure of a society”1 that structure society through different types of constraints and mechanisms of enforcement. An important factor is saving energy by following established paths—which allows for innovations later on.2 It is within institutions that individual and organizational actors pursue their aims. “If institutions are the rules of the game, organizations and their entrepreneurs are the players.”3 Of course, the rules of the game are always produced in a field defined by power structures. They tend to favor the powerful.

  • 4 Ibid., 364.
  • 5 Berger and Luckmann, 1990, 82-84.
  • 6 Ibid., 83.

3In the context discussed here, sociology is institutionalized by a group of interested individuals and organizations that by doing (their kind of) sociology for the first time in Ecuador define the rules of what sociology is and how something has to take place in order to be considered sociology. This process of institutionalization defines how sociology can develop in the sense of path dependency4 and how different actors can relate to it. Sociology as an institution is, thus, a set of rules played out by both individual and organizational actors. As such, it legitimizes itself through a certain cohesion of meanings and the language used.5 Sociology produces knowledge. However, in order to understand sociology as an institution, it is not so much about the academic and theoretically refined knowledge of sciences but rather the pre-theoretic “knowledge that supplies the institutionally appropriate rules of conduct.”6 This knowledge defines what is true and what not within the institution of sociology. Moreover, it also defines what can be known and what not.

  • 7 Blois, 2015, 638-639.
  • 8 Ibid., 640.
  • 9 Geiger, 1975, 237.

4Of course, there are much more concrete aspects to institutionalization. For instance, Blois elaborated in the Brazilian and Argentinian cases some factors that influenced institutionalization, namely the relation of the sociologists with both state, elites, and the broader civil society,7 and the relationship between teaching and research.8 Geiger developed a simple model of institutionalization from his research on early French sociology. For him, institutionalization can “be divided into three components— intellectual, organizational and sociocultural.”9 Central theoretical ideas are backed by organizations with resources and connect to the surrounding society—or not.

5This text will review the three major phases of institutionalization and the main individual and organizational actors involved. Starting with the first sociology and its out-of-date references, it will then discuss the 1950s and 60s as a systematic attempt to build up a degree course in sociology, and finally, in the 1970s, how Marxist sociology took the place of the positivist approach, with some similar problems.

Early sociology in Ecuador: the Cueva Sáenz-School

  • 10 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 419.
  • 11 Ibid.
  • 12 Ibid., 405. All translations by the author.
  • 13 Ibid., 413.
  • 14 Ansaldi, 2015, 16-17; Blanco, 2005, 25; Roig, 1979.

6The decade 1910 to 1920 can be considered the golden age of sociology in Ecuador, marked by important debates and a considerable production of sociological texts.10 The first Chair of Sociology was created in 1915 within the Law Department of the Central University of Ecuador in Quito. It was part of an attempt to modernize thinking on society and state, and to push for a general change in society through education.11 As in other parts of the continent, the installation of academic sociology was part of a major political project. Sociology appeared as a science “for a certain modernity,”12 one that should legitimate social changes and political reformism. As the rector of the Central University said in 1921, this should happen through the formation of the consciousness and morals of the nation in the sense of an uninterrupted social self-betterment.13 With this, Ecuador was rather late in the region in installing a professional sociology. In Colombia and Argentina, Chairs of Sociology were created in the 1880s and 1890s,14 and since around 1900 there were already important national and international associations of sociologists in place.

  • 15 Universidad Central del Ecuador, 1937.
  • 16 Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, 1961.
  • 17 Quintero, 1977, 135-136.

7It should be highlighted that the material conditions of most higher education in Ecuador can be considered semi-professional at least until the 1960s. University professors were paid only for the course they gave—generally four hours per week—but not for research, preparation of classes, and other tasks. However, this payment was relatively good; in the case of one major university, in today’s value, about US$ 1,000 per month.15 Nevertheless, almost all university professors had at least one other job.16 Only in the early 1970s did the first full-time positions for sociology professors appear.17

  • 18 Prieto, 2004, 170.
  • 19 García Ortiz, 1945, 147.
  • 20 Cueva Sáenz, 1918.
  • 21 Cueva Sáenz, 1915, 42.
  • 22 Ibid., 49.
  • 23 Ibid., 47.
  • 24 Ibid., 50.

8The first professor of sociology was the lawyer and liberal politician Agustín Cueva Sáenz who had this position with interruptions until 1931.18 He defined what sociology could be primarily through his classes.19 His students would get to know a sociology based on the ideas of Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Alfred Fouillée, Manuel Sales y Ferré, Gabriel Tarde, Franklin Giddings, and Lester Ward, applied to the study of the constitution of society, including inequality and the relationship between individual and society.20 In a sociological publication, Cueva Sáenz shows how those theories can help to understand society. He analyzed the concertaje system in Ecuador, a form of debt bondage based on colonial structures applied to indigenous people, that he understands as feudal. Now, following his political work during that time, concertaje can be understood as a barrier that does not allow for society to develop as it must. The fundamental social laws, including Fouillée’s idea-forces,21 Tarde’s imitation, Spencer’s social heritage, and the natural development of the economy22 cannot guide human behavior as they should. Instead, race, actually “a product of history and the environment,”23 produces insuperable separations that make national unity impossible to achieve.24

  • 25 Prieto, 2004, 81.
  • 26 Ibid., 170.
  • 27 Roig, 1979, 70.

9Until the 1930s, most of the sociological debates happened in the Sociedad Jurídico-Literaria, a cultural club of students and professors of the Law Department of the Central University in Quito, and the journal it published. It was here where this particular Spencerian sociology formed in the constant debate of Ecuadorian reality—and acquired its tendency towards a standpoint of political liberalism.25 In the 1910s, Cueva Sáenz and Belisario Quevedo in particular developed their sociological thought in this context. Then, in the 1920s, a newer generation around Ángel Modesto Paredes and Luis Bossano took over both the debate and the Chair of sociology.26 With them other organizations also became involved, such as the national library or, since the 1940s, the national cultural center Casa de la Cultura. While Cueva Sáenz and Quevedo were part of a more progressive radical liberalism, the second generation can be identified with a “liberalism of order,”27 oriented towards the justification of the existing society.

