Argentine Ethnography: Monsignor Pablo Cabrera’s free lecture (1925)

Abstract

The groundbreaking Reform that took place at the National University of Córdoba (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, UNC) in 1918, paved the way to the academic start of anthropology in Central Argentina. This new presence was fostered by two initiatives of the students’ sector: extra-curriculum or “free” courses, and public contests to professors’ positions. The latter was meant to exclude the Catholic and conservative personnel from the leading and teaching positions and from the administration, and to ensure access of the “most capable and dignified” professors to the University, in the name of capacity, justice and freedom. This paper explores a direct effect of such initiatives which seem to oppose such goals: the launching of the first free course of Argentine Ethnography by Prior (Monseñor) Pablo Cabrera (1857-1936) in 1925. Cabrera, its main professor, was a member of the Catholic Church of Córdoba and of the National Academy of Sciences, the director of the Provincial Historical Museum, and the author of myriad books and articles on Revista de la Universidad and the newspaper Los Principios. ¿Why and how a man of the Church launched this innovation in the anti-clerical context of the University Reform? How did his confessional adscription affect Cabrera’s work in a secular institution and conversely how did his academic stance impinge on his priestly activities? In sum, how could these two realms coexist within the single mind of a man acknowledged as the predecessor of Cordobesa anthropology?