Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine 3030747220, 9783030747220

Citation preview

Historiographies of Science

Ana Barahona Editor

Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine

Historiographies of Science Series Editor Michael R. Dietrich, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

The goal of this series is to provide definitive assessments of the historiography and the future of major fields and approaches within the history of science. Each volume will address the major trends in historical thought within a particular field, the major debates among historians of that field, and promising new directions that may shape future scholarship. Each volume is framed in terms of what a scholar should know about the history of work in that area, if they wanted to make a meaningful and original contribution to that field. Each volume will be written by experts in that field for graduate students and other scholars new to the history of that field. While other areas of history have extensive historiographic literatures, history of science has fewer resources from which to draw. The paucity of historiographical reflections by leading scholars in the history of science makes it more difficult for new scholars to join the field, as they try to assess the traditions of research on their own. These volumes will offer an informed introduction to major issues that will foster new, original research in the history of science. Editors will be asked to select topic areas/ fields that they think have had a substantial and diverse body of scholarship. Each volume will be informed by different methods, theories, and perspectives that can be compared and contrasted in each volume. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15837

Ana Barahona Editor

Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine With 16 Figures

Editor Ana Barahona Departamento de Biología Evolutiva Facultad de Ciencias UNAM Mexico City, Mexico

ISSN 2523-7748 ISSN 2523-7756 (electronic) ISBN 978-3-030-74722-0 ISBN 978-3-030-74723-7 (eBook) ISBN 978-3-030-74724-4 (print and electronic bundle) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Preface

While some areas of history have extensive historiographic literatures, history of science has fewer resources from which to draw than most. This scarcity of historiographical reflections by leading scholars makes it more challenging for newcomers who must try to assess traditions of historical research as they frame their own contribution to the history of science. As informed introductions to major themes in the writing of the history of science, we hope that this series will both help foster original research in the history of science and further discussion regarding historiographic trends. The goal of this series is to provide an assessment of the historiography and future of major approaches within the history of science. Each volume addresses the major trends in historical thought within a particular field, the major debates among historians of that field, and promising new directions that may shape future scholarship. Written for graduate students or scholars new to the history of science, each volume is framed in terms of what a scholar should know about the history of work in that area, if they wanted to make a meaningful and original contribution to that field. The volumes in the historiography of science series are not intended to provide comprehensive reviews of every topic discussed in the history of science. Editors of individual volumes select topic areas and fields that they think have had a substantial and diverse body of scholarship that have been informed by different methods, theories, and perspectives. Because we would like to foster more conversation about historiography, we see the idiosyncrasies of individual chapters, not as flawed and partial perspectives, but as opportunities to articulate diverse perspectives through an ongoing conversation. These volumes are open for revision through Springer’s Meteor publishing platform. Please engage with the authors and editors and help push this historiographic dialogue further. Michael R. Dietrich

v

Volume Preface

The aftermath of World War II witnessed a whole new phase of globalization, covering almost every nook and corner of the world, integrating and densifying previous historical interconnections, and impacting almost all domains in the social sciences and humanities, and history of science was no exception. Since the end of the twentieth century, the historiography of science has undergone important changes in its approach to the study of the life sciences and medicine. The field of science and technology studies (STS) has focused on the need to write transnational connected narratives based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts that describes the dynamics of scientific practices. This transnational approach seeks to abandon the concept of the nation as the main unit of analysis to understand the development of the history of science. It also seeks to move away from narratives focused on Europe and the USA to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of knowledge, people, artifacts, and scientific practices. This new perspective allows to achieve a novel understanding of science as a historical phenomenon. As part of the Historiography of Science Series, this volume seeks to provide definitive assessment of the historiography of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America. This volume will bring transnational analysis to the center of global historiographical discussions and seek to contribute both empirically and theoretically to history of science and science and technology studies in Latin America, to account for how the knowledge produced in developing countries is part of international knowledge as it circulates in transnational collaborative networks. Its objective is to make historiographic work (how people have written about a topic) available for new scholars to join the field, with meaningful and original contributions, and for graduate students and other scholars new to the history of science in Latin America. This volume provides a definitive assessment of the historiography of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America. It makes historiographic work available for new scholars to join the field and for graduate students and other scholars new to the history of science in Latin America, by means of meaningful and original contributions. Mexico City, Mexico April 2022

Ana Barahona

vii

Contents

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America in Global Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ana Barahona and Kapil Raj

Part I 2

3

.....................................

17

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva and Marcos Cueto

19

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Maurizio Esposito

39

Part II

Historiography

1

........................

63

4

Fragmented Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Luz Fernanda Azuela and Rodrigo Vega-Ortega

65

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and Evolutionism in the American Tropics . . . . . . . . Nicolás Cuvi and Delfín Viera

89

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adriana Novoa

117

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the Nineteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Juan Manuel Rodríguez-Caso

137

6

7

Natural History and Evolution

8

Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rosaura Ruiz-Gutiérrez and Ricardo Noguera-Solano

157

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gustavo Caponi

183

ix

x

Contents

10

Palaeontology in South America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irina Podgorny

205

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fabiola Juárez-Barrera, Ana Barahona, and Carlos Pérez-Malváez

225

Part III

Natural History and Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...............

12

Between History of Art and History of Science Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

13

José María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and Appropriation of Deep Time Thinking in Mexican Porfirian Geology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . María Ruiz-y-Limón and Erica Torrens-Rojas

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christian Reiß

Part IV

Agriculture

......................................

245 247

269 293

313

15

Agriculture As Connectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leida Fernandez-Prieto

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alexandra Ortiz Wallner

339

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America: Technology, Geopolitics, and Institutions . . . . . . . Wilson Picado

355

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael K. Bess

375

17

18

Part V 19

20

21

Race Studies, Medicine, and Genetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

315

393

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Olivia Gall

395

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and Anglo-American Historiographies) on “Race” Erica Torrens-Rojas and Juan Manuel Rodríguez-Caso

....

419

Malleable Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Lucía Granados Riveros, and Salina Suri

443

Contents

xi

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

..........................

467

23

The Frog and the Vine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ernesto Schwartz-Marin and Amelia Fiske

487

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aldo Mellender de Araújo

505

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

527

About the Series Editor

Michael R. Dietrich is Professor and Chair of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He studied Philosophy and Biology at Virginia Tech before earning a doctorate in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. As a historian and philosopher of twentieth-century biology, his primary interests are in the nature of scientific controversy. In numerous scholarly articles and chapters, he has explored controversies in evolutionary genetics and molecular evolution, as well as controversial figures, such as the émigré geneticist Richard Goldschmidt. He has coedited several books including Rebels, Mavericks, and Heretics in Biology with Oren Harman (2007), The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences with Nancy Anderson (2012), Biology Outside the Box: Boundary Crossers and Innovation in the Life Sciences with Oren Harman (2013), and Dreamers, Visionaries and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences with Oren Harman (2018). He is currently writing a book on genetic drift with Roberta Millstein and Robert Skipper entitled Survival of the Luckiest: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of Random Drift in Evolutionary Biology, as well as a biography of Richard Goldschmidt.

xiii

About the Volume Editor

Dr. Ana Barahona Departamento de Biología Evolutiva Facultad de Ciencias UNAM Mexico City, Mexico Ana Barahona studied biology and undertook postgraduate studies on the history of science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She stayed at Harvard University for a year with Professor Everett Mendelsohn and was invited to the American Philosophical Society in 1984. She undertook postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Irvine, with Francisco J. Ayala, and has made several research visits to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and to Harvard University’s Department of History of Science, among others. She is full-time professor in the Department of Evolutionary Biology in the School of Sciences at the UNAM. A pioneer in the historical and philosophical studies of science since 1980, she founded the area of social studies of science and technology in the School of Sciences. She has focused on the history and philosophy of evolution, genetics, and human heredity and medicine (especially in Mexico), and on the relationship between epistemology and science education. More recently, her interests have focused on medical genetics (population genetics and cytogenetics) and the impact of nuclear physics in the development of radiobiology and genetics in Mexico during the Cold War. She has also worked on genetics and agriculture in post-revolutionary Mexico, within the framework of transnational science. Some of her

xv

xvi

About the Volume Editor

published works include more than 70 specialized articles, several books of research, and textbooks for elementary education, middle school, and college education in biology and history and philosophy of science. She is member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the National System of Investigators, CONACyT. She has been president of the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, council member of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, and member of the International Committee of the Scientific Society Sigma Xi. She has served as associate editor of the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and member of the editorial boards of the journals Biological Theory, Science & Education, Almagest, Mendel Newsletter, and Journal of the History of Biology. She has been recently acknowledged as a Regular Member of the International Academy for the History of Science and member of the International Advisory Board of the British Society for the History of Science She received the 2014 National University Award (Premio Universidad Nacional 2014), for her contributions to science and technology studies, being the highest recognition that the UNAM gives to professors who have had a distinguished career. She currently coordinates the University Seminar of History, Philosophy and Studies of Science and Medicine, and is a member of the Board of Governors of the UNAM.

Contributors

Aldo Mellender de Araújo Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Luz Fernanda Azuela Geography Institute, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Ana Barahona Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Michael K. Bess Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Aguascalientes, Mexico Gustavo Caponi Department of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil Marcos Cueto Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Nicolás Cuvi Department of Anthropology, History and Humanities, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Sede Ecuador), Quito, Ecuador Maurizio Esposito Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal Leida Fernandez-Prieto Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain Amelia Fiske Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine, TUM School of Medicine, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany Olivia Gall CEIICH, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Lucía Granados Riveros Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Fabiola Juárez-Barrera Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Ricardo Noguera-Solano Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Adriana Novoa Department of History, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA xvii

xviii

Contributors

Alexandra Ortiz Wallner Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica Carlos Pérez-Malváez Facultad de Estudio Superiores Zaragoza, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger Institut für Romanistik, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen, Germany Wilson Picado Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica Irina Podgorny Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata/CONICET, La Plata, Argentina Kapil Raj École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France Christian Reiß Universität Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany Juan Manuel Rodríguez-Caso Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico División de Historia, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA Rosaura Ruiz-Gutiérrez Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico María Ruiz-y-Limón Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Ernesto Schwartz-Marin Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, EGENIS-Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, Exeter University, Exeter, UK Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK Gabriela Soto Laveaga Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Salina Suri Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Erica Torrens-Rojas Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Rodrigo Vega-Ortega Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico Delfín Viera Department of Biology and Chemistry, University Nucleus “Rafael Rangel”, University of the Andes, Trujillo, Venezuela

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America in Global Perspective Ana Barahona and Kapil Raj

Abstract

The aftermath of World War II witnessed a wholly new phase of globalization covering almost every nook and corner of the world, integrating and densifying previous historical interconnections, and impacted almost all domains in the social sciences and humanities and the history of science is no exception. Recent studies in the history of science have tended to cast aside the nation as the favored unit of analysis, as well as Eurocentric narratives, cultural-diffusionist interpretations, and the “center-periphery” binary, in order to examine the role of the global and local circulation of knowledge, people, artifacts, and scientific practices in the dynamics of scientific knowledge production and certification. The present Handbook of historiography of Latin American studies on the life sciences and medicine seeks to move away from narratives focused on Europe and the United States to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of knowledge, people, artifacts, and scientific practices in Latin America. As a geographic, economic, and cultural area, Latin America facilitated scientific exchange, collective production of knowledge, and identification beyond the level of the nation-states. The manuscripts in this book challenge the classical colonial studies narrative, which posits that science and technology were brought to America by the Western Empires as part of the discourse of the “civilizing mission,” and are written by experienced, expert authors who expose

A. Barahona (*) Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] K. Raj École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_1

1

2

A. Barahona and K. Raj

the lines of ongoing research in the history of life sciences and medicine in Latin America. With its wide thematic scope, this volume will hopefully be relevant to researchers across Latin America and abroad. The aftermath of World War II witnessed a wholly new phase of globalization covering almost every nook and corner of the world, integrating and densifying previous historical interconnections. The irreversible weakening and eventual dissolution of the historical European empires leading to the independence of vast areas of the globe, the concomitant polarization of global power between the Soviets and the West and their ruthless rivalry for world domination through the Cold War quest to impose their respective economic and cultural models, led to a radical reconfiguration of connections and dependencies that affected Europe, east and west, as much as it did the rest of the world (Iggers et al. 2017; see also Fradera 2009). The fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing redistribution of the cards of global power during the last three decades – to now include South and East Asia as well as parts of Central and South America – has only exacerbated this trend. These momentous processes have impacted almost all domains in the social sciences and humanities and the history of science is no exception. Enlarging on classical comparativist strategies to measure weaknesses in so-called backward or underdeveloped societies with respect to the West, new relational approaches in historiography, such as histoire croisée, crossroads-, connected-, circulatory-, and transnational histories have seen the light of day in the past few years. Recent studies in the history of science have emphasized the need to write narratives based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts. These approaches have tended to cast aside the nation as the favored unit of analysis, as well as Eurocentric narratives, cultural-diffusionist interpretations, and the “centerperiphery” binary, in order to examine the role of the global and local circulation of knowledge, people, artifacts, and scientific practices in the dynamics of scientific knowledge production and certification (Walker 2012; see also Turchetti et al. 2012; and Raj 2010). They thus highlight the need to decenter history of science from purely Western-centered accounts. Indeed, as Sloten points out, “non-Western regions of the world are not marginal to modern science; all regions and nations are interconnected on a global scale” (Sloten 2020 on 4; see also Coutinho and Schwartzman 2020; Cueto 2020; McCook 2020; Vessuri 2020). These new approaches problematize the notion of “international science” and seek to elucidate the key concepts they deploy, such as circulation, reception, adaptation, creativity, and so on. Although most studies on transnational science focused initially on early modern science, particularly on natural history, collecting and geography, the twentieth century and especially developments during the Cold War, have been receiving increasing attention during the past years. This was a period when the life sciences, public health, and politics intertwined, and new and renewed bilateral and multilateral organizations played an important role in the organization and output of scientific work (Cassier and Correa 2007; see also Gaudillière 2014). The remarkable expansion of state-funded medical science and military patronage of scientific work in the life sciences occurred during the Cold

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

3

War in industrialized and developing countries (Krige and Pestre 1997). The globalization not only affected the science and technology related to the military and space races but also research in biomedicine and other fields. According to Cueto and da Silva, “the context of these studies is still the era of globalization where political and economic processes intensified, such as the weakness of States in developing countries, the power of transnational corporations and the visibility of anti-globalization currents;” therefore, it is necessary to get away from the traditional bipolar narrative of the centers and peripheries, and point towards travels, encounters, and disencounters (Cueto and da Silva 2020). According to these authors, some works try to leave the Latin American sphere to include other geographical spaces such as Africa and Asia. The global perspective of the history of science in which the concepts of local and transnational are used represents one of the most innovative way to render intelligible how scientific practices, ideas, materials, and scientists themselves circulate beyond geographical and epistemic borders. Global history is shaped by the conditions of the time and places in which it emerges. As historian Sebastian Conrad asserts, “current assumptions about the globalization process should not be regarded as timeless. Global history today differs from its precursors in . . . its emphasis on entanglements and integrations, and its determination to move beyond earlier notions, among them the concept of discrete civilizations, of European diffusion, and of teleological narratives” (Conrad 2016 on 36). Criticisms of George Basalla’s diffusionist model, a typical product of the Cold War in which knowledge produced in European centers is disseminated to the peripheries which receive it passively, innagurated a new turn in the historical explanation of science at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Raj 2013). Challenging the notion of universal science, this global turn conceives science as a social practice; this implies that we have to study the internal logic of science at the same time as its political, social, economic, institutional, and historical specificities. This new approach has focused on how knowledge circulates in widely different contexts and collaborative networks and has relativized the role of the “nation” as the unit of historical analysis. To avoid the tension between locality and circulation, many works have focused on the problematic nature of circulation, paying attention to the effects locally produced knowledge exerts upon practices in motion and in its interaction with specific localities; in this view, circulation is a process of knowledge production, not only the moving of things (Raj 2007). In the case of the nation as the unit of historical inquiry, many scholars have pointed out that decentering the nation can shed some light on the trajectories of things on the move across borders (Barahona 2019). In recent decades, transnational and global perspectives on history of science have contributed to a more inclusive understanding of intellectual and cultural exchanges, challenging the ways in which the traditional narratives have tended to assign power privileges to “centers” in regard to “peripheral” countries (Körner 2019 on 3). These perspectives have rethought exchanges between so-called metropoles and peripheries, challenging preconceived ideas about the unidirectional flow of scientific and cultural practices, bringing out instead a forward and backward flow

4

A. Barahona and K. Raj

through a dialectic of contestation and negotiation, power asymmetries notwithstanding (Cooper and Stoler 1997). Jürgen Renn has stressed the need for a global perspective inasmuch as “the evolution of knowledge can only be understood as a global process” (Renn 2020, on 248). For him, although there are several investigations on this recent trend, the focus has been paid on local histories in which “the resulting rich but rather fragmented picture may lead us to underestimate the extent to which the world has been connected, for a very long time, by knowledge. . . the development of languages, food production. . .and calculating have been part of a long-term and indeed global processes since very early times and can only be properly understood from a more comprehensive perspective” (Renn 2020, on 248; see also Renn 2015). By the end of the twentieth century, historians of science had also turned their gaze to the local knowledges constructed by the so-called peripheries (Iggers et al., 2017, on 19–32). This in part allowed the history of science to turn not only to the local and to the global but towards the perspective of the transnational, thus giving rise to the so-called “glocal” (“What is often referred to as the local, is essentially included within the global,” Robertson 1995 on 35). As Conrad contends, “the local has emerged as a category of identification, and of analysis, in response to processes of nation-building of globalization. . . the global too, should not be supposed as a given formation but rather as constituted and instantiated through the activities of social actors” (Conrad 2016, on 137). This style of historiography takes sciences as a global phenomenon shaped by means of transnational circulation of knowledge and material culture, as well as through collaborative networks and actors, both social and institutional (Walker 2012; see also Barahona 2019). Thus, the interplay between the local and the global allows “global historians to negotiate various levels of social practice, and to address global interactions without having to treat the whole world as their unit of analysis. . . The global. . . is a scale that can be referenced even when we look at individual lives and small spaces” (Conrad 2016 on 140). This global approach to the history of science, which works with the concepts of local and transnational, represents one of the most innovative ways of explaining how scientific practices, ideas, teaching materials, and even scientists themselves circulate across borders in collaborative networks. Locality is socially and historically produced in and through a dynamic interaction. Localities, according to Raj, “constantly reinvent themselves through grounding (that is, appropriating and reconfiguring) objects, skill, ideas, and practices that circulate both within narrow regional or transcontinental – and indeed global – spaces” (Raj 2007, 2010 on 21). The global is also a way of placing objects of study in a certain time and place. Historians of science have tended to understand globalization as something positive, opening possibilities for new sources and methodologies, decentralizing Europe, moving away from colonial histories, and re-examining categories of analysis (Barahona 2019). All of this aims to cover the diversity of the emerging contexts in the world that are marked by regional fragmentation. When writing a detailed global history of science and building broader narratives, it is necessary to incorporate other actors and turn our gaze to the spaces in which science is built (Safier 2010

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

5

on 143): museums, field stations to high-tech laboratories, as well as cafeterias, cities, provinces, or countries. Even botanical gardens, hospitals, and universities have been studied since the 1970s within a constructivist perspective that historically explores the construction of these spaces (Livingstone 2003, 2010). This has allowed the development of the global history of science that attempts to put science in a specific place and time for its subsequent movement through the world or regions. By questioning the discovery and mobility of scientific practices, it has been possible to identify factors that contributed to the success or failure of the actual circulation of knowledge in very specific situations (McCook 2013). These places are far from being empty, on the contrary, they have the ability to shape the knowledge that is being built as it moves and changes and varies from place to place. The geographical turn is important for the history of global science since circulation occurs within spaces whose geography is modified or has been historically modified (Livingstone 2010; Raj 2013). The material places occupy abstract ones, such as social spaces in which it is possible to speak, do, and understand things. The space where knowledge is constructed, be it physical, abstract, or metaphorical, is traversed by networks where it circulates, supporting the units of analysis of the global history of science. Therefore, scientific knowledge develops in concrete, specific places, circulates from one place to another, and is made and reconstructed by how it is spoken (Livingstone 2003, 2010; Raj 2013). The narratives in which the circulation of knowledge is incorporated bring agents who do not necessary belong to Europe or the United States, back in history as active agents, experts from different parts of the world who interact in the transit of knowledge, of practices, and even of people who are in scientific training as a constitutive part of the construction of knowledge (Raj 2017). The role of circulation in the construction of knowledge suggests that science should be thought of as a form of communication and that the key to making these kinds of stories is the understanding of scientific knowledge as a practice. Such circulation not only occurs in an abstract way, but it is also reflected in the material forms of knowledge such as experimental instruments, natural specimens, models, books, drawings, notebooks, or paintings (Secord 2004). The ability of knowledge to move shows that science can be understood as knowledge in transit capable of crossing geographical, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries due to its social nature (Secord 2004). Although Secord (2004) stressed circulation as communication, circulation is more than mere communication. It implies the going and coming of things while transforming themselves. “By science we understand . . . the production of knowledge, practices, instruments, techniques, and services; and by circulation . . . not the “dissemination,” “transmission” or “communication” of ideas, but the processes of encounter, power and resistance, negotiation, and reconfiguration that occur in crosscultural interaction” (Raj 2013 on 343). In the introduction to an edited volume, Re-mapping centre and periphery, Axel Körner examines scientific and cultural exchanges in order to assess how, by circulating in scientific networks, scientific knowledge is adapted, changed, and appropriated. The contributions in this collection are critical to the classical narrative that assumes that the circulation of knowledge is a one-directional transmission

6

A. Barahona and K. Raj

“which is then used to establish an intellectual or political order that assigns particular spaces to positions of either core or periphery” (Körner 2019 on 2). The global perspective in the history of science has been widely established in multiple fields of academic history as shown by the many academic manuscripts and collective volumes that have been published in the last decades. As the historian of technology John Krige has written, decentering the nation-state as the unit of historical inquiry, the transnational lens magnifies the relationships of interdependency between people and places that crisscross national borders. Circulation of knowledge embodied in people and things is a “social accomplishment. It pays special attention to travel across borders, putting human individuals and their motivations for going abroad and for engaging with and transforming (and being transformed by) others in a foreign place at the core of the analysis” (Krige 2019 on 5). In the edited volume How Knowledge Moves, Krige takes knowledge-in-motion as its central object, with the goal of unraveling the relationships among people, ideas, and things that arise when they cross national borders. As he wrote in the introduction, boundary work is constitutive of borders. “Transnational networks connect remote places where knowledge is produced, exchanged, and appropriated. . . Transnational actors do not simply travel form one place to another; their knowledge is an asset that they deploy to reconfigure existing spaces and themselves and what they know. Networks are not rigid struts but dynamic relationships that evolve over time and that persist only as long as the networked participants reap some benefit from them” (Krige 2019 on 9). In a recent volume on the history of science, Richard Sloten, Ronald Numbers, and David Livingstone address the need for a comprehensive history of science whose goal is to provide an authoritative, up-to-date account of science from different perspectives: the national, the transnational, the international, and the global (Sloten et al. 2020). One of the major themes of this collective volume was the situatedness of science, placing activities, practices, and knowledge in their context. “A contextual analysis helps explain such problems as the role of particular local circumstances in the production of scientific knowledge and practice, how local conditions and value systems shape scientists´ decision to pursue specific areas of research and modes of practice, the reason why specific disciplines rather than others develop at a particular time and place, and why the reception of scientific theories differs in separate locations around the world” (Sloten 2020, on 2). They called for “the need to analyze the history of modern science not only in particular local, national, and regional contexts but also with respect to the flow or circulation of knowledge, tools, methods, people and artifacts across national borders” (Sloten 2020 on 3). Global history, thus, emphasizes the transnational circulation of knowledge between cultures, which as the term suggests, blur national frontiers. It focuses on intermediaries or go-betweens, like missionaries, travelers, and merchants, among others, who translate and make knowledge intelligible to different cultures (Schaffer et al. 2009). This perspective pays special attention to the circulation of books, maps, laboratory practices, ideas, people, and so on, from different cultures and even from different languages (Safier 2010). Or as Sloten has put it, they also addressed “the

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

7

important role of go-betweens or brokers who have mediated between traditional producers and users of scientific knowledge” (Sloten 2020 on 3). Knowledge itself is transformed while circulating (Raj 2013). In her piece on Largo dislocare, Soto Laveaga invites historians of science and medicine, to dislocate traditional narratives, not only geographically but also chronologically, to address a deeper understanding of the circulation of knowledge, people, and artifacts, and urges scholars to re-examine the flows of knowledge, and to assess “the importance of microhistories as the means to enrich and expand existing histories of science. . . I advocate a concerted effort to examine how and when distinct microhistories among nontraditional protagonists intersect. . . . and propose a methodology that takes this into consideration and insist that in the cases of innovations emerging from what is often termed the formerly colonized or developing world, histories are not factually complete without the attempt to seek protagonists who do not fit comfortably in that title. . . . Such histories require that we consider locals. . . that do not map nicely on to colonial/postcolonial divides” (Soto Laveaga 2018 on 23). This approach privileges chronologies out of the Eurocentered or center-periphery classical narratives and challenges the north-south imperial networks histories to avoid asymmetries in the historical process and asymmetries in the historical narrative “to enrich and expand our understanding of an interconnected globe” (Soto Laveaga 2018, on 27). By talking about largo (temporal) dislocare (put out of place), Soto Laveaga gives us the opportunity to expand the borders of history of science, to understand not only the chronology of the histories but also the spaces in which these histories are developed. For her, this is particularly important for Latin American studies of science that are “in a doublebind: contending with a colonial experience that often overlooks or mislabels construction of knowledge in its territories because of its link to Spain and, once independent, attributes much of its technological innovation to the action of development projects, usually from the United States” (Soto Laveaga 2018, on 27.) Latin American scholars have been caught between incomplete imperial narratives that do not acknowledge local contributions to global science, and colonial narratives that very often put Spain at the core in the construction of Latin American knowledge. “Largo dislocare emphasizes the need to expand both the parameter of time (when) and place (where) when examining those outside our typical knowledge-production institutions” (Soto Laveaga and Gómez 2018 on 8). The history of science has gained a lot from the dominant micro-histories of the last decades of the twentieth century, which have made it possible to understand the small details of scientific practices. However, recent studies have focused on shorter periods and broader geographies. Seeing science in transnational or global contexts, and focusing not only on people or ideas, but on scientific objects that travel, move, and transform, allows the articulation of stories over longer periods, with a great variety of actors and with a more global perspective (Quintero 2006). As Nicola Miller has said, categories of national and freeing knowledge coalesced in specific conjunctures in Latin America, when knowledge acquired locally succeeded across borders, pointing to the importance of thinking not only about

8

A. Barahona and K. Raj

knowledge production or how it is received when travels, but to what extend this knowledge is valid as to be worthy of being received (Miller 2019 on 78). Latin America was a concept coined in France in the nineteenth century, but it was not until the twentieth century that populism, authoritarianism, and social inequalities made Latin American countries more similar (see Cueto and da Silva 2020 on 10). According to historian Fa-ti Fan, regional cultural boundaries are essential and must be respected in the historical study of the world circulation of knowledge (Fan 2007), albeit “regions are here understood as socially constructed rather than geographically designated ‘self-evident blocks of terrestrial space’. . . A relational rather than absolute methodology thus theorizes space as produced through interrelations and interactions, that is, through strategic alliances or competition and conflict among different classes, class fractions or groups representative of classes at and across different spatial scales within the national territories, as well as inter and transnationally (regionally and globally), in the struggle for space” (Muhr 2016 on 255). As Miller has written “Latin America was foundational to 19th century debates about culture and politics. These new political communities all made a founding commitment to promoting knowledge and its circulation as central to the formation of modern societies. This commitment was particularly strong in the republics of Spanish America, where the rhetorical embrace of popular sovereignty was widespread, even if it was limited in practice. . . These new countries were the ultimate testcases of nation-statehood, because they were constituted without any obvious differences of race, language or culture to differentiate one from another. . . What role could the circulation of knowledge play in fostering collective identities and participatory democratic life, especially in the context of the modern global hierarchies of knowledge established during the 19th century?” (Miller 2019 on 79). In places like Mexico, a new generation of historians of science in the mid-1990s coincided with strong criticism of some disciplines for being too closely engaged with the legitimization of the Latin American states. “In order to turn away from these national and parochial narratives, some scholars trained in Mexico, along with others that were being trained elsewhere, started exploring historiographical strategies that would enable them to illuminate different aspects of the history of science in Latin America” (Alonso-Pavón et al. 2020 on 5). Cañizares-Esguerra’s work, for example, challenges the interpretation of America and its inhabitants as a young and backward place in the evolutionary scale in the Spanish Illustration and the Bourbon reforms in its colonies (Cañizares-Esguerra 2002). For Cañizares-Esguerra it was possible to reject the vision of Latin America as a structure where there was no development or communication of science, but as a period with particular and diverse values, exploring new sources and differences in the knowledge system (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006). The present Handbook of historiography of Latin American studies on the life sciences and medicine seeks to move away from narratives focused on Europe and the United States to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of knowledge, people, artifacts, and scientific practices in Latin America.

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

9

As has been said, this rich approach problematizes notions like circulation, reception, adaptation, and creativity. As a geographic, economic, and cultural area, Latin America, the product of more than 300 years of Iberian colonization, facilitated scientific exchange, collective production of knowledge, and identification beyond the level of the nation-states. This increased connectedness and its role in forming transnational spaces, ideas, and identities in the region is a subject of historical inquiry. The manuscripts in this book challenge the classical colonial studies narrative, which posits that science and technology were brought to America by the Western Empires as part of the discourse of the “civilizing mission.” In this way, this collection of manuscripts will contribute both theoretically and empirically to the history of the life sciences at an international level. According to Dietrich et al. (2020), history of science is “always constructed, filtered, placed within the content of what those who came before believed and wrote. With time, history becomes a palimpsest. To understand how successive generations have remembered the past, one must drill down, layer by layer” (on 1; see also Conrad 2016 on 137). Thus, historiography is the study of the science of history, and intends to understand how historians have written about the past: people, topics, disciplines, artifacts, processes, and practices, and “how historical scholarship reflects its different contexts” (on 1). According to these authors, “historiographic analysis is valuable because as historians create their narratives describing the past, they are in dialog not only with their sources but with other historians, other historical narratives, wider social, cultural and political changes, as well as shifting scholarly standards and methodologies” (on 2). This handbook, as Dietrich and colleagues have written for the first volume of the Springer Historiography series, intends to make visible the interaction and conversations among different historical traditions and narratives that have been produced in and about Latin American natural sciences and medicine. Also, by moving beyond the traditional narratives, it allows scholars to approach and contribute to the field as they follow the transit of knowledge putting attention to travel and circulation that reflect the global nature of science. Historiography, according to Iggers and colleagues, not only is a representation of the past as it was, but also as it is remembered. One of the tasks of historians must be to criticize and dismantle distortion and myths of the past. As this is not a simple task, historiography must be seen as a dialogue whose outcome is not a single story, but a multifarious interpretation of the past. “These enrich our picture of the past but nevertheless remain subject to critical examination by the scholar community” (Iggers et al. 2017 on 13). This new conception of historiographical studies, they assert, gave rise to the professionalization of the historical studies: history was transformed from a chronicle of events to coherent narratives (Iggers et al. 2017 on 3, 10). “The last few decades witnessed fundamental reorientation both in historical thought and in the broader context in which history is written. There was an expansion of historical studies with a greater interest in transnational and intercultural themes and a turn away from a focus on elites to a ‘history from

10

A. Barahona and K. Raj

below’, which included the ordinary lives of broad masses of the population who had largely been excluded from histories and were now given special attention. . . This modern transformation of historical writing was characterized by the rise of academic history and, along with it and because of it, the emergence of the historical profession” (Iggers et al. 2017 on 11). It is in this context, that the idea to edit a volume for the Springer series on Historiography dedicated to Latin American studies came from. Its main objective was to create an academic space for philosophical reflection and historical analysis of the life sciences and medicine that promotes interdisciplinary collaboration and the consolidation of research in Latin America. The chapters in this volume intends to delve into the conditions shaping the production and circulations of knowledge by considering the social context. The work of the scholars in this collection have been highly relevant in their contributions to the history of science and medicine in Latin America. They have helped to pinpoint constraints and inequalities that resulted in tensions such as the asymmetries experienced by scholars working in the non-West in their attempts to locally produce scientific knowledge (see Rodríguez-Medina et al. 2019). Following Minor, the chapters propose an approach that contributes to expanding the geographies and practices of science and medicine in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by centering on the interaction of knowledge and place. In this sense, Latin America is particularly relevant for examining the production and circulation of scientific practices that played a key role in the global development of the natural sciences and medicine (see Minor 2020 on 701). And it is precisely why the contributions in this book are original as they focus on the asymmetries of cultural and scientific encounters that challenge notions like centers and peripheries, or local and global. The emphasis is delving into the historiography produced by scholar working in or on Latin America. Following Baravalle and Zaterka, this does not suggest the existence of something like “a” Latin American history of science and medicine, but pluralistic accounts that try to contribute theoretically and empirically by attempting to integrate regional authors into the larger international debates (Baravalle and Zaterka 2020 on 1). This volume reflects the plurality of perspectives on offer. It presents the reader with a range of contributions by scholars working in different regions of Latin America, whose works are representative of the growing field globally. This book aims to boost attention on the Latin-American studies of historiography of science and medicine, by offering a collection of papers that address how history of science in different disciplines have been written. Also, this collection intends to reveal the multilayered and multidirectional flow of scientific practices, material culture, and intellectual exchanges between and among different parts of Latin America in a global context (following Körner 2019 on 5). It seeks thus to answer basic questions such as why are works, debates, and discussions about this field so scarce in our region? Why are Latin American scholars not present in larger global historical debates? In addressing these questions, it provides an opportunity for an international group of scholars to think beyond methodological nationalisms and regionalisms in order to understand the

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

11

complexity of our global present from the perspective of the history of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America. The manuscripts collected has been organized in five parts: historiography, natural history and evolution, natural history and art, agriculture, and race studies. Framed by an introduction, the first section provides a historiographical background to previous debates this collection attempts to tackle. It addresses the recent debates about the need to use center and periphery as an analytical tool to unveil the history of science outside the West (see also Körner 2019 on 6). While da Silva and Cueto aim to map the evolution of the tensions between notions like centers and peripheries, and local and global, Esposito describes why the distinction between these terms is still relevant for the history of biology, biomedicine and agriculture in Latin America. The social turn of the 1970s, assert da Silva and Cueto, was challenged by the global turn at the turn of the twenty-first century, when novel investigations emphasized transnational connections and circulation of knowledge. This global turn questioned studies limited to what occurred in Latin American countries and examined intermediaries who established links not only with the Western Europe and North America but also with Asia and Africa; for his part, Esposito argues that, despite old and recent critiques, we are not ready to abandon the center-periphery dichotomy as this is still epistemically pertinent and hermeneutically valuable for making sense of the development, spread, and circulation of scientific knowledge in Latin America. The second section presents the reader with the vast panoply of approaches on offer to the history of natural history. Azuela and Vega y Ortega acknowledge the significant number of uneven publications in Mexican historiography which have resulted in a fragmented story of its past, in particular those concerning knowledge coproduction and knowledge and practices’ reconfiguration, both at the local and global levels. Cuvi and Viera address the historiography of scientific explorations and evolutionism in the last 40 years in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, to show how it has grown and gained depth, from largely “internalist,” universalist, compilatory, descriptive, and hagiographic approaches, to critical and social narratives that focus on local actors, international networks, and science as power. The next four chapters in this section deal with Darwin and evolutionism from a variety of different perspectives. Novoa analyzes the progression of Darwin studies in the first half of the nineteenth century and the pioneering work of Thomas Glick in the 1970s in Argentina; her work focuses on the importance of communication, the formation of international networks, and the problems brought by the specialization that led to the formation of new scientific fields. Rodríguez Caso, by examining the introduction and reception of Darwinism in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, presents some historiographical critiques emanating from tensions within Latin American academic communities themselves. These tensions, such as the specific interests of historians or scientists, have led to a variety of proposals on how to understand the history of science. For their part, Ruiz and Noguera analyze how Darwin’s ideas interacted with positivism and Spencerism in the fields of politics, science, and medicine in Latin America, in light of increasing social, political, and economic liberalism in the region at the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of

12

A. Barahona and K. Raj

Florentino Ameghino in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century, Caponi challenges the traditional narrative that shows disinterest in epistemological issues, thereby facilitating a clearer understanding of the way in which the Darwinian Revolution impacted paleontology and natural history in Latin America. Continuing with paleontological studies, Podgorny reflects on how historiography has ignored many agents, ideas, and interests at stake, most importantly the crucial role of the Spanish bureaucracy and bureaucrats, in the extraction of fossils while examining what happened in Buenos Aires after the departure of the skeletons, and how the news circulated in South America. Barrera, Barahona, and Malváez’s contribution on Mexican biogeography highlights that the history of biogeography has been written more by biogeographers than historians, and in doing so, these studies show a bias towards the history of historical biogeography, leaving aside other disciplines like ecological biogeography. The third section of this volume turns to the intersection of science and art. While Phaf-Rheinberger, and Ruiz y Limón and Torrens deal with the work of Mexican painter José María Velasco, Reiss deals with the Mexican amphibian axolotl that was built as an experimental animal for searching the process of cell regeneration. Reiss thus uses the history of this animal as a historiographical lens through which to view the history of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America. Paving the way for a novel vision of the link between science and art, Phaf-Rheinberger, as well as Ruiz y Limón and Torrens’ reviews of different historiographies on the life and work of Velasco shed light on the state of geological sciences, evolutionary ideas, and landscape painting in late nineteenth century Mexico. The book’s fourth section comprises of four chapters dealing from agriculture as connectivity in Latin America and the Caribbean (Fernández-Prieto), South-South exchange networks and the circulation of knowledge in Mexico (Ortiz Wallner), a reappraisal of the Green Revolution in Latin America (Picado), and a hemispheric history of highway building (Bess). They address the centrality of the connectedness of agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean, setting aside the center-periphery framework and the vision of the region as a passive recipient of Western science and technology. Also, by confronting the traditional narrative of the Green Revolution, Picado introduces the notion of multiple revolutions with different chronologies and geographies, depending on agricultural modernization in each locale. The goal of Bess’s contribution is to examine the policies nation-states in local road construction and how these intersect across the hemisphere with implications for economic development, agriculture, public health, and safety. The volume’s fifth and final section is more heterogenous owing to the topics that it deals with, namely race, medicine, and genetics. While Gall, Torrens and Rodríguez, Soto Laveaga, Granados and Suri, and Rosemblatt address and critically reevaluate the traditional narratives on race, the chapters by Schwartz-Marin and Fiske, and Araújo describe different aspects of medicine and biomedicine in relation to human populations. Gall focuses on the story of Mexican sui generis racism over a long span of time, pointing to the development of a series of powerful state policies to dissolve indigenous ethnicities at the beginning of the twentieth century. Soto Laveaga and her colleagues examine the intertwined ideas of race and nutrition on a

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

13

global scale, briefly alluding to how nutrition became a eugenic tool and a function of capitalist and neoliberal landscapes that helped propel a transformation of rural and racialized populations in twentieth-century rural Mexico. While Torrens and Rodríguez Caso bring to the fore the different ways in which the concept of race and its relationship with the establishment of the Mexican state has been written about by both Mexican and US scholars in recent years, Rosemblatt focuses on the relationship between science, environment, and medicine with eugenic nationalism, in which scholars are now looking not just at how biology has shaped racial formulations but also at how ideas about nature and nurture – biology and culture – have been reconfigured. In order to advance insights that shed light into the ways in which biomedicine has been (or failed to be) committed to justice and solidarity, SchwartzMarin and Fiske revisit landmark cases linked with biopiracy and medical innovation in light of indigenous and Western knowledge practices in relation to toxic organisms. Finally, in Araújo’s narrative, the development of population genetics in Brazil with a variety of organisms, from insects other than diptera, nonhuman primates, humans, microorganisms, and plants, brings to light the collaborative networks and the circulation of knowledge characteristic of the twentieth century that lay behind the rise of the modern genetics and its diversification. With its wide thematic scope, this volume will hopefully be relevant to researchers across Latin America and beyond. The editors thank the authors for their participation in this collective volume that sheds new light on the history of science from and about Latin America. Their contribution is indeed at the heart of the volume’s success. Acknowledgments This research was partially supported by projects CONACyT CB-2018/A1-S8786 and DGAPA IN403718.