  • 28 Quintero, 1988, 12.
  • 29 Paredes, 1988b, 180.
  • 30 Ibid., 187.
  • 31 Ibid., 188.
  • 32 Paredes, 1988a, 205.
  • 33 Ibid., 212.
  • 34 Ibid., 214.
  • 35 Ibid., 223.

10Paredes, the most productive sociological writer in Ecuador28 and professor of sociology at the Central University between 1934 and 1937, had already defined his particular take on sociology in the 1920s. For him, the sociology of Durkheim and others is superficial and unable to understand why things happen in society.29 Instead, a sociology based on Spencer gives space for intuition and can better grasp the background of the undeniable laws of society. “Sociology studies the generation of the forces that determine the facts, and the deep motives of the phenomenon, as the process of the original unique energy […] that develops.”30 Therefore, sociology studies “the initial forces of the collective activities”31 that, later on, define the laws of society. As Tarde develops this idea, the collective aspect of social interaction produces a social consciousness reinforced by imitation. It is about inter-mental activities and not coercion through social facts. Based on this, Paredes proposes a psychological sociology that includes the biological and psychological bases of sociality.32 Since social heritage has a biological foundation in his view, Paredes breaks with Cueva Sáenz and reintroduces race as definitory for sociality. “In human life, there are many and successive submersions and the first is the one race has fixed.”33 Following Tarde, social groups have distinctive psychological energies that result from the mental processes between the members and can be analyzed as such. Psychological sociology focuses on “the repetition through suggestion to imitate something acquired, and the innovation in those things acquired, also called invention.”34 However, Tarde’s approach sticks to the inter-mental and is unable to focus on the intra-mental—the properly psychological aspects of this phenomenon. For Paredes, society is to be understood as a constant psychological interaction between and within minds and their relationship to the objective social interaction. The group persists due to its shared reactions to stimuli that become socially and biologically hereditary.35 In this sense, Paredes sticks to the Spencerian levels of the psycho-physical individual, the collective psyche, and the superorganic life that, in turn, produces the psyche on the lower levels.

  • 36 Bossano, 1941, 9.
  • 37 Ibid., 26.
  • 38 Ibid., 42.

11His colleague, Luis Bossano, professor of sociology at the Central University between 1937 and the early 1960s, had a much more pragmatic take on sociological theory. His interest was not as much in social laws or the forces behind them but rather “the consequent, adequate, and technical determination of the precise norms of coexistence.”36 However, in his review of the most relevant sociological theories, he sticks to Auguste Comte and Spencer: “The objective determination of the facts and serene induction through history and analysis will constitute the only way to discover the laws of society.”37 For him, every analysis of social facts will lead to the confirmation of these laws, laws that define the development of society. Sociology is, thus, “the science of the superorganic evolution that researches the laws of the social phenomena obeying the relations of causality.”38

  • 39 Thanks to Anne-Sophie Nussbaumer Schmutz (Bibliothèque de Genève).
  • 40 Duprat, 1928, 89-90.
  • 41 Quintero, 1988, 22.
  • 42 Paredes, 1949.
  • 43 Bossano, 1942.
  • 44 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, p. 426-427.

12This early sociology was based on a clearly defined central idea—Spencer’s vision of society Spencer, expanded by related theories, like those of Tarde or Giddings. Its institutionalization lasted until the 1950s and helped to establish sociology not only as an academic discipline but as a field of knowledge that could dialogue with broader society. In other words, Spencer and his idea of primal energies that lead society to develop in a certain way corresponded quite clearly with the worldview that political liberalism in Ecuador held at that time. The essential political position of all sociologists until the 1950s and their ability to introduce sociological arguments into political debates are proof of this. However, this successful integration into the political discourse came at the price of a disconnection with international debates within sociology. For instance the book by Paredes presented earlier received international attention when Guillaume-Léonce Duprat39 wrote a destructive critique of it for the Revue Internationale de Sociologie, founded by René Worms. Duprat criticizes the lack of study of the most relevant authors, an unclear theoretical position, somewhere between Durkheim and Tarde and close to Worms and Roberty, and a non-sociological organicism.40 Paredes’s reception of Durkheim is reduced to The Rules of Sociological Method, omitting, for instance, Suicide.41 But Ecuadorian sociology of that time was not discussed in Latin American debates either, as the contributions of Paredes and Bossano in the prestigious Revista Mexicana de Sociología during the 1940s show. Following the general framework of Spencerian sociology, Paredes denies the idea of a class struggle and understands social classes from an ethnic perspective and as being related to education and morals more than economics.42 Bossano engages in a neo-Malthusian argument and highlights the need to control the population through education and eugenics.43 Neither of those texts was quoted in the debates on both topics. The lack of systematic empirical data and the rhetorical aspects of this early sociology44 were undoubtedly also important factors that led to this isolation in the academic debate.

  • 45 Goetschel, 2013, 58.

13There is not much information on how the wider society perceived sociology at that time. Two public letters published in Ana María Goetschel’s 2013 book give an unclear panorama. One letter, from 1918, demands a systematic scientific study of the situation of women in Ecuador and proceeds to argue with questionable data that a man has seven times the worth of a woman. Another one, from 1929, asks sociologists to come to communities to teach “sociological principles or theories.”45

  • 46 Viñas y Mey, 1947, 214.
  • 47 Prieto, 2004, 82.

