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Academia Nacional de Ciencias, 1876
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Increasingly, then, the sober, civilian, stern-faced body of the scientist, towards the end of the century becomes a new model of 'habitus' for an urban, bourgeois professional class. Urban middle and upper-class young men would now attend medical faculties for social distinction rather than those of law, as they had done for most of the century. It is not by accident that most of the men depicted on this photograph of the Argentine Academy of Sciences (1876) are Europeans: in Argentina as well as in Chile and Brazil, foreign sages were imported from overseas to instruct new generations of local patricians eager to acquire the new paradigms of knowledge –and of self-representation– that could be wielded into modes of social distinction and thus of the preservation of a cultural hegemony.
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