Science takes to the stage in a peripheral setting. Experimental culture and uses of the theatre in Buenos Aires (1870-1925)

Abstract

We analyzed 25 theatrical events in a handful of Argentinian cities during the half-century from 1870 to 1925, dedicated to commemorating the scientific, technological, and medical life arising from the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries. In these acts, the most eminent scientists and phy- sicians took to the stage to present their knowledge in society, addressing a select public that was avid for news and shows and made up of the main patrician families in the emerging nation of Argentina. Study of these events, using historiographic tools from sociability research, allows visibilization, based on a wide   set of hitherto little-explored sources, of the complexity of procedures for local inscription in the scientific and medical societies of reference that they set up. It also allows reconstruction of their coevolution alongside local political powers and the «select» public that keenly attended the events. Scientific societies, political powers, and patrician audiences gave form to a particular type of social experience, based on the semi-peripheral appropriation of «rational delectation» par excellence, as in the theatrical and scientific events