References Alonso-Pavón JA, Cheé-Santiago J, Granados-Riveros ML, Ornelas-Cruces MD, Torrens-Rojas E, Barahona A (2020) A brief prècis of the institutionalization of history of science in Mexico. Br J Hist Sci 53(3):397–406 Barahona A (2019) Local, global, and transnational perspectives on the history of biology. In: Dietrich M, Borrello M, Harman O (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology. Springer, Cham, pp 1–22 Baravalle L, Zaterka L (2020) Introduction to life and evolution. In: Baravalle L, Zaterka L (eds) Life and evolution. Latin American essays on the history and philosophy of biology. Springer, Cham, pp 1–9 Cañizares-Esguerra J (2002) How to write the history of the New World: histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Cassier M, Correa M (2007) Intellectual property and public health: copying of HIV/AIDS drugs by Brazilian public and private pharmaceutical laboratories. RECIIS 1(1):130–149 Conrad S (2016) What is global history? Princeton University Press, New Jersey Cooper F, Stoler AL (1997) Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world. University of Calif Press, Berkeley

14

A. Barahona and K. Raj

Coutinho M, Schwartzman S (2020) Brazil. In: Sloten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (eds) Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 799–809 Cueto M (2020) Spanish South America. In: Sloten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (eds) Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 763–781 Cueto M, da Silva MAD (2020) Trayectorias y desafíos en la historiografía de la ciencia y de la medicina en América Latina. Asclepio 72(2):320–332 Dietrich M, Borrello ME, Harmann O (2020) New perspectives on the historiography of biology. In: Dietrich M, Borrello M, Harman O (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology. Springer, Cham, pp 1–7 Fan F (2007) Science in cultural borderlands: methodological reflections on the study of science, European imperialism, and cultural encounter. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 1(2):213–231 Fradera JM (2009) Reading imperial transitions. Spanish contraction, British expansion, and American irruption. In: McCoy AW, Scarano FA (eds) Colonial crucible. Empire in the making of the modern American state. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, pp 34–62 Gaudillière JP (2014) An Indian path to biocapital? The traditional knowledge digital library, drug patents, and the reformulation regime of contemporary Ayurveda. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 8 (4):391–415 Iggers GG, Wang E, Mukherjee S (2017) A global history of modern historiography. Routledge, New York Körner A (2019) Space and asymmetric difference in historical perspective: an introduction. In: Hauswedell T, Körner A, Tiedau U (eds) Re-mapping centre and periphery. Asymmetrical encounters in European and global contexts. UCL Press, London, pp 1–13 Krige J (2019) Writing the transnational history of science and technology. In: Krige J (ed) How knowledge moves. Writing the transnational history of science and technology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 5–34 Krige J, Pestre D (1997) Science in the twentieth century. Routledge, London Livingstone DN (2003) Putting science in its place. Geographies of scientific knowledge. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago Livingstone DN (2010) Landscapes of knowledge. In: Meusburger P, Livingstone DN, Jöns H (eds) Geographies of science. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 3–22 McCook S (2013) Global currents in national histories of science: the “global turn” and the history of science. Isis 104(4):773–776 McCook S (2020) Greater Caribbean: Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. In: Sloten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (eds) Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 782–798 Miller N (2019) Republics of knowledge: interpreting the world from Latin America. In: Hauswedell T, Körner A, Tiedau U (eds) Re-mapping centre and periphery. Asymmetrical encounters in European and global contexts. UCL Press, London, pp 77–93 Minor A (2020) Up-and-down journeys: the Latin America’s uniqueness for the study of cosmic rays. Centaurus 62:697–719 Muhr T (2016) South-south development cooperation and the socio-spatial reconfiguration of Latin America-Caribbean regionalism: university education in the Brazil-Venezuela ‘special border regime’. In: Robertson S, Olds K, Dale R, Dang QA (eds) Global regionalism and higher education. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, pp 253–271 Quintero C (2006) ¿En qué anda la historia de la ciencia y el imperialismo? Saberes locales, dinámicas coloniales y el papel de los Estados Unidos en la ciencia del siglo XX. Hist Crit 31:151–172 Raj K (2007) Relocating modern science: Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Raj K (2010) Introduction: Circulation and locality in early modern science. Br J Hist Sci 43(4): 513–517

1

A Historiography of the Life Sciences and Medicine in Latin America. . .

15

Raj K (2013) Beyond postcolonialism. . . and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science. Isis 6(1):9–42 Raj K (2017) Thinking without the scientific revolution: global interactions and the construction of knowledge. J Early Mod Hist 21:445–458 Renn J (2015) The history of science and the globalization of knowledge. In: Arabatzis T, Renn J, Simões A (eds) Relocating the history of science. Essays in honor of Kostas Gavroglu. Boston studies in the philosophy and history of science, vol 312. Springer, Cham, pp 241–252 Renn J (2020) The evolution of knowledge. Rethinking science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press, New Jersey Robertson R (1995) Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity. In: Featherstone M, Lash SM, Robertson R (eds) Global modernities. Sage, London, pp 24–44 Rodríguez-Medina L, Ferpozzi H, Layna J, Valdez EM, Kreimer P (2019) International ties at peripheral sites: co-producing social processes and scientific knowledge in Latin America. Sci Cult 28(4):562–588 Safier N (2010) Global knowledge on the move. Itineraries, Amerindian narratives, and deep histories of science. Isis 101:133–145 Schaffer S, Roberts L, Raj K, Delbourgo J (eds) (2009) The brokered world. Go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770–1820. Watson Publishing International LLC, Sagamore Beach Secord JA (2004) Knowledge in transit. Isis 95:654–672 Sloten HR (2020) Introduction. In: Sloten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (eds) Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 1–5 Sloten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (2020) Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Soto LG (2018) Largo dislocare: connecting microhistories to remap and recenter histories of science. Hist Technol 34(1):21–30 Soto LG, Gómez PF (2018) Introduction. Hist Technol 34(1):5–10 Turchetti S, Herran N, Boudia S (eds) (2012) Transnational history of science, special issue of Br J Hist Sci 45(3) Vessuri H (2020) Latin America: a commentary. In: Sloten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (eds) Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 810–822 Walker M (2012) The ‘national’ in international and transnational science. Br J Hist Sci 45(3):359–376

Part I Historiography

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva and Marcos Cueto

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Social Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Important Shifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Global Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

20 21 26 29 34 35

Abstract

This chapter examines the work done in Latin American history of science during the past few decades. A social turn that could be traced to the 1970s sought to understand how science and modern scientific disciplines emerged. Studies assumed their origins to be mainly European or North American and concentrated on how science took roots in Latin America’s culture, society, and politics. The focus was on Latin American nations as self-sufficient entities and a criticism of Eurocentric approaches, and the key concepts of reception, adaptation, and negotiation were used. This turn was challenged toward the turn of the twenty-first century in a global turn, when novel investigations emphasized transnational connections and circulation of knowledge. The global turn questioned studies limited to what occurred in Latin American countries and examined intermediaries who established links not only with the Global North but also with Asia and Africa. As a result, new research defied the traditional notions of an exclusive European and North M. A. D. d. Silva (*) University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Cueto Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: marcos.cueto@fiocruz.br © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_17

19

20

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

American origin of modern science as well as a subordinate Latin America in the scientific world. And even tested the usefulness of focusing on the uniqueness of the region in future investigations.

Introduction Historians of Science in Latin America have asked for some time if knowledge from their region is relevant to the rest of the world. A corollary question has been: are the social, cultural, and economic particularities of the region so strong that its scientific dynamic has always been a local process? Although this question has never been properly answered, Latin American historians have struggled to respond and provided tentative responses that are rich in itself. And the tension contained in the examination remains. This chapter aims to map the evolution of the tension between the notions of “Latin American” and “universal,” or between the “local” and the “global,” and to describe the main events and selected publications – mainly books – produced as expressions of complex and different analyses that helped to decenter Europe and the US as the origins and protagonists of modern knowledge. We will focus on the publications of the last 50 years, with special attention to the history of public health and medicine. Many studies overlap in methodologies and perspectives between them as well as with some studies in the history of science, and it is not possible to establish rigid thematic and even temporal lines between them. However, because of the shared expertise of the authors, we chose to focus on the works dealing with subjects commonly associated with the history of medicine and public health, such as epidemics, pharmaceutical laboratories, international health organizations, sanitary campaigns, among other subjects. The first part of the chapter explores the works carried out between the 1970s and the 1990s, a moment marked by the adaptation of a “social turn” in the history of science in the region. The main focus of these generations of scholars was on the Latin-American nations, their scientific institutions, issues of adaptation and recreation of European influences, the emergence of national intellectual traditions, and the impact of the asymmetrical relationships established between the region and the capitalist and knowledge centers of the Global North. The second part of the chapter examines some ongoing transformations in this agenda and the establishment of new perspectives and themes of research, a process experienced more clearly since the 1990s. In the second moment, the methods and aims of historians of science interested in Latin America partly changed. They started to investigate transnational relationships and not only national dynamics; they focused on individual actors rather than on institutions; and paid greater attention to historical agents often forgotten by the precedent generation, such as women and quacks. Even though innovative, several works published in this second moment continued to deal with dynamics expressed almost exclusively within the borders of a Latin-American country or with Latin America as a region. In the first years of the twenty-first

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

21

century, the hegemony of this position started to be challenged, a process influenced by a global turn that influenced history in general in many parts of the world. The third and last part of the chapter explores the emergence of this new agenda of questions and suggests the beginning of a global turn in the history of science in Latin America. It shows the challenges facing this new turn as well as its potentialities. It is important to mention that there is no clear frontier between this and older perspectives, and we will stress that eclecticism and diverse approaches coexist among historians of science of the region.

A Social Turn A turn toward the local characterized Latin American history of science during the 1970s to the early 1990s. These studies tried to break with a former tradition of historical studies done mainly by retired science practitioners and a few historians who usually concentrated on the local imitation of key ideas and practices from Europe and the USA. The key concepts of the social turn were local reception, recreation, and adaptation, as well as the study of institutional dynamics. The goal was to demonstrate the agency of Latin American scientists, collectors, and savants invisible in mainstream historiographies of science. According to this new agenda of research, Latin Americans were not passive recipients of European science, challenging the model of cultural diffusion proposed by George Basalla in 1967. In his article “The Spread of Western Science,” Basalla described the role played by the dissemination of cultural values and organization forms from industrialized societies to developing countries (Basalla 1967). According to Basalla, many of these countries were in a stage of “colonial science” immersed in replicating the science of the European metropolitan centers and the USA. His model reflected US Cold-War policies that sought cultural hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and development oversight by powerful industrialized countries (Rostow 1960). American influence was expected to be an agent of change in Latin American medicine and science, in a manner similar to the role that German research was believed to have played in nineteenth century North American universities. The social turn had in common a critique of Basalla’s diffusionist model that ignored local contingent factors that could be decisive in stimulating change and modernization. In sum, Latin American historians criticized Basalla’s interpretation as Eurocentric and linear (Figueirôa 1998). A small group of Latin American historians of science attended the International Congress on the History of Science held in Bucharest in 1981 and made a commitment to carry out studies and investigations in the region. In August of the following year, they met in Puebla, Mexico, and organized the Latin American Society for the History of Science and Technology (SLHCT). In 1982, the Society began publishing the journal Quipu in Mexico City, with Juan José Saldaña as editor. He was a disciple of Rene Taton and was appointed President of the SLHCT (a position in which he would remain for several years). Quipu would be a reference for the history of science in the region until the end of the 1990s (Silva 2014). Referring to a

22

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

pre-Columbian counting technique, the title suggested that regional scientific development had native roots (Saldaña 1984). New or renewed national societies for the history of science developed meetings and publications – the most important were those of Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil. Among the important regional events they organized was the International Seminar for the Study of the Methodology of the Social History of Sciences in Latin America held in November 1983 in Bogotá. In a somewhat independent way from the SLHCT, Mexican historian and chemist Elias Trabulse, professor at the prestigious Colegio de México, produced valuable studies on the local dynamics of Mexican colonial science and its development in the nineteenth century (Trabulse 1984). The research, readership, and context of studies influenced by the social turn had some elements in common. From the early 1960s, renowned intellectuals and scientists in Latin America criticized the science and technology transfer programs of bilateral agencies, promoted as the road to development, that implied following patterns and organizational models of universities from developed countries. Some of these critiques were deeply interested in developing alternative coherent policies for the relatively recent national research councils or believed that a nationally committed science would be instrumental to an autonomous development. The assumptions of many researchers were that the past could be a reliable guide to the future and that progressive and politically oriented history of science might contribute to development. The mission of new historical studies was to demonstrate that science and medicine played an integral role in the rise of nation-states or to identify the obstacles for a great impact of science in development. Many historians were influenced by the radical version of Dependency Theory, which argued that Latin Americans could escape an imperial design that dictated that the flow of raw materials from the “periphery” (or “underdeveloped” countries) was destined to enrich the “center” (or industrialized countries) and create obstacles in domestic processes of industrialization (Prebisch 1981). The solution was to break the dependency cycle. Latin American historians of science began to pay attention to native efforts to overcome the tendency to use the region as a scientific enclave where Europeans collected information that would be processed in Europe. Several historians rediscovered the erudite book, The Dispute of the New World: History of a Controversy, 1750–1900 by Antonello Gerbi (published in Italian in 1955 and in Spanish in 1960), who showed that Latin American politicians, naturalists, and savants responded to European naturalists and philosophers like Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, and Hegel who painted wildlife and flora of the Americas as inferior to the ideal models of the old continent (Gerbi 1960). The social turn also implied a methodological change by collecting evidence in archives, primary sources, and oral interviews instead of the previous methodology concentrated on examining published scientific works kept in libraries. Latin American historians also relied on the social and constructivist turn that crossed the history of science internationally. Thanks to this turn, science was understood as a process with the construction of discourses, organizations, and practices, rather than a simple product reduced to the discovery of “findings” and designs of theoretical models.

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

23

An important institutional and professionalization study was done by sociologist Simon Schwartzman who interviewed over 65 scientists and elaborated a comprehensive account of Brazilian scientific development (the book was published in Portuguese in 1977 and republished in 2001; Schwartzman 2001). His studies covered developments since the end of the colonial period in the eighteenth century, through the landmark creation of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1934 and the restoration of civilian rule in the mid-1980s. His emphasis was on disciplines, like biology, botany, physics, chemistry, and the earth sciences, where local demands could be identified. The tone of the book was that Brazil had confronted a difficult and uphill struggle marked by ephemeral and weak appreciation of science. The social turn was consolidated in Brazil by professors Shozo Motoyama and Maria Amélia Dantes from the Department of History of the University of São Paulo (Ferri and Motoyama 1979). Motoyama wrote a number of institutional stories; Dantes, and her students, studied not only universities, but also museums, private laboratories, botanical gardens, and research centers. These were novel research themes and were important for Brazil because the creation of the first universities only happened in the twentieth century (Dantes 2001). Another feature of this turn was the alliance with researchers from the US and Europe. This was an important move as few historians of science in these developed regions of the world considered possible the existence of the discipline in developing nations. Americans interested in Latin American history included Columbia University professor Nancy Stepan (later Nancy Leys Stepan) and Thomas F. Glick, professor at the universities of Texas and later Boston. One of the pioneers in the analysis of the subject of science and imperialism worked also with Latin American colleagues and themes: the American historian Lewis Pyenson, then professor at the University of Montreal. They were joined by Nathan Reingold, who, although did not work in Latin American archives such as Stepan, Pyenson, or Glick, published on science and colonialism. Reingold had regular contact with Latin Americans and was an influential scholar at the US History of Science Society (since 1966 he was at the Smithsonian, first as editor of the Joseph Henry Papers, then in 1985, as senior historian of the National Museum of American History). At the same time, researchers from the region participated in a greater number of international events, such as the international conferences on the history of science organized by the Division of History of Science and Technology (DHST), in Berkeley in 1985, in Hamburg in 1989 and in Zaragoza in 1993. These events gave greater visibility to investigations done in Latin America and made possible some of the first publications in English by historians from the region (Saldaña 2006). A model of the social turn was Stepan’s book on the Instituto Soroterápico Federal, a bacteriological institute founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1900 and at the origin of Fiocruz, Brazilian’s biggest scientific institution. According to Stepan, this laboratory became a first-rate medical institution as its director, Oswaldo Cruz, and his team creatively adapted the scientific and managerial model of the Pasteur Institute of Paris, where Cruz had studied. Also, Brazilian researchers appeared in Stepan’s analysis as paying due attention to local medical problems and inscribing their work as an essential part of the State. Local Brazilian scientists managed to

24

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

legitimize bacteriology as part of health programs for disease control and political discourses on the country’s development. Her book was not a radical break with Basalla’s ideas on colonial science. Stepan considered that Cruz’s Institute marked a transition from the “colonial science,” which she recognized had predominated until the late nineteenth century, to a “national science” (that is why the use of the word “beginnings” in the title). But, according to this study, the transition from colonial science to national science was more complex than what Basalla’s diffusionism envisioned and was mainly due to local factors (Stepan 1976). Other studies followed Stepan and demonstrated that scientific institutionalization was intertwined with discourses of the usefulness of research in education, the need to increase commerce, promote population growth, or foster economic development. These investigations emphasized the idea that not all peripheral science was peripheral to local and global knowledge. Peard analyzed the impact of a group of nineteenth-century Brazilian physicians from Bahia who became known in time as the Tropicalista School of Medicine and participated actively in international discussions on tropical diseases. Cueto studied how a group of Peruvian physiologists excelled in studies on human beings in the Andes during the 1920s, contradicting British scientists – such as Joseph Barcroft from Cambridge University – who argued that the little oxygen at high-altitudes explained the mental and physical “inferiority” of native races. It is important to mention that both studied with Stepan when she was a professor at Columbia (Cueto 1989; Peard 1999). Pyenson, another North American scholar interested in Latin-America, linked the reception of the exact sciences, especially physics and astronomy in Buenos Aires and Córdoba, with the German, Dutch, and French imperialism of the late nineteenth century. He enlarged the scope of the new European and American studies on science and imperialism, used a comparative perspective, and resorted to local archives something rare at the time. His interpretation privileged imperialism over local reception. According to Pyenson, imperialist motivations hindered local appropriation (Pyenson 1985). Glick, who already had a career in the history of Spanish medieval technology, edited a seminal book on the reception of Darwinism, which included a chapter on Mexico written by Roberto Moreno de los Arcos, a distinguished Mexican historian (Glick 1988; Domingues et al. 2003). The authors explored the arrival and adaptation of the Darwinian theory which was brought to Latin America by physicians, politicians, and social scientists frequently to settle debates over social order and material progress. Glick would later analyze the reception of other paradigms, such as the Theory of Relativity and Psychoanalysis, and outlined a theoretical framework on reception in which local factors were fundamental (Glick 1987). No less important was that it encouraged other reception studies in the region (Domingues et al. 2003). Latin Americans historians also established close ties with Spanish researchers such as José Luis Peset, Antonio Lafuente, Horacio Capel, José Sala Catalá, and Leoncio López Ocón, who studied scientific expeditions, the legacies of Bourbon science in the eighteenth century, and the relationship between science and nationalism (Lafuente and Mazuecos 1987; Lafuente et al. 1993). They highlighted how Spain and France sponsored numerous scientific expeditions to their colonial

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

25

outposts and examined the emergence of an intertwined link between science, development, and nationalism in Spain and Latin America. As Spain launched economic reforms to turn its colonies into specialized mining and agro-export producers, the state supported many expeditions to chart, catalog, and map the hitherto untapped botanical resources of the New World. Spanish authorities also generously patronized naturalists as part of the Spanish crown’s patriotic campaign to disabuse a common view of Spain in Europe at the time as an ignorant country, whose glories lay in the past. Thanks to the relationship between Latin-American and foreign historians of science, the first meeting on the History of Science and Technology of the Iberian and Ibero-American Countries was held in Madrid in September 1984. It counted with the participation of young historians from the region increasing the interchange among Iberoamerican investigators (Peset 1985). Furthermore, Latin American historians of science established contact with French researchers such as Patrick Petitjean, Anne Marie Moulin, and Catherine Jami. These scholars organized in Paris, in 1990, the colloquium “Science and Empires,” which compared historical development of the relationship between science and imperialism in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania (Petitjean et al. 1992). According to Petitjean, France’s “civilizing mission” and the effective colonization of large parts of the world during the late nineteenth century relied on scientists and scientific ideology. His studies indicated that science played a key role in colonial ideology and practice from the late nineteenth century, a perspective that influenced the studies on the motivations and impact of tropical medicine in colonial and postcolonial nations. Science and Empire became an important subject of research during the following years, inaugurating a compelling discussion about the relationship between science and imperialism (Bleichmar et al. 2009; CañizaresEsguerra 2006). At the same time, Roy McLeod (cofounder of the influential journal Social Studies of Science in 1971 that included history articles) and David Wade Chambers (professor at Deakin University) – both from Australia – played an important role by participating in meetings in Latin America, questioning Basalla’s diffusionist model, and presenting complex versions of scientific imperialism and the evolution of national knowledge (Chambers 1987). Some years later, in 2000, a volume of Osiris, edited by McLeod for some years, included valuable studies by Margaret Lopes and Irina Podgorny in Latin American Museums since the mid-nineteenth century, and by Silvia Figueirôa on Brazilian mineralogists during the turn of the nineteenth century (MacLeod 2000). They demonstrated that imperialism was a concept to be understood in plural (several imperialisms existed and competed, it was not only limited to governments but to institutions and they had no free leeway to impose their will but had to negotiate with Latin Americans). Another characteristic of the social turn was to focus on a few institutions. This had advantages and risks. It was productive because, in Latin American countries, scientific discourses and practices were concentrated in sparse cities and institutions where creativity was manifested not only in ideas but in the ability of researchers to face adverse conditions. The risk of writing local stories was that these ended up being sometimes parochial, namely addressed to readers already interested in

26

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

national developments, and their international relevance was not always clear. On the other hand, the emphasis on local reception did not question master narratives that assumed that scientific paradigms had been generated abroad and then exported to Latin America. In any case, in the social turn the number of Latin American historians of science grew and modernized – many of them, unlike a previous generation, were trained in history and no longer in the sciences (a number of the professional science historians in the region had been first trained in chemistry or physics). A reflection of the above was the second and third congress on the history of Latin American Science and Technology, held in Havana in 1985 and São Paulo in 1988 by the SLHCT. Finally, the legacy of the social turn was felt until 2001 at the International Congress on the History of Science organized by Saldaña that was held in Mexico with the provocative title: “Science and Cultural Diversity” (De Greiff and Nieto 2008).

Important Shifts Some changes were experienced in the history of science written in and about Latin America during the 1990s. These were concentrated on three major themes. First, the interaction of scientists from a specific Latin American country with their European or North American peers. These works usually emphasized the ability of the first to be protagonists of international networks (Palmer 2003). This meant, to emphasize the process of border-crossing of different scientific ideas, practices, and materials. The process was examined not as one-way impositions or appropriations but as part of shifting networks and flows of knowledge. Secondly, studies gave more importance to nonprofessional or traditional actors – such as journalists, women, lay healers, homeopaths, and quacks. And there was a focus on historical debates that transcended university settings or professional circles as those that occurred in newspapers. Third, studies began to focus on practices, methods, and ideas that sparked from Latin American region were adapted by European and American universities and academic disciplines. Although these works multiplied with greater intensity during the 1990s in Latin America, the context that explains them goes back to the collapse of the region’s military regimes begun in the 1980s. Civilian social movements involving unions, NonGovernmental Organizations, and feminist groups demanded their voices to be heard and worked in a globalized world where distances seemed to decrease at the fast pace of information and communication technologies. New concerns, such as the environment, influenced the history of science. No locality seemed remote, and a diversity of voices and actors seemed indispensable to sustain the democracy that returned to the region. It was also important that, on issues such as AIDS and the environment, not only experts but activists intervened and demanded the authorities to implement coherent policies. Partly in this context, historians in the region paid attention to popular knowledge about the body, disease, and nature (Sampaio 2001). Debates became for historians a magnifying glass on the cradle of ideas and resolution of disputes. It was also important to study how local histories intermingled

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

27

with metropolitan and imperial forces and the creation of networks of knowledge. This turn disputed the validity of binary notions of modern vs. colonial science implied in Basalla’s model and questioned the assumption that local contingent factors alone explained national scientific dynamics as the first reactions to Basalla had argued (Beltran 1997). In addition, comparative studies on common socioscientific topics like eugenics gained relevance trying to demonstrate that there was something unique in the science practiced in the region. For Stepan, a “soft” version of Latin American eugenics that emphasized the possibility of improvement of race with tools like education was a key tool not only as a socio-medical current, but for the local representations and ideals of race, gender, development, and nationality in the region (Stepan 1991). These new studies that refreshed the social turn coincided with a consistent development of academic programs, events, and specialized publications. In 1994, the academic journal História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos was created in Rio de Janeiro by the Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, a department of Fiocruz that in the following years would become a training center for master and doctoral students in history of science. The journal Saber y Tiempo was launched in Buenos Aires 2 years later by the Center for the History of Science “José Babini” of the School of Humanities of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. In addition, Latin American historians begun to publish more frequently in Spanish specialized journals such as Asclepio and Dynamis. Studies published in these periodicals not only consolidated a community of historians but made clear that regions and countries dismissed in mainstream narratives were not epiphenomena and presented their own problems crucial to understand the diverse meanings and impacts of science. The influence exercised by these political and institutional shifts occurred in parallel with new international academic dialogues. Indeed, this new generation of historians was influenced by feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial studies with referents not always working on Latin America such as Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu, Gian Prakash, and Mary Louise Pratt. Pratt – who did work in Latin America – was influential and relevant for future historical studies because she created the concept of “contact zones” where different savants, academics, and laypeople established short-term or lasting relationships that could include benefits but also coercion on the use of learned knowledge (Pratt 1992). There was also a greater dialogue between the history of science and social history, especially with Italian microhistory and the history of the popular classes “from below” by E. P. Thompson. An interesting development was that research subareas, such as the history of medicine, the history of natural science and life science, and the history of exact sciences were consolidated, but grew apart. The disciplines that received more attention were the history of medicine in the first place, and secondly, the histories of biology, physics, and of the earth sciences (geology and geography). It is important to mention that many studies in medical history also grew their interaction with historians working on tropical medicine during the turn of the twentieth century in different parts of the world (Espinosa 2013). In addition, critical medical history focused on different aspects like gender, cultural representations of disease, mental

28

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

health, citizenship and modernity, public-health policies, and links between medicine and discrimination (Armus 2003). Moreover, the interaction of the history of science with environmental history became gradually a central concern for researchers (Duarte 2013). All of this produced a fragmentation perceived by many as a price to be paid by the professionalization of history of Latin American science. Thus, not only fragmentation but hyperspecialization and a multiplication of debates, sometimes fragmented, ensued. This partly explains why, after a congress on the history of science and technology held in Rio de Janeiro in 1998, the SLHCT gradually faded to extinction. In the following years, historians of the region preferred to gather in specialized meetings. In any case, this new phase of the social turn produced remarkable books. An example was Jaime Benchimol’s study of the complex transition from the first Pasteurian ideas of the 1880s on microorganisms as the cause of yellow fever to the consensus around the methods used by Oswaldo Cruz against mosquitoes in Brazil in the early twentieth century (Benchimol 1999). The context was rich for a historian because, during the turn of the century, Latin American cities created laboratories with national visibility where cadres of local scientists – and in some cases led by European immigrants – began to do experimental work that would gain then international notoriety. In the Brazilian case, these institutes emerged in a period marked by the abolition of slavery, by the proclamation of the Republic, by an increase in the nationalism, by economic growth, and by governmental support for the promotion and reorganization of cultural activities. Benchimol focused on a “loser” of pasteurism, Domingos José Freire, who gained recognition in transnational networks but was later condemned in the canonical history of national microbiology that celebrated Cruz. Freire mistakenly believed he had discovered both the cause of yellow fever (which he called Criptococcus xanthogenicus) and its vaccine. His discovery was celebrated as a major local achievement; a scientific institute was created around it, and the vaccine was used for years in Rio de Janeiro and other cities in Brazil. Using different strategies, Benchimol followed Freire’s efforts to make his work amenable to bacteriological, epidemiological, and clinical circles and create bridges between traditional miasmatic ideas and the new Pastorian ideas. This process comprised vivid debates that took place in learned journals but also in newspapers and theaters and with interventions by major figures of Brazilian politics, such as Emperor Pedro II, and European science leaders, such as Louis Pasteur, Émile Roux, and Robert Koch. According to Benchimol, during Freire’s peak moments of popularity, Brazilian scientific elites saw no insurmountable distance between Rio de Janeiro and European medical centers. Another example of this turn was Cueto’s book on the epidemics of Peru during the twentieth century, which confronted the practices and discourses of different actors, such as physicians, Rockefeller Foundation’s officers, indigenous healers, and the church, in the face of epidemic outbreaks. His book used epidemics as a magnifying lens to consider the debates among these actors and the interaction between poverty, science, and power (Cueto 1997). The topic was also studied in other countries that stressed how the philanthropic agency made an alliance with Mexico’s revolutionary government since the 1920s (Birn 2006). Similarly, Armus

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

29

analyzed popular anxieties in the search for anti-tuberculosis drugs in Argentina (Armus 2007). Armus stressed how the disease afflicted an important urban center when there was no popular consensus on the scientific origin of the disease, and effective interventions did not exist. According to Armus, official policies sought not only to control the disease but to transform people into modern hygienic citizens. In sum, these new studies dealing with science in Latin America were sophisticated inroads into the social and cultural dimension of science, not limiting the focus to the relationship between institutions, scholars, and the state. In addition, they paid some attention to the interaction with scientists and agencies of developed countries and found that their reception was part of a complex process of negotiation. Yet innovative, the primary emphasis of these original contributions was a specific country of Latin America. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a new turn in the history began to present new perspectives.

