Responsibilities of the Foreign Scholar to the Local Scholarly Community

The purpose of this paper is to suggest guidelines for the conduct of scholars that will make it possible for the scholarly community as a whole to benefit more fully from the efforts of its members. It reviews some aspects of the evolution of the problem and then presents a set of recommendations, based on research by a team of social scientists in three Latin American countries, that may come to serve as a statement of common understanding concerning certain scholarly responsibilities. Te scope of the recommendations is confined to the relationship between the scholar and the world scholarly community, as this latter is represented by the scholarly community of the area within which he is working. The recommendations are neither all-inclusive nor necessarily perfect, and they must not be thought of as hard rules. They are guidelines, devised to remind scholars and granting agencies of their responsibilities to the larger scholarly community. They will be effective to the degree that scholars choose to be guided by them. They are designed to improve scholarship, not to detract from it; to facilitate it, not hinder it; to make it more humane, not less so. The general principle from which they stem is that a scholar should so conduct himself that his work is conducive to the continuing improvement of scholarship.