Cultural dependence and development

Abstract

The article analyses the most profound form of dependency: cultural dependency. The culture of a society is constituted historically from concrete social relations. It appears as values, beliefs, social conduct, the ideology that organises social relations themselves. Cultural dependence is the importation of values from outside society and it materialises as academic, scientific and technological dependence, contrasting what would be the peripheral "backwardness" against the "modern", civilised, of the central countries. Thus, it imposes strange criteria and values to peripheral societies that prevent them from creating development strategies based on their own characteristics. It seeks to demonstrate that development strategies can only be built on the basis of the concrete social relations that characterize a given society, on the basis of its concrete cultural reality. Thus, scientific and academic thought cannot be detached from the concrete reality of the periphery.