A Global Turn In recent years, a turn to the global has impacted history in general, challenging the discipline on two issues: its eurocentrism and its methodological nationalism. This new historiographical perspective is not however monolithic and different meanings and internal disagreements coexist. Although several Latin American historians use “global history” as a comprehensive term it is important to underline that according to some scholars, at least four approaches can be devised on recent global history studies; a comparative, a cumulative, an interactive and a structuralist one. The comparative approach is the oldest and may be the most popular. It aims to compare the historic dynamics of two or more regions, nations, continents, and even civilizations, seeing them as circumscribed objects. The cumulative approach frames the global as the sum of all human actions. Frequently, works dealing with this approach focus, for instance, on what was happening in many parts of the world in a given year. The third approach centers on the interactions between different societies and how they constructed global processes. Methodologically, it focuses on the confrontation of sources issued from different social and cultural contexts, which were put together or “connected,” by some historical process. The last approach proposes a structural parti pris: the integration of the world is a meta-process in place at least since the fifteenth century. Thus, every historical event, even if perceived a priori as national or local, is dealing and is influenced by the integration of the world (Conrad 2016; Drayton and Motadel 2018; Markovits and Subrahmanyam 2020). The global turn, with its these multiple faces, has influenced new investigations in the history of science (Barahona 2018; Fan 2007; Mateos and Suárez-Díaz 2016; Raj 2010). The scholars who embraced it believe that a global history of science aims to examine the construction of science and knowledge as the product of transnational and global movement of documents, books, maps, laboratory supplies, technical artifacts, images, and ideas from different countries, between different cultures, and even in different languages (Safier 2010). The objective is to transcend national borders and not limit what the Nation State did – or failed to do. In addition, the

30

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

global turn focuses on the intermediary characters, such as merchants, missionaries, popularizers, and travelers, who made science products intelligible in different cultures (Schaffer et al. 2009). An important assumption is that the content of knowledge is transformed into its circulation (Raj 2010). It is important to mention that authors differ between emphasizing the fluidity of the circulation of knowledge or highlighting the obstacles that this circulation encountered and the need to record its adaptations (Secord 2004). The context of the emergence of a global turn in the history of science is the acceleration of the globalization, especially in terms of economics, migration, and technology, the recognition of the value of multiple cultures of knowledge, and the intensification of somewhat different political and economic processes, such as the weakness of States in developing countries, the power of transnational corporations, environmental detrimental changes, and the visibility of anti-globalization currents. New historical studies attempt to be supranational and demonstrate how the generation and reconfiguration of knowledge are not constrained by national frameworks. As Cañizares-Esguerra well points out, the “global” and the “local” are not mutually exclusive notions, but rather presupposed one another (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006). Some historians aim to promote a geopolitically informed history of science that does not have the US and Europe at its center. In addition, other studies seek to escape the duality of the traditional notions of “center” and “periphery” and identify itineraries, connections, encounters, and cultural and political disagreements. Some studies try to transcend the Latin American sphere to place Asian or African localities at the center of their analysis, or enhance the visibility of South-South continental collaborations, questioning the assumption that the region has unique cultural characteristics. In parallel with these new investigations, comprehensive studies have appeared that cover the entire history of science or medicine of a country, region, or discipline, but unlike the general scenarios produced previously, they focus on a research problem such as nationalism, race, or political limitations of public health (Agostoni and Speckman Guerra 2005; Carbonetti et al. 2002; Cueto and Palmer 2016; Hochman 2016; Hochman and Di Liscia 2012; Emilio Quevedo et al. 2007; Zárate 2008). Despite its promises, the global history of Latin American science has encountered a series of problems to become truly global. As noticed by Sebastian Conrad, global history has emphasized connections between Asia and West Europe and showed little attention to Russia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America (Conrad 2016: 222). Concerning the last region, one can point out, however, that Conrad exaggerates in his statement. Indeed, some important global studies exist, such as the seminal work of Serge Gruzinski. Focusing on processes of global “hybridization” in place between 1580 and 1640 – namely the period when the monarchies of Spain and Portugal were merged – Gruzinski presents a vivid portrait of people living in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies of America, their constant connections with actors located in Paris, Antwerp, or Manilla, and how they succeeded in creating new forms of art and thought (Gruzinski 2004). Besides this study, Latin America is not a common theme in global historical studies, especially for those interested in the period following the independence of most parts of the region, that is, the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

31

Some new studies are progressively filling this gap. One main focus of these new researches is a new perspective on the Americanization of Latin American science in the early twentieth century and on the role played by the Rockefeller Foundation in the organization of academic knowledge in Latin America (Quintero 2011). According to these studies, the relationship between American philanthropy and Latin America was not a case of unilateral diffusion. On one hand, Latin Americans reacted and adapted models of organization of research, public health, and higher education, creating original strategies. On the other hand, the solutions invented in Latin America were sometimes appropriated by the Rockefeller officers and were used in other countries and programs. Analyzing Rockefeller’s medical programs to control hookworm in various countries in Central America and the Caribbean, Steven Palmer rewrote the history of the philanthropic agency and paid attention to changes in its imperialist agenda under pressure from local actors, such as doctors, politicians, and indigenous healers. Palmer’s remarkable study treated the agency as a flexible ensemble where testing, discussion, production, and consumption of knowledge were simultaneously local and global (Palmer 2010). He is also responsible for the key concept of “hybridization.” Although it came from the social science and was used in other regions, Palmer was the first to examine how indigenous, African and western traditions of medicine intertwined and blended in a manner that created norms more than exceptions. Another example of new global perspectives is the outstanding book by Gabriela Soto Laveaga that has a provocative title “Jungle Laboratories.” She analyzes how in the Mexico of the 1940s, the tuber known as barbasco became essential for the production of the first oral contraceptive. The peasants, who knew the different varieties of this plant well, negotiated with scientists, multinational pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican government to assert their rights. During the early 1960s, tens of thousands of Mexican peasants collected barbasco and sold it through intermediaries to multinational pharmaceuticals. In her complex study, she also described how the Mexican government tried to build an autonomous pharmaceutical industry to process barbasco into steroid hormones (Laveaga 2009). She returns to a subject treated by Argentine and Peruvian historians of medicine in the mid-twentieth century: the fundamental importance of popular knowledge in the formation of modern scientific knowledge and official policies as well as in the globalization of knowledge. In a similar perspective to demonstrate that national and regional actors shaped global processes, Benchimol and Denis Guedes Jogas Junior examined the complex global and national interactions of lay and academic knowledge in the efforts to understand and control leishmaniasis between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s (Benchimol and Jogas Junior 2020). Karin Rosenblatt’s work in Mexico and the USA underscores intricate transnational exchanges in the construction of racial categories and the design of policies of indigenous assimilation and immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century. She also studies how this work was key to validate the standing and prestige of social science and medical experts in the two countries (Rosemblatt 2018). Furthermore, other topics have been studied from a transnational perspective, such as eugenics, audiences, and the mobility of knowledge (José Correa et al. 2016; Miranda and

32

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

Vallejo 2012). Another important development has been the historiographical reviews of topics that assess the origins, main features, and challenges of topics frequently visited by historians of science (García 2019; Martins 2020; Sanjad 2017). In addition, the circulation of people and ideas in subregions, like Central America and the Caribbean, have been examined (De Barros et al. 2014). In a similar vein, but for the colonial period, Pablo Gómez studied ideas and practices on the body, climate, and nature among slaves and former slaves, especially of the Caribbean area of Colombia, who were consulted by Jesuits, pharmacists, doctors, and indigenous healers of different origins. His book is also a criticism of the traditional notion of the “Scientific Revolution” – as an exclusively European phenomenon situated in the eighteenth century. Gómez’s study – based on different sources but mainly on Inquisition records – also prioritized empirical experience over dogma, the relevance of eclecticism, and considered smell and other senses in the legitimization of knowledge (Gómez 2017). Recently, Matheus Duarte da Silva, seeking a dialogue between local phenomena and broader international histories, studied the pandemic of bubonic plague between 1894 and 1920. He stressed how it allowed several interactions between Brazilian, Indian, and French microbiological centers, creating what he calls a particular “space of circulation of knowledge.” The exchanges lived within this space became fundamental to the (re)construction of the heart of microbiology, namely sera, vaccines, and new forms of sanitary intervention, in Brazil, India, and France. In proposing this global shift, Duarte da Silva showed that the emergence of two crucial Brazilian laboratories at the beginning of the twentieth century (Manguinhos – the institute studied by Stepan – in Rio de Janeiro and Butantan in São Paulo), seen mostly as the fruit of national dynamics, were also part of a wider process of circulation of knowledge that connected the Brazilians not only with the Pasteur Institute in Paris but also with researchers working in Bombay. Furthermore, in following actors and objects as they moved in that space and focusing on sources found in Brazilian, Indian, and French archives, Duarte da Silva questioned both assumptions about the almost self-sufficient emergence of Brazilian microbiology and the “universality” of French microbiology. He concluded that, thanks to responses to the plague pandemic, the new science of microbes became truly a global product (Silva 2018, 2020). Something interesting that has occurred with the global turn is the need to write comprehensive histories of science from Latin America. Nieto Olarte has produced an encyclopedic study in Spanish that intertwines a global history of science with arts and politics that challenges the traditional borders established between “local” and “global” concepts, between academic disciplines, and between official and popular knowledge (Nieto Olarte 2019). This study also traces the emergence of Eurocentrism between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries and describes science making as a cultural endeavor not solely European. Nieto Olarte’s comprehensive book is part of an effort to rewrite the scientific institutions and ideas of the metropolis from a post-colonial perspective. An author that reiterates the interest in writing global histories of science from Latin America is the Argentine historian Miguel de Asúa, who has produced a series of remarkable studies beyond his country and the region (de Asúa 1996). Likewise, this type of analysis on both

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

33

sides of the Atlantic has been brilliantly cultivated for years by Cañizares-Esguerra, author of studies on the colonial period (Cañizares-Esguerra 2002). According to Cañizares-Esquerra, local savants challenged, during the eighteenth century, the credibility of European enlightened scholars, arguing they did not have the training or knowledge to understand the Americas and sought to recover the credibility of indigenous histories. However, global history should not be seen as a “magic bullet” able to solve or fix all historiographical problems in Latin American history of science. As stressed by Conrad, global history can answer better some types of questions, but to address others it might be necessary to take a local or national approach. Moreover, global history has its own problems. Sometimes it can be used to minimize asymmetries of power and create a “fetishization” of mobility, connections, and circulation (Conrad 2016: 224). Global history is also marked by eclecticism, namely sometimes studies draw theoretical inspiration from broad, diverse, and sometimes contradictory frameworks which lead to a lack of consistency. The latter means that the glorification of global history is often rhetorical and causes confusion of what are the real aims of the research. Partly because the definition of this history is not clear, some studies announce in their introduction that they are going to make a global history, but later repeat traditional perspectives like comparative history, the reception of international paradigms, or describe ephemeral contacts and simple connections. On the other hand, the advantages for Latin Americans of getting rid of a regional dimension are not clear. It is true that Latin America was a concept created in France in the nineteenth century, but the concept of the region as unique was also forged in the mid-nineteenth century by Latin American intellectuals opposing the US growing imperialism. And it is also true that during the twentieth century populism, European immigration, military dictatorships, rapid and chaotic urbanization, and social inequities increased commonalities among Latin American countries. Similarly, Darwinism, eugenics, bacteriology, tropical medicine, the relationship between physics and the Cold War, are fields and topics that almost all Latin American countries have in common since the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, at least since the 1980s, frequent contacts between historians in the region have created a density of knowledge that should not be wasted. We agree with other authors who defend the idea of the relevance of regional cultural borders in the historical study of the circulation of knowledge (Fan 2007). Another problem to consolidate this turn is the persistence to work in national archives and dialogue only with researchers who know these archives. One reason that explains the overemphasis on national archives is that Latin American historians face problems in obtaining financial resources or visas to visit archives in developed countries: essential for a transnational and global approach. Another reason is language. Many of Latin American historians do not have the necessary fluency to investigate in a language different from their own, mainly in English (Paz 2016). According to a senior social historian in Argentina, global history is perceived in the region as an Anglophone trend difficult to use by practitioners who can thrive without major contact with their colleagues overseas, and that do not have too many opportunities to work in archives located abroad (Sabato 2015). One solution

34

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

might be to follow the suggestion of Grecco and Schuster, who propose not to abandon national histories of science but to make them transnational (Grecco and Schuster 2020). Another solution would be to help with the translation to English of articles and books published originally in Portuguese and Spanish, an initiative taken, for instance, by História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos. However, one could add that translation needs resources, a challenge for many Latin American scholars. Three more challenges should be mentioned. In the first place, much of the global history of science produced abroad assumes an opposition between the “west” and “non-western societies,” like large parts of Asia and Africa. In contrast, Latin America has rarely been considered a nonwestern society (partly because of its historical closeness to Europe and the US since the early nineteenth century) and does not adapt easily to this dichotomy (even though at a subnational level “western” and “non-western” cultures and communities coexist in many countries of the region). Secondly, a challenge for combining Latin American history and global history of science in the region derives from the fact that Latin America has been too frequently portrayed – partly for political reasons – as a homogenic region of the world overstating the region’s similarities and obscuring its differences. Finally, the global turn faces in Latin America a problematic political context. In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis (and the recent Covid-19 pandemic), right-wing populism in the region has criticized globalization, undermined resources for universities, and encouraged irrational attacks on science, including attacks on history.

Conclusion In hindsight, it is now possible to argue that the social turn did not question completely a hierarchy where science and medicine of the USA and Europe are placed at the apex. Ultimately, the turn contributed to construct a narrative that assumed an original science model in the world from which universalistic concepts, like scientific development, were derived. There was little examination on how knowledge was internationally built, and it was assumed that it had its origins completely outside Latin America. The main contributions of the social turn introduced some important dissonances to Basalla’s Eurocentric account and emphasized the agency of local actors and the influence of different social, political, economic, and cultural contexts on the adaptation and reconfiguration of the model. They had little attention to science as a polycentric process. Last but not least, they gave a greater international visibility to the history of science done in Latin America. Although the global turn coincides with the social turn in the attention to cultural and social dimensions, it does not assume a primacy of the old continent or an a priori subalternity of Latin America. On the contrary, it is interested in understanding its global construction and for this reason pays due attention to international exchanges, entanglements, and reciprocal influences (and also examines divergences and interrupted networks) rather than national dynamics as self-contained processes. It also focuses on transnational intermediaries and seeks to reveal developments that

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

35

remained invisible in many traditional national historiographies. Likewise, global history supposes that the construction of hierarchies and global scientific leaderships, anchored in the metropolises of industrialized countries, are global processes in which scientists and other actors from Latin America intervened. In 2013, during the opening of the chair Histoire Globale de la Première Modernité in the Collège de France, Sanjay Subrahmanyam compared national history to the Seine and global history to the Bièvre, the small river that also passes through the French capital (Subrahmanyam 2014). Behind the metaphor laid the idea that the former was, since the nineteenth century (and maybe forever), the dominant frame mobilized by historians to tell their analyses, while the latter acted as an alternative path. However, as the two Parisian rivers, both accounts are not exactly in opposition to each other nor one will substitute the other. In the same vein, we believe that the global turn in the history of science in Latin America will not replace or overthrow national and regional investigations inspired by the social turn. They will prosper, at least for some time, in parallel and maybe in dialogue, as national frames keep relevance and allow the production of a set of questions, intellectual agendas, and professional careers. This being said, the first studies on the global turn by the history of science in Latin America have shown that the national frame has its limitations. Moreover, they pointed out that original stories can emerge if researchers focus on global connections and the circulation of knowledge. Furthermore, they could find an advantage in addressing new questions related not only to Latin America but to other parts of the world as they involved similar themes. It is probably too early to have a precise idea of the contributions the global turn will bring to the history of science in Latin America as its contours, subjects, and methods are not completely clear. Nonetheless, it is possible to notice that it promoted novel and nuanced answers, and allowed the emergence of new questions that illuminate the relationship between the scientific production in Latin America and the rest of the world.

References Agostoni C, Speckman Guerra E (eds) (2005) De normas y transgresiones: enfermedad y crimen en América Latina 1850–1950, Historia Moderna y Contemporánea 43. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City Armus D (ed) (2003) Disease in the history of modern Latin America: from malaria to AIDS. Duke University Press, Durham Armus D (ed) (2007) La Ciudad Impura: Salud, Tuberculosis y Cultura en Buenos Aires, 1870–1950, 1st edn., Ensayo. Edhasa, Buenos Aires Barahona A (2018) Local, global, and transnational perspectives on the history of biology. In: Dietrich M, Borrello M, Harman O (eds) handbook of the historiography of biology, Historiographies of science, vol 1. Springer, Cham, pp 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31974456-8_19-1 Basalla G (1967) The spread of western science. Science 156(3775):611–622 Beltran CL (1997) Ciencia en los Márgenes: Una Reconsideración de La Asimetría CentroPeriferia. In: Ciencia en los Márgenes. Ensayos de Historia de las Ciencias en México. UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Mexico City, pp 19–33

36

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

Benchimol J (1999) Dos Micróbios aos Mosquitos: Febre Amarela e a Revolução Pasteuriana no Brasil. Editora FIOCRUZ/Editora UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro Benchimol J, Jogas Junior D (2020) Uma história das leishmanioses no novo mundo: fins do século XIX aos anos 1960. Fino Traço/Editora Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro Birn A-E (2006) Marriage of convenience: Rockefeller international health and revolutionary Mexico, Rochester studies in medical history, vol 8. University of Rochester Press, Rochester Bleichmar D, De Voos P, Huffine K, Sheehan K (eds) (2009) Science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, 1500–1800. Stanford University Press, Stanford Cañizares-Esguerra J (2002) How to write the history of the New World: histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Nachdr. Cultural sitings. Stanford University Press, Stanford Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Carbonetti A, Garcés CA, Blanco F (eds) (2002) De Sujetos, Definiciones y Fronteras: Ensayos Sobre Disciplinamiento, Marginación y Exclusión en América, de la Colonia al Siglo XX, 1st edn. Ferreyra, Córdoba Chambers DW (1987) Period and process in national and colonial science. In: Reingold N (ed) Scientific colonialism. Smithsonian Press, Rothenberg, pp 297–321 Conrad S (2016) What is global history? Princeton University Press, Princeton Cueto M (1989) Excelencia Científica en la Periferia: Actividades Científicas e Investigación Biomédica En El Perú 1890–1950. GRADE, Lima Cueto M (1997) El Regreso de las Epidémias: Salud y Sociedad en el Perú del Siglo XX. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima Cueto M, Palmer S (2016) Medicina e Saúde Pública na América Latina: Uma História, História e Saúde. Editora Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro Dantes MA (ed) (2001) Espaços da Ciência no Brasil: 1800–1930. Editora Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro de Asúa M (1996) El árbol de las ciencias: una historia del pensamiento científico. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires De Barros J, Palmer S, Wright D (2014) Health and medicine in the circum-Caribbean, 1800–1968. Routledge, New York De Greiff A, Nieto M (2008) Lo que aún no Sabemos sobre el Intercambio Tecnocientífico entre Sur y Norte. Nortecentrismo, Difusión Científica y Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia. In: Saberes Locales: Ensayos Sobre Historia de la Ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacan, Zamora, pp 41–70 Domingues HMB, Romero Sá M, Glick TF (eds) (2003) A recepção do darwinismo no Brasil. Editora Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro Drayton R, Motadel D (2018) Discussion: the futures of global history. J Glob Hist 13(1):1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022817000262 Duarte RH (2013) Between the national and the universal: natural history networks in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Isis 104(4):777–787. https://doi.org/10. 1086/674944 Emilio Quevedo V, Germán Enrique Pérez P, Néstor Miranda C (eds) (2007) Prácticas médicas en conflicto: 1492–1782, Historia de la medicina en Colombia. Tecnoquímicas, Bogotá Espinosa M (2013) Globalizing the history of disease, medicine, and public health in Latin America. Isis 104(4):798–806. https://doi.org/10.1086/674946 Fan F-t (2007) Science in cultural borderlands: methodological reflections on the study of science, European imperialism, and cultural encounter. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 1(2):213–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12280-007-9022-5 Ferri MG, Motoyama S (1979) História das Ciências no Brasil. EPU, Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo Figueirôa S (1998) Mundialização da ciência e respostas locais: sobre a institucionalização das ciências naturais no Brasil (de fins do século XVIII à transição ao século XX). Asclepio 50(2): 107–123. https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.1998.v50.i2.338

2

From the Social to the Global Turn in Latin American History of Science

37

García M (2019) La historiografía de la fiebre amarilla en América Latina desde 1980: los límites del presentismo. Hist Cienc Saúde Manguinhos 26(2):623–641. https://doi.org/10.1590/ s0104-59702019000200014 Gerbi A (1960) La Disputa del Nuevo Mundo: Historia de una Polémica, 1750–1900. Fondo de Cultura Economica, Mexico City Glick TF (1987) La Transferencia de las Revoluciones Cientificas a través de las Fronteras Culturales. Ciencia y Desarrollo 12(72):77–89 Glick TF (ed) (1988) The comparative reception of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Gómez PF (2017) The experiential Caribbean: creating knowledge and healing in the early modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Grecco G, Schuster S (2020) Decolonizing global history? A Latin American perspective. J World Hist 31(2):425–446. https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2020.0024 Gruzinski S (2004) Les Quatre Parties du Monde: Histoire d’une Mondialisation. La Martinière, Paris Hochman G (2016) The sanitation of Brazil: nation, state, and public health, 1889–1930. University of Illinois Press, Urbana Hochman G, Di Liscia MS (eds) (2012) Patologías de la Patria: Enfermedades, Enfermos y Nación en América Latina. Lugar Editorial, Buenos Aires José Correa M, Kottow A, Vetö S (eds) (2016) Ciencia y espectáculo: circulación de saberes científicos en América Latina, siglos XIX y XX, 1st edn. Ocho Libros, Chile Lafuente A, Mazuecos A (1987) Los Caballeros del Punto Fijo: Ciencia, Política y Aventura en la Expedición Geodésica Hispanofrancesa al Virreinato del Perú en el Siglo XVIII, Libros Del Buen Andar 20, 1st edn. Ediciones del Serbal/CSIC, Barcelona/Madrid Lafuente A, Elena A, Ortega ML (eds) (1993) Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional. Actas del Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Ciencia. Doce Calles, Madrid Laveaga GS (2009) Jungle laboratories: Mexican peasants, national projects, and the making of the pill. Duke University Press, Durham MacLeod RM (ed) (2000) Nature and empire: science and the colonial enterprise, Osiris. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Markovits C, Subrahmanyam S (2020) Le palimpseste des grandes villes indiennes. Critique 872–873(1):195–205 Martins APV (2020) A Mulher, o Médico e as Historiadoras: Um Ensaio Historiográfico Sobre a História Das Mulheres, Da Medicina e Do Gênero. Hist Cienc Saúde Manguinhos 27(1):241– 264. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-59702020000100014 Mateos G, Suárez-Díaz E (eds) (2016) Aproximaciones a lo local y lo global: América Latina en la historia de la ciencia contemporánea, Eslabones en el desarrollo de la ciencia, 1st edn. Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, Políticos y Sociales Vicente Lombardo Toledano, México City Miranda M, Vallejo G (eds) (2012) Una Historia de la Eugenesia: Argentina y las Redes Biopolíticas Internacionales, 1912–1945. Electronic resource. Historia. Editorial Biblos, Buenos Aires Nieto Olarte M (2019) Una historia de la verdad en occidente: ciencia, arte, religión y política en la conformación de la cosmología moderna. FCE, Bogotá Palmer S (2003) From popular medicine to medical populism: doctors, healers, and public power in Costa Rica, 1800–1940. Duke University Press, Durham Palmer S (2010) Launching global health: the Caribbean odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paz GL (2016) Global history and Latin American history: a comment. Almanack 14:118–124. https://doi.org/10.1590/2236-463320161407 Peard JG (1999) Race, place, and medicine: the idea of the tropics in nineteenth century Brazilian medicine. Duke University Press, Durham Peset JL (ed) (1985) La Ciencia Moderna y El Nuevo Mundo: Actas de La I Reunión de Historia de La Ciencia y de La Técnica de Los Países Ibéricos e Iberoamericanos (Madrid, 25 a 28 de Septiembre de 1984). Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y de la Tecnologia, Madrid

38

M. A. D. d. Silva and M. Cueto

Petitjean P, Jami C, Moulin AM (eds) (1992) Science and empires: historical studies about scientific development and European expansion. Springer, Dordrecht. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10655078 Pratt ML (1992) Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. Routledge, London/New York Prebisch R (1981) The Latin American periphery in the global system of capitalism. CEPAL Rev 13:143–150 Pyenson L (1985) Cultural imperialism and exact sciences: German expansion overseas, 1900–1930, Studies in history and culture, vol 1. Peter Lang, New York Quintero C (2011) Trading in birds: imperial power, national pride, and the place of nature in U.S.– Colombia relations. Isis 102(3):421–445. https://doi.org/10.1086/661592 Raj K (2010) Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Rosemblatt KA (2018) The science and politics of race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Rostow WW (1960) Stages of economic growth, a non-communist manifesto. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Sabato HI (2015) Historia latinoamericana, historia de América Latina. Latinoamérica en la historia, August. http://ri.conicet.gov.ar/handle/11336/44754 Safier N (2010) Global knowledge on the move: itineraries, Amerindian narratives, and deep histories of science. Isis 101(1):133–145. https://doi.org/10.1086/652693 Saldaña JJ (1984) Presentación. Quipu 1(1):5–6 Saldaña JJ (2006) Science in Latin America: a history. University of Texas Press, Austin Sampaio G d R (2001) Nas Trincheiras da Cura: As Diferentes Medicinas no Rio de Janeiro Imperial. Editora da Unicamp, CECULT, Campinas Sanjad N (2017) Exposições internacionais: uma abordagem historiográfica a partir da América Latina. Hist Cienc Saúde Manguinhos 24(3):785–826. https://doi.org/10.1590/ s0104-59702017000300013 Schaffer S, Roberts L, Raj K, Delbourgo J (eds) (2009) The brokered world: go-betweens and global intelligence, 1770–1820. Science History Publications, Sagamore Beach Schwartzman S (2001) Um espaço para a ciência: a formação da comunidade científica no Brasil, Brasil, ciência & tecnologia 1. Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, MCT, Brasília Secord JA (2004) Knowledge in transit. Isis 95(4):654–672. https://doi.org/10.1086/430657 Silva MRB (2014) História e Historiografia das Ciências Latino-Americanas: Quipu (1984–2000). Rev Bras Hist Cienc 7:47–57 Silva MADd (2018) From Bombay to Rio de Janeiro: the circulation of knowledge and the establishment of the Manguinhos laboratory, 1894–1902. Hist Cienc Saúde Manguinhos 26 (2):1–19. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-59702019000200001 Silva MADd (2020) Quand la peste connectait le monde: production et circulation de savoirs microbiologiques entre Brésil, Inde et France (1894–1922). Thèse de Doctorat. Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris Stepan N (1976) Beginnings of Brazilian science: Oswaldo Cruz, medical research and policy, 1890–1920. Science History Publications, New York Stepan N (1991) The hour of eugenics. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Subrahmanyam S (2014) Aux Origines de l’histoire Globale. Collège de France/Fayard, Paris Trabulse E (1984) El círculo roto, Lecturas mexicanas 54, 1st edn. Fondo de Cultura Económica [u. a.], México City Zárate MS (ed) (2008) Por la Salud del Cuerpo: Historia y Políticas Sanitarias en Chile, Colección de Historia. Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

3

A Critical Overview of the Historiography of Life Sciences in Latin America Maurizio Esposito

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The “Periphery” Revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Reception to Appropriation of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Peripheral Life Science” in Latin America: From Darwin to Molecular Biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science Between Epistemic Appropriations and Emancipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

40 41 47 49 53 59 60

Abstract

The chapter explores three kinds of historiographic dichotomies that have deeply affected the historiography of biology and biomedicine in Latin America. The dichotomies are the following: center versus periphery; reception versus appropriation of knowledge; and “epistemic appropriation” versus emancipation through knowledge. The chapter introduces a few reasons showing why the first dichotomy is still pertinent and (alas) far from being compellingly superseded, although it needs important conceptual revisions and updating. Then, in considering and assessing some very significant works on the history of biology, biomedicine, and agriculture focused on South America, it is shown how, and to what extent, the two other dichotomies have informed the historian’s craft in Latin America.

M. Esposito (*) Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_28

39

40

M. Esposito

Introduction Writing history, as with many other human activities, is a practice eminently situated. The power and influence of place inform a host of implicit assumptions and local idiosyncrasies that cannot be easily overcome. These assumptions shape the way historians think their subjects; they forge approaches, perspectives, expectations, questions, and the ways they can be answered. Yet, while historians of science have been sensible in emphasizing the situatedeness of knowledge, they have been less concerned about the situatedeness of their own reconstructions. This is not surprising if we consider that, for most historians and historiographers, temporal issues had been more important than assessing how particular places influence our historical understanding. In other words, discussions over the sins of "presentism" have traditionally overshadowed the study of how contexts affect the comprehension of the past.1 The chapter aims to make explicit some of the situated assumptions informing the craft of history of science in Latin America, with particular emphasis on the history of biology and the biomedical sciences. While the proposal does not pretend to be exhaustive, I argue that those assumptions might be distilled into the form of three dichotomies with their respective “thick” concepts. The first basic dichotomy is the persistent and widely contested distinction between center and periphery (the CP distinction onward). I contend that, despite the many convincing critiques moved against this distinction (Chambers and Gillespie 2001; Raj 2007; Delbourgo and Dew 2008; Fan 2012; Medina et al. 2014; Hauswedell et al. 2019), we cannot easily reject it without losing an important hermeneutical device through which to assess and comprehend the asymmetric dissemination, circulation, and legitimation of knowledge in Latin America (and eventually elsewhere). I therefore introduce a number of important reasons showing why the distinction is still historically pertinent and far from being convincingly superseded, even though it requires significant conceptual revision and updating. Further, I argue that the CP distinction buttresses the other two controversial dichotomies that implicitly or explicitly inform many historical narratives in the region: the reception versus appropriation of scientific knowledge, on the one hand; and, on the other, what I call “epistemic appropriation” versus emancipation through scientific knowledge. In introducing and using examples taken from works focusing on the history of biology and biomedicine, I outline how the aforementioned dichotomies and concepts have affected and shaped – whether explicitly or implicitly – historical accounts of science in Latin America. In a programmatic article published by Gavroglu et al. (2008), the scholars introduced the notion of the “historiographical standpoint” of the periphery. Referring to the European “periphery,” the scholars observed how such a particular “historiographical standpoint”: “. . .might offer a clearer view over the intricate

1

For general introductions to the historiography and the philosophy of history, see, among many others, Croce (1921), Collingwood (1946), Butterfield (1965), Bloch (1953 [ed. 1992]), and Koselleck (2002). For a general introduction to the historiography of science, see Kragh (1990).

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

41

ideological constructs which accompany the establishment of science and technology, and at the same time, unveil their sociopolitical dimensions. It is often the case that what appears as a coherent whole of ideas or well-articulated practices when it seen from the point of view of the center, is entirely dissembled when it reaches the European periphery and becomes in issue of intense philosophical and political debate” (2008, 168). While Gavroglu et al. refer to the European south, I do think we can equally defend the possibility of a Latin American “historiographical standpoint” which presents, in spite of the relevant historical and social differences, some overlapping characteristics. In fact, a Latin American historiographical standpoint might be a promising perspective for observing how science has become global and, at the same time, how such an “universal” knowledge has changed through its peripheral reinterpretations and appropriations. This suggests that if we want to understand science as a global enterprise, we cannot overlook how science is appropriated in the “peripheries,” and the very same argument can be applied to the history of biology and biomedicine – whether we track the diffusion of botanical, medical, agricultural, or environmental knowledge, Darwinism, Lamarckism, or any other scientific tradition in Latin America.2 In what follows, I frame a short historical review of the concept of “periphery” and provide a few reasons why we still need it together with the ambiguous notion of “center” (and how we can eventually update the concepts according to our contemporary concerns). Then, in considering and analyzing some very significant works on the history of biology, biomedicine, and agronomy, I explore the two resulting dichotomies informing many life science history narratives in Latin America: first, the distinction between reception and appropriation of knowledge; and second, the difference between “epistemic appropriation” versus emancipation through knowledge.

The “Periphery” Revisited It is well known that, in Latin America, the conceptual distinction between center and periphery has its roots in dependency theory.3 From the 1950s, and throughout its diverse versions, the theory has emphasized how the economic asymmetries across different regions are not simply the outcome of local idiosyncrasies. (For example, cultural backwardness or the inability of proper integration in the capitalist system.) The asymmetries are structurally determined by the capitalist world system, 2

For instance, if we follow the thoughtful insights of Novoa and Levine (2010), which will be discussed in the third section in some detail, we can have a better understanding of Darwinism at the “center” when we consider and assess how it was “received” and reinterpreted in the “peripheries.” 3 In the European context, the origin of the CP distinction is often attributed to Gunder Frank (1966), Basalla (1967), Shils (1975), Amin (1976, 1988), and, of course, Wallerstein’s world system approach (1980). With the important exception of Gunder Frank, the Latin American debate has unfolded independently (or relatively so) ever since Haya and Mariátegui’s debate in the 1930s. See Kay (1991), Frank (1991), and Dos Santos (2000).

42

M. Esposito

where peripheral underdevelopment has been determined by the development of central and richer regions. As Andre Gunder Frank clearly put it: “Underdevelopment is not due to the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage in regions that have remained isolated from the stream of world history. On the contrary, underdevelopment was and still is generated by the very same historical process which also generated economic development” (Frank 1966, 43). In short, the split between center and periphery is structurally determined by the existence of a persistent and pernicious dependency of poorer countries on the richest ones. In the 1970s, the Brazilian economist Theotônio dos Santos defined dependency as the “situation in which the economy of certain countries is conditioned by the development and expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected” (1970, 231). Dos Santos distinguished among three historical forms of dependence: (1) colonial dependence; (2) financial-industrial dependence; and (3) technological and industrial dependence. The first form characterized the earliest European colonialism. The second corresponded to the dramatic nineteen-century imperialist expansion, and the third referred to the postcolonial period, where industrialized countries used “underdeveloped” regions as strategic reservoirs for primary commodities and cheap labor. This last stage implied that the “central” industrialized countries sold technologies (and therefore knowledge) to underdeveloped countries, while the latter could only export raw materials for increasing the productivity and capital accumulation in the North: “The big companies do not sell machinery and processed raw materials as simple merchandise: they demand either the payment of royalties, etc., for their utilization or, in most cases, they convert these goods into capital and introduce them in the form of their investments. This is how machinery which is replaced in the hegemonic centers by more advanced technology is sent to dependent countries as capital for the installation of affiliates” (1970, 234). All the efforts to industrialize the peripheries (and therefore generate economic independence) were constantly thwarted by the much superior industrial development of the centers. Countries specializing in the export of unprocessed commodities lacked enough currency to boost new local technologies and industries, while foreign investment coming from the “centers” served only to keep, or even to deepen, the dependency relation. The very same attempts to generate or improve local technologies in the “periphery,” eventually attracting and employing foreign investment, resulted in further increasing the level of dependency on the centers. We would not need much imagination to realize how such process could affect the development of science and technology in dependent and peripheral countries. After all, whether we consider socialist or capitalism forms of production, science and technology have been deeply intertwined with industry, invention, and innovation so that economic disparities among countries can affect the production of knowledge and technology in various ways. In fact, disparity and dependency did affect scientists working in the “peripheral” countries. One of the most perceptive observers of the asymmetries between centers and peripheries was the Argentinian mathematician Oscar Varsavsky. In his Ciencia, política y cientificismo (1969), he vividly illustrated the condition of a science practitioner in the periphery. The international community of scientists, he lamented:

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

43

. . .unconditionally accepts the leadership of the northern hemisphere: United States, Europe, URSS. In those regions the decisions are taken (or sanctioned, because the decisions are never explicit) about which are the topic of interest, what are the most promising methods and the general orientations that are most convenient for each science. In those regions are also assessed the work of scientists, culminating with Nobel prizes and other recognitions less ostentatious but equally effective for granting “status.” (27)

The “peripheral” condition, Varsavsky observed, produced in the young scholar a comprehensible admiration for the sciences as practiced in the “Global North” and added: “It is natural that any aspiring scientist looks with reverence to such a Mecca of the North, believing that any decision taken there is progressist and unique, and, therefore, he turns up to its temples for training. Then, when he receives the endorsement, he would keep at his return – if he returns – a link which is stronger with the foreign social context that his own” (29).4 For Varsavsky, the way out from peripheral dependency was a politicized science that would address such a subaltern position by recognizing that science has never been really universal. The “peripheral” scientist should be aware of the political forces determining their place in the world economy. Such self-conscious science would break the mechanism reproducing cognitive and material dependency and eventually foster a science addressing local issues, while providing at the same time new original, local, and global knowledge. Varsavsky’s analysis was eminently political and did not explicitly address the history of “peripheral” sciences and their relation with the “centers.” As far as I know, the first seminal historical and sociological work explicitly focused on the “peripheral” nature of science in Latin America was the collective volume La Ciencia Periferica: Ciencia y Sociedad en Venezuela edited by Elena Diaz, Yolanda Texera, and Hebe Vessuri and published in 1983. In the first chapter, in partially accepting the dependency approach, Vessuri observed that, if we grant that science and technology are intertwined with local economic, social, and political factors, we should expect that different regions develop distinct forms of science and science policies. She noticed, for example, that “peripheral” scientists face very specific challenges: . . .the conceptual development has fewer possibilities of happening in Latin America for the risks involved in the creation of a true new knowledge: both in economical and intellectual terms. The scientific communities in the periphery are more conservatives than those working at the center. The former work almost exclusively within the parameters of “normal science” for solving puzzles which have been generally conceived elsewhere. It is much more difficult for the national and international community to accept new ideas or concepts emerging from some place in the periphery than accepting those same ideas as proposed by a scientist working in a renowned institution at the center. (17)

Moreover, he ironically claimed that a student willing to specialize in the north “has to be really bad for not finding someone who accepts him. For the graduates coming from underdeveloped countries there are special considerations, scholarships and patience” (1969, 39). My translation.

