En este ensayo se analizan las representaciones sociales de desigualdad entre Estados Unidos y América Central y, por extensión, América Latina tal y como aparecen en los relatos históricos, publicados en Estados Unidos desde la década 1850 y hasta el presente, sobre la guerra que los centroamericanos libraron entre 1855 y 1857 para derrotar al filibustero o mercenario estadounidense William Walker que se apoderó de Nicaragua durante esos años. El trabajo muestra como quienes han escrito sobre este tema en los Estados Unidos, desde la propia época de los acontecimientos y hasta tiempos recientes, han relatado esta guerra dentro de una serie de representaciones que suponen una relación de superioridad e inferioridad entre Estados Unidos y América Central, en términos raciales y culturales, principalmente. Así, el estudio muestra en un caso concreto un proceso de producción y reproducción de representaciones de desigualdad a nivel internacional entre estados y sociedades distintas.

The paper discusses four contemporary processes that pose new challenges to the quest for equality: first, the rise of the ecological concern; second, the disentanglement of nation and state; third, the redefinition of civil society and solidarity; and fourth, the quest for complementarity between equality and difference. These four aspects are explored as components of an encompassing cultural change that evokes the idea of a new great transformation, to recall Polanyi’s thesis. The major argument is that in this new scenario the ways of perceiving social differences and inequalities are profoundly affected, while conventional policies to tackle poverty and inequality call for revision.

Using census data (for 1991 and 2000) for more than 5.000 municipalities, we examine the relationship between income per capita and inequality at the municipal level in Brazil. We uncover the existence of an “inverted-U” relationship in 1991 that flipped into a “straight-U” relationship in 2000, both of which are statistically significant. Such a flip has important implications, as it suggests that the current decline in inequality is likely to reverse as GDP per capita increases, with radically different prospects for the evolution of inequality in the country. Building on our case, and very tentatively, we submit that the flip may be due to the association of economic growth with industrialization. As long as the two are positively correlated, as was the case in Brazil and Latin America until late in the 20th Century, in OECD countries until the 1970s, and today in China and India, the standard Kuznets curve adequately describes the relationship between development and inequality. When that correlation is negative, however, i.e. when growth is accompanied by de-industrialization, as is the case in OECD countries since the 1980s and in Brazil since the 1990s, the curve “flips” and inequality declines at first, and then increases again after a tipping point has been reached.

Der vorliegende Artikel stellt verschiedene Ansätze jüngerer geschichtstheoretischer Debatten dar und untersucht deren Anwendbarkeit auf transregionale Konstellationen von Ungleichheit. Hierfür scheinen insbesondere die Konzepte der Verflechtungsgeschichte (Conrad und Randeria 2002) und der History of Circulations (Cohen 2010 und Raj 2007) interessant, da sie frühere vergleichende Ansätze überwinden und transregionale Perspektiven beinhalten, ohne jedoch die untersuchten Entitäten zu essentialisieren oder zu hierarchisieren. Brasilianische und deutsche Rassenvorstellungen, basierend auf der gemeinsamen Idee einer „weißen Suprematie“, führten zu unterschiedlichen eugenischen Praktiken, welche durch die massenhafte Migration Deutscher nach Brasilien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert kollidierten. Diese historische Konstellation wird mit Hilfe der geschichtstheoretischen Begriffe Verflechtungen und Zirkulationen dargestellt.

Una de las dimensiones de las desigualdades entrelazadas transregionales comprende la que se produce en los procesos de sistematización del conocimiento científico orientado a la toma de decisiones políticas para enfrentar los problemas ambientales, mediante las denominadas evaluaciones ambientales globales. Las Convenciones Marco de Naciones Unidas son las principales receptoras de estas evaluaciones. La Evaluación de Ecosistemas del Milenio se inicia en el año 2000 como esfuerzo internacional para describir los servicios ecosistémicos y su degradación por parte de la humanidad y a la vez ofrecer orientaciones políticas desde el conocimiento global. Desde este caso tomado en estudio se pretende verificar si las evaluaciones son un esfuerzo colectivo y geográficamente equitativo de una comunidad científica global o si, más allá de las declaraciones, desde la selección de los autores y coordinadores y de la bibliografía de base, son claro reflejo de las asimetrías centro-periferia.