14The organizational backing of sociology was, however, relatively strong. The Chair of Sociology at the Law Department of the Central University functioned without interruptions. From the 1940s on, other Chairs of Ecuadorian and Latin American Sociology were created.46 Moreover, in the 1910s and 1920s, Chairs of Sociology were created in the country’s other universities in Cuenca, Loja, and Guayaquil. In the cases of the Central University in Quito and Cuenca, several of the professors of sociology occupied important positions in their universities, such as dean or president. Some, like Cueva Sáenz, Bossano, or Luis Monsalve Pozo from Cuenca, also occupied positions in parliament or government. While sociology did not expand much until the 1960s, it was successfully inserted into the panorama of higher education of its time. Cultural organizations such as the Sociedad Jurídico-Literaria guaranteed a diffusion of sociology beyond the university Chairs—thinkers close to sociology and the first professional sociologists could exchange their ideas and develop a relatively coherent canon. The Sociedad also had the explicit goal of forming an intellectual elite and fostering cultural and academic debates to push for the general development of Ecuadorian society.47

  • 48 North, 1994, 361.
  • 49 García Ortiz, 1945, 149.
  • 50 Berger and Luckmann, 1990.
  • 51 Pozo, 1943.
  • 52 Vaquero Dávila, 1928.

15In North’s terms, Spencerian sociology defined a part of the “rules of the game”48 in which universities and cultural organizations could develop their activities. The type of sociology installed largely by Cueva Sáenz was viewed as the most relevant way to understand society. Other understandings could not develop in the same way, as in the case of Marxism which was primarily related to socialist organizations or individual intellectuals without institutional backing, or they produced counter-institutionalizations, as in the case of Christian sociology,49 which was connected to the Catholic Church and the conservative party, but not the university. Incentives and constraints would push most people toward the Cueva Sáenz school of sociology. As Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann point out, institutionalization produced specific ways of socialization.50 Ways that, as we will see later on, would eventually complicate an intellectual renovation on the individual and organizational level. One aspect of institutionalization is that it defines what is knowable. Spencerian sociology was perfectly able to understand Ecuador’s ethnic and regional divides and propose solutions. Other aspects could not be understood adequately. Again, Marxist theory would be an example. Between the 1920s and the 1950s, non-Marxist sociology was engaged in debates on the theories of Marx, especially in the journal of the Sociedad Jurídico-Literaria and the Annals of the Central University and the University of Cuenca. However, most of the contributions to this debate were strikingly uninformed or simply unable to grasp central elements of Marxist thought. Two clear examples for this are Monsalve Pozo51 and Jesus Vaquero Dávila52.

Towards modern sociology: the 1950s and 1960s

16The 1950s and 1960s saw a rapid transition in Ecuadorian sociology. While in the early 1950s sociology was defined by the same people who had engaged with it since the mid-1920s, the following years were marked by a generation change and the introduction of new concepts. Ecuadorian sociology tried to connect to global debates.

  • 53 Poviña is considered as one of the founders of Argentinian sociology and was influential in intern (...)
  • 54 Paredes, 1953, 15.
  • 55 Ibid., 16.
  • 56 Ibid., 26-28.
  • 57 Ibid., 31.
  • 58 Ibid., 37.
  • 59 Ibid., 38.

17The transition becomes visible when comparing some central texts. In 1953 (the complete book was published in 1954), Paredes published his reflections on The Biology of Social Classes. In it, he repeats many of his arguments from the 1920s. Starting with criticism of contemporary Latin American sociologists Gino Germani and Alfredo Poviña,53 Paredes highlights the need to study not only the material conditions of the different classes but the reasons for the formation of class consciousness that he understands as “consciousness of identical interests.”54 The development of this consciousness goes from an undifferentiated beginning to complete specialization.55 This Spencerian argument is strengthened with the idea of the consciousness of kind, developed by US sociologist Franklin Giddings about 50 years earlier. In this sense, identical interests develop with the first human communities and their process of internal differentiation and specialization.56 This process follows biological and environmental influences, turning social classes into “a spontaneous work of nature, without the intervention of human will.”57 In the same sense, the formation of social groups, primarily through professions, produces not only similar interests and values but also similar responses to stimuli.58 This is why Paredes does not accept the idea of inequality of social classes. For him, it is not about upper or lower class but rather about “a horizontal distribution, as a mosaic of realizations.”59 His preoccupation is not a class struggle but rather what he calls marginal groups—groups that are exploited and have no access to the national society.

  • 60 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 430.

18While Paredes was writing this text, a fundamental change in Ecuadorian university and sociology was underway. On the one hand, the number of university students grew 55% during the 1950s and 8,7 times between 1963 and 197360—an expansion of higher education that would change both the universities and society in Ecuador. This went hand in hand with attempts to modernize and professionalize higher education, related to the beginning of a state-led development policy in the late 1940s.

  • 61 Ibid., 439.
  • 62 Blanco, 2005, 30; Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 439; Sarzoza, 2014, 62-63.
  • 63 The second congress of Ecuadorian sociology would only happen in 1967 during a time of profound ch (...)
  • 64 Sarzoza, 2014, 89.
  • 65 Ibid., 88.
  • 66 Bossano, 1956.
  • 67 Astudillo, 1959, 257-259.
  • 68 Ibid., 275-276.