4

44

M. Esposito

Important exceptions to the norm, Vessuri added, were fields such as medicine, geophysics, geochemistry, and all those cognitive and practical enterprises which can be strategically linked to local necessities. In focusing her analysis on the development of the Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigations founded in 1959, she pointed out how the conception of science in the Venezuelan periphery oscillated between two extremes: on the one hand, an extreme academicism, which tended to uphold a universalist view of pure knowledge hermetically sealed from societal local needs (and cognitively dependent on the centers of knowledge production); on the other, a radical instrumentalism, which reduced science to an applied technique for solving very local issues with slight interest in participating in international, more theoretical, debates. In other words, “peripheral science” was affected by two kinds of limitations: Either it tended to form ivory towers representing local branches of “universal” knowledge radiating from the “Global North,” or it leaned toward an extremely focused technocratic enterprises largely disconnected from external (international) suggestions. Vessuri believed the way out from these two extremes was that peripheral scientific communities have to be “hybrid communities,” communities that supposed “an organizational framework where scientists, politicians, directors, engineers, industry representatives and other groups of interests communicate among themselves for defining the problems, strategies and research solutions” (69). In the late 1980s, the idea of peripheral science was challenged (as it is today). Marcos Cueto questioned the notion of “peripheral science,” preferring “science in the periphery.” In his Excelencia científica en la periferia: actividades científicas e investigación biomédica en el Perú 1890–1950 (1989a), he contested that the former concept, as it had been framed, was too inflexible and could not account for the specificities of science as practiced in “underdeveloped” regions. In addition, the notion could not make sense of dynamic relations between local and international scientific communities in their historical development. In short, Cueto argued that not all science in the periphery is peripheral, in the sense that not all scientific knowledge produced in the “periphery” has been marginal in relation to the scientific “centers.” There are various significant examples showing how science in the periphery has been highly relevant for “global” knowledge. Bernardo Houssay’s development of physiology in Argentina, Oswaldo Cruz’s development of bacteriology in Brazil, and the high-altitude biological studies developed at the Institute of Andean Biology at San Marcos University are all telling instances that demonstrate the existence of “scientific excellence” in the periphery, especially if we consider the history of biomedicine (see Cueto 1989a, b, 1994; Stepan 1981). For Cueto, historians of science could explore how “science in the periphery” developed according to its own idiosyncrasies and features, without considering it as a mere derivation of knowledge produced elsewhere, in the “Global North.” Cueto’s critique was important because it directed historical attention toward those peripheral contexts where science was successfully practiced. Yet, the analytical distinction between peripheral science and science in the periphery did not efface the CP distinction, as framed by most dependency theorists. While Cueto provided a substantial historical elucidation of the complex and dynamic relations between

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

45

centers and peripheries, we should not forget that the scholars who have employed the notion of “peripheral science” were not denying that some fields (such as biomedicine or geology) could reach “central” status given their privileged relations with local needs, institutions, and environment. Upholding some form of peripheral historiographic approach does not imply that important innovations, cutting-edge technologies, and knowledge cannot (or did not) emerge in the “Global South.” The dependency approaches only try to explain why there are general (and persistent) economic and epistemic asymmetries across world regions, and the relevant exceptions Cueto mentions only confirm the rule.5 There are at least other two sorts of critical stances that have been moved against the notion of peripheral science. The first contends that CP distinction supposes there is a center that is well structured, uniform, and not fragmented, which should be, at the same time, a tangible and autonomous agent of knowledge production. The second points out that the CP dichotomy hides the existence of complex and dynamic networks and connection between regions, institutions, and scholar communities, which constitute the veritable unit of knowledge production. Knowledge is not generated in the centers and then disseminated to the peripheries; knowledge is itself the outcome of a constant circulation of ideas, objects, technologies, and their contextual appropriations (Raj 2017). The first line of criticism is frequently associated with the pernicious idea of Eurocentrism (or Euro-Atlanticism). The second line is often related with the crucial distinction between the concept of “reception” and “appropriation” of knowledge.6 Let us start with exploring the first contention. Many scholars have questioned the unicity and uniformity of European culture and science, from Martin Bernal to Christopher Bayly, Jack Goody, Samir Amin, or Kapil Raj. The arguments have ranged from questioning the autochthony of many “supposedly” European inventions (i.e., democracy, capitalism, science, etc.) to deconstructing the European pretension that its nineteenth-century domination and hegemony depended on its intrinsic historical exceptionality, which other civilizations lacked. Historians of different schools and persuasions have put together a significant amount of evidence showing that as most groundbreaking inventions were stolen (or simply copied) from other or older civilizations, there was nothing really exceptional about Europe (see in particular Goody 2006). Many other civilizations did (or were doing) the same or similar things (i.e., exploring and colonizing new regions, organizing large markets and bureaucracies, building complex artifacts,

5

Ironically, the very same dependency theory can be considered as an instance of scientific excellence in the periphery. In fact, recently, economists in Europe were reconsidering it to understand the asymmetries generated among countries belonging to the European Union (see Tausch 2019). 6 One of the best contributions in which both arguments are really expressed and tied together is Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science (2007). Raj concludes: “Adducing historical evidence around specific and indeed crucial moments in the history of science, this book challenges both the largely unsubstantiated article of faith that modern science was created in the West and the assumption that it was subsequently disseminated, or imposed, elsewhere” (223).

46

M. Esposito

and developing sophisticated forms of knowledge). If all this is true, and we have very good reasons to believe it, then our notion of “center” – in opposition to a presumed “periphery” – becomes what Gandhi thought of the western civilization: a good idea. How, then, could the “peripheries” be shaped – culturally, politically, economically, and scientifically – by a “center” that was always, in reality, a fragmented collection of ideas and technologies appropriated from elsewhere? If the “center” is a forgery, then the “periphery” is too. Yet, as Immanuel Wallerstein has convincingly argued, this would be a rushed and, at the same time, dangerous conclusion. It would be rushed because, even though other civilizations did or were doing the same things as Europeans, “this still leaves us with the problem of accounting for the fact that it was the West, or Europe, that reached there first, and was consequently able to ‘conquer the world’” (1997, 32–33). And it would be dangerous because “By denying European credit, we deny European blame” (1997, 35). If we accept what Wallerstein ironically calls the “anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism,” we are not only left with no explanation for the dramatic nineteenth-century European expansion, but we also have no one to charge for colonial and imperialist misdeeds. A good form of anti-Eurocentrism, Wallerstein observes, would recognize the specificity of Europe and the consequent Europeanization of the world to understand, criticize, and transcend it.7 In short, to Wallerstein, the only way to be consistently anti-Eurocentrist is to keep the categories of “center” and “periphery” in place. An historiography without this distinction would be a poorer and unfair historiography. Yet, there has been another, very persuasive, challenge against the CP distinction: The distinction is too rigid, ahistorical, and relegates the periphery to an opportunistic consumer of knowledge created elsewhere. In 2008, Gavroglu et al. provided a battery of convincing arguments against the notion of periphery conceived as a passive receiver of ideas and technologies. Although the analysis of Gavroglu et al. is attuned to the European “peripheral” context, it raises a number of very interesting issues that can be easily applied to the Latin American setting. In fact, while Gavroglu et al. recognize the specific differences between the European peripheries and postcolonial peripheries, Manolis Patiniotis stresses the importance of exploring connections between postcolonial studies and the history of science in the European periphery (Patiniotis 2013). In the next section, I therefore assess the historiographic distinction between “reception” and “appropriation” of knowledge in Latin America, and I argue that the CP dichotomy is entirely compatible with an active (and therefore nonpassive) view of the “periphery.”

7 More recently, the position has been forcefully restated by Jürgen Renn, who observes: “It has become a mark of political correctness to provincialize European science as representing just one among many, equally justified points of view within global culture. Such well-meaning political correctness does not enable historians and philosophers to compensate for the destruction of indigenous cultures, for the genocides, for the lack of gender equality, in short, for the immense damage and crimes committed in world history in the name of Western rationality and science. The golem of science cannot be tamed by underestimating it, let alone by overestimating our own influence as its witnesses” (Renn 2015, 242–243).

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

47

From Reception to Appropriation of Knowledge Is the “periphery” a passive consumer of knowledge coming from the “center”? If the answer is yes, the historian’s task would be to track and assess how ideas and practices are received and used contextually without expecting any local form of autonomy, creativity, or novelty. Accordingly, the task of the historian in the periphery would be to reconstruct how these products and ideas are contextually used, while the historian situated in the center would describe how these products and ideas are manufactured or formulated. We would have two kinds of historiography: an historiography of reception (passive) in the peripheries and one of invention (active) in the centers. Yet, we do not need to frame the argument in such a form We can reject the idea that “peripheries” are passive users of products and ideas coming from elsewhere. In fact, Gavroglu et al. have convincingly observed that the very same CP distinction predisposes us to think of the periphery in such terms while supporting an “historiography of transmission.” The basic sin of such historiography is that it would miss the fact that scientific knowledge is not just received and disseminated. It is creatively appropriated: “The appropriation of scientific ideas and practices in the periphery is, above all, a knowledge-producing process. It is a process which helps us comprehend the particularities (and often idiosyncratic characteristics) of a number of discourses developed by local scholars” (161). Scientific ideas and practices are not adopted as ready-made objects and then spread in the cultural environment. In fact, to “receive” them, the local practitioners need to adjust and adapt them to their social environments. The very same process of adaptation, and therefore appropriation, is itself creative and interactive. Gavroglu et al. argue that shifting the emphasis from transmission to appropriation of scientific knowledge would inevitably question the traditional diffusionist view underpinning CP distinction. An historiography of appropriation would put much more emphasis on the network by which scientific knowledge circulates. There are no active centers and passive peripheries; rather, there is a constant circulation of ideas and practices within a large network made up of scholars, institutions, and technologies. Knowledge itself is not produced in powerful and autonomous centers; it is the outcome of a complex and dynamic transnational network: “Thus the concept of networking emerges as an alternative to the opposing concepts usually taken for granted such as centers and peripheries. Networks are extended, more or less hierarchical and fluid structure, which represent the mediation of ideas, practices, and instruments in between more or less faraway nodes, with their relative importance evolving dynamically in time” (162). As mentioned before, Gavroglu et al.’s analysis refers to the historiography of science in the European “peripheries,” but it can easily be applied to the Latin American context in general. After all, scientific knowledge in Latin America was not simply transmitted and received from the powerful European capitals; it went through a complex process of adjustment, contextualization, and appropriation which changed its original meaning. Knowledge was creatively transformed to adapt it to conditions very different from those existing in the supposed “center.” Yet, does the replacement of the notion of “reception” with the idea of “appropriation” imply renouncing the CP distinction

48

M. Esposito

altogether? My answer is once again negative: While we need to problematize or revise the CP distinction, we should not dismiss it too quickly. Keeping some form of distinction is entirely consistent with the idea that scientific knowledge is creatively appropriated in the “periphery.” Even more, the very notion of “appropriation” makes sense if we assume the CP distinction. After all, if there are neither centers nor peripheries, why would we need the notion of “appropriation” at all? No doubt, critics of the CP distinction can still argue: If the periphery is not a passive container and the center is not the active and autonomous producer of knowledge, why do we need to keep the distinction at all? It would be much better to dispense altogether with the distinction and shift of our emphasis onto the international networks, as many global historians are increasingly doing. Yet, what many of the network analyses overlook is the fact that there exist significant epistemic asymmetries across the regions of the world. Doing science in Peru or Colombia is not the same as doing science in the United States or France and, as the global historian Sebastian Conrad wisely observed, networks do not self-generate: They are constituted. In fact, historical studies based on networks: . . .do not always pay sufficient attention to the fact that networks are parts of broader power structure. The remote outpost of an empire still draws its authority from contexts that cannot be satisfactorily characterized as simple network effects: differences in military power, marked-induced dependencies, or discursive structures that legitimize and shore up hegemony . . .we must keep in mind that the network is embedded in structural inequalities, lest the impression arise that it operates in a vacuum. (2016, 127)

Conrad emphasizes how networks are hierarchically structured. There are scientists working in some more privileged regions than others. Epistemic authority and credibility are not distributed evenly along the network, and such distribution is not self-engendered or democratically produced; it follows the logic and interest of some influential “nodes.” In short, there are peripheral and central regions which constitute the whole network, and the latter influence or determine the former to a greater extent than the opposite. Again, critics of the CP distinction might still insist that a “network” language would not require “centers.” Yet, a symmetric network, which has neither centers nor peripheries, would hardly describe science in its concrete and historical reality. It would probably outline a somewhat abstract and amorphous space where ideas circulate “inertially” without any form of frictions, biases, and resistances. Kapil Raj has recently recognized that network approaches are affected by such problems: “Network analysis has a number of inherent problems, the foremost among these being that the inter-linkages are perceived as being linear, with no regard to the physical distance between actors, or the number of intermediaries it takes to establish and sustain a given relationship, nor does it allow one to perceive the hierarchical and/or power relationship between them, expect in terms of the twin function of centrality and density. In particular, the fluidity or direction of knowledge flows along the conduits cannot be easily problematized, giving the impression that knowledge circulates freely

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

49

within a network once a link is established” (2017, 51). To overcome those issues, Raj proposes to focus on what he calls “spaces of circulation” as a replacement of the network’s metaphor: “Spaces of circulation suggest a fabric with topographical unevenness, (power) asymmetries. Also, circulation does not entail the smooth flow of knowledge between individuals, communities, civilities, and institutions, and does not imply any synonymy between circulation and fluidity” (2017, 52). Moreover, “circulation entails processes of encounter, negotiation, reconfiguration, and mutation of knowledge” (2017, 58). While Raj’s proposal has the great merit of revealing the relevance of many intermediaries (go-betweens) who are undoubtedly essential in the long chain of knowledge production (and deserve all our historical attention), the notion of “asymmetry” is left unclear. In fact, I suspect that if we meditate further on the notions of “unevenness” and “power asymmetries,” we would probably end with some form of CP distinction. This is what scientific networks should eventually be, but unfortunately are not. Hence, without the concept of “appropriation,” we would have a very poor understanding of how knowledge is creatively processed in the peripheries, but without the CP distinction, we run the risk of upholding an idealized view of how scientific knowledge moves from one place to another. Scientific knowledge circulates in extended networks, but those networks are hierarchically structured according to an historically determined logic of power relations (economic and epistemic). In what follows, I introduce two excellent works on the history of biology and biomedicine that show very well how both the notion of “appropriation” and the CP distinction can be kept consistently together. Both case studies are staged in Argentina; the first is about the “peripheral” appropriation of Darwinism in the nineteenth century, and the second is about the attempt to “import” molecular biology into Argentina in the late 1950s.

“Peripheral Life Science” in Latin America: From Darwin to Molecular Biology In their monograph From Man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920, Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine make it immediately clear that their book is an advertisement for studying “peripheral science.” But their plea for exploring science in peripheral contexts is not chauvinistic. Instead, they contend that, if we want to understand better how science becomes global, we need to analyze what happens in the peripheries, because when scientific knowledge moves from one place to another, it changes. The appropriation of scientific knowledge is a complex and diachronic process involving many local adjustments. Reading Darwin in late nineteenth-century France or Germany was entirely different than reading it in Argentina in the same period. Accordingly, if historians intend to comprehend how Darwinism changed globally, they need to pay attention to how different actors

50

M. Esposito

in the “peripheries” adapted it to their idiosyncratic cultural spaces. The case of Darwin is particularly suggestive for exploring how science changes in transit. His On the Origin of Species and Descent of Man were built upon analogies that were part of the British (and European) cultural world. Those same analogies were read and understood differently in the Latin American context: “Given that analogies arise within particular cultures, and that some analogies are science constitutive, we would expect the familiar sciences of the 19th century European academy to take on unfamiliar forms at the geographical and cultural periphery – in Argentina, for example. We would expect science itself to be transformed, in ways that need not always be limiting” (6). Analogies are the salt of science, but they are locally produced and justified. When they are exported and introduced into a different context, their meaning changes. The battery of “thick” concepts that Darwin introduced for making sense of how life evolves – i.e., the struggle for existence, the tree of life, artificial and natural selection, variation in natural or domestic populations, sexual selection, extinction, and many others – was reframed and recast in the Argentinean world, as elsewhere. For Novoa and Levine, the first thing we should keep in mind for understanding the cultural framework in which Darwinism was integrated is that, as elsewhere, science and politics were inseparable. A country in the making needed optimistic narratives of progress distilled into ambitious expectations for the future of the nation. In this context, science was considered essential for inciting radical processes of modernization and civilization. Enlightened ideas, Romantic conceptions, and positivist approaches provided a rich and chaotic framework in which Darwin’s ideas could be fitted into. Novoa and Levine observed that Argentinian scholars reframed a new Darwin, while Darwin – with all his powerful ideas and analogies – shaped a new vision of Argentina. The dynamic and unstable coproduction of scientific ideas and nation relied upon what they call a “synthetic imperative.” The imperative required that any major theory had to be tailored within a larger intellectual framework encompassing science, politics, and the past and the future of the nation. The first Argentinian readings of Darwin, indeed, were associated with enlightened or romantic sources. Evolution itself was compared to a process of metamorphosis whereby Cuvier, Goethe, or Lamarck could be equally enlisted with Darwin. After the 1870s, a more direct knowledge of Darwin, spurred also by the increasingly available translations in French (in 1862) and Spanish (in 1877), convinced Argentinian readers that Darwin’s Origins could not be easily fitted into the optimist and triumphal progress narratives of the enlightenment and then positivism. There was an irreducibly gloomy message in Darwin’s broad view of the life evolving on the planet. The struggle for existence did not necessarily lead to a progressive path. On the contrary, the historical struggle was riddled with death and extinction. Whereas Lamarck had conceived of evolution as a progressive process leading to higher forms of life, Darwin intertwined evolution and extinction. No optimistic outlook could be easily extracted from such a destructive universe. Darwin tried to please Victorians’ thirst for progress by suggesting that, in the very long run, natural selection might eventually sift out

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

51

“superior” kinds of organisms, but the mechanism did not ensure improvement or progress. Most species that had ever existed simply perished in their struggle for existence, and the very same argument could be applied to humans and their civilizations. Not surprisingly, Argentinians scholars such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Francisco Moreno linked selection and extinction to the dramatic disappearance of native populations. While Darwin had naturalized extinction, Sarmiento or Moreno naturalized autochthonous genocide in the name of the law of evolution. Moreno himself observed that “the Argentine Republic is without doubt a vast necropolis of lost races. They came from the remotest theaters, pressed on by the fatal struggle for life, in which the strongest always wins, and here in our southern extremes, the conquerors annihilated the conquered” (cited in Novoa and Levine 2010, 100). On that note, the Darwinian paleontologist Florentino Ameghino saw the tree of life as a tree of Death, a clear representation of evolution proceeding through extinction. Evolution was not the triumph of life, but the regular accomplishment of death – a Lucreatian’s mors immortalis. The natives, as organisms unfit for civilized environments, were doomed to perish together with all the other life forms that had gone extinct. This pessimistic conclusion spurred the obsessive hunt for bodies and skulls to track the origins and genealogy of the Argentinians before their definitive annihilation. The study of the extinguished or extinguishing species and “races” echoed the need to create an identity in a precarious and ever-changing world. The Museo de la Plata directed by Moreno satisfied this need “to prevent the loss of the sense of self” (105). Moreno and many of his contemporaries used evolution as a conceptual tool to understand where Argentinians had come from and where they were eventually headed. In other words, Darwin was used as a strategic instrument to shape national identity. Novoa and Levine see the “appropriation” of Darwinism as a complex adaptation of foreign ideas and analogies to a very different cultural environment. In Argentina, Darwin was not just read, taught, and popularized; his views were radically unpacked and reconfigured and then repacked and translated for South American readers. The authors use the notion of periphery as a strategic hermeneutical tool for showing how “central” science was transformed along the way, exposing the “common sense” on which scientific analogy rested. They see the “peripheral” standpoint as a privileged point of view from which we can reveal the contingency and idiosyncrasy of those analogies that, in the autochthonous (British or European) culture, easily pass unperceived. In short, paradoxical as it might sound, we can understand science in the center much better by considering it from a periphery. The peripheral historiographic standpoint has also been emphasized by Pablo Kreimer, who dedicated a thorough study to an unsuccessful attempt to introduce molecular biology into Argentina in the late 1950s. In his Ciencia y periferia: Nacimiento, muerte y resurrección de la biología molecular (2010), Kreimer used his case to outline some of the main characteristics of peripheral science. First, he recognized that both centers and peripheries cannot be considered as

52

M. Esposito

homogenous and static sites of knowledge production or reception. Both are diversified, fragmented, and dynamic. No doubt, science and technology in the twentieth century is eminently global and characterized by a vast web of transnational connections and integrations. Yet, those transitional relations are not established in a uniform and nonhierarchical space. There is no great amorphous web, but a flexible network constituted by larger and smaller nodes, and the relations between these nodes are not evenly distributed. To be a biochemist, physiologist, or molecular biologist in a small “node” made (and still makes) a difference. Between the 1930s and the early 1950s, molecular biology was not yet an established field. It was just a name referring to diverse disciplines, views, and techniques. The main “centers” where this new prospective field was being assembled were England, France, and the United States. In the meantime, throughout the 1950s, Argentina went through a deep process of modernization in terms of the institutionalization of scientific research according to the developmentalist model, backed (among other institutions and agencies) by UNESCO. The restructuring of the Malbrán Institute in Buenos Aires, where a molecular biology division was established in 1957, needs to be contextualized within such a general process of institutional, political, and therefore scientific innovation. Kreimer provides a vivid description of what it meant to develop a new, still unstable, scientific field in the periphery in line with the seminal insights of Varsavsky back in the 1960s. This sort of development consisted, first, of an imitative stage where scholars traveled to one or more “centers” to train themselves in the most advanced techniques and knowledge available. The “imitative” stage included the process Kreimer calls “subordinate integration”: PhD candidates and postdoctoral scholars trained at the center returned to their home country to develop the same research agenda they had adopted in the host country, while maintaining a “subordinate” cooperation with the “central” institution. These scholars produced a segmentation between a less (or non-) internationally integrated local community of practitioners and a younger community of international (although subordinately) practitioners. The segregation between these two communities triggered the creation of alternative research traditions adopted by those pursuing a previously established agenda and those willing to innovate the field. Molecular biology in Argentina followed such a logic of subordinate integration achieved by younger scholars mainly trained in France and England. In particular, Kreimer mentions Ignacio Pirosky (Director of the National Institute of Microbiology, Malbrán), who had worked with André Lwoff at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and Cesar Milstein (Director of the Molecular Biology Division), who had worked at the Biochemical Institute in Cambridge with Frederik Sander. Kreimer notices that the “subordinate integration” with the “center” provided an effective work division. While those at the “center” continued to promote the discipline conceptually, experimentally, and technically, those in the “periphery” performed more routine tasks provided by the same “centers.” Peripheral science became deeply focused on solving very specific puzzles. It was, as Kreimer observes, a “hyper-normal science”:

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

53

The process of expansion and consolidation of the Molecular Biology in Argentina was produced in function of an “imitation” of research lines through what we call “subordinate integration”. This brought the discipline to develop along the conceptual and methodological orientation realized in the international referential centers. As a consequence, the discipline was established according to what we call “Hyper-normal science”, which defines a workstyle based upon a strong specialization that focuses on segments of particular topics, impeding the possibility to tackle substantial problems in the field. (157)

Imitation, subordinate integration, and hypernormal science define the space in which peripheral science develops.8 Although the Malbrán Institute ended its short existence in 1962 – a preview of the very turbulent political period to follow in Argentina – Kreimer also observes the reality had not substantially changed. Science’s transnational networks are far from democratic and the distinction between periphery and center persists, whether or not we treat peripheral knowledge as “received” or “appropriated.” The case studies mentioned here show that historians interested in the “peripheral science” can track how science is appropriated, used, and disseminated in particular contexts without overlooking the fact that the distribution of knowledge is neither even nor democratic.9 Both Darwinism and molecular biology assumed a local “flavor,” but whatever the local specificities were, they did not efface the CP distinction, as these authors reveal.10

Science Between Epistemic Appropriations and Emancipation My last section addresses other important questions related to the CP distinction: Has “central” science been a factor of emancipation for overcoming local superstitions, delusions, or backwardness? Or is it in reality an instrument of control, domination, or appropriation of peripheral “worlds”? More generally, is science really universal, embodying transnational values of rationality forwarding material and moral progress? Or has such a vision of science been a prejudiced Western idea, Defining a science as “peripheral” does not imply that it is not extremely valuable and important. Many first-rate scientists have been trained in peripheral contexts. After all, in 1984, César Milstein obtained the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine as a result of developing the technique for producing monoclonal antibodies while working at the University of Cambridge. 9 For a recent discussion on this issue, see Kreimer 2019. 10 One thing we should not forget is that the CP distinction does not define a static state. For example, between the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the life sciences in the United States were in a peripheral state with respect to Germany, France, or England. Scholars such as Charles Whitman, Edmund Beecher Wilson, Charles Manning Child, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and many others traveled to Europe to update themselves on the state of the art in their fields (cytology, embryology, evolutionary biology, etc.) (Esposito 2016). Gradually, United States institutions became new “centers” of knowledge production, overtaking many old “centers” in Europe. Today, we might expect that something similar is happening in various Asiatic countries. The power’s dynamics in the global network which innerve science and technology change constantly, and the historian should track those changes in their complex developments. 8

54

M. Esposito

imposing its view over other world regions? These questions – such as those tackled in the previous sections – populate the conceptual space in which the history of science (and biomedicine) is crafted in most postcolonial countries, including Latin American ones. A cursory historical overview would be sufficient to show that any answer to those questions could hardly be definitive. We would easily find examples supporting optimistic or pessimistic arguments whether we consider similar or different time frames and places: Domination or appropriation in colonial times is not the same as in postcolonial times, and the same can be said of the concept of emancipation and progress. No doubt, similar sorts of questions have stimulated the mind of many scholars from Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750). In the twentieth century, the question about whether science is something beneficial or hegemonical has been the hallmark of many philosophical discussions, ranging from the Frankfurt School to Michel Foucault, Jacques Ellul, David Noble, and many others. Yet, as this section will argue, these questions acquire a more specific sense in the Latin American context: The problem is not to assess whether science and technology have been positive or negative in general; the problem is to determine whether science and technology coming from the “centers” have had an emancipative or exploitative significance in relation to local forms of knowledge. From this perspective, the knowledge coming from the centers is not only received and creatively appropriated in the peripheries, but the peripheries themselves can also be “appropriated” by the centers through scientific knowledge and technology. Hence, the notion of “appropriation” in the periphery acquires an entirely different meaning for the historian. It may refer to the set of strategies and practices for seizing and controlling the natural world from the colonial, imperial, and then economic centers, and/or the set of methods making local forms of knowledge impractical and dispensable. This is what I call “epistemic appropriation.” Processes of “epistemic appropriation” have been widely explored by many historians, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and (more generally) postcolonial theorists. (For a general and thoughtful perspective, see Chakrabarty 2000.) Important scholars such as the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel have offered insightful viewpoints which can orient us in the conceptual labyrinth characterizing such contentious matter. In his “Rousseauian” essay, Um Discurso sobre as Ciências (1988), Santos distinguishes between a dominant paradigm and an emergent paradigm. The former was characterized by modern European science, which was essentially hegemonic and totalitarian in its pretension to know everything in analytic, quantitative, determinist, and reductionist terms. The emergent paradigm, fostered by the incipient crisis of the dominant one, should be much more pluralist, wide-ranging, and inclusive. Needless to say, Santos’ emergent paradigm has not quite merged. From the 1990s onward, Santos backed transnational research that would eventually culminate in what he calls the “epistemologies of the south.” (Santos and Meneses 2014) The rationale inspiring the research was to show that modern science and technology, in concert with colonial and imperial expansion, not only fostered genocide, but also caused an

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

55

“epistemicide” in the Global South. At the heart of the modern world lies a deep “cognitive injustice” which denies any legitimacy to alternative forms of knowledge. Insofar as everything can and must be translated in terms of scientific language coming from same powerful center, the replacement of all forms of local knowledge can be seen as a form of epistemic appropriation. A similar line of thought can be found in Dussel, who emphasizes how a pernicious “myth of modernity” which led a civilized and developed world to oppose a peripheral, uncivilized, and backward world. For Dussel, European modernity itself emerged with the definition of Europe as a “center” in opposition to a periphery in need of being conquered and dominated: “Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the ‘center’ of the World History that it inaugurates, the periphery that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition” (Dussel 1993, 65). The dynamic contradiction between emancipation and violence is consubstantial to the myth of modernity in the sense that European knowledge and imperial expansion are liberating and enslaving at the same time. It is liberating insofar as supposedly “universal” knowledge and political wisdom replaced local despotisms based upon superstitions. It is enslaving because such a replacement is violently implemented and imposed. Whether or not we agree with Santos, Dussel, or any postcolonial criticism about the nature and existence of these CP asymmetries, it is undeniable that the conception of knowledge as a form of cognitive appropriation has influenced many historical narratives of science (particularly biomedical, biological, and environmental histories of science) in Latin America. Many imperial and postcolonial histories assume the existence of a deep reciprocal connection between knowledge and power, and therefore between knowledge and control or domination structuring itself along a general CP dynamic relation. A very perceptive and insightful example of this trend is Antonio BarreraOsorio’s monograph Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (2006). Barrera-Osorio observed that, from the sixteenth century, the Spanish crown, supported by an army of entrepreneurs, merchants, royal official, and scholars, was keenly interested in exploiting the resource of its vast empire and its inhabitants. But effective exploitation required reliable knowledge. The control at a distance of vast portions of untamed regions presupposed consistent information and communication: “Royal authorities and merchants did not know anything about the New World – about its geography, natural history, or people. They needed practical information” (Barrera-Osorio 2006, 6). The acquisition of information, in turn, presupposed the development of a solid network of informants located on both sides of the Atlantic. The recollection and systematization of an increasing amount of “data” could only be achieved by an apt institutionalization of observational practices: “empirical practices eventually constituted a strategy for controlling, exploring, exploiting, collecting and studying the nature of the New World” (Barrera-Osorio 2006, 8). The frenetic epistemic activities of a multitude of informants disseminated all over the empire generated an empirical and practical culture, which, for Osorio, underpinned the development of modern science:

56

M. Esposito As in Spain, European states supported the development of those academies with the goal of obtaining power through knowledge: knowledge about routes, commodities, agricultural products, medicines, exotic animals, and wandering stars. The legacy of Spain to the emergence of modern science consisted in establishing a very successful model of domination based on empirical knowledge. Spanish books, institutions, and experts helped other Europeans to establish their own models of domination based on this type of knowledge, which would become the new science of the seventeenth century. (Barrera-Osorio 2006, 134)

The strategy of domination and control fostered by the empirical practices of Portuguese and Spanish informants produced an increasing asymmetry between exploiters and exploited – between agents situated at the imperial centers and those situated at its margins. Following Osorio, as well as any approach taking the uneven distribution of knowledge in the global world seriously, it is quite natural to conceive knowledge as a medium for establishing and keeping “power asymmetries.” Those “asymmetries” are revealed with particular depth in two excellent historical and anthological studies on bioscience and agriculture, which exemplify the relation between the CP distinction and the notion of “epistemic appropriation”: Mauricio Nieto Olarte’s Remedios para el Imperio. Historia natural y la apropiación del nuevo mundo and Jan Douwe van der Ploeg’s Potatoes and Knowledge. Both studies are particularly pertinent here because they outline two kinds of epistemic “appropriation” in two very different historical contexts. The first focuses on the practices of naturalists (botanists) working in the Spanish colonial setting of the Viceroyalty of New Granada (roughly modern Colombia). The second explores the social and epistemic clash between the traditional local knowledge of Peruvian farmers and the transitional techno-scientific industry in relation to potato farming in postcolonial Peru. Notwithstanding the temporal distance, both studies emphasize how science has been used as a tool for the appropriation of natural environment, its products, and the related local forms of knowledge. Nieto Olarte’s narrative begins two centuries after Barrera-Osorio’s analysis. In eighteenth-century Spain, one the most enlightened kings, Charles III, fostered a series of political and administrative reforms for reshaping, on a more rational basis, the largest colonial empire in the world. The reforms involved a more intense exploitation of the colonies overseas. An army of explorers, naturalists, and physicians was sponsored and sent to the New World to assess new possible lucrative trades linked to medicinal, agricultural, or commercial uses of the tropical flora. The natural history knowledge that was produced was conceived of as essentially useful, and such utilitarianism was connected with a logic of appropriation. For Nieto Olarte, when we consider the colonial context, knowledge and appropriation are almost synonymous. Describing, representing, classifying, and naming new plants is not only an epistemic act, but also essentially an act of appropriation. Yet, the seizure of the natural world required a complex set of steps and rituals aimed at translating local knowledge (Indigenous situated knowledge) into a universal scientific knowledge. Discovering something new in the tropical forest meant translating what was already known by the local community into the botanical language of science at that time, namely the Linnaean taxonomic system. Scientific discovery in the colonies consisted of a complex process of translation

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

57

which ultimately led to the material possession of the observed object once it had been moved – depicted, renamed in Latin, and sent in the form of a dried specimen – to the scientific center (Madrid). Nieto Olarte distinguishes between three fundamental moments characterizing the material and cognitive appropriation of the tropical flora. First, the local and traditional knowledge of the plants and their properties was apprehended and reported by the explorers. Second, the botanists identified the plant and certified it was a real new species. Third, the plant, now appropriately described and represented, was inscribed into the taxonomical system of Linnaeus and then decomposed into its basic chemical elements. Through this process, “medical knowledge, medical substances and their trade was converted in exclusive property of a community having its interests and power centralized in Europe” (Nieto Olarte 2006, 174). Madrid, and the royal pharmacy, became a strategic center where the tropical nature was represented, known, and therefore seized and eventually exploited. The problematic relation between local and scientific knowledge is the focus of Douwe van der Ploeg’s study. The short and simply titled text “Potatoes and Knowledge” is a brilliant work tying epistemology, anthropology, and the conflictual relation between local and global knowledge. The work focuses on the clash between the practices of Peruvian farmers in the highlands and the epistemology underlining scientific plant breeding. Its goal is a general critique of the notion of “development” in emerging economies. The argument is that development can often produce ignorance and dependency rather than emancipation and economic growth. Van der Ploeg uses the expression “Art de la localité” to describe farmers’ local forms of knowledge. (The expression was coined by Mendras 1970.) This art is a dynamic knowledge system deeply based on the use of descriptive metaphors heavily connected with the local space. For instance, local farmers assess the characteristics of a plot, recurring to a series of general, imprecise, and metaphorical concepts: The plot can be frio or caliente (fertile or unfertile), duro or suavecito (whether or not the soil has been tilled), or alto or bajito (whether the plot is well sheltered from cold or wind). Each plot has its particular characteristics, and the farmer is able to recognize its fitting genotype based on an observation of the plant’s phenotype. (“Suitable genotype” has no absolute meaning; it depends on many different, and idiosyncratic, considerations (price, yield, etc.).) One important consequence of the farmer’s local practice is the maintenance of the extant biodiversity and the generation of new, more suitable, varieties (van der Ploeg 1993, 213). The process is deeply experimental and relies on previous practical knowledge transmitted by the community or acquired through direct acquaintance in the field. In the context of “art de la localité,” progress is constantly achieved: “through the cycle of observation, interpretation, evaluation and manipulation, the scope of the art de la localité is enlarged, which enables the farmer to obtain new insights, and so on” (van der Ploeg 1993, 215). An entirely different form of knowledge is produced by scientific plant breeding. Unlike the knowledge produced by the local farmer, who starts assessing the extant phenotypical conditions for selecting specific genotypes, the scientific farmer begins with designing an ideal plant type, which should be in principle “superior” to any

58

M. Esposito

extant local variety. Once such an ideal plant has been conceived, a genotype must be created which includes most, if not all, of the phenotypes desired. Finally, when the new “improved variety” is available in the form of a seed, experimental testing reveals whether the seed has delivered the desired characteristics. But the difference between local and scientific agriculture goes well beyond experimental methodology. Through scientific farming, time is also deeply restructured: “time is converted from a basically indiscrete into a discrete category. And the labor process changes from the skill to confront and exploit specific circumstances, to the skill of applying general and standardized procedures to circumstances that are to be seen as more adverse the more they are specific” (van der Ploeg 1993, 219). Scientific, planned agriculture begins with an “abstract synthetic nature” that can only be converted into reality through a long series of standardized prescriptions and technologies concocted in some scientific center far from the farmer’s fields. Insofar as the cultivation of the “improved varieties” is intertwined with specific technologies, instruments, and knowledge (from pesticides and fertilizers to tractors and irrigation equipment), the traditional farmer is marginalized and rendered invisible while their knowledge becomes increasingly obsolete: “the introduction of ‘improved varieties’ initiates the creation of several chains of new dependency patters. New artefacts (namely those specified in the scientific design) must be bought, new procedures must be followed, new circuits (several markets and banking circuits) must be entered and new expertise (ability to decipher scientific and bureaucratic language) is to be mobilized” (van der Ploeg 1993, 220). Van der Ploeg’s analysis is particularly interesting as it reveals the deep contradictions between local and global forms of knowledge beyond the many simplistic philosophical views. The element separating a central, more powerful system of knowledge and a local and peripheral system of practices is not epistemic credibility, theoretical superiority, or truthfulness. The clash is not between science and pseudoscience or superstition (as many philosophers would tirelessly digress). Rather, the contrast is between a knowledge system requiring heavy investment and resources (material and technological) not everyone can afford and another system relying on local resources and traditional knowledge, which is cheaper and, therefore, more widely and evenly distributed. Indeed, once the scientific option has been embraced, local forms of knowledge are increasingly forgotten and the farmers have no other option but to become dependent on the “central” knowledge. But the application of scientific knowledge is expensive. When the farmer has no access to credit and investment that make scientific farming possible and rentable, poverty inevitably follows. The application of science in peripheral contexts can have a pernicious outcome: Instead of fostering welfare, prosperity, and emancipation, it can trigger ignorance, dependency, and scarcity, whether or not the “central” knowledge is theoretically and technically superior to the local one. The two cases here discussed exhibit two kinds of “appropriation.” On the one hand, we have appropriation through the use of scientific knowledge, which is employed as a tool for seizing the natural world and inscribing it within the colonial Spanish order. Here, a “universal” knowledge takes hold of many different forms of local knowledge through a sophisticated process of translation and mobilization

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

59

from the periphery to the center. On the other hand, we have a much subtler and strategic kind of appropriation: the introduction of a “superior” and expensive form of knowledge capable of demoting and effacing “inferior” ones. This is a type of epistemic appropriation rendering any alternative form of knowledge obsolete and inviable while producing dependency and, eventually, poverty. In fact, when the local farmer is unable to afford the costly application of the “central” knowledge, she might even need to sell her fields. Local knowledge assures autonomy; scientific knowledge generates dependency, and the critique of “epistemicide” has nothing to do with the defense of shallow philosophical pluralisms or theoretical relativisms. It has to do with the effects of scientific knowledge, and its application, to peripheral contexts. The spread of science from “centers” to “peripheries” is not necessarily a tale of progress and emancipation. It can also be a story of increasing dependency and amplification of local ignorance. Not surprisingly, the historiography of science in the “periphery” (and in particular the history of biological, biomedical, and agronomical sciences in Latin America) has been deeply affected by such concerns.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the historiography of science in Latin America has been deeply affected by the persistence of three main dichotomies: the controversial CP distinction, which in turn has fed the difference between the reception and appropriation of knowledge; and emancipation versus what I have dubbed “epistemic appropriation.” Those dichotomies and concepts outline the conceptual landscape in which many historical narratives of science (and particularly life science) have been crafted in Latin America. I have first contended that, despite old and recent critiques, we are not ready to abandon the CP distinction entirely. The CP historiographic category, with some important amendments, is still epistemically pertinent and hermeneutically valuable for making sense of the development, spread, and circulation of scientific knowledge in Latin America (as probably elsewhere). Further, I have argued that the “peripheral historiographic standpoint” in Latin America is extremely important for understanding how science succeeds in many disparate contexts. Ever since the beginnings of European expansion, science and technology have become increasingly global and, in a globalized world, the comprehension of science in the “centers” cannot overlook its creative appropriations, critical resistances, and instrumental uses in the “peripheries.” Yet, to emphasize the persistence of the CP distinction does not imply that the peripheries have not contributed to the development of science overall. On the contrary, in recent decades, many historians of science have revealed how “centers” depend on “peripheries” in many significant ways. I have suggested that we do not need to prioritize knowledge networks and circulation over the CP distinction. We can revise the latter in accordance with the latest historiographic approaches. Following Gravroglu et al. (2008), I have also argued that the historiographic category of “reception” (understood as a passive transmission of knowledge) should be abandoned in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. Scientific knowledge is not

60

M. Esposito

simply “received” in the periphery; it is creatively and critically integrated within the preexistent social world and the conceptual system conforming it. Science constitutes itself by a dynamic, hierarchically and unevenly structured (and global) network constituted of large and small nodes – networks that are very often shaped by the unstable vicissitudes of global economy. I think the study of Novoa and Levine on Darwinism in Argentina and Pablo Kreimer’s work on the introduction of molecular biology at the Malbrán Institute in Buenos Aires both wonderfully show in what sense scientific (biological) knowledge is “appropriated,” and therefore integrated, in smaller nodes. Finally, when we assess the historical development of science in Latin America, the question of whether scientific knowledge is basically emancipatory or hegemonic has been important too. Studies such as those of Nieto Olarte and van der Ploeg clearly show a persistent tension between the ideal of science as a liberating enterprise and science as a tricky form of appropriation of the natural world, both in the colonial and postcolonial period. Historians do not need to take a definitive position, adopting one view over another. I share Raj’s concern about the static and overarching views of science inspiring many postmodern or postcolonial approaches – the idea that there exists a unified science which is a purely hegemonic enterprise destroying and homogenizing all local, idyllic, and authentic knowledge systems that should be preserved like ancient artifacts in a museum (Raj 2007). First, such a view overlooks the fact that there are no authentic, static, or “natural” forms of knowledge. “Local” forms of knowledge are themselves the outcome of different historical sedimentations and have undergone constant changes. Second, there is no one unified scientific knowledge imposing its stamp everywhere; rather, there is a collection of heterogeneous epistemic strategies which can be hegemonic or liberating at different times and in different contexts. The historian should therefore track and assess how the tension between these two visions developed and changed, contextually and globally. Science, as for many other human institutions, is a deeply complex and contradictory enterprise, and the only way to understand it (and to avoid caricaturing it) is to multiply focused studies in parallel with more general perspectives. In the course of this chapter, I have contended that a properly historicized CP distinction, unencumbered from simplistic assumptions about the nature of science and its supposed linear diffusion, is still a very valuable historiographic category for understanding how a highly polarized network changes over time, in Latin America and elsewhere.

