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Species are fundamental units in many biological disciplines, but there is continuing disagreement as to what species are, how to define them, and even whether the concept is useful. While some of this debate can be attributed to inadequate data and insufficient statistical frameworks in alpha taxonomy, an equal part results from the ambiguity over what species are expected to represent by the many who use them. Here, mtDNA data, microsatellite data, and sequence data from 17 nuclear loci are used in an integrated and quantitative manner to resolve the presence of evolutionary lineages, their contemporary and historical structure, and their correspondence to species, in a species complex of Amazonian peacock “bass” cichlids (Cichla pinima sensu lato). Results suggest that the historical narrative for these populations is more complex than can be portrayed by recognizing them as one, two, or four species: their history and contemporary dynamics cannot be unambiguously rendered as discrete units (taxa) at any level without both choosing the supremacy of one delimitation criterion and obscuring the very information that provides insight into the diversification process. This calls into question the utility of species as a rank, term, or concept, and suggests that while biologists may have a reasonable grasp of the structure of evolution, our methods of conveying these insights need updating. The lack of correspondence between evolutionary phenomena and discrete species should serve as a null hypothesis, and researchers should focus on quantifying the diversity in nature at whatever hierarchical level it occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the existence of the dandy female subject in the Spanish American Modernist literature, from the anthology of the Chilean writer Juan Pablo Sutherland Cielo dandi. Escrituras y poéticas de estilo en América Latina. The incorporation of women writers in this anthology generates the debate about the status of their relationship with dandy and gender definitions. This article examines, in particular, the case of the Chilean writer Teresa Wilms Montt, relating her literary production with the conceptual subject definitions in Sutherland's anthology. Also this article proposes that the dandy subject is an authorial management that generated a specific discourse in literature, but at the same time this subject is produced by his own writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electoral victory of Hugo Chávez in 1998 became an important issue for the Latin American social sciences. Indeed, the very idea of being given such a major change in Venezuelan politics encouraged a number of perspectives on a process that has drawn the attention of many scholars and analysts of our reality. In 1999, the majority of Venezuelan electors gave a blank check to an electoral alliance that promised to change a nation which at that time took its toll to a democratic period which failed to adapt to a new age. Thus, we have at least three major areas for academic inquiry: First of all, the discussion about the scope of that change. Second, the discussion of the causes of that change, in terms of regarded Venezuela as a case sui-generis in comparative politics. And third, the analysis of the role played by the international variable in shaping that change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing differentiation of occupational roles has eroded the classic function of intellectuals as the supreme producers of sense and logic. Intellectuals survive as specialists in clearly defined areas in the roles of political advisors, research institution directors, university professors, and journalists/columnists, and a very small number of them as interpreters of general values and behavioral characteristics. This evolution has modified the previous close relation between intellectuals and political power, and has been partially responsible for the authoritarian tradition and for the lack of critical vision as to the real collective identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ambiguity and ambivalence is typical of black/non-black relations in Afro-Latin America and it has its roots in a number of factors, principal among which is the weakness of a politically oriented black consciousness which is prepared to anatomize and publicize mechanisms of racial discrimination that exist. This weakness is in turn based, firstly, on the presence of a black-white continuum, as opposed to the North American black-white division, which allows mulattoes to dissociate themselves from Blacks and be accepted as socially distinct and which permits some of them to marry up racially and, secondly, on the absence of the very overt and aggressive state-enforced discrimination typified by the Jim Crow era of the U.S. which oppressed a clearly defined category of Black people and thus set conditions for a politicized reaction by that category. However, it is also the case that sociological studies of race relations in Afro-Latin America have not helped to dispel this ambiguity and contrariness about the nature of race in the area.