19On the other hand, in 1950, Paredes and Bossano were part of the foundation of the International Association of Sociology and its regional branch, the Latin American Association of Sociology (ALAS)61. The third conference of ALAS took place in 1955 at the Central University in Quito, its president was Luis Bossano, and Ángel Modesto Paredes and other Ecuadorian sociologists participated with presentations.62 One result was the creation of an Ecuadorian Society of Sociology that was not active for a long time. The first congress of Ecuadorian sociology followed in 1957 at the University of Cuenca63. However, those two events could not renovate Ecuadorian sociology. While the ALAS conference of 1955 was international, only few of the presenters were actually sociologists or at least familiar with the sociological debates of their time. Most of the contributions were inspired by a desire to reflect on society and not by the sociology of this time. The main exception was Gino Germani,64 who did present complex methodological reflections that were related to the debate in global sociology at that time, for instance, the work of Talcott Parsons. Paredes repeated the main arguments from his text The Biology of Social Classes, the presentation by Víctor Gabriel Garcés was a description of the social situation in the countryside, and Aurelio García reused a text he had written several years earlier that established general elements of education. In each case, there was no analytical treatment of empirical data and a rather normative take instead of clear conceptual development. Another element of the congress was the debate on how to teach sociology in Latin America that included the necessity to strengthen teaching in sociological methods65 and the need to include national and regional studies that would be integrated through the shared history of the region and the canon of sociological theories.66 The debates during the congress in Cuenca in 1957 were mainly about inequality and social classes and the first census that had been executed just a few years earlier. César Astudillo, during that time professor of sociology at the University of Cuenca, presented an interesting paper on classes and casts in Ecuador. In it, he accepts the Spencerian bases, including the theory by Ludwig Gumplowicz that classes are formed through conflict between groups. Conflict can also lead groups to form states, furthering the differentiation of social classes.67 He follows Paredes in his biological interpretation and the role of morals and consciousness but insists on the importance of economic inequality.68 At the same time, he integrates Pareto and Sorokin with their ideas of social mobility and a pyramidal structure of social classes.

20The 1950s are thus marked by attempts to modernize sociology. In this, the organizational backing came from international organizations and the state itself. However, the support from civil society was much lower: the Sociedad Jurídico-Literaria had ceased to exist, and no other organization was able or willing to take its place. Another important problem was that almost all sociologists that were active in the 1950s had been university professors since the 1920s. They were close to the retirement age and had not trained a group of qualified successors.

  • 69 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 440.
  • 70 Sarzoza, 2014, 56.

21When the first School of Political Sciences was finally created in 1961 in order to “academically train state managers,”69 it absorbed some older sociologists like Aurelio García and Luis Bossano. The rest of the professors of this first school of social sciences in the country were lawyers, journalists, and historians.70

  • 71 Bossano, 1962, 9.
  • 72 Bossano, 1962, 33.

22During the short time when the School of Political Sciences actually was functioning, only a few texts were published. A text by Luis Bossano is interesting. While he sticks to the neo-Malthusian ideas he already expressed in the 1940s,71 he reflects on the masses as a modern phenomenon related to a higher life expectancy and urbanization. The growth of these masses changes how politics works. Concretely, it makes demagogy and political propaganda—a reference to Wright Mills—much easier. However, he highlights the role of imitation in the sense of Tarde.72 This makes an intellectual elite necessary to educate the masses in order to prevent the possibly damaging effects of what later would be called populism.

  • 73 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442.
  • 74 Sarzoza, 2014, 57.
  • 75 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442-443.
  • 76 Thanks to Martha Mantilla of University of Pittsburgh.
  • 77 Nett, 1971.

23This text offers an insight into the possibilities of a modernization of sociology as an academic discipline. However, this development was cut short: in 1963, a military coup ousted the elected government and, among other things, brutally attacked and closed down several universities. A modernization of the Central University following the US-American college system was then attempted through an agreement with the University of Pittsburgh (UPitt), funded by USAID and the Interamerican Development Bank in the context of the Alliance for Progress.73 Between 1964 and 1968, the Central University tried to install a Central Department for basic training before specializing in the different, pre-existing departments of the university. However, this was met with widespread rejection, especially as the Central Department started to build up its own degree courses. UPitt supported this attempt with a series of missions where their professors stayed for several months to several years and engaged in teaching and support for the reforms. A concrete result was the creation of a School of Sociology and Anthropology that, after the end of the agreement in 1967/1968, was merged with the School of Political Sciences and gave way to the School of Sociology and Political Sciences within the Law Department.74 While Campuzano speculates about the dominant theories during the agreement with UPitt—he thinks there was a push for structural functionalism75—the teaching curricula collected by Sarzoza (2014) and the few texts actually published show a prioritization of rather descriptive ethnographic research. Moreover, the two participating sociologists from UPitt, Roger and Emily Nett76, did not engage with the research done in Ecuador.77

  • 78 Geiger, 1975, 236.

24The attempts to modernize sociology in Ecuador in the 1950s and 1960s were unsuccessful. The slow shift from a canon of the 1900s to one of the 1950s happened late and inconsequentially. While some more contemporary influences of global sociology were discussed—Germani, Charles Wright Mills, Pitirim Sorokin—they could not constitute a new canon or a metaparadigm in the sense of Roger Geiger.78 Ecuadorian sociology had lost a clear understanding of society and could not establish a new one. At the same time, both solid and visible intellectuals and influential organizations were missing. Now, sociology was something done by people called sociologists—but not necessarily identified with sociology as an intellectual enterprise. The sudden change of name of the discipline—the creation of a School of Political Sciences and not of Sociology in 1961—is an expression of this weakness. The new and modernized sociology could not institutionalize. It represented an academic interregnum without clear ideas or an impact on wider society.

Critical sociology: a Cueva Dávila-School?

  • 79 Sarzoza, 2014, 71-73.
  • 80 Ibid., 57.
  • 81 Ibid., 55.
  • 82 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442-443.
  • 83 Thanks to George Klinzing.
  • 84 The word refers to the shrunken heads produced by the Shuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
  • 85 Polo Bonilla, 2012, 42-48.
  • 86 Quintero 1976, 14; Sarzoza, 2014, 53.
  • 87 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442-443.
  • 88 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 441-442.
  • 89 Sarzoza, 2014, 53.