References Amin S (1976) Unequal development: an essay on the social formations of peripheral capitalism. Monthly Review Press Amin S (1988) L’eurocentrisme: Critique d’une idéologie. Antropos, Paris Barrera-Osorio A (2006) Experiencing nature. The Spanish American empire and the early scientific revolution. University of Texas Press, Austin Basalla G (1967) The spread of western science. Science 156:611–622 Bloch M (1992) The historian’s craft. Manchester University Press, Manchester Butterfield H (1965) The Whig interpretation of history. W. W. Norton, New York

3

The Historian’s Craft in the “Periphery”

61

Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton Chambers DW, Gillespie R (2001) Locality in the history of science: colonial science, technoscience, and indigenous knowledge. Osiris 15:221–240 Collingwood RG (1946) The idea of history. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Conrad S (2016) What is global history? Princeton University Press, Princeton Croce B (1921) Theory and history of historiography. Harrap & Co, London Cueto M (1989a) Excelencia científica en la periferia: actividades científicas e investigación biomédica en el Perú 1890–1950. GRADE-CONCYTEC, Lima Cueto M (1989b) Andean biology in Peru: scientific styles on the periphery. Isis 80(4):640–658 Cueto M (1994) Laboratory styles in Argentine physiology. Isis 85(2):228–246 de Sousa Santos B (1988) Um Discurso sobre as Ciencias. Afrontamento, Porto de Sousa Santos B, Meneses MP (eds) (2014) Epistemologías del Sur. Akal, Madrid Delbourgo J, Dew N (2008) Science and empire in the Atlantic world. Routledge, New York Diaz E, Texera Y, Vessuri H (eds) (1983) La Ciencia Periferica: Ciencia y Sociedad en Venezuela. Monte Avila, Caracas Dos Santos T (1970) The structure of dependence. Am Econ Rev 60(2):231–236 Dos Santos T (2000) A Teoria da Dependência: balanço e perspectivas. Ed. Civilização Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro Dussel E (1993) Eurocentrism and modernity. Boundary 2 20(3):65–76 Esposito M (2016) Romantic biology 1890–1945. Routledge, London Fan F-t (2012) The global turn in the history of science. East Asian Sci Technol Soc 6:249–258 Frank AG (1966) The development of underdevelopment. Mon Rev 18(4):17–31 Frank AG (1991) Latin American development theories revisited: a participant review essay. Scand J Dev Altern 10(3):133–150 Gavroglu K, Pationiotis M, Papanelopoulou F, Simões A, Oliveira Carneiro A, Diogo MP, Bertomeu-Sánchez J, García-Belmar A, Nieto-Galan A (2008) Science and technology in the European periphery: some historiographical reflections. Hist Sci 46:153–175 Goody J (2006) The theft of history. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Hauswedell T, Korner A, Tiedau U (eds) (2019) Re-mapping centre and periphery: asymmetrical encounters in European and global contexts. UCL Press, London Kay C (1991) Reflections on the Latin American contribution to development theory. Dev Chang 22 (1):31–68 Koselleck R (2002) The practice of conceptual history: timing history, spacing concepts. California University Press, Stanford Kragh H (1990) An introduction to the historiography of science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Kreimer P (2010) Ciencia y periferia: Nacimiento, muerte y resurrección de la biología molecular. Eudeba, Buenos Aires Kreimer P (2019) Science and society in Latin America: peripheral modernities. Routledge, London Medina E, da Costa Marques I, Holmes C (eds) (2014) Beyond imported magic. Essays on science, technology, and society in Latin America. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Mendras H (1970) The vanishing peasant: innovation and change in French agriculture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Nieto Olarte M (2006) Remedios para el Imperio. Historia natural y la apropiación del nuevo mundo. Ediction Uniandes, Bogotá Novoa A, Levine A (2010) From man to ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Patiniotis M (2013) Between the local and the global: history of science in the European periphery meets post-colonial studies. Centaurus 55:361–384 Raj K (2007) Relocating modern science. Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London Raj K (2017) Networks of knowledge, or spaces of circulation? The birth of British cartography in colonial South Asia in the late eighteenth century. Glob Intellect Hist 2(1):49–66

62

M. Esposito

Renn J (2015) The history of science and the globalization of knowledge. In: Arabatzis T, Renn J, Simões A (eds) Relocating the history of science: essays in honor of Kostas Gavroglu. Springer, Dordrecht Shils E (1975) Center and periphery: essays in macrosociology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London Stepan N (1981) Beginnings of Brazilian science: Oswaldo Cruz, medical research, and policy, 1890–1920. Science History Publications, New York Tausch A (2019) Globalisation and development: the relevance of classical “dependency” theory for the world today. Int Soc Sci J 61:467–488 van der Ploeg JD (1993) Potato and knowledge. In: Hobart M (ed) An anthropological critique of development: the growth of ignorance. Taylor & Francis, London Varsavsky O (1969) Ciencia, política y cientificismo. Centro Editor de América Latina, Buenos Aires Wallerstein I (1980) Capitalist world-economy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Wallerstein I (1997) Eurocentrism and its Avatars: the dilemmas of social science. Sociol Bull 46(1):21–39

Part II Natural History and Evolution

4

Fragmented Memories Natural History in Mexican Science Historiography Luz Fernanda Azuela and Rodrigo Vega-Ortega

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Background of Mexico’s History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Continuity and Changes in the Historiography of Sciences (1921–1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Mexican Communities of Science Historians (1964–1989) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiographical Trends in Mexican Science History. The Study of Natural History (1989–2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix: Bibliometrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

66 67 69 74 78 82 83 86

Abstract

Natural history has been one of the most important scientific disciplines in Mexico since pre-Hispanic times well into the twentieth century. But despite its uninterrupted continuity, Mexican historiography of natural history developed unevenly, resulting in a fragmentary story of its past, where certain periods, disciplinary fields, historical figures, and geographical regions have been addressed to the detriment of others. This chapter will analyze such fragmentation, as well as the successive interpretative approaches used by Mexican historians of science to account natural history’s development, from 1886 to 2019.

L. F. Azuela (*) Geography Institute, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] R. Vega-Ortega Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: rodrigovega@filos.unam.mx © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_11

65

66

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

This chapter is based on a bibliographic-hemerographic research, from which a sample of texts was selected and analyzed. The results of such analysis revealed that the number of historical studies on natural history increased during the 1980s, due to the recognition of the history of science as an academic discipline in our country. Thus, natural history’s historiographic development advances in parallel with that of the gradual consolidation of the history of science in Mexico, and through the successive theoretical approaches, addressed in this chapter.

Introduction Mexico’s geography and natural history have been the most important scientific disciplines since pre-Hispanic times well into the twentieth century, both in terms of its epistemic principles and in terms of their practical applications. With the arrival of Spaniards in the region, the study of nature and territory, as well as the indispensable record of its findings, had two fundamental purposes: backing up their political domination strategy and verifying its extractive potential, objectives that remained valid after the Mexican independence (1821). These plans relied on a long research process, in which the original inhabitants of each region directly collaborated, and where both endogenous knowledge and the European scientific corpus were subjected to a series of negotiations and exchanges, which produced novel forms of knowledge, not directly derived from the practices and traditions of one or the other. As such, it can be said that this was a process of “knowledge coproduction,” in which epistemic superiority is not attributed to any of the knowledge systems involved (Raj 2001, 120). The history of such knowledge coproduction in Hispanic America has yet to be properly studied, although some scholars such as Pardo-Tomás (2002) and Cañizares-Esguerra (2006), among others, have begun to explore it. The evolution of the aforementioned process was essentially related to the interest of the Spanish Crown in understanding its transatlantic territories and propelled research on their natural environment, which produced a considerable amount of bibliography and a large collection of maps, plans, records, and images, marked with visible traces of local knowledge. For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to emphasize that the study of Mexico’s geography and natural resources constituted the primary objective of science during the colonial period and throughout the nineteenth century, due to its epistemic value and its obvious advantages for territorial control and exploitation of its riches. The epistemological, material, and human strategies used to reach these goals changed over the years, as well as the actors and institutions that promoted them. Despite an uninterrupted continuity of those activities, Mexican historiography of natural history has had an uneven development. Moreover, research in this field has focused on certain periods, disciplinary fields, historical figures, and geographical regions, to the detriment of others. And it has been oriented by a variety of

4

Fragmented Memories

67

interpretative approaches as it will be shown and analyzed here. The title “Fragmented Memories” addresses the fact that Mexican historiography does not offer a complete picture of natural history practices throughout history, neither of the whole country. To show the disparity in the historiographic development in Mexico, a bibliographic-hemerographic research of the historical studies on natural history that have been carried out in this country, between 1886 and 2019, was undertaken. From an ensemble of 198 studies integrated by 52 books, 112 books’ chapters, and 34 articles, a sample was chosen among those that used appropriate sources, were supported by a methodology congruent with the historiography of their time, and were written with the greatest historical rigor. This selection resulted in the analysis of 23 articles and 79 chapters, grouped as 102 short texts, plus 16 books (see “Appendix: Bibliometrics”), which will be addressed in this chapter, establishing their theoretical lineage. This sample excludes texts explicitly conceptualized as history of medicine, except for a few referring to therapeutic herbalism in the context of medical historiography. Instead, this work will focus on the historical texts on natural history, written in Mexico over the period under review. The bibliometric investigation revealed that the scarce number of historical studies in this field at the beginning of our selected period started increasing during the 1980s, due to the recognition of the history of science as an academic discipline in our country. As a result, the historiographic development that concerns us will reveal the growing interest in natural history’s past.

Background of Mexico’s History of Science Although some previous historical studies can be found, during the great scientific vitality of the nineteenth century’s last decades, (During Porfirio Díaz’s regime, known as “Porfiriato” (1876–1910), numerous scientific institutions were created, and scientists received great support (see Azuela 1996).) a positivist historiographic current produced significant works that acknowledged the role of science in the continuous strengthening of human reason and in promoting progress and wellbeing for humanity, and particularly for Mexico. The most representative and valuable work written under this period was the Historia de la Medicina en México desde la época de los indios hasta la presente by Francisco Flores ([1886] 1982), a general study that bestowed an important place to the history of natural sciences. The author describes the institutions, actors, and developments throughout the three stages of positivist history, under the assumption that Mexico would arrive to the positivist phase at the end of the nineteenth century, after a long process of political and epistemic disputes, and having freed itself from theological dogma. (According to Flores, the pre-Hispanic period corresponded to the theological state, the colonial to the metaphysical and the positivist had opened up in 1833, with liberal reforms in public education. By the same token, the author deals with each of them separately in the three original volumes of his work (Flores [1886] 1982, 2:461).) In the last stage, Mexican science would be placed in parity

68

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

with that of Europe, an indispensable reference point for this historiography, as local developments were interpreted in light of their relationship with those carried out in European capitals. A few years later, Porfirio Parra published “La Ciencia en México,” where he exposes a positivist interpretation of the development of Mexican science since pre-Hispanic times until the end of the nineteenth century. Like Flores, Parra believes that the origin of Mexican science was “imported by the conquistadors” (Parra 1902, 426). References to natural history are scarce due to the brevity and theoretical orientation of Parra’s work, but he highlights the Mexican “contributions” to “world science,” which consisted in geography studies and research on “its numerous plant, animal and mineral products” (Parra 1902, 464). At the same period, other historical works specifically dealt with natural history, such as Nicolás León’s Biblioteca botánica-mexicana: Catálogo bibliográfico crítico de actores y escritos referentes a vegetales en México. . . (1895). This inventory includes many of the botanical writings produced up to the nineteenth century that Guevara calculated in “1577 texts [. . .] printed in Italy, France, England, the United States, Germany, Spain, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland,” adding that most of them were published in Mexican periodicals (Guevara 2001, 173). Leon’s records indicate foreign interest in Mexican nature, while those corresponding to local publications show the public interest in scientific subjects. Most of those periodicals were aimed to the wider public and included some aspects on the history of science (Azuela 2018, 2020), such as biographies of noteworthy Mexican and foreign scientists, as well as some reviews on the origins and development of scientific institutions as the Botanical Garden and the National Museum. “La Botánica entre los Nahuas” (1886) by philologist Francisco Del-Paso, on the other hand, appraised Indigenous therapeutics and emphasized their long historical tradition, continuing the Enlightenment’s effort to portray the local epistemic capabilities in face of the Black Legend. As a nahuatl philologist and translator, Del-Paso underlines the virtues of the knowledge system denoted by the Nahua plant names. He cites Motolinía’s Memoriales, pointing out that Indigenous nomenclature was based on “experiences” in which therapeutic action was verified, and from them, the natives named “the herbs after their effect” (Del-Paso 1886, 141). Such “experiences” were carried out in Mesoamerican “scientific spaces,” described in a complete chapter (1886, 145–165). As one can see, the philologist falls into understandable anachronisms by classifying pre-Hispanic gardens as “scientific” and by emphasizing the practice of “experiences” to determine the effectiveness of medicinal flora. His choice of concepts could be considered a rhetorical resource, to legitimize their knowledge within the context of positivist philosophy. Nevertheless Del-Paso’s work distinguishes from those previously studied, because he not only describes the virtues of Mesoamerican botany, but mostly also focuses on its contributions to “universal” knowledge. So, while still recognizing the unitary and general nature of science, he reflects on the bidirectional flow of knowledge. To close the prolegomena of the historiography of the twentieth century, it is enough to point out that the four works reviewed admit a double intellectual root,

4

Fragmented Memories

69

since at the same time they exhibit the features of a long-standing local scientific tradition, and they integrate their evolution with that of European science after the Conquest. Thus, when they historize European science in Mexico, they are writing the history of Mexico’s science, because according to positivist philosophy, it is a single science and one history, both conceived from the certainty of their universality. (Saldaña states that this works, “instead of recording the history of science of Latin America they sought to record the history European science in Latin America” (Saldaña 1986, 61. Author’s Italics).)

Continuity and Changes in the Historiography of Sciences (1921–1964) Many scholars specialized in the history of Mexican science consider the revolutionary period as a milestone in the evolution of its practices, institutions, and protagonists. (This period includes the armed conflict (1910–1920) and the governments that followed, until that of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), which led to the setting up of modern Mexico.) Some rely on the chronological framework of Mexico’s political history, while others, such as Gortari (1963), Trabulse (1983), and Azuela and Morales (2006), approach it from the perspective of the institutional history of sciences, pointing out the organization changes starting in 1914. But regardless of their different views, certain consolidated scientific areas enjoyed relative continuity, while others were seriously affected by the war and subsequent disputes between various interest groups. The historiography of the sciences, for its part, showed a palpable devaluation after the momentum reached in 1912 (Azuela and Guevara 1998), and it practically vanished under the weight of rhetoric condemning Porfirio Díaz’ regime. The fact that the political group that supported him was called “los científicos” (the scientists), and that positivist philosophy had championed its ideology, led his adversaries to engage in an antiscientific militancy that had an impact on Porfirian science’s appreciation and on postrevolutionary historiography. As stated by Azuela and Guevara (1998, 82), “while men of science faced difficulties in continuing the development of their practices in the new organizational schemes, historians took on the reinterpretation of the past, favoring the development of political historiography.” Few, and quite notable, were those who concerned themselves with the history of science. Among them, stands out natural historian Alfonso-Luis Herrera, whose career began to flourish during the Porfiriato and declined in the 1920s. He was one of the main advocates of biology in Mexico through his controversial studies on the origin of life (Cuevas and Ledesma 2006). However, he managed to institutionalize this field of knowledge in various scientific establishments (Ledesma and Barahona 2003). Herrera published La biología en México durante un siglo (1921), when the armed period of the revolution was barely over, where he claims that postrevolutionary science studies were more valuable in the field of biology.

70

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

This work is mostly based on the idea that science is a progressive process of development, Eurocentric in nature, but universal in scope, prevailing the assumption that knowledge dissemination is unidirectional. Nevertheless, Herrera underlines the local scientific potential to contribute to knowledge development and writes the history of “biology” displaying a gallery of exceptional individuals who made “positive contributions” to its advancement, although most of them were natural historians. He mentions the institutions where they worked, and emphasizes those created after the Restoration of the Mexican Republic, (The Restoration of the Republic (1867–1877) begins with the defeat of the Second Empire, after the execution of Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg (1867) and concludes with the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1877).) such as the Mexican Society of Natural History (1868), and the National Medical Institute (1888), his narrative acquires a panegyric and autobiographical tone from the Revolution onwards. After Herrera’s text, natural history ceases to be the subject of historical research for 15 years until his dear disciple, biologist Enrique Beltrán, reinstated the Mexican Society of Natural History in 1936. Its opening took place in the sessions room of the National Academy of Sciences “Antonio Alzate” (The Academy was founded on the basis of the Scientific Society “Antonio Alzate” (1884–1930), one of the most advanced associations during Porfiriato. It became the National Academy of Sciences in 1930 by presidential decree.) and was attended by some survivors of the first era, such as Herrera. One of its most resonant public events was the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Mexican Society of Natural History. The anniversary congress boasted the involvement of renowned scientists whose works were published in the Revista de la Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural (RSMHN) (1939), which had granted a space to the history of natural sciences. Among the texts that came about from this commemoration, Beltrán’s “Setenta y cinco años de ciencias naturales en México” (1943) stands out, as well as Maldonado-Koerdell’s “Las sociedades científicas en el desarrollo de las ciencias naturales en México” (1943). Somolinos considers these works and those that followed as the “product of the new historical consciousness” that forged its way in the 1940s, and which manifested itself in the renewal of studies on Mexico’s scientific past (Somolinos 1965, 270). As to their theoretical reference, the historical writings of these years maintain the universal and positivist conviction of their predecessors, as they uncritically assume the diffusionist notion that permeated the historiography of sciences in those years. (Consider, for example, the works of George Sarton, John D. Bernal, Henry Sigerist, Georges Canguilhem, Charles Singer, and René Taton. They all hold a Eurocentric view, and although they allude to American science, they omit any reference to Latin America.) From this point of view, recording the history of Mexican natural history implied assigning value to the lives of its most prominent actors and displaying their “contributions to universal science.” The effort involved has been described by Trabulse as an act of “torture” carried out on the

4

Fragmented Memories

71

texts “with the aim of finding some passages that might reveal that the author they were studying partook in the ‘positive science’ which prevailed at the time” (Trabulse 1983, 1:20). Somolinos wrote a valuable overview of the historiography of the 1940s and 1950s in his article “History of science,” where he refers to the efforts being made to place the discipline in the academic landscape. As a historian of Mexican medicine, he emphasizes its long historiographic tradition and lists some historical works of other disciplinary fields written in those years. The author characterizes these studies as historical-scientific, developed within the framework of “a history of scientific ideas,” again, with a universal and Eurocentric focus, even though American science and its historiography had been acquiring more weight, thanks to the global circulation of specialized journals such as Isis. By contrast, with the exception of those published in the RSMHN and those included in the Gaceta Médica de México, many of the historical writings of the time appeared in other medical journals, as well as in newspapers and magazines, as there were no specialized publications. In fact, the first history journal, created by El Colegio de México, is Historia Mexicana (1951), where some works on the history of science were published. One alternate communication channel came from commemorative academic conferences, such as the congress to celebrate 400 years since the foundation of the University (1951) or the Mournful Tribute to George Sarton, organized by the Mexican Society of Natural History (1956), among others. These events gave way to publications related to local and international scientific history, including studies on natural history with a Universalist perspective. An example of this was the small book Ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en homenaje a la memoria de George A. Sarton, 1884–1956 (1958), where Somolinos published “El Dr. Francisco Hernández y la primera expedición científica en América.” The text is part of the voluminous bibliography dedicated to pay homage to the heroes of local science, in this case Hispano-Americans, as it focuses on the Spaniard’s contributions to universal scientific development. But, by once again reflecting on the bidirectional flow of knowledge between the Old and New World, the work comes together with the historiographical tendency inaugurated by the sixteenth-century chroniclers and which Francisco Del-Paso took over. In his article on Hernandez, Somolinos makes an indisputable reference to the integration of Mesoamerican therapeutics into the European canon when he refers to remedies for syphilis: The new American pharmacopoeia is spreading rapidly throughout Europe, some of its remedies are effective against the terrible syphilis plague that assailed the Old World in those days, and we thereby see how those herbs and roots, modestly used by Indian healers fall into the category of simples in the official pharmacopoeias. (Somolinos 1958, 74)

With this work, and others published within the field of medical history, praise on the epistemic value of American therapeutics found its place among the topics most studied by historians.

72

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

As for the panegyric trend in the histories of science in those years, scholars sought to reflect on the personal imprint of past scientists by means of biographies which outlined their intellectual contributions to natural history. Their writings described their heroic acts in pursuit of “discovering” new species and research methodologies, despite the adversities they faced. As such, they studied those renowned natural historians who drove the linear and progressive advancement of natural history over time. Their texts refer the incorporation of European scientific theories, methods, and instruments into local practices and emphasize the gradual establishment of scientific institutions and societies like those in metropolitan centers. The authors of the period had different professional origins, including men of science and some philosophers with historical inclinations. Their studies characteristically lack the critical and methodological rigor of the specialty and exclude references to foreign professional works. However, in the mid-1950s, the efforts to systematize historical studies on Mexican science, and to devise interpretive frameworks related to their specificity, began to bear fruit. One of the most outstanding at the time was that of the Seminario de Problemas Científicos y Filosóficos (1955), among whose organizers was Eli de Gortari, who promoted the study of the historical aspects that framed philosophical discussions, and wrote influential works on the history of Mexican science, which will be referred later. Meanwhile, the medicine historian José-Joaquín Izquierdo had delved into the theoretical-methodological principles that guided his specialty, through his contact with historians from other regions. (He was close to the historian of medicine Henry E. Sigerist (1891–1957), who founded the John Hopkins University’s Bulletin of the History of Medicine (1933).) He supported his work on strong primary sources, which he subjected to critical interpretation, so that the assessment of historical actors and their practices would be in line with the standards of the time in which they worked, that is, avoiding the formulation of “presentist” judgments in evaluating the past, something usual at the time. He advised: The discussion of the problems of the history of science cannot be carried out through the filter of contemporary viewpoints. To critically analyze the problems studied in the past, it must be done through the views, opinions and leanings that held sway at the time. (Qtd. in Varela 1969, 102)

Although Izquierdo did not deal with natural history, he had a significant influence on his contemporaries through his exemplary work and his criticism toward those who claimed to record the history of science without going beyond a “mere description” of facts. He considered that the latter “would not acquire historic meaning until being examined in the light of a proper critique” (qtd. in Rodríguez de Romo 1996, 101). The most ambitious work of those years, considering both the novelty of its interpretive framework and its influence on Mexican historiography, was La ciencia en la historia de México (1963) by Gortari. Based on dialectical materialism and his

4

Fragmented Memories

73

extensive philosophical experience, this book follows the methodological proposal of John D. Bernal, stating that “since the beginning, science has developed in close relation to the material progress of society.” As such, the goal of his book is to determine . . .what was the scientific knowledge developed by Mexicans at different times, by analyzing the historical conditions that gave rise to it, the influences received or exercised on various occasions and through different channels, and the way in which that knowledge became an active agent on Mexico’s social life. (Gortari 1963, 11)

Under these assumptions, Gortari tried to move away from the historiographic tradition that limited itself to point out the “positive contributions” to universal scientific advance, in order to construct an externalist interpretation of local science, which would explain it based on its connections to productive development. Paradoxically, the author applies historical materialism in greater detail when he explains the nexus between the emergence of capitalism and the development of European science, but referring to Mexico, the core of his book, he resorts to the traditional narrative of his time. Thus, he mentions the scientists who made contributions to knowledge, in our case on the natural history of the country, without going into depth when explaining the said nexus. Furthermore, he assumes a linear and progressive narrative, albeit also fragmentary, as he dedicates numerous pages to the assessment of the botanical knowledge of “ancient Mexicans” based on the chronicles of the sixteenth century, as was usual in the historiography, reviewed so far. But the following century lacks any mention of natural history, until its reappearance during the Enlightenment. Regarding the science of the seventeenth century, Gortari characterizes the work of Carlos de Sigüenza as exceptional, in the “obscurantist” environment that held sway in the viceroyalty. At this point, the author aligns himself with the foreign historiography of the times, which had chosen the study of the “scientific revolutions” as the unifying core of the future of Western science. (In this historiographical trend stand out the works of Herbert Butterfield, Thomas S. Kuhn, and Alexandre Koyré.) In this context, Gortari integrates Sigüenza into a narrative that highlights local contributions to the development of science, this time, through the dissemination of the scientific method and the latest astronomical ideas. (Sigüenza took part in numerous controversies, where he attacked the Thomism and Aristotelianism of his detractors, and supported on the works of Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes, among others.) As for his assessment of studies on Mexican nature that took place between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the author points out that they were limited to a mere accumulation of data and specimens, which had not produced “true” knowledge. However, he finds the “origins” of scientific progress in the Enlightenment scholars’ consciousness of their duty to “know the country and to prepare technicians who could transform it in every sense.” The eighteenth-century Mexican scientists had thus responded by attempting “to make an inventory of the material and cultural riches in Mexico” (Gortari 1963, 242).

74

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

Regarding the nineteenth century, Gortari denies the possibility of scientific activities before the Restoration of the Mexican Republic and considers Porfirio Diaz’ regime a period of prosperity, derived from the preeminence of positivist philosophy and the growth of capital. Natural history, from this perspective, would have been limited to the accumulation of data on useful species to be exploited as raw materials for export, one of the pillars of Porfirio Díaz’ economic policy. According to the above, the author fails to fully adhere to the objective of interpreting Mexico’s scientific development from an externalist perspective. However, the value of La ciencia en la historia de México is undeniable, as it constitutes the second attempt to present a complete picture of scientific development in the country. Moreover, his effort encouraged the leanings of some intellectuals toward an object of study developing on the fringe of institutional disciplinary areas, while its voluminous information was the basis for further studies. In fact, interest in the history of science had grown to a point where the need of an institution led to the creation of the Mexican Society for the History of Science and Technology (SMHCT) in 1964. It was promoted by Beltrán and Izquierdo who, along with Gortari, can be considered the pioneers and promoters of the professional history of science in our country.

The First Mexican Communities of Science Historians (1964–1989) Since the founding of the SMHCT, history of science started gaining force and recruiting new practitioners by means of academic meetings and the publication of its memoirs (Beltrán 1964). This was also supported by the circulation of the most influential works of American and European science historians that expressed the new philosophical and historiographical trends and discussed various interpretative approaches (e.g., internalism vs. externalism, continuity vs. discontinuity in the evolution of scientific thought). Other discussions that permeated history of science derived from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, while Basalla’s model on the scientific development of colonial countries was being debated. Such deliberations brought to the fore the social aspects involved in the construction of scientific knowledge and the unavoidable reference to historical context. Elías Trabulse was one of the local historians who drew on the new theoretical perspectives. He obtained his doctorate with the thesis “Science and Religion in the 17th Century,” published later as a book, which was followed by others devoted to the same period. (His works on seventeenth- century science focus on astronomers and mathematicians.) In addition to the value of this line of research, which addressed an almost unknown period, Trabulse established himself as a specialist with his ambitious five-volume Historia de la ciencia en México (1983–1989). This work constitutes the third general history of Mexican science and, to this day, the last. (This work is a compilation of scientific writings from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. He dedicated one volume to each century, and the last one to general indices and bibliography.)

4

Fragmented Memories

75

In his general “Introduction,” the author reflects upon the exclusion of science in Mexican historiography and calls historians to take on the challenge of including it in their works, as its effects have been as profound and enduring as those of political history, and in some cases, even more. The notorious historiographic absence led Trabulse to label science as the “secret history of Mexicos,” and he demanded the contribution of scholars to bring the mystery to light. The objective of this work was to show the “scientific development of our country in order to include it in the broad movement of universal scientific progress.” Trabulse admitted the lack of “stars of a great magnitude” in the process but claimed that this was no excuse “to disregard our scientists’ original contributions in fields such as botany, zoology or pharmacotherapy” (Trabulse 1983, 1:16). His analytical perspective is derived from Kuhn’s proposal, from which he takes the concepts of “paradigm” and “scientific community.” But unlike Kuhn, Trabulse does not perceive any discontinuity in the historical development of Mexican science, but rather a succession of stages, differentiated “by the kind of scientific beliefs, of paradigms, adopted and accepted by the scientific community,” which frequently overlapped (Trabulse 1983, 1:26). In his opinion, some political and cultural factors slowed down scientific progress in Mexico, and he turns to Basalla to affirm, from a diffusionist perspective, that “the only thing that distinguishes one region from another is a chronological discrepancy regarding the degree of rejection or acceptance of a particular modern and innovative theory, affiliated with some of the prevailing scientific traditions” (Trabulse 1983, 1:21). According to the above, like Parra and Gortari, Trabulse establishes the beginning of Mexican science at the time of the Conquest and defines “the period 1521–1580 as the phase of the European science’s acclimatization in Mexico.” Trabulse reiterates “the expertise of the Indians in the botanical classification and knowledge [. . .of] species used for medicinal purposes,” as shown in such works as the Herbario De la Cruz-Badiano (Trabulse 1983, 1:45). This way, he admits the bidirectional flow of knowledge, although he limits it to this period, and highlights that “sooner or later, indigenous science and American nature became an important part of the accumulated scientific knowledge [of] Europeans” (Trabulse 1983, 1:41). Like Gortari’s seventeenth-century account, natural history disappears in Trabulse’s, with the exception of some references to medical texts, such as Gregorio López’ Tesoro de medicinas. . . (1672) and Juan de Esteyneffer’s Florilegio medicinal. . . (1712). Likewise, he focuses on the discussion of contemporary astronomical and cosmological works and points out “a greater dissemination of hermetic theories and, to a lesser extent, of mechanistic ones” through the century – the latter, by means of the works of Carlos de Sigüenza and Diego de Rodríguez, to whom he attributes their introduction, once again, akin to the historiography which identifies the beginning of modern science in the scientific revolutions. Regarding the Enlightenment, he states that practitioners of natural history, like those of other scientific disciplines, gradually adopted the mechanistic paradigm, which “triumphed” at the end of the nineteenth century. The author links the phenomenon to the epistemic openness, fostered by Bourbon reforms, and declares

76

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

that “the botanical cycle of New Spain brilliantly comes to a close with a series of works carried out by the botanical expedition” (Trabulse 1983, 1:97). He explains that during this heyday, data collected by Mexican natural historians from the past two centuries were framed by the new canons and incorporated into the universal heritage of science (Trabulse 1983, 1:99). He considers the years 1750–1810 as a “period of great scientific growth” and also attributes to the independence movement (1810–1821) the temporary break in the rhythm of scientific activity and credits its relative continuity to the inertia of the enlightened movement, which would last until 1850. Trabulse sees no discernible changes in the development of natural history. He considers that in spite of the perennial political instability, “during the first three decades of national life, botany and zoology were cultivated following the guidelines set for by the works of Mociño, Sessé, Cervantes and Humboldt” (Trabulse 1983, 1:175). (The first three of them were part of the Royal Botanical Expedition of New Spain (1787–1803), while Alexander von Humboldt resided 1 year in New Spain (1803–1804).) It is important to point out that Trabulse follows almost to the letter Gortari’s narrative, in his tendency to extol the most eminent scientists, their works, and the institutions where they worked. The most notable differences concern the sporadic mention to the links between scientific practices and capitalism, made by the latter, while Trabulse focuses on the expression of epistemological traditions in scientific works. Both agree that the curb of nineteenth-century science’s development is due to political instability and find its recovery and flourishment in the Restored Republic and Porfiriato, thanks to positivism drive. Therefore, natural history in Trabulse’s work consists in references to natural historians’ studies, according to his interpretative approach, which gives “less importance to factors external to scientific development, i.e. institutions, economic, and political factors, cultural background.” Evidently, Trabulse was not the only Mexican interested on history of science in the 1980s, despite the “secrecy” he had denounced. In the same years that his work started to circulate, Roberto Moreno, who specialized in the study of the Enlightenment scholars in New Spain, wrote several texts on natural history: “De Plinio y la historia natural en Nueva España” and “La Historia Natural o Jardín Americano de Fray Juan Navarro, 1801,” both published in Ensayos de historia de la ciencia y la tecnología en México (1986), as well as La primera cátedra de botánica en México (1988), and Linneo en México: las controversias sobre el sistema binario sexual: 1788–1798 (1989). His writings do not express an acquaintance with the contemporary interpretative proposals of the history of science, (Moreno’s work adheres to historicism, the most influential historiographical current in Mexico between 1940 and 1970.) with the exception of Basalla’s model, which he embraces unquestioningly in Linneo en México. . ., in order to point out the traits of each of the periods addressed therein. Clearly, his study is placed in the third of these, which would have started in 1787, when “the efforts made to [build] an independent science” are visible. The book reprinted the harsh controversy derived by the imposition of Linneo’s taxonomic system in the Chair of Botany. Moreno highlights that “its subject was, as in many other places, that of the universal applicability of the Linnean proposal of a binary nomenclature to classify each natural species” (Moreno 1989, X).

