This essay reconstructs the history of the Instituto Fisico-Ceogrdiico Nacional, its scientists, and their activities. After surveying the historical context and the first scientific activities in Costa Rica, it narrates the institutional history of the IFG. Also covered are the main activities of the Instituto-meteorology, botany, agriculture, andethnography, especially theefforts to mapCosta Rica in the 1890s. Theworkof this institute and the scientists associated untn it markthefitful beginnings of the institutionalization of modern science in Costa Rica. Thecase of theIFG clearly demonstrates theenormous obstacles facing scientists and scientific institutions in the agro-exporting economies of modern Latin America. As a small country on the "periphery of the periphery," Costa Rica offers an extreme example of the problems of cultivating modern science in developing nations.

The politics of inflation typically have been cast as reflecting an underlying “collective-action problem,” in which actions that would benefit the entire group are irrational from the viewpoint of each individual. Everyone would be better off without inflation. But in the absence of a mechanism that would permit social groups such as workers and owners to construct a lasting bargain, each group finds itself structurally obliged to push for higher money incomes, even if each one knows that any temporary gains in real income will be inflated away. Brazilian inflation has been described in these terms (Franco 1989). This article will suggest instead that the attitudes of one key Brazilian social group may be better understood as a case of “rent seeking.” In other countries, financial capital as a net-creditor sector opposes inflation. But because of Brazil's unique set of financial regulations, Brazilian bankers and upper-income investors have reaped substantial economic benefits from inflation in recent decades. Although they might prefer as citizens to have lower inflation, their rational economic interests give them few strong reasons to make sacrifices in the interest of solving society's “collective-action problem.” Because not all important actors desire stabilization, bringing prices down becomes intrinsically more difficult than if the problem were simply one of finding a means of overcoming mutual distrust to reach a cooperative solution.

Insurgency has largely subsided in Central America, but the academic debate over the causes of the violence in the 1980s waxes hotter than ever. As scholars, we have an obligation to subject our theories to the acid test of reality. As individuals interested in the policy process, we must evaluate the outcomes of those policies, even though they are sometimes based on faulty readings of our theories. The increasingly rich body of literature and data available on Central America compels observers to move away from the speculation that dominated early scholarship on the region and toward serious empirical tests of our theories. In doing so, scholars will be in a position to evaluate the policies pursued by the United States and various Central American governments. My article in this journal on land tenure in El Salvador attempted to address both theory and policy with new data (Seligson 1995). Judging by the reactions of Martin Diskin and Jeffery Paige, the conclusions that I drew have succeeded in stimulating a rich debate.

The literature on the cycle of studies on Brazilian race relations written in the 1950s, supported by UNESCO, has considered it a milestone that offered solid findings about the variety of such relations and the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination in Brazilian society. Some evaluations of these studies have asserted that the results of the UNESCO Project frustrated expectations that Brazil could be used as a positive example for race relations and an instrument in the struggle against racism in the period following the Holocaust. This research note takes a different stand in arguing that from the early stages of the organization of the project, Brazilian, French, and U.S. social scientists favored broadening the geographical scope under investigation because they were aware of several patterns of race relations and racial prejudice in Brazil. Originally, a limited and idealized regional focus was to center on the state of Bahia, but soon the scope of investigation became almost national in including Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Pernambuco.

Most studies of civil society in Latin America have focused on urban social and political actors. In the Ecuadorian Andes, however, civil society has crystallized around the institutions of indigenous rural community that developed historically in opposition to white-meztizo urban administrative centers. This article explores the evolution of indigenous communal institutions in relation to local government and national politics by focusing on the canton of Otavalo in northern Ecuador. It is argued here that over the past thirty years, Andean communities in Ecuador have played an important role in the national processes of democratization and decentralization.