25In 1967, the School of Sociology and Political Sciences was created in problematic conditions: at the beginning, it had 67 students and 11 professors, only 5 with a work contract. Teaching happened in different classrooms of other departments.79 The first regular director of the school (from 1969 to 1970) was Agustín Cueva Dávila,80 son of Agustín Cueva Sáenz, who tried to give sociology a clearly Marxist direction. The rejection of structural functionalism that supposedly had been introduced during the agreement with UPitt was a significant strategy of legitimation for this Marxist turn that only by the mid-1970s would be completed.81 The active political rejection of the presence of UPitt in Quito is described differently by the different parties—only the political left describes protests,82 while the members of the academic missions83 of UPitt themselves and the authorities of the Central University do not mention any kind of rejection. However, the idea of resistance against a cultural imperialist penetration in the context of the Alliance for Progress had a deeper impact on the university and society. The new sociologists understood themselves as part of a political movement that fights imperialism and its intellectual expressions, such as structural functionalism. Before entering the universities, most of them were part of a literary movement called the tzántzicos,84 dedicated to renovating Ecuadorian literature by “reducing the heads” of the cultural elite of the 1960s,85 compromised through their collaboration with the military dictatorship. The fight against structural functionalism was understood, thus, as a fight against attempts of an old and worn-out intellectual elite to sell out Ecuadorian society. It is not a coincidence that this elite is seen—against all evidence—as dominating.86 As this is clearly a political struggle, it was unnecessary to engage with actual debates on structural functionalism—strictly on a conceptual level, it would have been helpful to connect to the readings of Wright Mills or earlier sociologists, for instance. Rather, it was about creating a shared ground and collective identity among the new sociologists by rejecting certain academic practices associated with politics more than with academics.87 Another aspect of the same collective identity is a marked anti-intellectual and anti-academic attitude. Every academic was understood foremost as a political activist and revolutionary.88 Instead of re-reading earlier sociologists, this new critical sociology attempted to connect to debates in leftist political parties and worker unions.89

  • 90 Cueva Dávila, 1969, 7.
  • 91 Cueva Dávila, 1969, 8.
  • 92 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 446.

26Unlike the earlier sociologies in Ecuador, the critical sociology since the late 1960s was marked by a high degree of reflexivity and debates on what sociology should or should not be or do. Already early on, in the introduction of an ethnographic study published by the School of Sociology and Political Sciences, Cueva Dávila sketched his ideas of how social research should be. For him, the lack of direct social research in Ecuador led to academia’s loss of contact with the reality of the country.90 Therefore, social sciences needed to be renewed based on the research done outside of the universities, which would allow connecting to the national culture and, ultimately, constitute a “real social theory of Ecuador.”91 These debates became more developed around the mid-1970s, especially with the conferences of the Schools of Sociology in Ecuador and the journal of the School of Sociology and Political Sciences of the Central University, Ciencias Sociales, both starting in 1976 and both organized by Rafael Quintero.92

  • 93 Quintero, 1976, 13; Quintero, 1977, 132.
  • 94 Quintero, 1976, 14.
  • 95 Quintero, 1977, 131.
  • 96 Quintero, 1976, 13-14.
  • 97 Ibid., 15.
  • 98 Quintero, 1977, 129.
  • 99 Quintero, 1977, 131.

27Quintero himself, during that time director of the school, outlines what the new critical sociology is supposed to do: “it is constructed as a function of the demystification and destruction of the whole pseudo-scientific bourgeois sociology, born in defense of the interests of class and domination.”93 This supposedly dominating sociology is directed to “hide the real gears of the functioning of our society.”94 Quintero detected a strong neopositivist tendency in the official bureaucratic sociology in Ecuador that did not go beyond refined quantitative methods.95 For the new sociology, the main characteristic of society was class struggle, and critical sociologists had to take sides. Therefore, it went beyond the disciplinary limits and was properly a critical social science. That did not imply rejecting scientific objectivity but rather “a political posture, result and consequence of the same knowledge of the socio-economic system to which we find ourselves, to our regret, submitted.”96 In order to do so, the university itself must be understood as a political battleground where the social sciences are pressured to become servile or marginal.97 It became, thus, a crucial task to strengthen the critical strains within the social sciences against the dominating ideas and ideologies in the bourgeois university. One way to do so was the close cooperation with political organizations of the radical left within the School of Sociology and Political Sciences.98 This clear political position made it necessary for the directors of the school to ensure that the it had not became a school of political cadres or a political party. Its goal was rather to study Marxism and to increase the critical perspective of the students.99

  • 100 Cueva Dávila, 1976, 23.
  • 101 Ibid., 25.
  • 102 Ibid., 26.
  • 103 Ibid., 28.
  • 104 Ibid., 31.
  • 105 Ibid., 32.

28Agustín Cueva Dávila, during that time already working in Mexico, had a different vision of Ecuadorian sociology. For him, the persisting contradictions of an underdeveloped society made the formation of a sociological tradition impossible.100 So, instead of the tradition developed in the present text, Cueva focuses on “our sociological tradition of the left”101 that can be found in the leftist political parties, the realist literature of the 1930s, and some individual thinkers. It was only in the 1950s and 1960s that the professionalization of social thought and sociology occurred, related to Anglo-Saxon anthropology and its imperialist foundations.102 The extra-university tradition from the left failed to professionalize. In the 1960s, it was still “more the extension of a militant activity than the expression of the professionalization of the social scientist.”103 At the same time, the left was in a crisis that made it impossible to produce an organic relationship between the young intellectuals and the social movements. This is why Marxist sociology, since the late 1960s, has been unable to overcome the divide between concrete empirical studies and a broader theoretical development.104 As the lack of theoretical reflection does not make it possible to put the envisioned reinterpretation of Ecuadorian history into practice, Cueva’s recommendation for critical sociology in Ecuador is to “learn from Marxism and consequently apply it to the concrete study of a concrete reality.”105

  • 106 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 447.
  • 107 Ibid., 449.
  • 108 Ramírez Gallegos, 1999, 275-276.
  • 109 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 446.
  • 110 Jácome, 2005, 139-140.