4

Fragmented Memories

77

His work appeared in the context of growing local and foreign communities of scholars specialized in the discipline. (Not every group of that decade was especially interested in Mexican science. The UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, for example, regularly held a seminar on philosophy and history of science, where cases related to “universal” science were discussed.) For the subject at hand, it was especially significant the formulation of individual and collective strategies to “position the history of Latin American science” as a legitimate object of study, which had to be analyzed from a local perspective that would heed its singularities. This was promoted by a group of seven Latin American historians who attended the 15th International Congress on the History of Science (1981), in whose program their region was absent, as if it were composed by “countries without science.” In consequence, they signed the “Bucharest Declaration” and committed themselves to promote the institutionalization and professionalization of the discipline in their countries. A year later they founded the Latin American Society for the History of Science and Technology. (Its first congress (1982) was attended by 200 people from 16 countries. Less than a dozen of attendees had a PhD in History of Science.) The alternative historiography they intended to construct faced complex problems, derived from diffusionism, and it was not an easy task. As Lafuente and LópezOcón claim, “there is nothing natural about the transmission of science, nor is it a homogeneous process, unidirectional or unavoidable” (Lafuente and López-Ocón 1998, 6). In fact, the latter involved the center-periphery geometry; the processes of “negotiation” of foreign theories and actors with the subjects and knowledge of the different localities; the role of the social and cultural in such negotiations; and the definition of the particularities of the knowledge and practices that arose from them. Such problems corresponded temporarily with postcolonial studies, which developed critical tools to analyze the effects of metropolitan knowledge on their colonies; judge that of the subordinate culture, and analyze their mutual interactions. (A valuable analysis of the theoretical perspectives of those years is found in Barahona (2019).) Also in that time, sociologists who delved into the analysis of scientific practices introduced problems, analytical concepts, and proposals that influenced the evolution of the historiography of sciences. (With the emergence of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) in the 1970s, all scientific and technological expressions were defined as social practices. Some of its most prominent scholars, organized around different analytical proposals, were Barry Barnes, David Bloor, Steven Shapin, Bruno Latour, Michael Callon, and Michael Lynch, among others.) Meanwhile, in the philosophical field, the debate on the proposals of Thomas S. Kuhn, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, among other authors, went on, stressing the recognition of history as an indispensable element in the analysis of scientific ideas. On the other hand, the social sciences recognized the epistemological relevance of geography, noting that space is not a reflection of social and cultural context, but one of its constitutive elements, and that the spatial dimension is essential for the explanation of social events (see Ophir and Shapin 1991). Regarding Latin American history of science, the analytical proposals of these and other works influenced the redefinition of a historiography which could

78

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

historically conceptualize the relationships between science and society and would emphasize the “place” where scientific practices were executed and validated. Among the first agreements of Latin American historians of science stands out the unanimous view that the process of science diffusion to the former Spanish colonies had not been linear or homogeneous, since it involved changes, resistance, and unique modalities in the appropriation of the foreign knowledge. (According to Saldaña (1992, 20), this led to the formulation of concepts such as “acclimatization,” “domestication,” “negotiation,” and others.) Lafuente and López-Ocón observed that much of the historiographic production in this time was aimed at explaining “the process of expansion of Western science, as well as that of the mechanisms that favored the appropriation of certain scientific practices and values.” In research conducted for this purpose, the authors found evidence that . . .the receiving pole of any transfer process is not a passive element of the chain, but rather shows itself capable of imposing conditions, be it by choosing what objects are acceptable, or by organizing them into a hierarchy different than that which they had in the place of origin. In any case, there is always a fertile interaction between the new and the traditional, as well as in the application of the resulting hybrid to different objectives. An operation that transforms the meaning of the experience and that of the ideas and practices in rotation. In the domestication of knowledge, local culture plays a decisive role and bestows autochthonous science with unique profiles. (Lafuente and López-Ocón 1998, 7)

Historiographical Trends in Mexican Science History. The Study of Natural History (1989–2019) From the aforementioned discussions, and with the institutional support of some university units, and graduate programs, new generations of trained historians of Mexican science emerged. Many of them assumed social history as a methodological basis, (Strictly speaking, their analytical leanings can be found within the framework of sociocultural history that distanced itself from the socioeconomic focus which had dominated in previous decades.) by defining scientific practices as social phenomena, subjected to the action of the State, the economy, and the cultural environment, which influenced their development (Saladino 2015, 146–159). Given the aim of Mexican rulers to promote knowledge with explicitly political goals, numerous historians assumed a particular perspective within this broad interpretative approach, where the role of the State is seen as the root and engine of scientific development. According to Saldaña, since the independence, a link was born “between science and politics, between knowledge and power [. . .] that would be lasting and decisive for both spheres. A two-sided historical process began: the scientification of society on the one hand, and the politicization of science on the other” (Saldaña 1992, 49). (The same link between science and politics is present in his analysis of the Colonial Period (Saldaña 1992, 20–36).)

4

Fragmented Memories

79

Science-state perspective gave birth to a numerous historiography, whose authors continued to place their works within the epistemological space of social history, even if their analysis did not consider science as a cultural expression. Instead, they focused on government initiatives associated with new scientific institutions or research projects in disciplinary fields related to political control or productive development (such as geography and natural history). Among these natural history studies, Zamudio (1992) and Aceves’ (1993) emphasize the role of Bourbon politics in the promotion and development of modern botany in New Spain. (Due to the large growth of works on natural history, beginning in the 1980s and increasing through time, from here on, only examples that clearly manifest their methodological orientation will be addressed.) They both refer to the local scientific practices and actors, their epistemic negotiations with foreign scientists, and new theories and highlight the constant circulation of European culture within Mexican scholars devoted to science. The same primacy of governmental agency appears in the analysis of the Mexican Society of Natural History in the last third of the nineteenth century, where Azuela (1996) interprets the development of the discipline by exposing its links with the State’s modernization project. Under this view, natural historians’ initiatives had to align or negotiate with the political powers to make evident the mutual benefits they could obtain by their promotion. This book highlights the international relationships established by natural historians and emphasizes the exchanges and controversies they had with their counterparts abroad. In addition to the studies mentioned so far, in the same period, others were concerned with scientific institutions and historized the National Medical Institute, (It was created to study medicinal plants, among other objectives.) the Natural History Section of the Geographical-Exploratory Commission, and other natural history governmental projects. There was also a proliferation of texts dedicated to outstanding natural historians, where the development of natural history and its practitioners’ interactions with social networks were analyzed, through the lens of scientific biography (Cuevas 2002). This approach was not immune from the consideration of the State as the protagonist, since a good part of the biographies emphasized the political role played by their characters. This is a particular feature of Mexican science whose protagonists were frequently government officers. (For example, Mariano Bárcena was governor of Jalisco; José N. Rovirosa was a member of parliament; and Alfonso Luis Herrera was in charge of the Biological Studies Direction in the Ministry of Development.) An approach related to the previous perspective opposed the concept of colonial science to that of “national science,” which also had many Latin American proselytes. In Saladino’s opinion, historians felt impelled by “the need to integrate the role of science into the history of each country,” in order to “enrich the understanding [of its] past” (Saladino 2015, 38). As it has been outlined, Latin Americans of those years discussed concepts and methods to account for the historical processes of scientific practice in the region, which did not permeate global historiography due to the dominance of the AngloSaxon tradition. (The conceptual apparatus currently used comes from scholars of

80

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

colonial science, who proposed it independently. See, among others, Raj (2001).) However, since the 1980s, they had noticed the asymmetries in knowledge circulation processes; they recognized the role of local cultures in the mechanisms of negotiation, rejection, and appropriation of knowledge – all this in remarkable parallelism with current historiography. Nevertheless, the interpretative approaches of the last two decades were not immune to criticism, and in the early years of the twenty-first century, they were objected by some specialists who set out to expose every weakness and failure of their predecessors. In particular, the notion of Mexican science as part of the progressive development of “universal” knowledge was censured, and national history accounts were considered unsatisfactory. Critics claimed that science-state historians believed that by “taking refuge in the limits of the ‘political context,’ [. . .] the essence of the local would be defined, [. . .but] local history ended up repeating the general lines of the central history” (Gorbach and López-Beltrán 2008, 16). To distinguish themselves from the latter, this group of researchers was determined to: . . .disarm that dominant narrative, that meta-narrative that sneakily remakes the world in the likeness of universal, European history. It was necessary to consider a return to the analysis of the strategies and tactics of control used by the nation-state, as well as engage in a detailed review of the paradoxes of the disciplinary histories and their institutions [. . .] to recover the past that was hidden, the one which the nation had to exclude in order to become possible, and to bring to the present all those contradictory and diverse modernities that define and construct us. (Gorbach and López-Beltrán 2008, 20)

They proposed a “return to the local,” through the formulation of “new theoretical tools” to examine again “the heterogeneity of each practice, of each case” and to leave behind definitively “the idea of a single history, a single science and a single modernity” (Gorbach and López-Beltrán 2008, 20–21). For Achim, “local studies dismantle the supposed universalism to reveal the existence of heterogeneous practices, inseparable from their place of production, allied to particular customs and uses” (Achim 2008, 240). The local emphasis paved the way to a novel historiography that reinterpreted themes that had been the object of numerous studies, such as José Antonio de Alzate, the Botanical Expedition, or the National Museum, among others. The novel view tackled topics absent in previous studies, such as the material culture and its contingencies during processes of exchange, reconfiguration, and appropriation. The narratives of this localist historiography have distanced themselves from “the essentialist conceptions of science” (Barahona 2019, 10) and have offered novel interpretations of recurrent themes in historiography. Thus, Constantino’s study on Alzate (2019) remarks his strategies to implement the experimental method in the study of hummingbirds to refute the assertions of European ornithologists about their nature. In addition, she emphasizes the circulation of Mexican specimens to transatlantic scientific centers and the existing limitations of their ex situ study, not only due to the geographical conditions of their natural habitat, but also to their inevitable deterioration. On the other hand, Vega

4

Fragmented Memories

81

examined the wealth of agents that provided natural history specimens and collections to the National Museum and the Botanical Garden, and those who preserved them through the difficult years after the independence, pointing out the liveliness of knowledge networks within the country (Vega 2014, 2018). Natural history travelers were also redefined, linking them to the global circulation of specimens, collections, and writings on the subject, and whose practices could or could not be framed in the professional statute of the discipline. In fact, an abundant foreign historiography has detailed the variegated character of the actors who participated in “la collecte du monde,” including the eighteenth-century expeditionaries, amateur botanists from small towns, museum natural historians, and their commercial agents, as well as those who traded with “exotic” plants and animals. Travelers have been a topic in Mexican historiography of natural history, especially Alexander von Humboldt, in addition to the expeditionaries previously mentioned, and a few postindependence foreign natural historians. But except for some references to the traffic and looting during the wars of intervention, the subject of natural objects trade has hardly been addressed. Recently, García-Corzo has studied these agents in “Adolphe Boucard (1839–1905) y las apropiaciones de la naturaleza mexicana” (2017), where she addresses his engagements with private collectors and scientific institutions, such as the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, and the Smithsonian Institution. Other emerging subjects in the historiography of natural history came from research on science and the public through hemerographic sources, which, on the other hand, had not reached the prominence that it has recently acquired. Its use has been particularly valuable for the study of science in the first half of the nineteenth century, which had been considered deprived of scientific activity by some of the authors analyzed here. In fact, journals of that period show the uninterrupted interest in science shared by readers and editors since the Enlightenment. In the absence of specialized publications in that period, scientists published their studies in wide public journals, such as El Iris (1826), El Registro Trimestre (1832–1833), and El Ateneo Mexicano (1840–1851), among others. Furthermore, Vega has proved that wide public journals express the purpose “to develop an inventory of the country’s natural resources with the intention of exploiting their agricultural, artisanal and therapeutic uses” (Vega 2013, 129). The same sources were decisive to track down the presence of other actors in the practice of natural history, like amateurs working along with professionals, bureaucrats, as well as businessmen, landowners, and artisans, interested in the use of natural resources. This way, the nineteenth-century press attests to the existence of a large Mexican community of natural historians and unveils the diversity of spaces devoted to natural history collections and teaching, as well as those related to exploration and experiments (Vega 2013; Serrano 2020). All this shows the role of science in nineteenth-century culture and leads to the cultural approach, another historiographic trend that made its way into the field of social history, redimensioning institutional history, and the State’s role. From this point of view, Barahona proposed the option of analyzing “the history of science [. . .] as the history of practice and culture” (Barahona et al. 2003, 27–28), while other authors surveyed the aforementioned hemerography to identify its publics. Their studies have

82

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

shown that women, children, artisans, farmers, and merchants, among others, consumed the writings on the natural diversity of Mexico and of other countries. Finally, and regarding current trends in historiography, the recognition of the global and regional connections that are manifested in the circulation of knowledge, as well as the collaborative networks that have been present in the development of natural history, is becoming increasingly prominent. By taking these elements into account, historians have highlighted the processes of coproduction of knowledge, among a great diversity of actors, and have revealed the asymmetries they manifest, as well as the routes along which texts, instruments, techniques, and natural specimens circulate in numerous geographical spaces. For Barahona, this analytical perspective “has helped to explain the construction of knowledge both locally and globally”: The transnational perspective in the history of science, which has pointed to the need to reconstruct cross-border narratives to account for the way knowledge produced in developing countries, is part of international knowledge, as it circulates through collaborative networks. This perspective has facilitated the production of narratives that go beyond the national framework, through the analysis of transnational participants and processes, and has fostered new ways of thinking about the history of biology in national and regional contexts. (Barahona 2019, 1)

From this approach, Zamudio resumed her studies on New Spain’s botany in “Practicantes de la historia natural novohispana: Circulación de saberes y objetos en el Nuevo y Viejo Mundos” (2012) and examined the knowledge networks which included Alfredo Dugès’ studies (Zamudio 2017). García-Corzo (2020) studied the scientific exchanges related to water lily, as a problem of global interest, and Azuela (2020) reflected on the tensions between the goals of local practices and those of global science.

Conclusions Tensions with metropolitan powers have been a constant in the work of Mexican natural historians throughout time, and they have been analyzed from the successive perspectives exposed so far. As pointed out in each one of them, the interpretation of historical events has varied according to the approach, although certain constants have been maintained, which have been explained taking into account the links between Mexican natural history and the main scientific, economic, and political centers. In fact, Mexican historiography of natural history has always had foreign science in mind, either under the diffusionist argument where local scientific practices were receptors of European knowledge, or from the understanding that they were part of “universal science,” or aspired to be. But those were only limited considerations to account for the specificity of local scientific work; to explain the nature of epistemic exchanges with foreign scientific centers; or to ponder the role that science has played in the social, political, and cultural life of the country. From these limitations emerged the theoretical efforts of Latin American historians, as well as those from other countries, determined to vindicate the knowledge

4

Fragmented Memories

83

generated in the South, in which they give the same epistemic validity to traditional knowledge and analyze its interaction with Northern science. Evidence of the explanatory nature of space in the advancement of natural sciences induced novel interpretive criteria, both regarding the origin and development of its epistemic principles, as well as to the political strategies and economic interests that encouraged its circulation throughout the globe, in particular those concerning knowledge coproduction and knowledge and practices’ reconfiguration, both at the local and foreign levels, which have been explored in numerous case studies (Raj 2001). These new approaches are just beginning to be explored in the Mexican historiography of natural history, due to the recent professionalization of the history of science, and the small community of its scholars. This explains the temporal and regional omissions that appeared in the bibliometric study, exposed next. Acknowledgments Research paper supported by the UNAM’s project “Científicos, empresarios y funcionarios en la construcción del conocimiento y su aplicación práctica en México (1815–1940)” (PAPIIT IN302519), coordinated by Luz Azuela from the Geography Institute

Appendix: Bibliometrics As stated in the Introduction, a bibliographic-hemerographic research of the historical studies on natural history written between 1886 and 2020 was undertaken, from which a sample of 23 articles and 79 chapters (grouped as 102 short texts), plus 16 books, was selected. (Until the 1980s, the authors of the analyzed papers were men; by the 1990s, most of the papers were signed by women.) The sample shows an uneven development, described below: From a spatial perspective, out of 102 short texts, 86 refer generically to the Mexican Republic, and there are only 16 studies that address nine states of the country (see Fig. 1), all of them located in central areas. From this evidence, it is possible to conclude that regional history is underrepresented, due to the insufficiency of historians of science in many states. (In fact, the works hereby examined were written by 42 authors, of which 13 are coauthors, who mostly live in Mexico City.) As from a temporal point of view, considering the century addressed by the authors, Fig. 2 shows that more than a half of them deal with science through the nineteenth century (especially during Porfiriato), and almost a third with that of the Enlightenment. This is not surprising, since those are flourishing periods in Mexico’s scientific development. As for their object of study, more than half of the short texts (56) refer to natural history in general, 40 of them deal with botany, and 6 study mineralogy and zoology. These indexes reveal a deficit in the historical knowledge on Mexican minerals and fauna. On the other hand, almost a quarter of the documents are biographical; 16.6% refer to natural history collections; and a smaller number (about 11%) deal with institutions, natural history expeditions, and various topics published in the press (see Fig. 3). Significantly, biographically oriented texts mostly focus on a few

84

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

Fig. 1 Percentage of short texts by spatial area

Fig. 2 Percentage of short texts and books by century studied

characters: Antonio Alzate, Vicente Cervantes, Mariano Mociño, Alfonso Herrera, Alfredo Dugès, and Alfonso-Luis Herrera. Consequently, great periods of the practice of natural history continue to be part of “the secret history of Mexico,” denounced by Trabulse. A notion useful to

4

Fragmented Memories

85

Fig. 3 Percentage of short texts by study objects

Fig. 4 Percentage of books on general natural history and botany

characterize regional science, whose scientific undertakings have been overlooked, as those of natural historians, of whom little is known, except for some biographical data and scarce mentions to their works. Books’ subjects are analogous, as their contents are similar to those of the shorter texts, since neither mineralogy nor zoology is studied, and almost a quarter of them deal with biographical enquiries (Figs. 4 and 5). Finally, Fig. 6 shows the gradual growth of short texts and books in the studied period. Such development runs parallel to the academic legitimization of the history of science and the increase of its practitioners in Mexico.

86

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

Fig. 5 Percentage of natural history subjects in books

Fig. 6 Number of short texts and books per decade in which they were published

References Aceves P (1993) Las políticas botánicas metropolitanas en los virreinatos de la Nueva España y del Perú. In: Lafuente A, Elena A, Ortega ML (eds) Mundialización de la ciencia y la cultura nacional: actas del Congreso Internacional Ciencia, Descubrimiento y Mundo Colonial. Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 287–296 Achim M (2008) La querella del temperamento en México. Meteorología, hipocratismo y reformas urbanas a finales del siglo XVIII. In: Gorbach F, López-Beltrán C (eds) Saberes locales. Ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacán, México City, pp 235–261 Azuela L (1996) Tres sociedades científicas en el porfiriato. Las disciplinas, las instituciones y las relaciones entre la ciencia y el poder. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología, A. C., Universidad Tecnológica de Nezahualcóyotl, UNAM-Instituto de Geografía, México City

4

Fragmented Memories

87

Azuela L (2018) La ciencia en la esfera pública mexicana (1821–1864). Saberes 1(3):30–56 Azuela L (2020) La Naturaleza. Periódico de la Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural: prácticas locales en el entorno de la expansión global, 1869–1914. In: Vega R (coord) Historia de las relaciones entre la prensa y las ciencias naturales, médicas y geográficas de México (1836–1940). UNAM, México City, pp 101–123 Azuela L, Guevara R (1998) La ciencia en México en el siglo XIX: una aproximación historiográfica. Asclepio 50(2):77–105 Azuela L, Morales C (2006) La reorganización de la geografía en México en 1914: crisis institucional y resignificación de la práctica. Scr Nova 10:218 Barahona A (2019) Local, global, and transnational perspectives on the history of biology. In: Dietrich M, Borello M, Harman O (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 1–22 Barahona A, Pinar S, Ayala FJ (2003) La genética en México: Institucionalización de una disciplina. UNAM, México City Beltrán E (1943) Setenta y cinco años de ciencias naturales en México. Rev Soc Mex Hist Nat 4 (3–4):245–264 Beltrán E (ed) (1964) Memorias del Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Historia de la Ciencia, 2 vols. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología, Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, México City Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) How derivative was Humboldt? Microcosmic narratives in early modern Spanish America and the (other) origins of Humboldt’s ecological sensibilities. In: Cañizares-Esguerra J (ed) Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp 112–128 Constantino E (2019) José Antonio Alzate: animal instruments and reliable knowledge in New Spain in the eighteenth century. Hist Cienc Saude Manguinhos 26(2):465–481 Cuevas C (2002) Un científico mexicano y su sociedad en el siglo XIX. Manuel María Villada, su obra y los grupos de los que formó parte. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, Pachuca Cuevas C, Ledesma I (2006) Alfonso L. Herrera: controversia y debates durante el inicio de la biología en México. Hist Mex 55(3):973–1013 Del-Paso F (1886) La Botánica entre los Nahuas. Anales del Museo Nacional 3(1a Época):140–235 Flores F ([1886] 1982) Historia de la medicina en México, desde la época de los indios hasta la presente, Facsimile of the first edition. Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, México City García-Corzo R (2017) Adolphe Boucard (1839–1905) y las apropiaciones de la naturaleza mexicana. In: Azuela L, Vega R (coord) Estudios geógraficos y naturalistas, siglos XIX y XX. UNAM, Instituto de Geografía, México City, pp 135–149 García-Corzo R (2020) De planta utilitaria a especie invasora. La experiencia con el lirio acuático en Estados Unidos, Australia y México (1883–1918). In: Azuela L, Vega R (coord) Las investigaciones geográficas, naturalistas y geológicas en México, 1876–1946. UNAM, Instituto de Geografía, México City, pp 33–46 Gorbach F, López-Beltrán C (2008) Introducción. Apuntes para ubicar nuestras historias de las ciencias. In: López-Beltrán C, Gorbach F (coord) Saberes locales. Ensayos sobre la historia de la ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacán, México City Gortari E (1963) La ciencia en la historia de México. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México City Guevara R (2001) La biblioteca botánico-mexicana. Un artefacto de y para la ciencia nacional. Relaciones 22(88):167–206 Herrera AL (1921) La biología en México durante un siglo. El Colegio de Mexico, México City Lafuente A, López-Ocón L (1998) Bosquejos de la ciencia nacional en la América Latina del siglo XIX: introducción. Asclepio 50(2):5–10 Ledesma I, Barahona A (2003) The institutionalization of biology in Mexico in the early 20th century. The conflict between Alfonso Luis Herrera (1868–1942) and Isaac Ochoterena (1885–1950). J Hist Biol 36:285–307 León N (1895) Biblioteca botánico-mexicana: Catálogo bibliográfico, biográfico y crítico de autores y escritos referentes a vegetales de México y sus aplicaciones, desde la conquista hasta el presente. Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, México City

88

L. F. Azuela and R. Vega-Ortega

Maldonado-Koerdell M (1943) Sociedades científicas en el desarrollo de las ciencias naturales mexicanas. Rev Soc Mex Hist Nat 4(3–4):233–244 Moreno R (1986) Ensayos de historia de la ciencia y la tecnología en México. UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, México City Moreno R (1988) La primera cátedra de botánica en México, 1788. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología, México City Moreno R (1989) Linneo en México: las controversias sobre el sistema binario sexual, 1788–1798. UNAM, México City Ophir A, Shapin S (1991) The place of knowledge. A methodological survey. Sci Context 4(1): 3–21 Pardo-Tomás J (2002) El tesoro natural de América: Oviedo, Monardes, Hernández: colonialismo y ciencia en el siglo XVI. Nivola, Tres Cantos Parra P (1902) La ciencia en México. In: México: su evolución social. J. Ballescá y Cía, México City Raj K (2001) Colonial encounters and the forging of new knowledge and national identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850. Osiris 15:119–134 Rodríguez de Romo AC (1996) José Joaquín Izquierdo Raudón (1893–1974): Historiador de la Medicina. In: Rodríguez-Sala ML (ed) Tres etapas del desarrollo de la cultura científicotecnológica en México. UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, México City, pp 85–108 Saladino A (2015) Elementos para una teoría latinoamericana sobre historia de la ciencia. Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca Saldaña J-J (1986) Marcos conceptuales de la historia de las ciencias en Latinoamérica: Positivismo y Economicismo. In: Saldaña J-J (ed) El perfil de la ciencia en América. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología, México City, pp 57–80 Saldaña J-J (1992) Acerca de la historia de la ciencia nacional. In: Saldaña JJ (ed) Los orígenes de la ciencia nacional. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia de la Ciencia y de la Tecnología, México City, pp 9–54 Serrano D (2020) El conocimiento de la naturaleza desde la visión del Semanario Artístico para la Educación y Progreso de los Artesanos, 1843–1846. In: Vega R (coord) Historia de las relaciones entre la prensa y las ciencias naturales, médicas y geográficas de México (1836–1940). UNAM, México City, pp 47–68 Somolinos G (1958) El Dr. Francisco Hernández y la primera expedición científica en América. In: Ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en homenaje a la memoria de George A. Sarton, 1884–1956. Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, México City, pp 71–81 Somolinos G (1965) Historia de la ciencia. Hist Mex 15(2–3):269–290 Trabulse E (1983) Historia de la Ciencia en México: Estudios y Textos, 5 vols. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México City Varela G (1969) El Instituto Bacteriológico y el Instituto de Higiene. Anales 1:97–104 Vega R (2013) Recreación e instrucción botánicas en las revistas de la ciudad de México, 1835–1855. Hist Crit 49:109–133 Vega R (2014) La naturaleza mexicana en el Museo Nacional, 1825–1852. Historiadores de las Ciencias y las Humanidades, A. C, México City Vega R (2018) El Jardín Botánico de la Ciudad de México en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Centro Universitario de los Lagos, Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara Zamudio G (1992) El Jardín Botánico de la Nueva España y la institucionalización de la Botánica en México. In: Saldaña J-J (coord) Los orígenes de la ciencia nacional. Sociedad Latinoamericana de Historia de la Ciencia y la Tecnología, UNAM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, México City, pp 55–98 Zamudio G (2012) Practicantes de la Historia Natural novohispana: circulación de saberes y objetos en el Nuevo y Viejo Mundos. In: Azuela L, Vega R (coord) Naturaleza y territorio en la ciencia mexicana del siglo XIX. UNAM, Instituto de Geografía, México City, pp 17–31 Zamudio G (2017) La práctica botánica de Alfredo Dugès a través de la red naturalistas decimonónicos. In: Azuela L, Vega R (coord) Estudios geográficos y naturalistas, siglos XIX y XX. UNAM, Instituto de Geografía, México City, pp 121–134

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and Evolutionism in the American Tropics Nicola´s Cuvi and Delfín Viera

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Naturalist Explorations in the Tropics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography of Naturalist Explorations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evolutionism in Tropical America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Historiography of Evolutionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

90 93 102 106 109 111 113

Abstract

We present a panoramic view of the history of scientific explorations and evolutionism, and its historiography over the last four decades, on the American tropics, especially those territories corresponding to present-day Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, with some allusions to Bolivia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica. The historiography in these two fields in the last 40 years has grown and gained depth, from more “internalist,” universalist, compilatory, descriptive, and hagiographical approaches, to critical and social narratives that focus on local actors, international networks, and science as power. Nation-state approaches still predominate though. The most recent works have been influenced by STS positions, situated in local contexts. Classic explorations and characters such as José Celestino Mutis and Alexander von Humboldt have been radically reevaluated, and many processes of circulation of evolutionism, unknown until N. Cuvi (*) Department of Anthropology, History and Humanities, Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Sede Ecuador), Quito, Ecuador e-mail: ncuvi@flacso.edu.ec D. Viera Department of Biology and Chemistry, University Nucleus “Rafael Rangel”, University of the Andes, Trujillo, Venezuela © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_7

89

90

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

recently, revealed and analyzed. The relevance of knowledges and traditions of local scientists and institutions, guides, collectors, traders, painters, and Indigenous, among others, hitherto largely invisible actors and processes, in America and Spain, has been reinterpreted. Today, there are more professionals in the history of science, with more active clusters in Bogotá and Madrid. The growing amount of research has been reflected in articles and books of remarkable depth and originality, which provide original theoretical categories and offer interesting and novel paths of inquiry.

Introduction The biological diversity and complexity of the American tropics was first known and managed by the millenarian inhabitants of these territories. Since the sixteenth century, it has also aroused the interest of Europeans and Creoles that assimilated, appropriated, translated, and mobilized those local knowledges, oral stories, traditions, and elements of the territory, through collections of specimens, writings, drawings, maps, archives, and ships. Such artifacts served to generate novel theoretical approaches in natural history, geology, geography, ethnography, and cartography, all of them functional for the control of space and people. Over time, the emerging knowledge, already mixed, was assimilated or resignified by individuals and institutions in tropical America that, at times, tried to resemble the European ones, such as universities, scientific societies, or literary clubs. It is true that Latin America’s rich history of cultural adaptations, suppressions, and hybridizations “cannot be labeled non-Western without serious qualifications” and that As the first colonial outpost of the early-modern European world, Latin America has long witnessed complex processes of cultural cross-pollination, suppression, and adaptation. Beginning in the fifteenth century, millenarian Amerindian civilizations, heirs to rich local “scientific” traditions, seemingly gave way to European institutions of learning and to new dominant forms of representing the natural world. (Cueto and Cañizares-Esguerra 2018)

In Lima, the first university was opened in 1551, in Bogotá in 1580, in Quito in 1620, and in Caracas in 1721. Cabinets, museums, herbariums, botanical gardens, and libraries were organized. Treatises, books, inventories, manuals, and chairs were disseminated and created. Since the nineteenth century, this used to happen through initiatives of the republics, although seeking support from foreigners. Over time, local explorers also started to mobilize knowledges using European devices, with fewer resources, but always relying on local peoples. The history of these processes has been told in different ways, building a rich historiography. The narratives range from traditional hagiographies or “internalist” histories (told by travelers, their scientific successors, or historians to the present day, sometimes associated with nationalist or imperialist imaginaries), to stories that, since the late twentieth century, have observed science and technology as something more social, intrinsic to power relations and colonialism that, on many occasions,

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

91

submerge local actors and their knowledges. Science is approached today as an activity that weaves complex and increasingly known transnational and global networks (Cueto and Silva 2020; Barahona 2018; Horta Duarte 2013). Although in the 1990s the social history of science in Latin America (and about Latin America) was barely an emerging field, this diagnosis has changed (Cueto and Silva 2020). A professionalization and emergence of critical approaches arose as part of the institutionalization of STS science studies in the region (Kreimer et al. 2014). The connection of local historians with each other and with colleagues and institutions elsewhere also helped. Social and critical studies of science have been published in specialized Latin American journals, starting with Quipu in 1984, and also in Spanish, French, German, or Anglo-Saxon journals and publishers of history of science. A notable effort that represented the transition toward different narratives in tropical America were the volumes of the Social history of science in Colombia, produced in the 1980s and 1990s. It has helped to leave behind deficit approaches, such as the one that argued that in Colombia there was a surprising “absence of a debate on Darwin or any other scientific concept during the nineteenth century” (Safford 1985, 431). There have been processes, sometimes more sustained, sometimes punctual and discontinuous, toward the critical historicizing of knowledge. The greatest production has occurred in Bogotá, a cluster of activity, where notable efforts are mobilized, even by nontropical researchers. In Lima, Quito, and Medellin, there have been isolated but relevant initiatives, especially in the history of medicine, sometimes in connection with botany. In Venezuela, there occurred important processes in university spaces, but the current situation is one of ongoing deterioration. A first set of narratives elaborated about knowledge in the American tropics, with nuances and crossovers, is made up of hundreds of compilations and descriptions that reveal sources and archives, actors, and institutions. Many of these, less theoretical but important stories, continue to appear in the form of books, chapters, or scholarly journal articles. A second set, each time less used, ascribes, at times uncritically, to the idea of empty spaces of “scientific knowledge” to which ideas were “diffused”: the classic approach proposed by Basalla in 1967, the rigid model of centers and peripheries. Fertile as it was, giving rise to an enormous consensus, literature, and discussions, recent researches have shown its many limitations. A third set of narratives emphasizes the active and central role of local peoples; it ranges from stories about the existence of deep American knowledges, before and after 1500, and contains the argument that the European Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment only were possible by the encounter with America (and Africa) and the empirical practices associated with the Atlantic exchange (Castro-Gómez 2005; Barrera-Osorio 2006; CañizaresEsguerra 2006). A similar argument has been proposed from Asia: “knowledges that thus emerged were totally contingent on the encounter and that important parts of what passes off as ‘Western’ science were actually made outside the West” (Raj 2007, 223). Likewise, the prominence of several European kingdoms or nations, mistakenly considered “peripheral” to modern science, is becoming increasingly recognized (Arabatzis et al. 2015). Partly as a consequence of these

92

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

reflections, there is a tendency to construct new histories that connect places, individuals, artifacts, and ideas, in order to understand the complex material and social hybrid sometimes named as technoscience. These sets of narratives’ styles follow, in many ways, those proposed by Cueto and Silva (2020) for the historiography of science and medicine in Latin America. Although they situate their work overall in three countries of greater extension and population, their proposal of four styles/stages, with permeable limits, is a good reference to categorize the approaches of history of science in the region that include some aspects already mentioned. Those styles/stages are as follows: (1) the rise of universalism, (2) reception and local dynamics, (3) international networks and new social actors, and (4) the global turn. Faced with the profuse and diverse literature in the history of life sciences in Latin America, this chapter attempts a broad (and probably ambitious) synthesis of the history and historiography of two specific themes: scientific explorations (a practice), and evolutionism (an idea). Many fields were left out, including history of medicine, forestry, agriculture, cattle raising, marine sciences, geology, conservationism, physiology, microbiology, embryology, genetics, and neurobiology, among others, that have marked life sciences, increasingly complex, especially from the twentieth century on. This chapter is about the histories and historiographies of expeditionism and evolutionism in the current territories of Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, with allusions to Peru, Bolivia, Panama, and Costa Rica. Although Tropical America is largely Brazil and the Caribbean, the production in that country and that latter region is beyond the scope of this chapter. Two main purposes stand out: first, to highlight events, actors, and processes with a connected approach, that is, to tell the main parts of the story to those not familiar with the region and some aspects of its history; second, to analyze the ways in which these stories have been told, especially since the 1980s, leaving aside, therefore, abundant narratives made before, starting with the first Spanish chronicles or geographic relations. To choose the sources, the first selection was of works written in Spanish, developed by historians located in the American tropics and in Spain, who sometimes publish in other languages, especially English. This could be a contribution for scholars and students around the world who, mainly for language reasons, do not have access to these sources and approaches and therefore may find some less “famous” stories. The reader may think this chapter offers a selection of cases. That first selection of works was also practical, as it may be impossible to visit the enormous production on explorations and evolutionism produced in other languages, since visitors to the American tropics such as Alexander von Humboldt or Charles Darwin, among many others, have received multiple studies. Some works first published in English, then translated to Spanish and published in the tropics because of their local relevance, were also considered. Also some works are made by authors writing in English who, located elsewhere, investigate local/tropical actors. Finally, a handful of untranslated influential English-language works were reviewed. The final selection of sources and authors relied on research in catalogues and databases and in six interviews made in February 2020 with historians and

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

93

sociologists of science located in Bogotá. At the end, more than 300 references on explorations and evolutionism were collected, so among them a large number of more descriptive works were left aside, sometimes hagiographic or compilatory. As for the most active authors, one or two works that illustrate their themes, approaches, and narratives were selected. Anyhow, many good works were left out of the list of references, just naming the authors without quoting their books, chapters, or journal articles. Specialists in these regions and subjects might consider the work as not exhaustive, so the reader is faced with a broad synthesis that hopefully will arouse interest and spark curiosity in the treated fields. The two topics chosen, history of explorations and evolutionism, are among the most researched in the history of life sciences. Explorations to the tropics served to gather evidence, sustain theories, and build fields such as modern ecology or the theory of evolution. The Chimborazo mountain was fundamental to explain Humboldt’s biogeography. Similarly, Galapagos’ birds and terrestrial turtles were crucial to support ideas such as natural selection, speciation, or adaptive radiation. Both European explorers were greatly admired and followed by other travelers and scientists. In the case of evolutionism in Latin America, it often circulated as “social Darwinism,” closely linked to power relations. A much explored vein of that social Darwinism, eugenics, has received much attention in the region, not only from the history of science and medicine.

