When Kalman Silvert died of a heart attack, Latin Americanist scholarship lost its greatest protagonist; American scholars lost one of the most active opponents of intellectual technocracy, and, thereby, the American public lost an important proponent of democracy; the Ford Foundation lost a guiding figure in international social science planning; his family and friends lost an individual of inestimable and irreplaceable personal worth; and Kal, himself, lost the opportunity to pursue his own course toward the development of a humanistic politics for the Western world. In the fall of 1976, Kal and Frieda Silvert were to have taken up residence in Mexico, to continue to work for the Ford Foundation, but in a new direction and with much more time for him to dedicate to the problems that interested him the most. Leaving some part of his task undone was inevitable; it is difficult to imagine anyone being able to achieve the goals that Kal set for himself.

Theories on the relationship between religion and social change over the past decade have received significant new empirical inputs from developments in Latin America where religious symbols and institutions have undergone some dramatic alterations under the influence of various modernization processes. Sociologists and anthropologists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe stressed the basically conservative effect of religion on society, and concluded that religious institutions are normally obstacles to change as a result of their traditionalistic orientation and association with established social structures. However, there is a growing uneasiness with the conclusions of these major theorists (Spencer, Malinowski, Durkheim, Marx, Weber) in the light of developments in major religions in some areas of the Third World, particularly Roman Catholicism in Latin America. Popular reporting as well as recent scholarly research have noted significant shifts to the left in parts of the Latin American Church, exemplified by strong episcopal condemnations of social injustice, growing political activism of militant clergy groups, and the emergence of new pastoral and social programs aimed at religious and societal reform. The conclusion in much of this literature is that the Church is undergoing a major transformation and this new phenomenon will provide a powerful stimulus for social change throughout the continent.

The Brazilian government's plans to build the Transamazon Highway from the Atlantic coast to the Peruvian border and to settle thousands of landless peasants along it created intense debate before the project's precipitous beginning. Critics of the road “that went from nowhere to no place” denounced it as economic folly, while champions of “national integration” saw it as a crucial step toward the economic and geopolitical unification essential to Brazil's realization of its “great nation” potential and toward alleviating some of its land-tenure concentration (Tamer 1970, Pereira 1971).

The Catholic Church in Latin America was until the mid-1960s one of the most ignored topics of research in a neglected continent. It was not only overlooked by North Americans and Europeans; stranger still, it received only cursory attention from Latin American scholars. The meagre consideration it did attract was overwhelmingly historical in nature and frequently came from authors promoting or attacking particular religious beliefs and institutions. The controversy in Colombia over the persecution of the Protestants (Goff, 1965), and the dramatic events caused by the reactions of the Church to the Mexican revolution (Brown, 1964), stimulated a literature that was at times extremely biased.

Yet, it is not easy to explain the neglect of the Church in the literature since, unlike peasant leagues or guerrilla movements, it is not a novelty in the region. The Church was founded simultaneously with the Iberian societies; much of the culture of Latin America derives from within the Church and has evolved in relationship to it; social fields such as education and charity have always been heavily influenced by Church doctrine and organizations; and the vast majority of the population are declared Catholics. In addition the Church is a highly structured organization in a region of low organizational development; in all countries Catholic groups have been politically active and in some cases assumed the form of Christian Democratic parties (Williams, 1967) which have held power; and the political models currently being formulated in Brazil and Peru would appear to owe much of their content to traditional Catholic principles of hierarchy, paternalism, and corporate identity.

