The aim of this paper is to analyze a selection of arguments used by the Argentine Supreme Court to reduce the sentence of individuals convicted of crimes against humanity. The focus will be primarily centered on “Muiña´s case”, in which a lenient outdated ruling was made. The questions that this work will try to answer revolve around the court´s merit in issuing this lenient ruling to Muiña´s case and its justification. First, Muiña´s case is analyzed in depth. Then, a (...) critical analysis about the ruling and a decision concerning the existence of a true justification will be developed. Finally, we will discuss the appropriateness of the Court’s decision in Muiña´s case as opposed to the decision made in “Batalla´s case”, in which a less beneficial law was applied retroactively. (shrink)

Florentino Ameghino was probably the most important naturalist in nineteenth-century Argentina, being a self-taught palaeontologist, whose theories rivalled the most advanced of the time in Europe and the United States. On top of his vast palaeontological discoveries, Ameghino’s fame came from his theory of the origin of the human species in the Argentine Pampas, published in 1880. The idea of Ameghino’s followers was to create a place of secular pilgrimage for the new Argentine nation to honour their own (...) secular hero or saint, as Ingenieros had called him. A few accusations by the local Catholic Church were posed with Ameghino’s followers denying them. The education of the nation was one of the greatest concerns that Catholics had, and some saw in the positivist liberal position a rejection of the education on the virtues required for the building of a nationally educated society in Argentina for the twentieth century. -/- . (shrink)

In the history of relations between the Argentinean government and the Holy See, two ideas are permanently intertwined: signing the Concordat and defending national patronage. The changes that occurred in the 1960s indicated that exercising the right of patronage, based on the principles outlined in the Constitution, was impossible, and the peaceful establishment of the principles of bilateral relations could only be indicated through an international agreement. The Concordat signed by Argentina in 1966 removed the national patronage, but the changes (...) to the content of the Constitution were introduced only in 1994. The aim of the study is to show the concordat agreement concluded in 1966 by Argentina with the Holy See as an example of an international agreement. The main focus is the presentation of concordat standards for the institution of patronage. Due to the subject and purpose of the study, the work uses methods typical of social sciences in the legal science discipline. The dogmatic-legal method is the basis for consideration of the Concordat as a source of Argentine law, and as an auxiliary method, the historical-legal method was used to show the historical background of the presented issue. (shrink)

This volume is a welcome, exciting, and unusually informative addition to what now seems a definite trend toward introducing Latin-American philosophers to the English-reading world. The preface contains a brief review of milestones in this development, which the interested reader will find handy as reference. The principal features common to post-revolutionary Latin-American intellectual history are very present in Lipp's examination of Argentine thought; namely, the dedication to some principle of activism, the search for an authentic national character, a national (...) ethos fashioned in the crucible of European traditions and the specific conditions confronting the new nations, the linkage of philosophy to the economic, social, and political conditions of the time and the rejection of abstract speculative philosophy as inconsistent with, and alien to, the needs of the struggling young societies. Lipp's chosen area is the study of twentieth-century Argentine intellectual development as seen through the prewar period of positivism, the postwar reaction against positivism, and the contemporary period. Each period is studied by examining the work of an outstanding Argentine philosopher: positivism and naturalism through Jose Ingenieros, the ethics of human freedom and personalism through Alejandro Korn, and transcendentalist anthropology through the works of Francisco Romero. There is something fresh and appealing in the philosophical expressions of these youthful, undeveloped, or under-developed societies which should find responsive echoes among student youth in this country. Ingenieros' book, The Mediocre Man, inspired generations of Latin-American students to revolt and reform the universities and their respective societies. Korn's strongly ethical views led him to sympathize openly with student revolt and to oppose the divorcing of philosophy from historic reality. Romero put his life where his philosophy was and went to jail for his opposition to Peron. Romero's dream of a humanized transformation of society and Korn's view of man as a "rebellious animal" who strives for human freedom through rebellion and creativity are but two sparks of the book's vitality that recommend it to the English-speaking reader.--H. B. (shrink)

