Latin American and East Asian societies have experienced somewhat similar social, cultural, and political complexities associated with "imported" science, technology. and medicine. In this regard, Beyond Imported Magic, edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes, offers a rich source of ideas for East Asian readers. Beyond Imported Magic is a compilation of seventeen essays by a diverse group of researchers: fifteen based in Latin America, nine from the United States, and four from Europe, comprising eight historians, seven anthropologists, six sociologists, and seven STS researchers. The editors grouped the contributions into three main sections in the book.
The first section, titled "Latin American Perspectives on Science, Technology, and Society," opens with Henrique Cukierman's "Who Invented Brazil?," which studies the mutual influences between scientific expeditions to northern tropical Brazil and the people living in that inland region between 1911 and 1913. He discusses the scientists' awareness of "the poverty—the misfortune of our abandoned backland inhabitants" and presents the social challenges that these realities posed to the scientific explorers. Mariano Fressoli, Rafael Dias, and Hernán Thomas study the tensions between global markets and local developments in the field of innovation. In "Innovation and Inclusive Development in the South: A Critical Perspective," they show how grassroots and bottom-of-pyramid movements offer insights and lessons on how to create innovation networks, by analyzing the contemporary Latin American experience and Indian cases since the beginning of the twenty-first century. "Working with Care: Narratives of Invisible Women Scientists Practicing Forensic Genetics in Colombia," by Tania Pérez-Bustos, Maria Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Diaz del Castillo H., discusses gender issues encountered by women forensic scientists. The chapter focuses on these invisible women scientists' contributions to science by showing that care is crucial to the doings of science, particularly in contexts of social conflict. These