Most latinamericanists will be interested and some fascinated by the aesthetic import of this epoch-making exhibit, jointly organized and presented by the Yale University Art Gallery and the University of Texas Art Museum. The purpose of this brief statement is to indicate some of its more important repercussions on the social scientist and historian which have potential research value. The first and obvious value lies in the fact that the catalogue presents in one compact volume all of the outstanding stylistic developments in painting, and to a lesser extent in architecture and engraving, from early Independence times to the present day. From a purely documentary point of view, excepting the few authentic, extant architectural remains, painting is the only medium that gives visual expression to the developments in the first half of the 19th century; so that the exhibition provides a basic research tool towards determining what the graphic representation of the socio-political developments of the period were. Even for the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this concentrated panorama supplies us with representative perceptions of how Latin Americans conceptualized themselves and their cultural traditions. We base our remarks on the paintings themselves and on an excellent representative catalogue. Catlin, director of the exhibit, with his collaborators (Grieder, Davidson, Deredita, and Faulhaber) will soon begin work on a scholarly volume which will interrelate the aesthetic developments with the social, economic and political developments of Latin American history in a thoroughgoing study.

The title of D. Neil Snarr and E. Leonard Brown's “An Analysis of Ph.D. Dissertations on Central America: 1960–1974” (LARR 12, no. 2 [1977]) suggests a comprehensive compilation and analysis of dissertation research on Central America between 1960 and 1974. While one might have hoped for coverage of a broader period, particularly since the 1950s produced several significant doctoral dissertations on Central America, such a title promises at least a handy bibliographic reference tool for Central Americanists. A close reading of the article unfortunatley makes it clear that it offers much less than that and in fact represents a distortion of the reality of doctoral research on Central America in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Central to research on Latin American politics has been the pursuit of an explanation for both the stability and the instability of its various systems. Two general modes of analysis on Latin America have emerged. One, developed on the foundations of sociology and anthropology, has evolved as structural-functional analysis and its partner, behavioralism. The second mode grew out of an economic perspective and is having a profound effect on contemporary studies. This article will give a brief review of some of the analyses that have their bases in economics and will specifically apply assumptions of human behavior drawn from microeconomic theory to the problem of explaining systems of political competition and their resultant structures.

Although this paper is a sequel to an earlier review of Latin American urban research (1965b), the volume and sophistication of work in the urban field during the past five years have made it advisable to limit the number of themes addressed, to dwell on complementary or discrepant approaches to certain central issues, and to suggest comparative perspectives. The first section, restricted to Spanish America, attempts to clarify some colonial antecedents of contemporary phenomena and is even less systematic than the other four sections as a research inventory. Attention to nineteenth-century developments is limited to references in Section V. The review of contemporary themes is weighted toward anthropological, sociological, and general institutional matters; the author has no credentials for prowling the arctic realms of economics, political behaviorism, and geographic place theory.

In recent years, a body of literature analyzing development and modernization since the world wars has emphasized the diverse tasks women perform in premodern agrarian societies as compared to incipient industrial economies. The greater input of women in many nonmechanized societies, compared to their role thereafter, has been seen as the key to understanding why the introduction of machine technology has often resulted in the subsequent general unemployment or underemployment of working-class women.

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The study of the distribution of income summarizes a nation's social organization and the outcome of the forces of social change. The measurement of income distribution itself yields a type of social scorecard, the resolution of claims by competing groups for the economy's output. As an indication of social justice, income distribution measures as well the extent to which different groups share in a nation's economic progress.

During the academic year 1974–75, the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies (PCCLAS) is commemorating its twentieth anniversary. A summary of its origins and some of the highlights of its development may give current participants in its affairs that breadth of vision which historians assert is helpful in evaluating such human institutions.

In the last decade in Peru, there have been substantive changes in thinking about Peruvian history and society. Although this change is visible in all the social sciences, in a special way economic analysis and historical investigation have made some important gains. Economics no longer consists, in the works of its better adherents, of vague meditations or the crude accounting of a druggist; and historical studies are also finally beginning to reach a minimal level of seriousness. Once the end product of only a few particularly lucid minds, the concept that we have today of history and the work of the historian is now shared by a much larger group. It is interesting, therefore, to see where these changes have been made, not only because of the academic necessity of giving a correct accounting, but also because the outlines of this new consciousness of its past that Peruvian society is acquiring need to be underscored. The study of history in Peru, more than any other social science, is part of the continual struggle to redraw the past of Peruvian society and to destroy the collective amnesia of the masses. These two objectives have always been sought but only now are they being achieved by works of indisputable rigor.