ABSTRACT
In this article, we discuss the participation of US rural sociologists in technical missions in Latin America during World War II as part of the Inter-American cooperation programs under the Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations. We argue that the political and intellectual context of the Roosevelt Era as well as the communitarian thought style that informed these social scientists shaped a vision of their neighbors to the South not only as economically backward but as the locus of original societal experiments that could, in the course of its development, circumvent those that were considered the deleterious effects of modernization in the US, such as the dissolving individualism and the weakening of community ties. Focusing on the case of T. Lynn Smith, who served as an agricultural analyst in Brazil and Colombia, we indicate how such a sociological diagnosis of Latin America’s development potentials also involved dialogues with local thinking traditions.
Office of Foreign Agricultural Relations; Modernization; Rural Sociology; Latin America; T. Lynn Smith