This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman, the latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema. Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the dis- appeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman ‘countersigns’ the genre, proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship. By presenting the existentialist drama of (...) an upper-class woman involved in a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engagement with Judith Butler’s account of mourning, this article argues that the film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel’s film may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are in a sense ‘ungrievable’. By proposing an entanglement of temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel’s film each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an ethical key to future possibilities. (shrink)

Approaches to the “Indian Issue” which fail to go beyond the mere charting of evolutions in legal norms or the articulation between neoliberalism and multiculturalism do not allow us to take the full measure of indigenous policies, in terms of the goal set for the enlargement of the spaces for public interpellation and the reconfiguration of ideas and practices pertaining to citizenship. Starting from the Argentine experience, the aim of this article is to examine the question of the sedimentation (...) of neoliberal procedures, in a context marked by the will to re-appropriate national and popular sovereignty over territories and resources. The Indian question thus poses both the problem of the model of development that has been adopted and the question of the characterizing of the pleb (the category of the popular, or of those most underprivileged) as a part of the populus, that is, as part of the people of the nation, and therefore of the demos, understood as the space open to those who can legitimately give form and content to populus and who can put words on the world. (shrink)

Constructivist research in Science and Technology Studies is committed to revealing the heterogeneity of technological change and the fluid boundaries between the elements involved. Its major theories, the Social Construction of Technology and Actor Network Theory, have however both been criticized for limiting themselves to the micro-level of cases, impeding a structural analysis of technological systems. This article seeks to bridge any such divides. We research the recent changes in the viticulture of Mendoza, Argentina, which underwent radical changes over the (...) past decades: once governed by low-cost yield maximization, grape production now revolves around “quality.” To show how the particular quality definition developed, we depart from a social-constructivist framework, following the sociotechnical shaping of problem-solution relationships across the wine production system. To include relevant social groups from different settings around the world, we gradually incorporate the ANT concepts of obligatory passage points, enrollment, convergence, delegation, and codes into the analysis. Combined into the concept of “sociotechnical alliance,” our analysis follows the dual process of creating agreement while establishing heterogeneous practices across settings at different levels. It shows that functioning involves alliance building and highlights the hybridity and continuous dynamics of systems at large. (shrink)

This analysis seeks to contribute to the understanding of the development of fascism by studying the ideological left-to-right evolution of an intellectual from a peripheral country. I suggest that this intellectual evolution proves the universality of the ideological developments that preceded fascism, and sheds new light on the ideological interaction between fascism as a European political culture and local nationalist uprisings against liberal democracy and dependence on foreign financial power.

Resumen: El presente trabajo intenta analizar los elementos críticos a la base de aquella suerte de prescripción que Edward Said formulara a los intelectuales bajo la célebre consigna de “decir las verdades al poder”, esto es, de interpelar públicamente al poder -político, económico, religioso, militar- frente a toda evidencia de injusticia, inconsistencia o turbia manipulación en su operar. En tanto tal, y a partir de nuestra lectura de Said, delimitamos cinco dilemas que el intelectual ha de resolver, en tanto requisitos (...) para decir las verdades al poder: orientación intramundana versus extramundana, rol profético versus sacerdotal, libertad universalista versus organicidad, racionalidad sustantiva versus instrumental y arrojo versus temor. Se comentan las implicaciones de estos dilemas a la luz de los desafíos y oportunidades que las sociedades contemporáneas -en particular, las latinoamericanas- presentan para el rol del intelectual.: This work analyzes the critical foundations of that quasi-rule posed by Edward Said to intellectuals through the famous motto “speaking truth to power”, that is, of publicly interpellating to power -political, economic, religious, military- whenever its exercise may involve injustice, inconsistency or underhanded manipulation. So, according to our interpretation of Said’s work, we identify five dilemmas the intellectual should resolve in order to be able to speak truth to power: a worldliness orientation versus an otherworldliness one, a prophetic role versus a priestly one, universalist freedom versus organic compromise, a substantive rationality versus an instrumental one, and courage versus fear. Involvements of these dilemmas are discussed according to the challenges and opportunities posed by current societies -in particular, the Latin American ones- to the intellectual’s role. (shrink)

