ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the notion of individuation could be a tool for non-Western sociology. It analyses the most important axes of the sociological tradition of Western institutional individualism. The chapter argues that the difficulty of using this model to describe the kind of individual to be found in Latin America. It presents the most important trait of the Latin American individual: the relational hyper-actor. The chapter provides some reflections about the new challenges that comparative sociology must face. For a long time sociology – and more broadly the humanities and social sciences – considered the individual a unique product of Western modernity. The chapter argues that some theoretical and historical reflections about Latin American individualism and upon the results of an empirical qualitative research on the individuation process in Chile. In Western tradition individualism, the idea of individuals as moral beings attached to a particular subject representation supposes a particular modality of cultural representation and institutional work.