29This summary already shows two interesting points: a significant debate was not about how to apply Marxist theory to Ecuadorian reality but rather about who understands Marx better.106 Moreover, there was an opposition between Quintero’s understanding of sociology as an interdisciplinary Marxist academic study of reality and Cueva Dávila’s view of sociology as necessarily connected to the broader culture, especially literature.107 There also seems to have been a closure that excluded everything that was not Marxism, including central thinkers like Max Weber, who was rejected as positivistic and bourgeois.108 Possibly, this rejection of Weber and anyone who worked with Weber even led one professor at the school, Esteban del Campo, to leave the Central University and, eventually, higher education. Even other Marxist schools of thought were excluded in favor of the structuralist Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas and Louis Althusser, for instance, the Frankfurt School or the Birmingham School, and the Gramsci revival of the 1970s.109 Campuzano understands this closure towards an apparently scientific approach as being due to negotiations with a still conservative environment at the Central University. For Nicanor Jácome, the panorama was broader, including Herbert Marcuse, Lucien Goldman, and Latin American Marxist sociologists of the time.110 However, Campuzano’s position would explain why the critical sociology was unable to integrate the complex reflections on how to understand culture in Marxist terms, as Bolívar Echeverría argued, or to engage with the Annales school of history explained by Juan Maiguashca, both at the conference of 1976 and in the first issue of Ciencias Sociales in the same year.

  • 111 Cueva Dávila, 1970, 722.
  • 112 Ibid., 728.
  • 113 Del Campo, 1978, 1116.
  • 114 Quintero, 2018, 182.
  • 115 Ibid., 195.

30The 1970s were a productive time for critical sociology in Ecuador. Many texts engaged with three major debates: populism, rural sociology, and the state in Ecuador. The debate on populism started in 1970 with Cueva Dávila, who argued that the populism of five times president José María Velasco Ibarra was based, at least in his first term, 1934-1935, on the growing urban subproletariat that had recently left the countryside and had the function to overcome a potentially revolutionary situation and an ongoing crisis of the established political powers.111 In this, Velasco Ibarra used Catholicism as a political language offering personal participation in politics to his followers.112 Esteban del Campo largely agrees with Cueva Dávila, expanding on the socio-economic background. However, he highlights that the masses were not merely passive but rather captivated through the “typical authoritarianism of this form of charismatic relationship.”113 Rafael Quintero has criticized this view since his PhD thesis during the mid-1970s. In a text first published in 1980, he rejects the subjectivist aspects of del Campo114 and interprets the first success of Velasco Ibarra not as a result of a new class—that had no right to vote, as most members of the new urban subproletariat were illiterate, and constituted as such only much later115—but of the modernization of the Conservative Party.

  • 116 Note the contradiction with Campuzano who claims that Gramsci was introduced only later.
  • 117 Guerrero and Quintero, 1977.
  • 118 Guerrero, 2018.
  • 119 Velasco Abad, 1979, 162, 167.

31Rurality and its historical development was another major debate in critical sociology in Ecuador. Andrés Guerrero worked on the formation of the colonial haciendas and how they affected society. In a text co-written with Rafael Quintero, he explores how the colonial structures could integrate earlier forms of rural work and how they slowly adapted to capitalist necessities, always in relationship to the colonial state. He describes this following the Gramscian concept of the rural block as a colonial block,116 a specific articulation between social classes and modes of production defined in the long 17th century.117 Later on, this research would inform his famous concept of ventriloquism, which explores how the state during the 19th century managed its populations, primarily the indigenous population.118 In this context, the reflections on the indigenous and peasant movements that would become important in the 1990s started. One of the first critical thinkers here was Fernando Velasco. In the late 1970s, he debated contemporary research by influential rural sociologists Barrington Moore, Aníbal Quijano, and Eric Wolf in order to highlight the material (and not ethnic) background of the indigenous struggle and the centrality of the fight for an agrarian reform.119

  • 120 Aguirre, 2018.
  • 121 Moreano, 2018.
  • 122 Ibid., 112.
  • 123 Guerrero & Quintero, 1977.

32The two debates above already contain essential elements of the central debate during that time: the debate on the state in Ecuador and the social formation that was its basis. Following a particular reception of Marx, the social formation, understood as the constellation of social classes and modes of production during a particular epoch, became the central tool for understanding society. This approach was introduced by the leftist parties and reformulated in a more complex and conceptually mature way by Manuel Agustín Aguirre, socialist economist and spiritus rector of the critical sociology of the 1970s.120 The sociology professor at the Central University, Alejandro Moreano, shows in his contribution to the important book Ecuador. Pasado y Presente how this approach helps to understand the development of society and the state in Ecuador. For him, the development of the bourgeoisie in Ecuador always depends on the development of the world market. While the cacao crisis in the 1920s marked the end of the liberal modernization of the state and produced, through the economic crisis, a deep ideologic crisis of the ruling classes, only the banana boom starting in the late 1940s allowed for the introduction of a new class compromise.121 During this time, the political left was unable to organize on a mass basis and was reduced to “the grand verbal reserve”122 of the bourgeoisie. The text quoted above by Guerrero and Quintero highlights the importance of the colonial state in creating coherence among the diverse modes of production that coexist in a complex system of, at times, contradicting forms of power. The colonial state and the diversity of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production condition each other—and this mutual conditioning could explain the problems that formed in the 19th century.123

  • 124 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 446-449.
  • 125 Ramírez Gallegos, 1999, 276-277.
  • 126 Jácome, 2005; Ramírez Gallegos, 1999, 285.
  • 127 Ramírez Gallegos, 1999.