Les dictatures militaires latino-américaines des années 1960 à 1980 ont suscité des résistances civiles au nom du droit à la vie et, plus généralement, des droits de l’homme. Les femmes ont été à l’avant-garde de ces combats en Argentine et en Bolivie. Après avoir brièvement présenté ces deux résistances non-violentes, on avancera ici quelques hypothèses relatives à l’engagement collectif de ces femmes en tant que mères et à la réussite de leur entreprise de mobilisation. On discutera notamment les présentations (...) qui font exclusivement reposer la protestation collective sur des caractéristiques liées au genre, en distinguant le discours performatif qui l’accompagne de l’explication de celle-ci. (shrink)

Cet article traite d’un mythe cosmogonique où un dragon mapuche, le Kai Kai Filu, appartenant à la Patagonie argentine et chilienne, est signalé comme le responsable du déluge, de la montée des eaux et de la formation des golfes, îles et autres accidents géographiques. Un suivi du mythe montre qu’avec les frontières dressées entre ces deux pays, les populations originaires se sont fragmentées ainsi que leurs récits millénaires. Le résultat est que l’Argentine présente un mythe segmenté, plus proche (...) des mythes occidentaux et le sud du Chili nous raconte une version plus ancienne, faisant basculer le sens de la figure du dragon et sa forme dans un glissement symbolique significatif. Ce mythe vit de manière permanente et apparaît dans de nombreuses narrations locales, narrations qui vont témoigner de la vitalité du mythe : il change et se renouvelle selon les mouvements de la terre et les tsunamis qui se succèdent dans cette région du Sud. Les versions s’enrichissent quand les changements des structures économiques bouleversent la vie des habitants et que de nouveaux éléments apparaissent dans les contes populaires, revigorisant le mythe originel. (shrink)

Cet article est un premier essai d’étude historique sur les relations de genre dans les sociétés indigènes du Chaco, en Amérique du Sud. Le traitement de cette question nécessitant de travailler à partir de contextes sociaux, temporels et spatiaux concrets, nous avons situé l’analyse dans un secteur de la « frontière » chaquéenne placé sous la juridiction argentine, à des moments immédiatement antérieurs et postérieurs à la campagne militaire engagée pour soumettre les populations indigènes entre 1884 et 1911. Nous (...) travaillons ainsi depuis un front de colonisation interne pour repérer les changements que cette situation a provoqués sur les relations, les rôles sociaux et les identités des hommes et des femmes autochtones. L’analyse repose sur des sources issues de deux moments différents du processus de colonisation : le moment initial, à partir des missions franciscaines établies sur les bords du fleuve Bermejo pour évangéliser les Matacos ; puis l’apogée du processus, lorsque les Matacos furent incorporés comme brassiers salariés dans les raffineries sucrières. (shrink)

Grounding refers to expressions that establish a connection between the ground and the content evoked by a nominal or finite clause. In this paper we report on two grammatical implementations of nominal grounding in Argentine Sign Language: pointing and placing. For pointing constructions, we also examine distal-proximal pointing and directive force. We introduce the concept of placing, in which a sign is produced at a specific meaningful location in space. Two types of placing are discussed: Placing-for-Creating, in which a (...) new meaningful location is created, and Placing-by-Recruiting, which recruits an existing meaningful location. We suggest that our analysis of pointing and placing provides an account of nominal grounding unified by general cognitive principles as described within the theory of Cognitive Grammar. Pointing is known to occur in all signed languages studied to date. Although previously undocumented, we suggest that placing is also common to many, perhaps all, signed languages. (shrink)

