A historical and comparative analysis of the influences of academic disciplines on Latin American Studies

• In Event: A Critical Look at Latin American Studies

Abstract

What are the most influential academic disciplines in Latin American Studies? What explains the rise and fall of the importance of different academic disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, history, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology, over the years? These questions about disciplinary influences on area studies have rarely been addressed because it is difficult to demonstrate such influences empirically. While existing reviews on this topic tend to rely on academic knowledge and opinions of particular specialists, this study makes a significant contribution by providing a unique empirical evidence of the importance of the disciplines. The authors use the abstracts of the articles published in each discipline’s prominent journals between 1990 and 2015. They employ latent semantic analysis, a natural language processing method, to measure the degrees of similarity between the disciplines and Latin America Studies based on the patterns of word usage in the abstracts. Latent semantic analysis thus uncovers “the most influential discipline,” that is, the discipline whose ideas and concepts are used most extensively in Latin American Studies. We hypothesize that the rise and fall of the influence of the social science disciplines (economics, sociology, and political science) can be explained by salient political and economic issues and problems Latin American countries faced at each historical juncture while the other disciplines’ influences have been more or less stable. By making the relationships among academic disciplines visible, latent semantic analysis of journal articles will open up a new field of research for area study scholars.

Author

• Takeshi Wada, The University of Tokyo