Naturalist Explorations in the Tropics The powerful and complex natural environment that Europeans encountered in the American tropics filled them with not only awe and wonder, but also with fears and insecurities. The diversity of ecosystems, species, and microclimates stood out before their gaze, as did the domestication of plants and animals that the Indigenous had carried out. Their amazement was genuine: Columbus described in his diaries, in October 1492, his conviction that he was in Paradise; something similar was reported by Amerigo Vespucci in his 1500 letter to Lorenzo de Medici. From early on, the Amazon was understood as a space with the potential of hosting desired things such as gold, cinnamon, slaves, or territorial possessions, in which European myths seemed to materialize, as that of warrior women, the Amazons, or the one that became hybridized in America about a city of gold named El Dorado. The foreign assimilation and understanding of that natural world included many visions that denigrated it as inferior. In any case, the colonial process gave way to a feverish exchange between various continents. Knowledges, ideas, foods, recipes, customs, animals, vegetables, minerals, diseases, and people circulated intensively. In some cases, it led to population exterminations or intense landscape transformations, for example, after the introduction of sheep or extended deforestation processes. The Atlantic Ocean not only was full of possibilities but also was a formidable barrier, not only wide but filled with hitherto unknown winds and currents, foul weather, tempests, and hurricanes. Crossing it safely was by no means a small feat; many collections were lost in wreckage even as late as the nineteenth century. The reader

94

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

might wonder how much irreplaceable materials were also lost because of insects, fungi, weather, or mistreatment. Europe set itself the colossal task of knowing, collecting, ordering, interpreting, and mobilizing that “new world,” its nature, and inhabitants. The explorations benefited from scratch from a marriage between geography and botany. The searches for minerals, dyes, food, wood, medicines, and remedies, and for cartographic, geographic, astronomical, meteorological, and ethnographic purposes, never stopped. That insatiable and permanent appetite to capture and collect had impacts on native and endemic species that today rest as inert samples in museums and herbariums, or were completely lost during maritime voyages. Dozens of expeditions were sent from Spain, and also from other European kingdoms. The chroniclers, sometimes sailors (at times corsairs and pirates), acted as the first naturalists, collecting and organizing observations and testimonies, starting with those of the Indigenous peoples. Spain generated the first “scientific” expedition to present-day Mexico between 1570 and 1577, led by Francisco Hernández, to collect medicinal plants and associated knowledges, using Indigenous informants and producing figures and texts in Nahuatl, a native language. Something similar happened with the Florentine Codex prepared by Bernardino de Sahagún. A rich European bibliography on the American tropics was produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chronicles, relationships, and firsthand testimonies were published on the peoples, places, and biodiversity of America, as well as secondhand narratives and interpretations. Most of the firsthand histories were made by religious and Spanish officials. Reality and fantasy generated powerful hybrids, although various aspects became clearer as the explorations increased. European kingdoms competed to be the first to reach “undiscovered” and vast territories, seas, and islands; sometimes, they did so by chance, such as the arrival of Tomás de Berlanga in 1535 to the Galapagos archipelago, or the first complete European trip through the Amazon, by the military man Francisco de Orellana and the religious chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal in 1541–1542. A commonly highlighted work was produced by the Jesuit José de Acosta in 1590, who toured and analyzed the natural history of Peru, Mexico, and other American sites. The management of the American space became increasingly complex due to European and African influences, in the second case by people mobilized as slaves. Baggages of knowledges about space management were transferred from those continents to America. The eighteenth century saw the rise of formal “scientific expeditions” to tropical America, beginning with the Geodesic Mission (or Expedition) to Peru, between 1735 and 1744 to present-day Ecuador, well studied by historians such as Antonio Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Eduardo Estrella, Miguel Ángel Puig-Samper, or Neil Safier, among others. Its objective was to determine the value of one degree of the arc of a meridian and establish whether the Earth was flattened at the poles. Four French academicians, two Spanish naval officers, a cartographer, an engineer, a surgeon, a watchmaker, and two French assistants, as well as servants and slaves, participated. Two members made important contributions to natural history: botanist Joseph de Jussieau and Charles Marie de La Condamine. The latter gave news in

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

95

Europe about rubber and made the first formal description of the Cinchona trees of Loja, and the first complete and accurate map of the Amazon River, which he traveled in 1743 with the Riobambeño geographer Pedro Vicente Maldonado. Shortly after, in 1754 occurred the Expedition of Limits, to determine the borders between the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the Amazonas and Orinoco rivers’ basins (present-day Venezuela and Brazil). A disciple of Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist Pehr Löfling (Loefling), participated in it but died all too soon, without time to accomplish his ambitious tasks. This explorer has been studied by historians such as Francisco Pelayo, Styg Ryden, and Manuel Lucena Giraldo, among others. During the second half of the eighteenth century, several explorers traveled only through the Caribbean coasts, without entering inland, unlike Löfling. The Dutch-Austrian botanist and explorer Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin collected specimens in the Caribbean, Central America, and present-day Colombia and Venezuela, financed by the Austrian Court; he has been studied by Santiago Madriñan. Another Austrian, Joseph Märter, arrived with the same purpose to present-day Venezuela and has been researched by Helga Lindorf. Among the best-known explorations were the three botanical expeditions organized under the enlightened and reformist Spanish Bourbon policy: the Royal Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada starting in 1783, led by the physician and botanist José Celestino Mutis; the Royal Botanical Expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru, beginning in 1777 with the botanists Hipólito Ruiz and Joseph Pavón at the head; and the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain, starting in 1787, led by the physician Martín de Sessé. The first two had a special interest in the knowledge of Cinchona. These botanical expeditions have been recurrently visited by hundreds of historians; around them, sources are still being discovered and controversies raised. Enterprises such as the Malaspina Expedition initiated in 1789 and had several natural history ingredients. One of its members, the Bohemian Tadeo Haenke, made inventories and observations in Peru, Bolivia, and other territories in South America. This expedition has been visited by many historians, including Juan Pimentel, María Dolores Higueras, Virginia González Claverán, Rafael Sagredo, José Ignacio González Leiva, Andrés Galera, and Victoria Ibáñez. The turn of the century saw the well-known voyage of the Prussian Alexander von Humboldt and the French Aimé Bonpland, between 1799 and 1804. Among other things, their travel connects, in the narratives, the tropical American territory. In cities such as Bogotá, Quito, and Lima, they encountered Creoles who had scientific works, but who were seldom recognized as key informants by Humboldt, or not recognized at all. These travelers published observations and analysis of America, along with landscapes and drawings of plants and animals, such as one of a Condor (an Andean vulture) and of an Amazonian monkey, the black bearded saki (Fig. 1). That monkey was first called by the Prussian as Simia Satanas, a name that soon changed to Chiropotes satanas. Humboldt was no stranger to the fascination for tropical nature:

96

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

Fig. 1 Drawings of a Condor and a black bearded saki. (Source: Humboldt and Bonpland (1811– 1833). Bibliothèque nationale de France)

When a traveller newly arrived from Europe penetrates for the first time into the forests of South America, he beholds nature under an unexpected aspect. He feels at every step, that he is not on the confines but in the centre of the torrid zone; not in one of the West India Islands, but on a vast continent where everything is gigantic, —mountains, rivers, and the mass of vegetation. If he feel strongly the beauty of picturesque scenery he can scarcely define the various emotions which crowd upon his mind; he can scarcely distinguish what most excites his admiration, the deep silence of those solitudes, the individual beauty and contrast of forms, or that vigour and freshness of vegetable life which characterize the climate of the tropics. It might be said that the earth, overloaded with plants, does not allow them space enough to unfold themselves. (Humboldt and Bonpland 1907/1807)

Many religious (Jesuits, Dominicans, and Franciscans) acted as explorers since the first contact, making observations of fauna, flora, ethnology, and cartography. Joseph Gumilla, for example, in his book El Orinoco Ilustrado of 1741, described the preparation of the curare poison and gave accounts of Amazonian living beings and Indigenous peoples, although without mentioning any individual in particular, as if they were an amorphous mass. Many religious cartographers concentrated on mapping the rivers, the main communication channels. Some were Samuel Fritz, Antonio Caulín, Felipe Salvador Gilig, or the Swiss Joannes (Juan) Magnin. One simple map of Magnin, a simple drawing on a section of the Amazon, the Morona and Santiago rivers, and its tributaries, in present-day Ecuador, is shown in Fig. 2. Also in the eighteenth century, missionaries such as Juan de Velasco, from

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

97

Fig. 2 The course of the Morona River, from Macas and downstream, and of the Santiago River. (Source: Juan Magnin, Manuscript map, 1743, 39
53 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Riobamba, published works on the natural history of the American tropics, defending its superiority in comparison to European nature. The activities of this enormous group of actors gave rise to the idea of the “scientific missionary,” used by modern historians to categorize not only religious but also nonreligious individuals. Religious missionaries have continued to be influential, especially in frontier territories; in some way, they have been, like the military explorers in the first centuries and private companies after, “representatives” of the State in those remote places. Some of their members still make collections, observations, and publications on nature and culture. In the nineteenth century, nation-states emerged after the independence wars in Spanish America. As many territories were hitherto badly known by the State institutions and to modern science, the new countries hired, at different rates and times, until the twentieth century, European and national scientists for inventories of flora, fauna, and minerals, drawing of maps, strengthening and/or creation of botanical gardens, museums, universities and chairs, and scientific stations, or to

98

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

promote extractive activities: “They also created the technical and financial conditions for extending the reach of the state through developments of railroads, telegraphs, mining, export agriculture, and public health” (Cueto and CañizaresEsguerra 2018). Many of these men relied on scientific networks with Europe and the United States. For example, the Scotsman William Jameson, based in Quito since 1826, maintained intense exchanges with Kew Gardens. The Italian geographer Agustín Codazzi published an Atlas in 1840 in Venezuela and headed the Chorographic Commission between 1850 and 1859 in Colombia, an exploration that recruited naturalists, botanists, and painters. The results of that work proved to be a major historical milestone for the imaginary of Colombia as a nation, as noted by historians such as Olga Restrepo Forero, Nancy Applebaum, among others. In Ecuador, some Jesuits were brought in 1870 to the recently founded National Polytechnic University; among them were the German geographer and geologist Theodor Wolf and the Italian botanist Luis Sodiro. Around the same time, in Peru, the Italian geographer Antonio Raimondi was in charge of implementing several natural sciences’ chairs in the university, as the German Adolfo Ernst in Venezuela. Several of these men were also involved in the local circulation of evolutionism from the university classrooms. Apart from the explorations financed by nations, in the nineteenth century, there were private naturalists or adventurers, many of them Germans, as the tropical American experience could be crucial for their academic career later at home. Wilhelm Sievers made relevant contributions to the geography and geology of Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador. Karl Ferdinand Appun collected plants and animals in Venezuela and English Guiana. Alphons Stübel and Wilhelm Reiss made volcanology and geographical studies in Ecuador and Colombia. German Alfred Hettner also visited Colombia, and Carl Friedrich Eduard Otto traveled through Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States. The English Richard Spruce went up from the Amazon to the Ecuadorian Sierra and led the first successful smuggling of Cinchona seeds to Europe and Asia. His compatriot Alfred R. Wallace also explored the Amazon and traveled up the Negro River to Venezuelan jungles. The also English orchidologist Charles H. Lankester traveled through Costa Rica. At the end of the nineteenth century, there were also Spanish explorations, such as the well-known Scientific Commission of the Pacific (see http://www.pacifico.csic.es/), with the naturalist Marcos Jiménez de la Espada, studied by Leoncio López-Ocón, MÁ Puig-Samper, and Ma. de los Ángeles Calatayud, among others. There were many other botanical collectors, ornithologists, entomologists, mammologists, paleontologists, and ichthyologists, who worked in several countries and which for reasons of space cannot be detailed here. In addition to naturalists, the explorations involved actors more difficult to trace such as artists and painters, or less known as commercial collectors or guides. It has been noticed that Humboldt’s divulgative strategy decisively influenced the emergence of scientific art and inspired many artists to travel and represent the tropics (Garrido et al. 2016). Among the group of painters who came in the wake of the Prussian and Bonpland were Frederic Edwin Church, who was in Ecuador, or the German Ferdinand Bellermann who went to Venezuela and painted a beautiful oil of La Cueva del Guácharo (Guácharo Cave), in Caripe, North Eastern Venezuela

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

99

Fig. 3 Guácharo Cave (La Cueva del Guácharo). (Source: Ferdinand Bellermann, Oil in canvas, 1874, 118.75
156.85 cm. Photography: Mark Morosse. Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros)

(Fig. 3). In the Chorographic Commission, some painters were the Colombian Manuel María Paz or the Englishman Henry Price. In that country, also worked the English diplomat Edward Walhouse Mark. In Ecuador, Rafael Troya, originally a local painter of religious themes, was hired and trained by Stübel to paint landscapes and volcanos. Also the Frenchman Auguste Morisot went to Orinoquia between 1886 and 1887, as part of the French expedition led by Jean Chaffanjon, who claimed to have discovered the headwaters of the Orinoco River, which was untrue. The Orinoco headwaters became some kind of national obsession or challenge (similar to that around the headwaters of the Amazon River) and only were precisely established by a French-Venezuelan expedition more than 60 years after. Many artists portrayed the tropics with oils, watercolor, or engravings, until the appearance of photographers like the Hungarian Pal Rosti, who toured the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, and took the first landscape photos of Venezuela in 1857. Many explorations occurred until the twentieth century in Nicaragua and Panama, associated with the future construction of the interoceanic channel; some have been studied by Stanley Heckadon Moreno. The Panama Channel led to the formation of the Barro Colorado Island, where in 1923 the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute was established, becoming, in their own words, one of the most intensively studied tropical forests in the world. A photo from that island in the 1950s (Fig. 4) shows its strategic position.

100

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

Fig. 4 Ship traveling through Gatun Lake, Panama Canal, from Barro Colorado Island, 1953. (Source: Smithsonian Institution Archives. Image #92-15291)

In the twentieth century, the Swiss-American forester Henri Pittier was influential in Costa Rica and Venezuela. In the first country, he was in charge of the recently founded National Physical-Geographic Institute and was important for other institutionalization processes. Another important scientist was the German Ernst Schäfer, founder of the Rancho Grande Biological Station in the coast of Venezuela in 1950. There were explorations in several countries to the still unknown, but rich in resources, Amazon. The Second Geodesic Mission arrived in Ecuador in 1901, led by 23 French soldiers, among them Paul Rivet, who made ethnographic observations; this mission has been a topic of research by Ernesto Capello. The Swiss expedition of Otto Fuhrmann and Eugène Mayor took place in Colombia in 1910. National expeditions, to even uncharted territories, continued along the twentieth century. For instance, in 1956 occurred the first exploration of the School of Biology

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

101

of the Central University of Venezuela to the Auyán-tepui, a topic visited by Helga Lindorf (the Tepuys are the table mountains in the Great savanna that inspired the 1912 novel The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle). Expeditions from the United States increased since the nineteenth century, and there was greater emphasis on zoological collections. An early one was that of the Williams College in Venezuela, in 1867, studied by Yolanda Texera Arnal. Some went to the Galapagos, such as that of the California Academy of Sciences in 1905–1906; expeditions to that archipelago have been studied by US scholars such as Elizabeth Hennessy or Matthew J. James, among others. A Norwegian zoological expedition, conducted by Alf Wollebaik, also went to that archipelago and to Colombia in 1925. Important zoological expeditions were headed by personnel from the American Museum of Natural History. There were explorations for ornithological captures in Colombia and Venezuela studied by Camilo Quintero Toro and Yolanda Texera Arnal, among others. In the latter country, the paleontologist and evolutionary biologist G. G. Simpson made some incursions, also under the aegis of the AMNH, that called the attention of Hebe Vessuri. There were scientific missions for the promotion of native and introduced crops. Cacao, rubber, bananas, sugar, or coffee were exploited, sometimes in relation with private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Since World War II, it increasingly occurred in the framework of international cooperation for development. In Venezuela, the first state agricultural scientific stations were implemented with the support of the Belgian engineer Fernand Miesse in the 1910s. They did not prosper due to his resignation but gave rise to the arrival of Pittier and the creation of the Experimental Station of Agriculture and Forestry. Pittier also spearheaded environmental conservation efforts in that country, which resulted in the first Venezuelan national park in 1937. There were also many geological expeditions, associated with the search for oil in the coastal and Amazonian sides of the Andes. These interventions of the United States in tropical agriculture and tropical biodiversity research have been researched by historians such as Stuart McCook, Christopher Shepherd, Megan Raby, John Soluri, Leida Fernández, and Nicolás Cuvi, among others; many studies have focused on the processes of the Green Revolution. The twentieth century saw an increase in explorations led by local scientists. For example, in 1937, the Ecuadorian government sent a National Scientific Commission to Galapagos, organized by the Central University, in order to reinforce the first declarations of the archipelago as a protected area in 1934 and 1936. Several Spanish exiles arrived, mainly in Venezuela and Colombia. Geologist José Royo Gómez or botanist Josep Cuatrecasas Arumí, among others, contributed to scientific knowledge of the countries and also taught young students. Scholars such as Carlos Acosta Rizo or José María López Sánchez have focused on these scientists. In the second half of the twentieth century, exiles arrived from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, leaving their countries due to dictatorships. The diversity of explorations presented reflects a personal selection, as a complete synthesis of the hundreds of efforts cannot be detailed. But indeed, this selection aloud an analysis of some perspectives in the historical narratives.

102

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

Historiography of Naturalist Explorations Scientific explorations, together with medical topics (which sometimes overlap), have received the greatest attention in the local history of science (and also in stories built from outside the tropics). This has been influenced by the importance given to science and scientists in the construction of the nation, sometimes extolled as fundamental in the independence processes. Also the fact that these explorations were, with rare exceptions, the most important scientific enterprises of European kingdoms, the United States, or particularly in present-day Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. At times, in the narratives, the botanists, zoologists, geographers, geologists, or cartographers have been highlighted even more than the processes and results they got. Many works have been descriptive, compilations, with hagiographic and uncritical ingredients, although this changed since the 1980s. National approaches have predominated, and very few have been comparative. Connected history exists in works about actors who explored territories beyond the national level. Authors such as Diana Obregón or O. Restrepo have argued that the descriptive approach served to local scientists to justify themselves and to find – or perhaps, rather invent – a tradition to hold on, especially in countries where there is, still today, neither much appreciation nor understanding of the various edges of scientific enterprises and its representatives. A few of those expeditions’ histories are considered here, as case studies, to analyze recent approaches. Humboldt and Bonpland have been visited recurrently. Historians of science from all perspectives raised by Cueto and Silva (2020) have been, at one time or another, “Humboldtians.” His figure is transversal to countries and longitudinal in time. As in the Darwinian case, there is a more modest, but anyhow robust, “Humboldt industry” that extends to exhibitions, documentaries, films, and novels. His results continue to be used, in a valid way, to analyze issues such as the altitudinal migration of plants due to climate change. Another recurrent figure has been that of José Celestino Mutis, self-appointed as “the oracle of the Kingdom” (Nieto Olarte 2006, 212–215), erected as the epitome of higher science in Colombian culture (somewhat less so in Spain), where the Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada would be a “myth of origin” or a “ground zero” of science in that country (Obregón 1994, 541). There is also a successful “Mutis industry,” mainly Colombian and to a lesser extent Spanish, with dozens of academic texts that illustrate diverse aspects, sources, and perspectives (Bernal Villegas and Gómez Gutiérrez 2010; Amaya 2005; among many researchers including Olga Restrepo-Forero, José Luis Peset, MÁ Puig-Samper, Thomas F. Glick, Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, Luis Carlos Arboleda, Daniela Bleichmar, Germán Amat-García, and Luis Palau-Castaño). Diverse outreach products have also been produced, such as the exhibition Natural History and Politics (see www.banrepcultural.org/historia-natural-politica). Despite the more thoughtful contemporary critical reviews of Mutis, the hagiographic vision continues. For example, in a study of the Spaniard as the third myrmecologist there was in the world, the authors state that he should be regarded nowadays as the “eighteenth apostle of Linnaeus” and that he was “an honest man, privately as well as publicly,” who “operated strictly on the basis of the phenomena

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

103

he could personally observe” (Wilson and Gómez Durán 2010, 20). These assertions are at the antipodes of what is suggested by researchers such as Nieto Olarte (2006), who names him as an “agent of the empire,” or Fernández (2019), who doubts his integrity to give truthful information due to his interests around the commerce of quinine. The critical views of Mutis have been accompanied by highlights of the relevance of Creoles. For example, it has been pointed out that there is no evidence that Juan Bautista Aguiar, Francisco Antonio Zea, or Sinforoso Mutis (nephew of José Celestino) had known the manuscripts on the flora of New Granada “that remained for them as an arcane.” The payanés Francisco José de Caldas and the nephew Sinforoso would have had access to such manuscripts only after the death of José Celestino, in 1808, “and they were perplexed by the disorder and poverty of the manuscripts” (Amaya 2000, 121). Caldas was the director of the journal Weekly of the New Kingdom of Granada, considered the first scientific publication in those territories. A profuse cartographer and pioneer of biogeography, he was an important figure for his ideas on “plant leveling,” which he developed before meeting Humboldt and Bonpland and working with them for a few months in Quito and surroundings (Nieto Olarte et al. 2006). He captured these ideas in maps like the one in Fig. 5, in a similar line to what Humboldt published later as “plant geography.” That coincidence has been treated as misappropriation, synchrony, or simply obviated, opening interesting lines of analysis

Fig. 5 Profile of the Andes from Loja to Quito. (Source: Francisco José de Caldas. In: Nieto Olarte et al. (2006))

104

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

(Gómez Gutiérrez 2016; Valencia-Restrepo 2018; Cañizares-Esguerra 2006; Vila 2018/1960; Díaz-Piedrahita 2006; among others). Less critical versions, although no less abundant, have been given to the relationship between science, power, and imperialism of the Royal Botanical Expedition to Peru, visited by authors such as Eduardo Estrella, Esther García Guillén, Antonio González Bueno, Raúl Rodríguez Nozal, Oscar Muñoz Paz, or Francisco Pelayo, among others. There have been reviews of the role of Humboldt and Bonpland, which question their originality and lack of recognition of sources. Some actors obviated were Caldas in matters such as the biogeography and the taxonomy of Cinchona, or the Limean José Hipólito Unanue and other Creoles of that city, on the knowledge of meteorology or, in general, their ideas on environmental decline and “environmentalist” thought. Informants were key for the pair of European travelers, and sometimes they let it be known, but without depth or full recognition (Cushman 2011; Freites 2000). There are also less critical views, which highlight the Prussian’s contributions to science or to political activity, such as the works of MÁ PuigSamper, Alberto Gómez Gutiérrez, Sandra Rebok, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Yajaira Freites, Frank Egerton, and Stephen Bell, among many others. As is understandable, fair assessments of the complete historiographies of scientific figures such as Humboldt or Mutis fall far beyond the reach, aim, and scope of this chapter. Natural products such as the Cinchona trees’ bark, considered the most significant American contribution to universal pharmacopoeia, have drawn historical attention throughout the centuries, up to the present day, with various polemics. A controversy has been about whether or not the Indigenous knew its febrifuge properties. Some decades ago, Estrella (1995) showed the role of local connoisseurs for the knowledge of plants, and Ortiz Crespo (1994), after working at the Vatican archives, gave important sources to ratify that the Indigenous knew their medicinal properties. There is a growing body of work on local peoples, as the herborizations and botany classes of José Mejía Lequerica, or the lesser-known participation of Viceroy Caballero y Góngora, the Baron of Carondelet, or the Creole Juan Eloy Valenzuela y Mantilla in proposing the teaching of botany in present-day Ecuador and Colombia. There are several texts on Francisco Zea’s works in Bogotá, or on the creation of a chair of botany in Lima in the eighteenth century. These works, whether descriptive or analytical, share the intention of revealing individuals that were buried in the past under the shadow of Humboldt, Mutis, and others. Many of the aforementioned works can be inscribed in views that leave behind diffusionist, uncritical, and crystallized frameworks on “center/periphery” relations. Without denying the asymmetries, the new perspectives introduce actors traditionally discarded or made invisible. The hagiographic chorus of great figures has gradually vanished. There are still ingredients not only of diffusionist perspectives, but also of “international networks and new social actors,” such as the analysis of the Flora Huayaquilensis, discovered by the physician and historian of science Eduardo Estrella in the archives of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid (Estrella 1989). That work was made by the hitherto badly known botanist Juan José Tafalla, part of

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

105

the Botanical Expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru, but it lay buried for almost two centuries. It demonstrates the gap between collecting in the field and processing materials in the cabinet or museum, an argument at times used to propose that in reality those expeditions have not ended. Because of this case and others (such as the archives on Bonpland’s latter research in southern South America), it cannot be discarded altogether the existence of novel and dramatic sources on unknown and even very visited topics. Also in the line of “international networks,” but also of “global turn,” there are studies on relations between Latin America and the United States mediated by explorations, disciplines, collections, publications, or other forms of circulation of science (Cuvi 2011; Quintero Toro 2012; among others). There are renewed views on national processes, even from foreign authors. In Colombia, the deficit model perspective has been questioned by more critical and pondered versions (Appelbaum 2016; Bleichmar 2012). There have also been approaches to iconographic sources, painters, and illustrators by other authors such as Nancy Stepan, O. Restrepo, Elisa Garrido, Pablo Diener, Alexandra Kennedy, Mariana Zinni, and Carmen Sotos Serrano. It is considered that the natural history of colonial America was embedded in a “visual epistemology,” as “knowing and making visible were inextricably intertwined” (Bleichmar 2012, 6). A splendid sample of some drawings produced during the Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada is available at http://www.rjb.csic.es/icones/mutis/. Many studies on explorations have been produced from Spain, with access to archives such as the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid or the General Archive of the Indies in Seville. In that country there have been several programs, as one on the Globalization of Science and National Culture, under the framework of reception and diffusion, the most influential in the 1990s, but at the same time critical of it (Lafuente et al. 1993). There is a profuse literature on the botanists around the Royal Botanical Garden and their quarrels, partly related to the botanical expeditions of the late eighteenth century, commercial interests, and power; two emblematic characters of controversial relations were Casimiro Gómez Ortega and Antonio José Cavanilles, also related with Francisco Antonio Zea. Other historians are Diana Soto Arango, José Antonio Amaya, Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, and Antonio González Bueno. Finally, there are several works that fit into the “global turn” perspective, connecting the Atlantic world, such as Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Jorge CañizaresEsguerra, Mauricio Nieto Olarte, Santiago Castro Gómez, Neil Safier, María M. Portuondo, and Judith A. Carney, among others. This perspective has enriched the understanding of these processes, by opening up new veins of analysis that surpasses national approaches. There are many other works that fall between several of the mentioned perspectives and that are not detailed here. Some are descriptive, although they do survey local networks and actors. Several are about institutions, professions, characters, or paradigm shifts in the life sciences, as from natural history to biology and ecology, or on the role of ecologists and biologists in institutionalizing conservationism, or the emergence of fields within biology, etc.

106

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

Evolutionism in Tropical America The circulation of Darwinist ideas in tropical America has been studied in greater detail for Bolivia and Colombia. There is also research about episodes in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Panama, and Costa Rica. In all these places, national actors were connected to the theory through publications coming from Europe or the United States, lectures and classes by scientific travelers, and local publications containing translations or analyses by doctors, naturalists, lawyers, politicians, students, historians, geographers, geologists, theologians, priests, and philosophers. Most studies have relied on printed sources. Fundamental scenarios of the debates around evolutionism were universities, high schools, scientific societies, pulpits, and printed, informative, and specialized media. In this topic, the communities of cities and countries were, as far as is known, disconnected from each other. As a result, there were singular processes conditioned by political, national, and local conditions. More marginally, Darwin and his evolutionist colleagues maintained contact with some correspondents in America. The circulation of Darwinian-evolutionary ideas in the American tropics occurred basically since the 1870s. Under names such as “doctrine of descent” or “transformism,” Darwinian ideas were unfolded, diffused, appropriated, signified, resignified, replicated, or misrepresented in various ways. They had greater resonance in the framework of philosophical, theological, and ideological disputes, which intermingled biological evolutionism with sociopolitical or cultural analyses. For this reason, it is considered that the circulation in the region was, above all, in the form of “social Darwinism,” which refers to the use in nonscientific spheres of ideas such as struggle for existence, survival of the fittest, adaptation, selection, and extinction (Argueta Villamar 2009). It has been argued that in Colombia, for example, one could not allude to a “scientific” or “biological” Darwinism, because it was especially social: “long before the fiction of a social Darwinism completely separate from the uncontaminated Darwinism of nature was invented, the followers of Darwinism in Colombia as elsewhere had already discovered its multiple possible uses and its dangerous associations” (Restrepo Forero 2009, 37). In contrast, the ideas of the English naturalist were more slowly incorporated in the realm of scientific practices in the twentieth century, which were changing from natural history to biology (Puig-Samper 2019, 219). Given that the tropics host large Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations, in addition to whites and creoles, many debates were around races and the origin of humanity. Denials and extreme defenses of miscegenation were common ground. Darwinism also gave space to debates about conceptions of society, social classes, freedoms, social evolutionism, degeneration and regeneration, competition/solidarity/communalism, economy, politics, religion, science, animal husbandry, medicine, psychiatry, eugenics, acquired traits, monogenism/polygenism, bodies, food, hygiene, biopolitics, immigration, common ancestor, fixism, transformism, teleology, and design. In many cases, evolutionism was known and interpreted through the texts or readers of Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, or other popularizers. These diverse

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

107

readings led to an eclectic framework, with ingredients of Lamarckism, Haeckelian monism, and Krausism, among others (Puig-Samper 2019; Glick 2013; Ruiz Gutiérrez 2019; Restrepo Forero 2009; De la Vega 2002; Argueta Villamar 2017). It was also coupled with interpretations of positivist ideas, and disputes between Spencerianism and Comtism, as in Bolivia (Démelas 1981; Argueta Villamar 2009). All these are in a framework of struggles between liberals and conservatives, religious and anticlericals. Many individuals took positions of evolutionary theism, such as Manuel José Pérez in Panama, Teodoro Wolf in Ecuador, or José Marabini in Bolivia. Those conciliatory positions may have been more effective to oppose the theory than tenacious and bitter confrontations, which also existed. In present-day Panama, a province of Colombia in the nineteenth century, the major controversies, traceable in translations of foreign texts and contributions of local actors, were about the origin of humans. Only in 1925, a writing on biological evolutionism appeared, by Federico Calvo, professor at the National Institute (Pruna Goodgall 2013; Villarreal and De Gracia 2017). In Bolivia, the first popularization text appeared in 1877, associated with Haeckelian transformationalist thought. The struggles between conservatives and liberals were combined with conflicts with Indigenous and border problems. As in Colombia, Darwinian ideas in Bolivia were accepted and disseminated by anticlerical liberals, who used them for discussions about society. Among the few situated in a scientific research framework, although in a partial way, were the geographer Luis Crespo and the physician Belisario Díaz Romero, who acted through geographical societies and bulletins since the end of the nineteenth century. Díaz had controversies with the religious Marabini. Several Bolivian popularizers were associated with Masonic lodges, high schools, and universities; one place that concentrated several of them was the Literary Circle of La Paz (Argueta Villamar 2009). Only since 1913, transformism began to be taught. Less is known about Peru, a matter that would respond to the lack of spectacular debates, except for the one between the Catholic Church and the physician Celso Bambaren. The Italian geographer and geologist Antonio Raimondi alluded to Lamarck in 1857 and, in 1874, quoted Darwin to briefly explain the evolutionary controversy, without taking sides, perhaps due to a lack of understanding of the subject. One of his disciples at the San Marcos University, the physician and naturalist Miguel Colunga, explained Lamarck’s classification system through the chairs of Medical Natural History, Zoology, and Botany. In the twentieth century, evolutionary thought influenced studies on high-altitude physiology and discussions on the racial question (Cueto 1999). In Ecuador, the first known circulations were in charge of Teodoro Wolf, who had a solid background in evolutionism and had incorporated it as a theoretical framework for his research and reasoning. His first diffusion was through the lessons he gave, beginning in 1871, at the Polytechnic National University in Quito. He taught and debated the transformist doctrines in his geology and paleontology classes, situated in a position of evolutionary theism. The uniqueness of Quito is that Darwinism was spread by a Catholic Jesuit. However, his conflicts with other local religious, for those classes and other differences, made him leave the university

108

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

and the Jesuit Order in 1874. For example, his request to travel to the Galapagos was rejected by the Vatican because it could be harmful to his religious spirit. Evolutionism in Ecuador remained in some syllabi, and there were public polemics between religious and laics, and it was only more discussed and incorporated after the Liberal Revolution of 1895, reaching scientists such as Luis Sodiro, the influential Jesuit botanist who had immigrated along with Wolf (Cuvi et al. 2014, and other articles from these authors). Later on, in the Ecuadorian context, there were also several debates around the Galapagos archipelago, on geology and biological evolution, involving Europeans, Northamericans, and also an Ecuadorian scientist, Misael Acosta Solís. Universities were the main scenarios of debate in Colombia, as well as professional societies, salons, literary gatherings, books, university and student newspapers and gazettes, novels, poems and pamphlets, theses, public lectures, magazines, and minutes of professional and literary societies. University students were very active, at a time of struggle for the educational model and control of educational institutions at all levels. The first appearance in university programs and student speeches was in 1868, with no real incorporations in research programs. In the 1880s, the Swiss professor Ernst Röthlisberger explained at the National University of Colombia the systems of Laplace and Darwin, for which he was criticized by the conservatives. After 1886, with a more conservative leaning in society, discussions were less visible. According to Restrepo Forero (2009, 31), Colombian naturalists “sympathized with Darwinian ideas, without producing much noise. They were cautious in their use, and participated little in public debates openly in defense of Darwinism, although they did participate in polemics related to races, immigration and other equally important issues.” In Venezuela, it was also a German, Adolf Ernst, the capital figure in the early circulation of Darwinism, who founded the Society of Physical and Natural Sciences of Caracas and directed the National Museum, from where he divulged Darwin and Haeckel. References to the naturalist appear in the minutes of that Society since 1867. Ernst taught, from 1874, Lamarck’s “transformism” and Darwin’s “natural selection” through the chair of Natural History in the Central University of Venezuela. He was Darwin’s correspondent between 1880 and 1882. In 1893, Pablo Acosta Ortiz, professor of anatomy, introduced modern anatomy following Darwinian norms. There were later polemics that had, among their protagonists, the Caracas native Luis Razetti, who succeeded Acosta in the same chair in 1896. In 1904, “Razetti maneuvered the Academy of Medicine into a statement of public support for evolution by introducing a motion in such a way that the members had a choice of voting in favor of the motion or declaring themselves unscientific ideologues” (Glick 2013, 262). In the twentieth century, there were more actors defending the theory, such as Misael Acosta Solís in Ecuador or the Venezuelan physician Rafael Villavicencio. There were also new polemics, for example, in Costa Rica, where two professors who taught evolutionary theory in a school were publicly attacked by religious people (Molina Jiménez 2001).

