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The Americas, Volume 65, Number 3, January 2009, pp. 423-424 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/tam.0.0090

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 BOOK REVIEWS 423

The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture’s Modern Dreams. By Beatriz Sarlo;

translated by Xavier Callahan. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp.
xiii, 185. Notes. $60.00 cloth.

In this study written over a decade after her landmark essay on the intersection
of avant-garde art and literature and the culture of modernity in Argentina, Una
modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires, 1920 y 1930 (1988), the celebrated cultural
critic Beatriz Sarlo further explores the grip that technology, in its myriad forms,
held on the popular imagination of an Argentine public pulled onward by the frenzy
of the new. Sarlo argues that the fascination with technology and the eagerness to
engage with it across all sectors of the population, not simply the elite, had to do
precisely with its egalitarian possibilities in a society as class-stratified and class-
conscious as early twentieth century Argentina. Technology’s impact involved not
only economic modernization and urban change, but also “a matrix . . . [for] imag-
inary constructions” (p. 3). In this process, the participation of what Sarlo terms “the
popular sector” shows how “poor people’s knowledge had come to be fodder for an
imagination that was not exclusively literary” (p. 2).

Acknowledging the crossover between the knowledge and practices of the let-
tered elite with those of the working class, Sarlo divides her study in two parts enti-
tled “Letters” and “Histories” where she examines literary and journalistic texts and
the social interactions with science and technology. Two initial chapters focus on the
writers Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Quiroga, who set up home laboratories
and dabbled in agrarian engineering, likewise wrote stories featuring motion pic-
tures, craftsman “primitives of technology,” and the genre of the scientific report.
Arlt, a working-class self-taught writer who debuted in the popular press, depicted,
for the first time, an industrial Buenos Aires, “a cubist collage whose chaotic beauty
was an affront to moral sensibilities [and] aesthetic organization” (p. 40) and
matched the vision of his contemporary, the reformist architect Wladimiro Acosta.
Like Quiroga, Arlt too tried his hand at invention (literally and in literature) and
exhibited a penchant for the occult. Their literary portrayal of science and technol-
ogy reflect a more generalized popular enthusiasm, which can be gauged by the suc-
cess of magazines and newspapers such as Crítica, El Mundo, and Ciencia Popular,
analyzed in Chapter 3. Addressing a wide readership, the popular press promoted
the idea that anyone, regardless of their educational background, could be a con-
tributor, innovator, and inventor, and saw the technological future as “something
more to be desired than feared” (p. 76).

This wider commerce between society and technology is the focus of the second
part. One chapter, devoted to the phenomenon of “inventors,” contrasts its partici-
patory qualities with the closed milieu of “science.” Invention, often practiced by
self-taught do-it-yourselfers, revealed both a keen desire for upward mobility and a
new kind of poetic imagining. Among the prominent results of such inventive activ-
ity, the radio, cinema, and television and the degree of access to each capture Sarlo’s
imagination in Chapter 5. In Sarlo’s analysis, despite class conflict, “[at] this stage
424 BOOK REVIEWS

of radio broadcasting and reception, the airwaves were a democratizing force” (p.
110), something that was not equally true of cinema, where “amateur filmmaking
. . . remained confined to ‘comfortable mansions.’” The higher cost and technical
difficulty that made film less accessible also applied to television, which despite
optimistic experimentation, remained a distant fantasy, or, as Sarlo puts it, was “not
quite [t]here” (p. 126). The final chapter turns to the activities of doctors, clairvoy-
ants, and quacks as “[o]ld obsessions of traditional culture . . . met new urban dis-
courses [such as] theosophy, parapsychology, popularized psychological and even
psychoanalytic ideas” (p. 128). Although this chapter might appear slightly out of
place, Sarlo argues that technology had spurred the belief that everything was pos-
sible, including miraculous cures and medical wonders, clairvoyance and disem-
bodied communication, both here and in the hereafter. And without ignoring the
proliferation of fraud, Sarlo sees here “ancient wisdom . . . being recycled in a dem-
ocratic way” (p. 131) and the “obscure zone of parapsychological wonders . . .
which still awaited rational explanation” (p. 137).

Although foregoing a conclusion that might clarify, “which possibilities were

open in early-twentieth century Argentina, a country that certainly reversed its
course quite radically in the 1940s,” Sarlo succeeds in painting a lively picture of
the enthusiasm for technology and of the imaginings for class mobility it fueled.
Some scholarship quoted may also seem dated, but this is perhaps due to the fact
that the original, La imaginación técnica: Sueños modernos de la cultura argentina,
was published 16 years ago. While not offsetting this lag, the excellent English ver-
sion by Xavier Callahan adds useful contextual material to the already copious end-
notes. In all, this slim yet solid volume provides rare insight into the intersection of
culture, technology, and society in early twentieth-century Argentina.

University of Alberta ODILE CISNEROS

Edmonton, Alberta

ETHNOHISTORY & INDIGENOUS POLITICS

Skywatching in the Ancient World: New Perspectives in Cultural Astronomy. Edited
by Clive Ruggles and Gary Urton. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.
Pp. xxiii, 392. Illustrations. Tables. Maps. Notes. References. Index. $65.00
cloth.

This book represents the current state of the field of archaeoastronomy, or rather
cultural astronomy, and is a tribute to Anthony Aveni’s pioneering contributions that
have defined and continue to shape the “anthropology of astronomy.” The book title
likely stems from Anthony Aveni’s Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico (1980; rev.
2001) publication, reflecting the theoretical and methodological developments of
the field referred to by the editors as “social contextualization” (p. 2), and specifi-
cally points to a change in scholarly focus from the skywatchers to skywatching,
from studying ancient astronomy to emphasizing social processes and practices
related to cultural cosmologies and the sky.