Education for sensibility: circulation of new knowledge on body education in Iberian America in the beginning of the twentieth century

Abstract

In this article, we analyze the practice of producing, circulating, and appropriating different pieces of knowledge about the body and its education between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Resorting to distinct sources, mainly reports, textbooks and educational journals, we have sought to present the contact points between several reformatory initiatives, asking how and when the new ways of understanding body education and education of sensibilities have moved from Latin America to Europe and vice versa. We believe that the vectors of these new ways did not go one-way – from Europe to our countries – but experiences also departed from here, which would qualify public education in European lands. Consequently, we turn our eyes to the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Spain in order to comprehend those reciprocal displacements in the perspective of cultural mediators according to the viewpoint of connected histories.