Imagining Latin American Social Science from the Global South: Orlando Fals Borda and Participatory Action Research

Headnote

1970s Latin America was a hotbed of theoretical and methodological innovation in the social sciences and the arts, developing novel approaches to studying social reality to support social movements. This article uses Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda's field notes and his four-volume work Historia doble de la Costa to analyze how he and his colleagues, working in collaboration with the Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos on the Caribbean coast, developed the methodology of participatory action research, which attempted to erase the distinction between researchers and researched, and to rewrite the history of the peasantry from below using novel formats.

Durante la década de los setentas América Latina se convirtió en un semillero de innovación teórica y metodológica en las ciencias sociales y las artes, desarrollando diversos enfoques para el estudio de la realidad social en apoyo a los movimientos sociales de la época. Este artículo utiliza las notas de campo del sociólogo colombiano Orlando Fals Borda y su proyecto orgánico de cuatro volúmenes Historia doble de la Costa para analizar cómo él y sus colegas, trabajando en colaboración con la Asociación Nacional de Usuarios Campesinos en la costa del Caribe, desarrollaron la metodología de Investigación Acción Participativa (IAP), cuyo objetivo era borrar la distinción entre investigadores e investigados y reescribir la historia del campesinado desde abajo utilizando formatos novedosos y controversiales.

In 1972 Causa popular, ciencia popular (Bonilla et al. 1972) appeared on the shelves of Colombian bookstores. A small volume that fits neatly into your pocket, it looks like many of the paperbacks published by the Colombian left in the period. On its cover is a photo of an old man reading a sheaf of papers: he is Abel Tique, from Ortega, Tolima, which indigenous leader Manuel Quintín Lame had reconstituted as a self-governing landholding institution that ensured collective land rights for Native peoples. Lame's 1939 treatise on indigenous rights was published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (henceforth, La Rosca), the same organization that brought out Causa popular (Lame 1971 [1939]). The four authors of the slim volume are listed on the cover in alphabetical order: journalist/anthropologist Víctor Daniel Bonilla, sociologists Gonzalo Castillo and Orlando Fals Borda, and economist Augusto Libreros.

La Rosca-which means "in-group" in Colombian Spanish and a...