Between the “Notable” and the “Intellectual”: The Potentialities of the Field Model for Analyzing a Society in Transformation (Santiago del Estero, 1920-1930)

Abstract

The processes of modernization promoted in Argentina from 1880 onward, together with the impact of the progressive settlement of immigrant masses, were experienced unevenly and at different times in different regions of the country. When we approach the analysis of the groups of “intellectuals” active in Argentina during the 1920s, and when we seek to do so in terms of “field”, we are obliged—in order to know what we are talking about—to go back to the study of the composition of the elites of the society in question, and above all to their dynamics of transformation. It is here that the model becomes more complex and, at the same time, displays its potentialities. As always in the social sciences, the point is not to “apply” an explanatory model, but rather to put a concept to work, taking advantage of its heuristic possibilities according to the particularities of the case and the available material.

Between 1920 and 1930, by contrast, not only had the composition of the governing groups diversified, but it no longer coincided directly with the groups holding economic or social power.

A diachronic analysis of the composition of women’s associations—such as charitable societies, other institutions linked to the Church, such as the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, and those that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as the Society of Patrician Women or the Women’s Branch of the Patriotic League—confirms the same intuition. Everything suggests that, during these years, a dissociation occurred among economic, political, and social capital. If, in the nineteenth century, the same families accumulated all forms of capital—precisely because of the lack of differentiation of symbolic capital—from 1920 onward we find evidence of progressive differentiation.

As we shall see, the efforts to construct a specific space for intellectuals with their own voice were marked by a voluntaristic bias, by the still very strong presence of the “notable”, and by debates closely linked to the combination of this traditional presence with the debates characteristic of the 1920s. In Buenos Aires, by that time, those debates were already the expression of struggles within a relatively autonomous field, in which the different avant-garde groups specifically opposed the literary practices of an earlier generation of intellectuals.