El presente trabajo busca acercarse al problema del exilio como categoría jurídico-política. Con esta finalidad, se hace un recorrido sobre la noción misma de exilio en tanto pena desde sus orígenes en el derecho romano arcaico. Interesa de modo particular ver el lugar que esta institución punitiva ha tenido en la política latinoamericana, tanto en el momento de su constitución política bajo la forma de Estado-nación, como en las últimas dictaduras militares de la región. En vistas a desarrollar un análisis (...) filosófico situado, se revisará el modo en que se instituyó jurídicamente el exilio durante los últimos periodos dictatoriales, especialmente en el caso de Argentina y Chile. (shrink)

En Argentine, pays où le féminisme connaît depuis la moitié des années 2010 un essor historique, et où le football constitue un socle essentiel de l’identité nationale, le football féminin devient professionnel en mars 2019. Les revendications d’ordre sportif, portées par la joueuse Macarena Sánchez, se voient inscrites dans un discours féministe – une convergence inédite dans ce pays latino-américains – et les inégalités de genre dans le monde du football peuvent alors être appréhendées de façon structurelle. Le féminisme (...) s’empare, sur un plan pratique et théorique, d’une sphère traditionnellement réservée aux hommes : sous quel prisme peut-il l’interroger? Comment peut-il contribuer à la déconstruire? Qu’est-ce que, finalement, la pratique sportive de haut niveau peut donner à penser, à son tour, au féminisme? (shrink)

Le chineo est une coutume héritée de l’époque coloniale selon laquelle un homme criollo s’introduit dans les communautés indigènes pour avoir des relations sexuelles avec leurs femmes. Parfois librement consenties, ces unions sont toutefois souvent réalisées avec violence. Les plaintes pour viols commencent à être davantage entendues par la justice argentine. L’analyse d’un procès tenu en 2007 souligne le rôle joué par des travaux anthropologiques et historiques dans l’argumentaire de l’un des juges.

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the Argentine Pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. The recognition of these women’s agency through care – care of their children, global care, and green care – offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and Eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. The first of these types of care empowers women (...) to improve the nutrition of their children. It also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. The second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district’s countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Mahmood, 2001; Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving – by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations – fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality. (shrink)

Argentine tango has been investigated by scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds. A broad range of empirical methods has been used in this research. But little attention has been paid to the artefacts which participate in the practice of Argentine tango. Following the programmatic claims of the ‘practical turn’ in the social sciences and in cultural studies, practices are always linked with the materiality of the practising bodies and of the artefacts participating in practices. Thus materiality is indispensable for (...) the analysis of any practice. How materiality can be included into the generating of data and the analysis is little discussed in practice theories. High heels in Argentine tango are the example to demonstrate the necessary application of various qualitative research instruments to investigate the role of artefacts in practice. High heeled female dancing shoes as used in Argentine tango are analysed with respect to their gendered performative and symbolic impact. (shrink)

We propose a theatrical Aesthetics of liberation understood as one that articulates imaginary, visual, or textual bridges between the opening to the context-world and its impact on subjectivity and that gives rise to a scenic production favorable to the conservation and improvement of life that raises opposition or rejection of those contexts that are not conducive to it. We will observe the productions of the theatrical scene in three moments of the recent Argentine past to visualize both the resistance (...) and denunciation of the decrease or disappearance of rights and the rejection of the necessary control of bodies and actions to impose the liberal/neoliberal model. We will look into scenes produced during the Argentine Revolution, stagings of the end of the 20th century responding to the exacerbation of neoliberalism, and finally, those produced during the last neoliberal restoration. (shrink)

