DOSSIER: Intellectuals and editors

Abstract

The intellectual opens ideas, the publisher closes them. The writer produces texts, the publisher produces printed texts. The intellectual writes but it is the publisher who publishes. Not for nothing, say some psychologists, the thought culminates with its publication. Between the writer and the publisher a symbolic and social energy is mobilized, sublimated under the printed lines that reach the reader. That between-place of production of senses, of cosmologies, of society that marked the formation of great part of the cultures since the appearance of the graphical expression of the ideas, remains like an elusive problem for the investigation, at least for the anthropology practiced in these latitudes. It seems a question blocked by the dominant accumulation of stories of ideas, of literature, of thought that reactualize the opposition between spirit and matter, aesthetics and society, text and context. Evidence of this is the closure suffered by the sociology of literature, a sub-discipline so uncomfortable for the guardians of the aura of the national literary genius.

This dossier seeks to illuminate that relationship with the certainty that it models one of the most fertile terrains to rethink the legacy of the history of culture in the West and to generate a vast program of research problems scarcely explored by the social and human sciences in Latin America, and applicable to the study of any culture, with or without writing.