33This model of sociology entered a crisis in the 1980s. At first, due to a lack of funding in the public universities—for instance, Ciencias Sociales could not be published between 1984 and the 1990s124—, then, because of the ideological crisis of critical sociology caused by the end of the Soviet Union.125 Theoretical and conceptual reorientation was one result. Suddenly, Jürgen Habermas was discovered as a Marxist thinker, and even suspiciously bourgeois sociologists like Parsons or Niklas Luhmann were re-read. Sociology as an academic discipline opened up to the needs of the state and NGOs, especially in relation to a boom of development studies.126 However, the modernization and globalization of Ecuadorian sociology in the 1990s were still incomplete.127 Until the years after 2010, the earlier institutionalization could only work through individual efforts and not as a general school of thought. Its definite end was, again, related to a generational change: due to a reform of the law of higher education, most main actors had to retire by 2010.

  • 128 Ansaldi, 2015, 29.
  • 129 Beigel, 2016, 14.

34The institutionalization of critical Marxist sociology in Ecuador was quite effective. While no major organizations were backing this attempt—instead, it was supported by a mosaic of different leftist parties and unions—the School of Sociology and Political Sciences at the Central University of Ecuador developed a considerable strength, despite a fundamental lack of resources. This was, in part, related to the wide public and academic visibility of Agustín Cueva Dávila and then a much larger group around Rafael Quintero and Alejandro Moreano. At the same time, the late 1960s and 1970s were marked by the hegemony of Marxism in Latin American social sciences128 that, in the Ecuadorian case, led to the temporary immigration of such important thinkers as Arturo Andrés Roig or René Zavaleta. During that time, academic production focused on what Fernanda Beigel calls local circuits of diffusion that tend to be dominated by endogamic criteria and disconnected from global debates.129

35Marxism was installed as a metaparadigm, excluding non-Marxist and even some Marxist approaches, leading to strong connections to the political left and academic isolation, at least in the debates outside Latin America. The formation of a certain way of understanding social reality—in relation to social classes, modes of production, and material contradictions—made it possible to approach to some aspects but impeded a better grasp of other aspects. For instance, the existence of social classes, capitalism, or the state in the modern sense during the colonial period—as Guerrero and Quintero claim—is still heavily debated today. The centrality of class-related aspects of the rural movements highlighted by Velasco was contradicted already when he wrote his text—in the 1970s and 1980s, the indigenous movement moved towards a marked ethnic and identitarian understanding of their reality.

36Sociology in Ecuador has been institutionalized three times. The first time, the basis of an outdated sociology meant international isolation—but important points of contact on the national level, especially within political liberalism. The second time was cut short by political interferences. It promised a modernization on Spencerian grounds established earlier and struggled with an imminent generational change. The third time was quite successful and very productive. During this period, Ecuadorian critical sociology could engage in continental debates and define both canon and research questions for decades inside Ecuador.

  • 130 Ansaldi, 2015, 26.

37Revising the history of institutionalizations, we can go beyond the somewhat stereotypical talk about the constitution and development of Latin American sociologies in and through crises.130 Of course, there is a permanent crisis, and there are again and again direct influences from political or economic actors in academic sociologies. However, when they are not destructive interventions—the 1960s would be an example—the crises do not necessarily reduce the ability of the organizations and individual actors to act and continuously develop the institution of sociology. It is rather about the concrete form of institutionalization itself: it is here where a problematic canon can exclude possibilities of dialogue, where a certain view of society invisibilizes important aspects of reality, or where the ability to innovate can be reduced.

  • 131 Maia, 2014, 1106.
  • 132 Alatas, 1993, 307.
  • 133 Alatas, 2003, 603.
  • 134 Alatas, 1993, 312.
  • 135 Alatas, 1993, 329.

38In general, we cannot find a blind import of Northern theories131 or an uncritical captive mind132 amongst Ecuadorian sociologists. Some sociologists could creatively adapt global theories to local realities in each of the three epochs described. There was no simple academic dependency that would define what could be researched and how133—this type of reduction would happen through the concrete forms of institutionalization. We can find a series of moments of successful indigenization. However, due to different reasons, they could not successfully institutionalize. The creative understanding Cueva Sáenz made of Spencer to fight against the semi-feudal structures in the country would be one example, and the avant-la-lettre critique of populism in mass society by Bossano another one. They are on all four levels—metatheoretical, theoretical, empirical, and applied—examples of indigenous social science.134 The problem for them was not the “exclusion of discourses”135 but rather the implications of the concrete form of institutionalization in each case. While Cueva Sáenz created a school of thought, his students and followers stuck to the classics he introduced—and ignored his concrete arguments as in the case of Paredes, who reintroduced a racism that Cueva Sáenz explicitly rejected. Bossano, it seems, had the bad luck to write what he wrote at the wrong time. Just a few years later, he and all other sociologists of his generation were forgotten by a new generation of critical sociologists that wanted to reinvent the wheel.

  • 136 Dufoix & Macé, 2019, 99.
  • 137 Ibid., 98.
  • 138 Ibid., 103-104.
  • 139 Blois, 2015.
  • 140 Dufoix et Macé, 2019, 119-120.

39Ecuadorian sociology was based on complex importations defined by broader social contexts and an active role of the local sociologists.136 As the creative adaptations of positivist sociology and Marxism as a sociological paradigm show, there is not simply a single origin or a uniform way of diffusion.137 One effect of this was that the boom of US American sociology in the 1950s and 1960s138 did not reach Ecuador in the same way as it did in Argentina or Mexico.139 Therefore, it would be more helpful to focus on the diverse developments of sociology in different regions on a comparative level, in the sense of a non-hegemonic sociology.140 That would also make it possible to go beyond what Ecuadorian sociology seems to be today, to accept it as a product of a contradictory historical development, and maybe even to reintroduce the debates on some classics, such as Tarde’s sixty years ago, in the ongoing re-discovery of those classics.

