ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development of the critique of cultural imperialism that emerged amongst Latin American leftists in the 1960s through an analysis of the work of the Ford Foundation in the region. In that decade, the Ford Foundation expanded its efforts to fund the modernization of the social sciences in Latin America, as well as to promote related projects in literature and the arts. When the marginality project was closed, the Ford Foundation judged it to be as costly in terms of the Foundation's credibility, its relations with the scholarly community, and its ability to assist research on important but sensitive issues. The marginality project produced virtually no usable scholarship, but in combination with Project Camelot and the revelations surrounding the CCF, it had helped create a climate of suspicion around the study of Latin American society. The chapter argues that the interaction between liberal and radical arguments made the shared goal of emancipatory social science difficult to realize.
