TOK situations from Latin America and the Caribbean
Where a case comes from changes what it can show. These are the situations in the library drawn from latin america.
- Latin America
Bones as witnesses
Forensic teams exhuming mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina matched skeletal evidence to survivor accounts, converting disputed atrocities into documented…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Latin America
The inflation statistic nobody believed
After Argentina's government intervened in its statistics institute in 2007, official inflation ran far below every independent estimate for years, private…
Enduring · The human sciences
- Power
- Objectivity
- Latin America
The satellite data that cost a director his job
In 2019 Brazil's space agency published satellite figures showing sharply rising Amazon deforestation; the president called the numbers lies and the agency's…
Enduring · The natural sciences
- Power
- Evidence
- Objectivity
- Latin America
Twenty-seven books, one afternoon
Diego de Landa burned Maya codices in 1562 as works of the devil, and only a handful of pre-conquest Maya books survive anywhere today. Much of what…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Latin America
Drawings meant for no one on the ground
The Nazca lines have been read as astronomical calendars, ritual pathways, water markers and stranger things, with each era's favourite explanation tracking…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Latin America
Records tied in knots
Inca administration ran on quipus, cords whose knots encoded census and tribute data and possibly narrative, and Spanish authorities destroyed many precisely…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Latin America
Telescopes on other people's mountains
The Atacama's dry altitude makes it ideal for observatories, and the same plateaus carry deep significance for Indigenous communities who were rarely central…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values
- Latin America
The vine, the lab, and the elders
As clinical interest in ayahuasca-derived compounds accelerates, Amazonian communities that developed and ritually govern the brew's use are often absent from…
Current · The natural sciences
- Power
- Values