The civilization of barbarism: the thesaurus of the "lettered city" in the sketch of D.F. Sarmiento
In the second half of the XIX century, by the time that Independence was proclaimed in a number of Latin American countries, a new enlightened class had taken shape in the big cities of the region, differing from their predecessors due to their autonomy concerning the authorities. Despite the existing ideological differences, the common mission of the so-called “lettered city” was to create  a “symbolic map” of the new republics, attributing cultural meanings to the vast and heterogeneous space of their native lands. The main source of the article is a classical text by the educator and statesman of Argentina, Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811–1888) “Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism” (1845). The method of thesaurus analysis developed by Russian culturologist Vladimir Lukov allows to define the intricate relation between the Self and the Other in the writer’s polarized worldview that eventually set the basis of the Argentine national identity.