Preliminary Programme

This project analyzes a social and moral reform movement of global scale that considered alcoholism as a threat to humanity at large. The movement within the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile and Uruguay) evolved on the background of various national modernizing projects in post-colonial Latin America. It brought together most diverse groups from evangelical Temperance missionaries to anarchists. The changing meaning of drunkenness from sin to disease was part of the worldwide expansion of liberal models of society where the individual was supposed to take more self-responsibility. Experts working in institutions formed after models of the “global north” analyzed and penetrated societies and developed “prescriptions” for social illnesses such as alcoholism, gambling or venereal diseases. Knowledge on alcoholism as a medical disease was demanded through transnational networks and adapted in the local context in order to establish bourgeoisie moral values as part of a national civilizing mission.
This paper will focus on actors – mainly medical experts - who exchanged on various levels of interaction. Within transnational networks, they shared knowledge on alcoholism as medical disease that they adapted into their own institutional environment and local context. Curricula at state schools and educational programs to mothers show how Temperance advocates were successfully bringing a medical definition of alcoholism into discussions about the child health and education. All around the world, medical experts hold social capital to the success of this global movement, who’s legacy cannot only be measured in success or failing of Prohibition.
By looking at strategies of dissemination and adaptation of knowledge about alcoholism as a “disease of the will” (Mariana Valverde), I seek to provide a new perspective on this movement and its impact on societies of the Southern Cone. Besides control regimes on alcohol consumption, there was a great deal of measures implemented by activist of all different currents represented in the movement: theater, literature and physical education were all techniques of disciplining and practices of subjectivation. Chronic alcoholics that were considered incurable were locked away in mental asylums and became objects of study to medical experts. Many of them considered their role in society not only in practicing jobs, but to reform the body nation as a whole, through state institutions and civil society activism.
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This article derives from my current PhD research project concerning the strategies and practices of power by President Augusto B. Leguia in Peru from 1900 to 1930. The purpose of my research is to reconsider the specificity of Leguia’s government by situating him into the perspective of the long period of Peruvian politics and into the contemporary challenges of the post World War I in Latin America, a period that remains widely neglected by Peruvian historiography. The history of Peruvian nation-state building can thus be observed through the prism of the tight relation between the State and its planning policies. The territorial and geographical framework I propose implies a new way of analyzing the concrete mechanisms of power relations and the nature of the Leguiist State.
This framework being considered, my article attempts to highlight the “territorialization” of the political process by analyzing the development of an embryonic policy of tourism in Peru at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, the production of practices and knowledge about tourism and more generally about planning policies reveals the insertion of Peru into intellectual and human forms of circulations. The history of the Peruvian Nation-State formation under Leguiism is studied through the symbolic representation of geographic space on the one hand, and through the expansion of the State apparatus and infrastructure projects on the other. From the local to the global, this “game” of geographical levels contributes to conveniently place the institutional history of the Peruvian State at the core of the transnational dynamics of this time. (Show less)

The cost of living index elaborated in 1918 by Alejandro E. Bunge was the first Argentine indicator of that sort, published in the Review of Argentine Economics (Revista de Economía Argentina, REA). The one developed in 1933 by the National Labour Department (Departamento Nacional de Trabajo, DNT) was the first one to be elaborated on the basis of a household budget survey. Both have substantial methodological failures.1 The paper will set these indicators in the wider context of the information and the knowledge being produced by the public statistical apparatus at that time in order to develop a comprehensive explanation of those pitfalls. Moreover, given the relevance of cost of living indices, the role of both indicators in that "number factory"2

1 Lanata Briones, Cecilia T., (2013) 'A new estimate of the cost of living. City of Buenos Aires, 1910-1923', XIV Jornadas Interescuelas/Departamentos de Historia, Mendoza, Argentina, 2-5 October; and Lanata Briones, Cecilia T., (2012) 'Methodological revision of the cost of living index of the city of Buenos Aires, 1933-1945', Estatística e Sociedade, Porto Alegre, No.2, pp.24-41. will be assessed. (Show less)

The history of the Argentine welfare regime in its pre-Peronist articulations has gained considerable attention over recent years. We now have a good understanding of Argentina’s entry into the “modernity of welfare” in response to the emergence of the “Social Question”, and new research has focused on the relationship between the state and other entities in advancing welfare reform in the early 20th century, revising the idea of a liberal state, reluctant to intervene in social regulations. More recently, also the innovations in the domain of social policies after the collapse of the liberal consensus, most clearly manifested in the coup of 1930 and the responses to the global economic crisis, have come under scrutiny.
This paper addresses a still poorly understood aspect of the discourse on the modernity of welfare in Argentina. The controversy over policy models across the Atlantic world and the transnational dialogues concerning social policy issues provided a significant repertoire of expertise and innovations for experts both within the structures of the state, and beyond it. Drawing on such diverse experiences as the US New Deal, Fascist Italy, the early Soviet Union, but also Latin American reforms, the social imaginary of reformers was permanently informed by reform agendas in other countries and their contextualisation within networks of expertise. To address the limits of social and economic integration under industrial capitalism and to simultaneously weaken the appeal of revolutionary political forces, expert visits and the participation in transnational organizations, such as the ILO, professional bodies, and regional/international gatherings, provided a fertile ground to discuss the future of the welfare state at home. To rationalize the social world and provide legitimacy for interventions in times of a perceived crisis was therefore not only conditional upon a co-constitutive relation between the state and the production of knowledge, but was deeply embedded in a transnational sphere of action. By focusing on issues of welfare related labour reform after 1930 and before the rise of Peronism, this paper will argue for a serious embedding of the argentine experience within a transnational setting, in order to understand the process of the formation of the argentine welfare state.
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