Social inequalities have conventionally been researched as synchronous processes within the frame of national borders and articulated in the concept of class. This means that established scholarship has not adequately considered the historical dimensions and global entanglements or interconnections between class and other social classifications that have shaped existing inequalities. Starting from world system and postcolonial theories as well as from recent debates on transnationalism, the paper first presents a set of resources for overcoming current deficits in the research of inequalities. In order to illustrate how these resources analytically operate, the second part of the paper discusses the case of social inequalities which affect Afrodescendants in Latin America.

La construcción de identidades y de alteridad en el contexto histórico-social y político de América Latina no es un proceso inocuo, sino que constituye el punto de partida para generar y legitimar desigualdades. Para comprender cabalmente la exclusión, invisibilización, e intentos de homogenización o segregación cultural-racial-étnica es preciso ubicar estas problemáticas en el proceso que fue constitutivo de los mismos. La propuesta es abordar la noción de colonialidad y la distribución de identidades sociales racializadas como la matriz de poder que opera en la constitución y perpetuación de las desigualdades sociales. En este marco teórico, se abordará la noción de “diferencia colonial” de W. Mignolo, con la que se alude al proceso de escisión colonizador/colonizado, para luego complementarla con un análisis del racismo cultural, develando la continuidad entre la esencialización de las esferas de lo cultural y de lo racial. La idea que surge no desvanecer la noción de cultura o diversidad cultural, sino resignificarla.

Inequality emerged as a social concern during the Enlightenment and was seen as violating the norm of human equality. Three main development narratives were generated following this concern: one of long-term equalization (de Tocqueville), one of polarization (Marx), and one of modern rising inequality followed by equalization (Kuznets). Although each of these narratives was able to score some points, none of them fully captured the actual trajectory of the inequality curve which is currently bending upwards towards more inequality. 21st century inequality studies are taking off in new directions, multiscalar, multi-dimensionally rooted in recent moral philosophy, and more focused on causal mechanisms and forces. Since early modernity a centre of economic inequality in the world, Latin America has a special relevance to inequality studies. Nevertheless, it is currently the only world region with a predominant tendency of equalization.

Most of the existing social science literature understands inequality and stratifi cation primarily as processes that occur within national boundaries. Such a focus has produced a number of infl uential overarching narratives. One such narrative is that people’s relative well-being is shaped most fundamentally by the capacity of homegrown institutions to promote economic growth and/or equity. Another, that people over time have become more stratifi ed by their relative achievement and effort rather than by the characteristics with which they are born. A third one, a corollary of the other two, is that contemporary upward social mobility is fundamentally the outcome of the adoption of better domestic institutions by countries, and/or the acquisition of greater human capital by individuals. In our recent book, Unveiling Inequality (Korzeniewicz/Moran 2009), we argue that looking at the unfolding of social inequality, stratifi cation and mobility in the world as a whole over a long period of time –in other words, from a world-historical perspective – calls these narratives into question.

Current sociological understandings tend to presuppose that the transformation of inequality patterns entails a series of “new” phenomena, which make the coining of new concepts such as the “Europeanization” and the “transnationalization” of social inequality necessary. In turn, the paper argues that, at least since the European expansion into the Americas, inequalities have been the result of transnational processes arising from transregional entanglements between shifting metropolitan and peripheral areas. To this end, the paper uses the example of the Caribbean as “Europe’s fi rst colonial backyard” (S. Mintz) in order to show the historical continuities between “creolization” as a term originally coined to describe processes specific to the Caribbean and what is being analyzed today under the label of the “transnationalization” of (Western) Europe. In showing how the transregional fl ows of people, goods, and capital established transnational links between inequality patterns between Europe and its colonies in the Caribbean as early as the sixteenth century, the paper subsequently claims that theorizing the continuum of structures of power linking colonialism to (post) coloniality is an essential element in of the endeavor of creolizing Europe.