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Notes

1 North, 1994, 359-360.

2 Berger and Luckmann, 1990.

3 North, 1994, 361.

4 Ibid., 364.

5 Berger and Luckmann, 1990, 82-84.

6 Ibid., 83.

7 Blois, 2015, 638-639.

8 Ibid., 640.

9 Geiger, 1975, 237.

10 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 419.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 405. All translations by the author.

13 Ibid., 413.

14 Ansaldi, 2015, 16-17; Blanco, 2005, 25; Roig, 1979.

15 Universidad Central del Ecuador, 1937.

16 Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, 1961.

17 Quintero, 1977, 135-136.

18 Prieto, 2004, 170.

19 García Ortiz, 1945, 147.

20 Cueva Sáenz, 1918.

21 Cueva Sáenz, 1915, 42.

22 Ibid., 49.

23 Ibid., 47.

24 Ibid., 50.

25 Prieto, 2004, 81.

26 Ibid., 170.

27 Roig, 1979, 70.

28 Quintero, 1988, 12.

29 Paredes, 1988b, 180.

30 Ibid., 187.

31 Ibid., 188.

32 Paredes, 1988a, 205.

33 Ibid., 212.

34 Ibid., 214.

35 Ibid., 223.

36 Bossano, 1941, 9.

37 Ibid., 26.

38 Ibid., 42.

39 Thanks to Anne-Sophie Nussbaumer Schmutz (Bibliothèque de Genève).

40 Duprat, 1928, 89-90.

41 Quintero, 1988, 22.

42 Paredes, 1949.

43 Bossano, 1942.

44 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, p. 426-427.

45 Goetschel, 2013, 58.

46 Viñas y Mey, 1947, 214.

47 Prieto, 2004, 82.

48 North, 1994, 361.

49 García Ortiz, 1945, 149.

50 Berger and Luckmann, 1990.

51 Pozo, 1943.

52 Vaquero Dávila, 1928.

53 Poviña is considered as one of the founders of Argentinian sociology and was influential in international organizations like the International Institute of Sociology or the Latin American Association of Sociology. His rather philosophical take on society was replaced in the late 1950s by the empirical sociology of Germani, close to structural functionalism (Blois, 2015).

54 Paredes, 1953, 15.

55 Ibid., 16.

56 Ibid., 26-28.

57 Ibid., 31.

58 Ibid., 37.

59 Ibid., 38.

60 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 430.

61 Ibid., 439.

62 Blanco, 2005, 30; Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 439; Sarzoza, 2014, 62-63.

63 The second congress of Ecuadorian sociology would only happen in 1967 during a time of profound change of sociology in the country.

64 Sarzoza, 2014, 89.

65 Ibid., 88.

66 Bossano, 1956.

67 Astudillo, 1959, 257-259.

68 Ibid., 275-276.

69 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 440.

70 Sarzoza, 2014, 56.

71 Bossano, 1962, 9.

72 Bossano, 1962, 33.

73 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442.

74 Sarzoza, 2014, 57.

75 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442-443.

76 Thanks to Martha Mantilla of University of Pittsburgh.

77 Nett, 1971.

78 Geiger, 1975, 236.

79 Sarzoza, 2014, 71-73.

80 Ibid., 57.

81 Ibid., 55.

82 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442-443.

83 Thanks to George Klinzing.

84 The word refers to the shrunken heads produced by the Shuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

85 Polo Bonilla, 2012, 42-48.

86 Quintero 1976, 14; Sarzoza, 2014, 53.

87 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 442-443.

88 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 441-442.

89 Sarzoza, 2014, 53.

90 Cueva Dávila, 1969, 7.

91 Cueva Dávila, 1969, 8.

92 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 446.

93 Quintero, 1976, 13; Quintero, 1977, 132.

94 Quintero, 1976, 14.

95 Quintero, 1977, 131.

96 Quintero, 1976, 13-14.

97 Ibid., 15.

98 Quintero, 1977, 129.

99 Quintero, 1977, 131.

100 Cueva Dávila, 1976, 23.

101 Ibid., 25.

102 Ibid., 26.

103 Ibid., 28.

104 Ibid., 31.

105 Ibid., 32.

106 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 447.

107 Ibid., 449.

108 Ramírez Gallegos, 1999, 275-276.

109 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 446.

110 Jácome, 2005, 139-140.

111 Cueva Dávila, 1970, 722.

112 Ibid., 728.

113 Del Campo, 1978, 1116.

114 Quintero, 2018, 182.

115 Ibid., 195.

116 Note the contradiction with Campuzano who claims that Gramsci was introduced only later.

117 Guerrero and Quintero, 1977.

118 Guerrero, 2018.

119 Velasco Abad, 1979, 162, 167.

120 Aguirre, 2018.

121 Moreano, 2018.

122 Ibid., 112.

123 Guerrero & Quintero, 1977.

124 Campuzano Arteta, 2005, 446-449.

125 Ramírez Gallegos, 1999, 276-277.

126 Jácome, 2005; Ramírez Gallegos, 1999, 285.

127 Ramírez Gallegos, 1999.

128 Ansaldi, 2015, 29.

129 Beigel, 2016, 14.

130 Ansaldi, 2015, 26.

131 Maia, 2014, 1106.

132 Alatas, 1993, 307.

133 Alatas, 2003, 603.

134 Alatas, 1993, 312.

135 Alatas, 1993, 329.

136 Dufoix & Macé, 2019, 99.

137 Ibid., 98.

138 Ibid., 103-104.

139 Blois, 2015.

140 Dufoix et Macé, 2019, 119-120.

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Philipp Altmann, « Ecuadorian Sociology or the Institutionalization of a Strange Discipline »Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, 42 | 2023, 123-144.

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Philipp Altmann, « Ecuadorian Sociology or the Institutionalization of a Strange Discipline »Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines [En ligne], 42 | 2023, mis en ligne le 07 juin 2023, consulté le 15 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/8189 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.8189

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