The article advances, from the point of view of the philosophy of language and ethics, a critical refl ection on the political phenomenon of Argentine Peronism. It claims that each of the historical periods in this movement is marked by a different kind of discourse and enunciation: in the period of the rise to power, the excess of significations; in the period of exile, the absence of significations; and in the period of decay, a disappointment of signifi cations. The (...) author proposes, in the light of Paul Grice’s theory of conversation, that these linguistic types of discourse have a meta-pragmatic character, since they go beyond the rationalist and moralist framework of this theory and involve affective and rhetoric elements that do not fi t the standard of “deviation from maxims”. The article contends that Veron’s and Sigal’s analysis of discourse is more appropriate than the pragmatic approach to understand complex ethical and linguistic phenomena such as Peronism. Key words: signification, Peronism, ethics, pragmatics, Grice. (shrink)

This article examines the crisis of sovereignty currently sweeping South America. Argentina’s instability is compared to Brazil’s apparent and precarious stability. As the monetary crisis grinds the Argentine economy and society, Brazil is shaken by an undeclared civil war. The confidence lacking in the Argentine currency takes the form of an absence of society in Brazil, resulting in an inequality, which traverses the different phases of the country’s development. We analyse here the specificity of the form of the (...) developmentalist state, which develops itself out of a syncretism of the colonial tradition and corporatist modernism; and finally the theoretical and political ambiguities of the left, vis-à-vis a system of privilege which permits the perpetuation of an iniquitous social system. (shrink)

While constitutionalism is generally reduced to the idea of limited government, little has been said to its contribution to the juridification of the social sphere. The article shows the significance of constitutionalism for the institutionalization of modern civil societies. Modern civil societies, it is argued, can only flourish in a form of modern state that has undergone a process of internal differentiation in the direction of a separation of powers. Through the analysis of the process of self‐constitution of Argentine (...) civil society, I show how the erosion of the constitutional components of the state by populist democratizing movements resulted in the disintegration of civil society. (shrink)

This article presents a critical discursive analysis around the concept of menstrual health in a series of texts published in book format and in social networks in the last five years (2019-2023) by different activists and menstrual educators in Argentina. In a reading itinerary that goes from the singular to the collective, I identify the configuration of an experiential episteme that redefines the menstruating body as informational and multidimensional, which enables that, in addition to a physiological dimension, its role in (...) different social, political, cultural, environmental and economic contexts is vindicated. I place these examples in the context of the neoliberal precariousness that installs the therapeutic-managerial culture as a moral imperative, while at the same time it challenges certain subjectivities with relative privilege —white, urban, trained and educated women— to dispute and strain meanings. (shrink)

Frente a la incapacidad de cumplir con las funciones delegadas al poder político, la necesidad de conservación del poder y de legitimación genera respuestas simbólicas a demandas ficticias generadas e impulsadas por actores globales o locales llamadas "campañas contra la inseguridad", "campañas contra el terrorismo", etc. En consecuencia los Estados usan las leyes penales como propaganda electoral. Sin embargo como ha señalado Hassemer "quien pone en relación al ordenamiento penal con elementos simbólicos, puede crear la sospecha de que no toma (...) en cuenta al dureza muy real y nada simbólica de las vivencias de quien se ve sometido a persecución penal, detenido, procesado, acusado, condenado, encerrado". (shrink)

ArgumentThe spread of Darwinian ideas by the late nineteenth century in Argentina transformed the intellectual elites' notion of progress and civilization. While before Darwin, union, harmony, and assimilation were the ideas most commonly associated with the civilizatory process; variation, struggle, and divergence dominated the post-Darwin discussion. More importantly, unlike in Europe, in Argentina the theory not only triggered interest in the process of speciation, but also its relationship with extinction. Extinction became the benchmark of progress, and the sign of success (...) for the nation. If the country was civilizing itself, the “natural” elimination of inferior individuals, unfit for the struggle for existence, had to be proved and displayed. The origin of modernity was here associated with the existence of evolutionary waste that revealed the work of natural selection on behalf of national improvement. (shrink)