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

109

Historiography of Evolutionism Although the history of evolutionism would have received excessive attention in several places, along with genetics, molecular biology, and bacteriology (Meunier and Nickelsen 2018), in Latin America it is more recent. More tradition and attention have been posed on explorations. Still, some syntheses exist (Glick 2013; Argueta Villamar 2017; Puig-Samper 2018, 2019; Ruiz Gutiérrez 2019; among others). Those syntheses tend to be dominated by approaches on countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Spain, and Mexico; only Puig-Samper (2019) gives certain details on all – Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Panama. Almost nothing is known about most Central American and Caribbean countries (with the notable exception of Cuba), nor about Paraguay, which would be the “only country in the region where there was no debate over Darwin’s work in the nineteenth century” (Glick 2013, 259). There are works in the form of books, journal articles, and proceedings of academic meetings. Of particular importance are the dozens of studies compiled in the proceedings of the eight Colloquia on Darwinism in Ibero-America, organized regularly since 1997 by the International Network for the History of Biology and Evolution, with Rosaura Ruiz Gutiérrez and M. Á. Puig-Samper as outstanding figures. In contrast to explorations, there are fewer works in languages other than Spanish, with the notable exception of those on eugenics, not analyzed in this chapter. The historiography of Darwinism in the American tropics, written locally and since the 1980s, has had three main influences: the constructivist turn, with a focus on issues such as locality and controversies; the ideas of reception and introduction; and a focus on “social Darwinism.” There have also been many exploratory and more descriptive works. The studies have been, above all, of national or subnational scale, through the analysis of published works, individuals, institutions, classes, and polemics. As happens with scientific explorations of the past centuries, the emphasis has been on national actors and histories, partly because the national sources of financing are oriented to build national narratives, partly because of the difficulty there has been to create and maintain national and international societies, partly because the costs of travel to foreign archives in the region. The only comparative approach that considers tropical countries is between Mexico and Bolivia (Argueta Villamar 2009), and the most complete synthesis is that of Puig-Samper (2019). There are gaps in connected history. Although there is information on the relations of each country with Europe and the United States, almost nothing is known about the relations of tropical countries with each other, or in broader networks. In the region, as in the rest of the world, Darwin has not only been the object of elegies, but has also been criticized provoking constant controversies. This is not unexpected, as it has been a constant since the first dissemination of his ideas, with events such as the well-known controversy between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley in England. Most stories about Darwinism have had an emphasis on controversies involving the binomials science/religion, liberalism/conservatism,

110

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

atheism/Catholicism, materialism/idealism, and less for theoretical aspects, as between Lamarckism and Darwinism. The research on the reception of Darwinism as a phenomenon in Latin America was inaugurated by Thomas F. Glick, when he included, in a compilation of works on comparative reception in 1974, an analysis of Mexico made by Roberto Moreno. In the revised preface to that book, 15 years later, he explained that many new national studies had appeared (Glick 1988). He analyzed Cuba, Uruguay, and Brazil and continued to use the framework of “reception” for Darwinism and other scientific ideas. This idea of reception relates with “the use of concepts such as evolutionism, natural selection, and adaptation by journalists, politicians and ideologists” (Argueta Villamar 2017). It is an analytical model to determine the fortune of scientific ideas when they cross cultural boundaries. For example, there has been a focus in “the interested landing of evolutionism in the social world and its diverse political use by the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movements” (Puig-Samper 2019). Until today, many works illustrate the individuals that receive the ideas, the contexts in which they use or mention it, the currents of thought to which they respond, and the areas of discussion and application (Ruiz Gutiérrez 2019). The reception approach has been intermingled with that of “introduction,” to allude to the use of Darwinism to explain biological phenomena, as well as to explain why it was not used immediately, or with delay, as a biological theory: “is the use of those same terms by doctors, biologists, agronomists and other professionals that employ such concepts in their professional practice to better explain the processes that they study” (Argueta Villamar 2017, 94). Reception and introduction have been categories widely welcomed, although they have also been questioned, partly because they can be interpreted as a diffusionist approach in the style of Basalla, also because it has been argued that “reception cannot be divided in societies in which the scientific and the social/political facets were closely linked” (Restrepo Forero 2002). The recurrent idea that Darwinism in Latin America in the nineteenth century was, above all, social is supported by the fact that, as far as is known, only in Brazil and Cuba there were Darwinian programs in biology in the nineteenth century in a “introduction” style, and in Uruguay one associated with cattle breeding. Among other things, that would have been used as “evidence of a defective cultural and educational structure” (Glick 2013, 259). Positivism in the region was very influential, and its relation with evolutionism raises debates. Glick (2013) alerts that the perspective of analysis that has linked the reception of Darwinism with positivism would have slowed down the investigation of “scientific Darwinism.” Puig-Samper (2019) adds that some studies would have been influenced “by an erroneous point of view about the influence that positivism had on them.” Glick is correct in stating that emphasis has been placed on the search for relations between positivism and evolutionism, sometimes indistinguishable and eclectic in Latin America, also in saying that positivism was a term that comprised different understandings. Some historians have debated whether it was Comtean or Spencerian positivism. According to Ruiz Gutiérrez (2019), in practically all countries, it was the “Spencer’s version,” especially Lamarckian, that was known, which would have favored assimilation between lawyers and physicians.

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

111

Conclusions In the last 40 years, there has been an important professionalization and institutionalization of the history of science in the American tropics, especially in Bogotá, with more isolated initiatives, although of important depth, in Caracas, Quito, Lima, or Medellin. That institutionalization has helped to broaden the approaches, as critical perspectives have been added to the descriptive, compilatory, and hagiographic ones. Since the 1980s, Creoles, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-descendants have appeared in the histories. As a result, today their role is better known (although still with gaps) in the process of construction of the complex edifice of science, acting as scientific peers, guides, informants, painters, collectors, porters, animal caretakers, and cooks, among others. This is a fruitful path of research. Also the regional and global connections are better known. Before the 1980s, there were several attempts to highlight “American science,” especially pre-Columbian. This approach has diversified to more “radical” positions that place American peoples as fundamental for the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, also to narratives that pose in question the traditional accounts about actors such as Humboldt or Mutis, highlighting their deliberate misappropriation of knowledges, invisibilization of sources, or even information manipulation. Those daring and uninhibited looks at classic problems/topics, which broaden and pluralize views, are gaining ground due to their interpretative strength and relevance. It is worth to note that this approach does not emerge only “from the tropics” as a resistance to traditional histories: It is also present in studies made “from outside” but with less Eurocentric views, embracing a less “basallist” view. The influence of STS studies and constructivist methodologies and styles has been key to attain those critical approaches. Also many people have received specific academic training in the history of science, and the work with primary sources has become more professional. The social, cultural, economic, and power ingredients around local spheres are increasingly better understood. Categories such as imperialism by invitation, civil plants, layers of colonialism, scientific missionaries, Creole scientists, local and hybrid knowledges, relocation of science, and circulation of knowledges have emerged, replaced, or reframed others such as conquest, center, periphery, metropolitan, diffusion, and transfers. Explorations have been a primary and favorite theme, revisited from many perspectives, although many travelers still have not received much, if any, attention so far. For example, there is little work on the activity of the religious missionaries, in contrast to the global and local “Humboldtian industry” and “Mutisian industry.” In the case of evolutionism, the narratives are more recent, quite influenced by a look at diffusion and reception, and an emphasis on controversies and processes framed in “social Darwinism.” The influence of Humboldt and Darwin has been such that historians of science in the region, almost without exception, have been, to a greater or lesser degree, Humboldtian, Darwinian, or both, even to oppose traditional approaches on those actors. A historiographic knot of importance and density has been generated around the Cinchona trees. This natural medicinal product has generated knowledges at very different levels, from the most traditional in the field to refined laboratory analysis.

112

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

Like the coca or the Andean seagull, the Cinchona trees connect the tropical Andes and have aroused botanical, cartographic, commercial, and political interest from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Its connections go beyond Europe and America, as it was decisive for the European imperialist expansion in Africa and Asia. A national approach, sometimes nationalistic, has predominated in the narratives since the nineteenth century. In each country, historians have investigated their national contexts, even before nations existed. Mutis, for example, has been considered the ground zero or myth of origin of “Colombian science” (although he was a Spaniard working in an imperial Viceroyalty, loyal to the Spanish crown, unlike many of his disciples who became independentists). There is a lack of comparative studies, let alone connected regional approaches. Several works connect the tropical countries with the Global North, but few connect the tropical countries with each other in the studies on explorations, almost nothing around evolutionism. The reasons for these gaps, even with so much material available, have not been researched. In the interviews, issues like financing to travel, national funders’ interests, and the prevalence of connections of local historians, with their peers in the Global North (where many of them went to study) rather than with their neighbors, were raised. Botanical explorations of the nineteenth century have been one of the most visited themes, followed by geological, geographical, zoological, and multidisciplinary explorations. These stories illustrate the complexity of traveling, exploring, collecting, and mobilizing and show visions of the natural world that have not always been known or systematized, much less recognized in traditional narratives of discovery and exploration. As the representation of America was visual in many ways, iconographic sources have attracted increasing attention, illustrating fundamental devices in the process of knowledges’ circulation. This appears to be a potentially fruitful path of research, as it means to leave aside the primacy of textual sources of all kinds that have been the preferred ones in Western academic approaches to the detriment of tacit knowledge, oral history, and landscape history, among others. A field or category seems to be emerging aimed at exploring a “scientific revolution of the Atlantic.” It would bring together a set of works and a trend in research, full of potentialities to rethink several conventional interpretations. The characteristics of such a process would be its graduality, extension in time and space, decentralized or blurred, perhaps even horizontal, empirical, without crucial experiments, and therefore largely alien to great names and top individuals. Research around this “in process” field or category would reinforce the interpretation that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment took place over several centuries and directly and indirectly involved, at least, four continents and a wide density of actors little surveyed in mainstream research. While studies on explorations cover, with overlaps, the four categories of Cueto and Silva (2020), studies on Darwinism circulation in the tropical territories can overall be situated in the first two, somewhat less in the third, and practically nothing in the fourth. There are many compilatory and descriptive works in both fields,

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

113

necessary as a starting point. Many works still incorporate the categories of centerperiphery, but as in the Science and Technology in the European Periphery group, they use them as “flexible and dynamic” (Nieto-Galan 2015), seeking to highlight the agency of local actors and the forms that knowledges acquire when circulated in local contexts. Cueto and Silva’s proposal for the historiography of science in Latin America offers a stable view to understand the transformations in narratives and approaches, although, as these authors warn, they should be considered as flexible. Acknowledgments This chapter was prepared as part of the project “Historiography of Life Sciences in the Tropical Andes,” IP 1059, sponsored by the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Ecuador).

References Amaya JA (2000) Una flora para el Nueva Reino. Mutis, sus colaboradores y la botánica madrileña (1791–1808). In: Obregón D (ed) Culturas científicas y saberes locales. Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, pp 103–159 Amaya JA (2005) Mutis, apóstol de Linneo. Historia de la botánica en el Virreinato de la Nueva Granada (1760–1783). Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá Appelbaum NP (2016) Mapping the country of regions: the chorographic commission of nineteenth-century Colombia. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Arabatzis T, Renn J, Simões A (eds) (2015) Relocating the history of science. Essays in honor of Kostas Gavroglu. Springer, Cham Argueta Villamar A (2009) El darwinismo en Iberoamérica. Bolivia y México. Catarata y Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid Argueta Villamar A (2017) Darwinism in Latin America: reception and introduction. In: Quiroga D, Sevilla A (eds) Darwin, Darwinism and conservation in the Galapagos Islands: the legacy of Darwin and its new applications. Springer, Cham, pp 91–107. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3319-34052-4_6 Barahona A (2018) Local, global and transnational perspectives on the history of biology. In: Dietrich MR, Borrello ME, Harman O (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology. Springer, Cham, pp 371–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90119-0_19 Barrera-Osorio A (2006) Experiencing nature. The Spanish American empire and the early scientific revolution. University of Texas Press, Austin Bernal Villegas JE, Gómez Gutiérrez A (2010) A impulsos de una rara resolución: el viaje de José Celestino Mutis al Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1760–1763. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá Bleichmar D (2012) Visible empire. Botanical expeditions & visual culture in the hispanic enlightenment. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) Nature, empire, and nation. Explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Castro-Gómez S (2005) La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva Granada. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá Cueto M (1999) La historia natural, la fisiología de altura y las ideas de la evolución en el Perú. In: Glick TF, Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas y Doce Calles, Mexico City/Madrid, pp 103–113 Cueto M, Cañizares-Esguerra J (2018) History of science in non-Western traditions: Latin America. In: Introduction to the history of science in non-Western traditions. History of Science Society,

114

N. Cuvi and D. Viera

Seattle. https://hssonline.org/resources/teaching/teaching_nonwestern/teaching_nonwestern_ latin/ Cueto M, Silva MAD (2020) Trayectorias y desafíos en la historiografía de la ciencia y de la medicina en América Latina. Asclepio 72(2):320. https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2020.21 Cushman GT (2011) Humboldtian science, creole meteorology, and the discovery of human-caused climate change in South America. Osiris 26(1):16–44. https://doi.org/10.1086/661263 Cuvi N (2011) The Cinchona Program (1940–1945): science and imperialism in the exploitation of a medicinal plant. Dynamis 31(1):183–206. https://doi.org/10.4321/S0211-95362011000100009 Cuvi N, Sevilla E, Sevilla A, Piñas F (2014) La circulación del darwinismo en el Ecuador (1870–1874). Procesos Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia, Procesos (Quito) 39:115–142. http:// hdl.handle.net/10644/4219 De la Vega M (2002) El antagonismo entre positivismo y evolucionismo, dos teorías de la sociedad y la práctica política. Repercusiones en el proceso actual venezolano. Politeia 29:7–38 Démelas M-D (1981) Darwinismo a la criolla: el darwinismo social en Bolivia, 1880–1910. Hist Boliv 1–2:55–82 Díaz-Piedrahita S (2006) La historia natural y la nivelación de las plantas en la obra cartográfica de Caldas. In: Nieto Olarte M (ed) La obra cartográfica de Francisco José de Caldas. Ediciones Uniandes, Academia Colombiana de Historia, Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, and Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, pp 53–73 Estrella E (1989) Introducción histórica: La Expedición de Juan Tafalla a la Real Audiencia de Quito (1799–1808) y la “Flora Huayaquilensis”. In: Tafalla Navascués JJ (ed) Flora Huayaquilensis: sive, Descriptiones et icones plantarum Huayaquilensium secumdum systema Linnaeanum digestae. Tomus I. falla, vol 1. Instituto para la Conservación de la Naturaleza y Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid Estrella E (1995) Ciencia ilustrada y saber popular en el conocimiento de la quina en el siglo XVIII. In: Cueto M (ed) Saberes andinos. Ciencia y tecnología en Bolivia, Ecuador y Perú. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Lima Fernández J (2019) La solución del enigma botánico de las quinas. ¿Incompetencia o fraude? Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, La Orotava Freites Y (2000) La visita de Humboldt (1799–1800) a las provincias de Nueva Andalucía, Caracas y Guayana en Venezuela y sus informantes. Quipu 13(1):35–52 Garrido E, Rebok S, Puig-Samper MÁ (2016) El arte al servicio de la ciencia: antecedentes artísticos para la impresión total del paisaje en Alexander von Humboldt. Dynamis 36:363–390. http://scielo. isciii.es/scielo.php?script¼sci_arttext&pid¼S0211-95362016000200006&lng¼es&nrm¼iso Glick TF (1988) Preface, 1988. Reception studies since 1974. In: Glick TF (ed) The comparative reception of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp xi–xxviii Glick TF (2013) Darwinism in Latin America. In: Ruse M (ed) The Cambridge encyclopedia of Darwin and evolutionary thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 258–263 Gómez Gutiérrez A (2016) Alexander von Humboldt y la cooperación transcontinental en la Geografía de las plantas: una nueva apreciación de la obra fitogeográfica de Francisco José de Caldas. Startseite 17(33):22–49 Horta Duarte R (2013) Between the national and the universal: natural history networks in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Isis 104(4):777–787. https://doi.org/10.1086/674944 Humboldt Av, Bonpland A (1811–1833) Recueil d’observations de zoologie et d’anatomie comparée [Texte imprimé], faites dans l’Océan Atlantique, dans l’intérieur du Nouveau Continent et dans la Mer du Sud, pendant les années 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802 et 1803. F. Schoell et G. Dufour: [puis] J. Smith et Gide, Paris Humboldt Av, Bonpland A (1907/1807) Personal narrative of travels to the equinoctial regions of America during the years 1799–1804, vol 1. George Bell & Sons, London Kreimer P, Vessuri H, Vehlo L, Arellano A (coords) (2014) Perspectivas latinoamericanas en el estudio social de la ciencia, la tecnología y la sociedad. Siglo XXI, México City Lafuente A, Elena A, Ortega M (eds) (1993) Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid y Doce Calles, Madrid

5

History and the Quest for a Historiography of Scientific Explorations and. . .

115

Meunier R, Nickelsen K (2018) New perspectives in the history of twentieth-century life sciences: historical, historiographical and epistemological themes. Hist Philos Life Sci 40(1):19. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s40656-018-0184-3 Molina Jiménez I (2001) La ciudad de los monos. Roberto Brenes Mesén, los católicos heredianos y el conflicto cultural de 1907 en Costa Rica. Editorial Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, San José Nieto Olarte M (2006) Remedios para el Imperio. Historia natural y la apropiación del Nuevo Mundo. Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá Nieto Olarte M, Muñoz Arbeláez S, Díaz-Piedrahita S, Arias de Greiff J (2006) La obra cartográfica de Francisco José de Caldas. Universidad de los Andes, Academia Colombiana de Historia y Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, Bogotá Nieto-Galan A (2015) Centers and peripheries revisited: STEP and the mainstream historiography of science. In: Arabatzis T, Renn J, Simões A (eds) Relocating the history of science: essays in honor of Kostas Gavroglu. Springer, Cham, pp 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31914553-2_6 Obregón D (1994) Historiografía de la ciencia en Colombia. In: Tovar Zambrano B (ed) La historia al final del milenio. Ensayos de historiografía colombiana y latinoamericana, vol 2. Editorial Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, pp 539–618 Ortiz Crespo F (1994) La Cinchona Antes y Después del Virreinato del Conde de Chinchón. Interciencia 19(3):130–136 Pruna Goodgall PM (2013) Charles Darwin y Panamá. In: Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 415–424 Puig-Samper MÁ (2018) La Recepción del Evolucionismo en el mundo Hispánico, una Revisión Comparada. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo desde el sur del sur. Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 15–32 Puig-Samper MÁ (2019) El Evolucionismo. El Colegio de México, Ciudad de México Quintero Toro C (2012) Birds of empire, birds of nation. A history of science, economy, and conservation in United States–Colombia relations. Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá Raj K (2007) Relocating modern science. Circulation and the construction of knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills/Basingstoke/Hampshire/New York Restrepo Forero O (2002) Leyendo historias sobre el darwinismo. In: Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Galera A (eds) Evolucionismo y Cultura. Darwinismo en Europa e Iberoamérica. Junta de Extremadura, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Editorial Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 21–45 Restrepo Forero O (2009) El darwinismo en Colombia: visiones de la naturaleza y la sociedad. Acta Biol Colomb 14(5):23–40. https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/actabiol/article/view/10828i Ruiz Gutiérrez R (2019) Prólogo. In: Sarmiento M, Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Naranjo MC, Betancor MJ, Uribe JA (eds) Reflexiones sobre darwinismo desde las Islas Canarias. Doce Calles, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Madrid, pp 11–20 Safford F (1985) Acerca de la incorporación de las ciencias naturales en la periferia: El caso de Colombia en el siglo XIX. Quipu 2(3):423–435 Valencia-Restrepo D (2018) Contribución de Francisco José de Caldas a la fundación de la geografía de las plantas. Rev Aleph 52:185 Vila P (2018/1960) Caldas y los orígenes eurocriollos de la geobotánica. Revista de la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Revista Acad Colomb Ci Exact 11(42): 153–157. https://doi.org/10.18257/raccefyn.753 Villarreal CA, De Gracia GI (2017) La recepción inicial del darwinismo por el Panamá decimonónico. Societas 19(2):107–147. https://revistas.up.ac.pa/index.php/societas/article/ view/392 Wilson EO, Gómez Durán JM (2010) Kingdom of ants. José Celestino Mutis and the dawn of natural history in the New World. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin America Adriana Novoa

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darwinism and the Emergence of History of Science and History of Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peripheral Darwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The 1990s Shift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darwin Studies, from Diffusion to Global History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

118 118 123 128 129 132 132

Abstract

The historiography of the comparative reception of Darwin’s work in Latin America developed a subfield that addressed crucial problems in the dynamics that characterize the exchange of knowledge among different societies. This chapter analyzes the progression of Darwin studies from the reasons that explain the lack of interest in Darwinian evolutionism by the first half of the nineteenth century, and the pioneer work of Thomas Glick in the 1970s, to the most recent contributions produced in the field of global history. The review of this scholarship helps us to recognize the contributions that this scholarship made to Darwin studies, and in general to history of science, including the importance of communication, the formation of international networks that circulated information, and the problems brought by the specialization that led to the formation of new scientific fields.

A. Novoa (*) Department of History, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_2

117

118

A. Novoa

Introduction In 1975 John C. Greene wrote that in the previous two decades there had been a striking development of Darwin research that led to the “emergence of a recognizable field of Darwin studies cultivated by a substantial number of scholars in reasonably close touch with each other and engaged in a productive dialogue involving clearly articulated difference of approach, methodology, and interpretation” (1975, 243). In 1972 there had been a conference held at the University of Texas, Austin, about the comparative reception of Darwinism where only two countries represented the Iberoamerican world, Spain and Mexico. Thomas F. Glick was one of the leading organizers of this event who became not only pioneer for Darwin studies, but also in promoting the study of comparative reception of scientific ideas. Studies on Darwinian science grew up even more after this meeting to create an important subfield in the scholarship of Latin American history of science, and its progression was the result of an interaction of local and international researchers over time. The vastness of the field requires precise limits; in this chapter, we focus on a specific historiographical trajectory that starts with the decline of Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionism that dominated in the Americas by the first quarter of the twentieth century, its consequences, the creation of a field in dissemination and comparative reception of Darwinism in Latin America linked to a center/periphery dynamic analyzed through national cases, ending with the study of global circulation of Darwinian scholarship around the world. Olga Restrepo Forero has correctly addressed how the historiography of diffusionist studies of Darwinism followed closely the historiographical changes of science studies from the beginning, from the most normative studies to the most recent efforts to understand dissemination as a process of adaptation and translation to complex local interests, and this is precisely what this essay will explain (2009, 43).

Darwinism and the Emergence of History of Science and History of Ideas Darwinian evolutionism’s importance declined by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and by the 1900s it was not clear what would be its place in the future. Herbert Spencer’s biology had been discredited by August Weismann, who provided irrefutable proof of its mistakes, shocking those who had faith in the doctrines of positivism in Latin America. In Argentina, the Spencerian Ernesto Quesada wrote in 1907 that Darwin’s evolutionism did not have any proof of how variability happened and “heredity itself still waits for a definitive law that explained its functioning,” which resulted in the circulation of ideas that were all speculative (1907, 23). Spencer had provided a needed supplement to Darwin’s science, but by this time the former’s critics “had demolished without pity the majority of his doctrines,” which at the time were “confused more and more with the fog of what it was. . .” (1907, 87). The decline of scientific ideas that were the foundation of the ideology of

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

119

modernity in Latin America was partly responsible for the formation of a spiritual movement of regeneration among the youth of the educated elites; they rejected the supremacy of science over philosophy and the arts, or materialism over spiritualism, as it was explained in José Rodó’s Ariel published in 1900 and proposing a new philosophical idealism. The same issues were also present in Europe; for example, in a book of essays about Darwinian ideas, published in 1909, it was mentioned in the preface that it was not clear whether “Darwin’s views on the modus operandi of evolutionary forces” would receive “further confirmation in the future,” or whether they would be “materially modified” (Seward 1909, vii). In the same volume, an article by Weismann explained that it was not possible “to bring forward any actual proof of the selection-value of the initial stages, and the stages in the increase of variations,” which compromised the standing of natural selection, a key component of Darwin’s evolutionary theory (Weismann 1909, 49–50). Only after the modern synthesis was developed, in the 1930s and 1940s, would Darwin recover its relevance in evolutionary theory. The problems mentioned triggered a crisis because it was not clear how the Enlightenment’s unity of thought and universality could continue. Specialization related to the emergence of new scientific disciplines dominated higher education, and the universality provided by the humanities curriculum was seen as unnecessary by materialist thinkers. In 1915, during the Second Pan American Scientific Congress, the Argentine evolutionist José Ingenieros, who by now was specialized in philosophy, gave a speech in which he explained that during the previous century “the principle of evolution” was introduced to all human knowledge according to local experiences; to each “system of ideas” had corresponded a social order that had born and served “in function of its environment.” The drastic changes that resulted from the new science had led to a “contemporary universal crisis” that could only be resolved by a new organization of the universities. Specialization had led to the loss of a “system of general ideas” like the humanities; and a new one needed to replace it to provide “a synthetic direction for culture.” This system needed to be antidogmatic and socially applied, and “current,” meaning scientific, “and social,” which meant “American.” Ingenieros rejected past eclectic attempts to create a conciliation between “the old and the new” represented by the sciences based on experience, aiming to criticize pragmatism and Henri Bergson’s derived philosophies and sciences (1917, 18). According to Ingenieros, in the case of the biological sciences, this new system would provide “an exact notion of what humanity is as a zoological species and man as a member of this species”: they would teach to know “the development of psychic faculties related to the adaptation and survival of the varieties and race that were part of the species” (1917, 20). This was an expression of the materialist philosophy that circulated at the time; it repudiated metaphysics and Bergsonian vitalism which was viewed as an attempt to bridge the past and the present, which explains why Bergson received a Nobel Prize in literature and not in the sciences in 1927. Roswell C. McCrea, from Columbia University, was another speaker at the congress; he presented about the curriculum of a school of commerce, and in it he

120

A. Novoa

cited Joseph Wharton to explain how he had embraced “the humanities” and even “Darwin, with all his surprising success as a specialist, lamented the imperfect development which debarred him from enjoyment of art and music” (1917, 274). These different ideas are a good example of the split that existed at the time about the meaning of humanity, and how it could be possible to link the old humanistic culture with new societies dominated by evolutionary thinking. It is in this context of ideological uncertainty that two new historical fields started to be developed to unite science and philosophy. History of science defended the unity of modern sciences, its intrinsic coherence, and its relationship with philosophy, which were the core of the humanistic program. Interestingly, those who came to define this discipline, and those who participated in it at this time, were not historians but chemists, biologists, physicists, and physicians, among some of the most popular fields. In Belgium, George Sarton, trained as a chemist, founded the journal Isis in 1913, and the next year he left for a position in the USA taking the journal with him and resuming its publication in 1919. Sarton also established in the 1930s a Ph.D. in history of sciences at Harvard, and an undergraduate major where many future scholars would be formed. In 1936 he defined science as “systematized positive knowledge,” and history of science as “the only history which can illustrate the progress of mankind. In fact, progress has no definite and unquestionable meaning in other fields than the field of science” (1936, 5). The use of the words positive and progress placed him as part of the positivist lineage whose extinction Quesada had mourned; but during this decade its defense was related to the failure of European politics that led to World War I and the emergence of fascism, an ideology that claimed for itself the connection to the ancient period traditionally associated to humanistic culture. Philosophers also helped to develop a field to reconnect philosophy with other disciplines by the 1910s. The philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, a student of William James, was a pioneer of this field, which became established during the 1930s. Lovejoy’s The great chain of being gathered the lectures he delivered in 1933, which was viewed as a great contribution to the establishment of history of ideas in the USA. This field had its own distinctive analytic method inspired by chemistry and attempted “to understand how new beliefs and intellectual fashions” were “introduced and diffused,” in order to elucidate “the psychological character of the processes by which changes in the vogue and influence of ideas have come about,” making clear, if possible, “how conceptions dominant, or extensively prevalent, in one generation lose their hold upon men’s minds and give place to others.” The title referred to ideas that had been “so closely and constantly associated that they have often operated as a unit,” creating one of the major conceptions in Western thought: “the Great Chain of Being” (1936, 20). For Lovejoy man was “by nature, and by the most distinctive impulse of his nature, a reflective and interpretative animal, always seeking rerum cognoscere causas,” including “the reactions of his intellect upon the brute facts of his sensible existence” which constituted, “an essential part of the natural history” of Homo sapiens (1936, 22). History of Science and history of ideas also framed the study of Darwinism in Latin America by the 1930s. In Mexico “history of science began to be considered an

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

121

independent discipline” in 1939 (Alonso-Pavón et al. 2020, 397). In 1952 Enrique Beltrán wrote a history of Mexican science from 1900 to 1950, and in 1957 the Mexican Society of History of Medicine was founded by Beltrán and Eli de Gortari both of whom produced groundbreaking work (Beltrán 1952, D’Ardois 1965). Darwin’s place in Mexican history, though, was defined by the philosopher and historian of ideas Leopoldo Zea, a student of the Spanish philosopher José Gaos, who had moved to Mexico after his country’s civil war, renewing the teaching of philosophy in Mexico. Zea understood ideas, including scientific ones, as an expression of social class, in this case the “scientific” class that started to control Mexico during the last quarter of the nineteenth century (1943). Under the weight of this foundational work, Comte, Darwin, and Spencer were linked to the ideology of nation building and progress, relegating the study of evolutionary science which was at this time being developed in a different context. History of ideas had been also relevant in the USA, partly because the field was included as one of the committees of the American Council of Learned Societies created in 1919. In 1947 the Committee on the History of Ideas in America was organized under the auspices of the Committee on History of the Pan-American Institute of Geography and History, partly funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, making possible to complete research on the reception of Darwinism as connected with positivist philosophy (Zea 1959). One of the authors connected to this project was the Panamenian Ricaurte Soler, who wrote a study of positivism in Argentina that paid more attention to the links between science and philosophy providing a new interpretation for this kind of thought in the country (1959). The 1930s were also very important for the study of evolutionary science in Argentina; in 1930 George Gaylord Simpson started his first stay in the country where he worked in the paleontology collections of the Darwinist Florentino Ameghino, establishing a close relationship with the latter’s brother, Carlos. His second visit, from 1933 to 1934, allowed him to continue his work on South American mammals, and a decade later he would publish work that contributed to the development of the modern synthesis. In 1933 the Spanish mathematician Julio Rey Pastor and the Italian chemist Umberto Paoli created the “Grupo Argentino de Historia de la Ciencia” [history of science’s Argentine group], which facilitated in 1939 the arrival from Paris of Aldo Mieli, who was responsible for developing the field together with Sarton. In 1919 he had created the journal Archeion for the study of history of science, which he continued editing from Paris where he went into exile for his socialist ideas. In France he created in 1928 the International Committee for the History of Science, whose name it would be later changed to Academy for the History of Science, and, in 1932, the Institute of history of science at the Centre international de Synthèse. According to Miguel de Asúa, Mieli’s history of science was framed “along the lines of the Enlightenment narrative, a parabola of progress that originated in Greece and culminated in the Italian Renaissance,” which led to his interest in synthetizing historical developments as it was the case with Sarton (Asúa 2018, 1139). Mieli vision for the new field was very influential, according to Robert Fox he believed in a history “that would be general” in the sense that “it would embrace all

122

A. Novoa

sciences and demonstrate their essential unity as pursuits that progressed through the application of a united concept of scientific method” (2006, 416). As it is the case with Miguel de Asúa, Fox also positioned Mieli as part of the positivist current. In Argentina, he was hired to work in Rosario, in the province of Santa Fe, as the director of the Institute of Philosophy and History of Science that had been created in 1938 at the Universidad del Litoral. At the institute he worked with whom it would become the leading historian of science in the country, José Babini, and from 1940 to 1943 he published four issues of the journal Archeion in Argentina. Its publication ended with the center in 1943 due to political events. Mieli moved to Buenos Aires where he died in 1950; until the publication of Quipu, in 1984, his was the only journal of history of science published in Latin America. Mieli’s interest in a synthetic narrative led to a project to write a multivolume history of science that started to be published in 1945, and for which he wrote the first five. Panorama general de historia de la ciencia became the most important text of history of science published in Spanish, and it ended up with 12 volumes, the last 7 written by Babini and the Hungarian historian of science Desiderius Papp, who had also moved to Buenos Aires. In 1961, the last volumes were published; the eleventh, covering biology and medicine of the nineteenth century, contained 12 chapters, several of which discussed evolutionary ideas that by now included the modern synthesis. It started with “the morphological unity of species” and it was followed by “First theories of evolution” which dealt with Lamarck’s ideas; “Darwin and the origin of species”; “The origin of man and the debates of Darwinian authors” discussed the work of Huxley, Haeckel, and Weismann; “The unicellular world, and the problems of reproduction and fecundation, the discovery of chromosomes” explained the work of Siebold; “The biological inheritance of evolution” addressed the work Mendel, Johannsen, de Vries; “the development of organic chemistry” explained the latest development on the field; “Physiology” introduced the ideas of Magendie, Müller, and Bernard, and there was also a chapter of psychology that also connected to evolutionism (Babini and Papp 1961). The scholarship of science in the 1960s departed from the focus on history, sociology became the main field of study. Pablo Kramer and Hebe Vessuri defined the study of science and technology in Latin America, from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, as characterized by “a strong political concern” that dominated “various sectors of the scientific and technological community.” This was the result of “the region’s technological dependence on the more advanced countries in industrial terms”; an absence “of virtuous relations between the development of S&T and innovations”; and, finally, the questioning “of the very nature of the sciences and their role in a peripheral context like Latin America” (2018, 21). Among those who favored a Marxian approach in their study of science, the influence of John D. Bernal’s science of science was very important; it proposed a discipline that examined itself using statistical examination and economic factors (Bernal and Mackay 1966). On the other side, George Basalla developed a simple path to understand science’s development that similarly than Rostow’s model created stages that went from dependency to autonomy to explain the emergence of national science (1967). “Colonial science was, in effect, considered a scientific adolescence

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

123

that might eventually grow with the new nation-states into the maturity that Europe had long since achieved” (Chambers and Gillespie 2000, 225). This perspective was centered on the dynamic of center/periphery that framed the movement of commodities and knowledge from the former to the latter. The main conflict among historians of science was what does influence scientific ideas, a controversy that divided two camps, “internalist” and “externalist.” As David Hull explained, the traditional internalist view was that “reason, argument, and evidence play the major role in science.” Sociopolitical factors were considered “extraneous if not downright detrimental”; on the contrary, for externalists science was influenced by the environment surrounding scientists. For example, Darwin “lived in a competitive, individualistic, dog-eat-dog society” and, for this reason, his theory was just as competitive and individualistic as Victorian society was (Hull 2005, 137–138). Central to the internalist–externalist dispute “is the commonplace distinction between causes, on the one hand, and reasons, views and ideas, on the other hand” (Hull 2005, 138). The relevance that the concepts of center and periphery played in the debates about Latin American science enhanced the disputes about internalist and externalist approaches.

Peripheral Darwin According to Thomas F. Glick, Darwinism was received in Latin America “always in relationship, whether explicit or not, with positivism,” a term created by Saint-Simon to describe “a scientific method and its extension to philosophy,” which for him explained why Darwin was before the 1970s studied mostly in the links of politics and philosophy, and little attention was paid to the specific elements of his science (Glick 2010, 258). While this is correct, it is important to recognize that the failure of Spencer, and the development of an evolutionary field with an uncertain place for this strain of Darwinism, made historians of science, who by this time were mostly scientists themselves, less inclined to pay attention to this type of evolutionism; as Ingenieros noted, this choice was not only the result of local conditions, but of the intellectual disarray that the incomplete understanding of evolution left behind. The emergence of history of science and history of ideas reconnected made possible to return to a linked general understanding of science. In the 1970s the field of reception and diffusionism of Darwinian science became important for both historians and philosophers of science. David Hull made a compilation of reception among the scientific community, and Thomas Glick edited a volume with the essays presented in the conference about Darwin he had organized in Texas in 1972 (Hull 1973; Glick 1974). It was the beginning of a new historiographical trend because the attention was placed in the actual scientific ideas and how they were received and popularized in Latin America instead of just placing them as associated with a philosophical and political project. In Glick’s view, by the 1970 there was “very little tradition in comparative history of ideas” and “almost none at all in the history of science” (Glick 2010, 693). In terms of Darwinism, there were only two national studies of note, and Glick’s leadership was crucial to define

124

A. Novoa

this field. Since he was a historian of Spanish medieval science and technology, his work required him to analyze a multicultural society that interacted for centuries; cultural exchanges, conflicts, appropriations, negotiations, and assimilations were part of his material, which made him flexible to the introduction of different methodologies from the social sciences, something that was not so common at the time. In an article about acculturation, written with Oriol Pi-Sunyer in 1969, they introduced acculturation and anthropological theory of culture to provide “a scientifically valid theory of cultural relations” (Glick and Pi-Sunyer 1969,138). In this view acculturation aimed “at providing a dynamic model applicable to all culture change resulting from external influence.” This was not a unidirectional force, culture “is never in a ‘steady state’” but is “always a system with multiple feed-backs: every change, every new experience, alters, however little, the criteria according to which future experience, future opportunities are to be judged” (Glick and Pi-Sunyer 1969, 139). Years later, Glick defined the term diffusion as one of the processes of acculturation that referred “to any learned hypothesis that posits an exogenous origin for most elements of a specific culture of cultural subset.” It was for this reason that he started to create a field of comparative history of science with a clear understanding of the complexities brought by cross-cultural exchanges (Glick 2000, 118–119). The organization of the 1972 conference was led by Glick together with the historian and philosopher of science Michael J. S. Hodge, and Alexander Vucinich, a historian of science and social dynamics; they framed the understanding of comparative reception of Darwinism, specifying the content expected from the study of national cases in this way: the sequence of the primary diffusion of the Darwinian corpus (translations, editions, reviews); the sequence of pro- and anti-arguments in each country, factors encouraging or inhibiting the reception of evolutionary ideas: philosophy and ideology; national scientific traditions, the role of scientific institutions, organized religious or political pressure); the sociology of Darwinism; variable institutional, disciplinary and regional penetration of Darwinism; the impact of Darwinism on scientific research, as well as on other areas of thought, the social sciences in particular. (Glick 2010, 694)

The result of the essays presented at the meeting ended up being different, but extremely influential in spite of the criticism some received related to the absence of a methodology in the studies of reception, and the uneven quality of the work. Latin America fell as an example of a reception defined under the category of “substitution phenomenon” because “natural history was undernourished” and “the university structure was thin” in this area which led to a reception, dissemination, and popularization of Darwinian ideas mediated by “lawyers and professors of philosophy, who stressed the perceived immorality of social Darwinism, in stark contrast to the puerile attempts, mainly of clerics, to rebut biological evolution with outmoded clichés drawn from theology,” and shaped by “appropriate Cuverian notions of type” (Glick 2010, 694). The volume included two articles about the Iberian American world, one about Spain, written by Glick, and the other about Mexico written by

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

125

Roberto Moreno. The latter emphasized the importance of education and focused on the analysis of the Comtian Gabino Barreda, who rejected Darwin, and the biologists, such as Alfonso L. Herrera, who followed him. In history of science, the model of Basalla continued to be prominent; Mauricio Nieto wrote in 1995 that in the case of the studies in Latin American science the influence of this author continued still in “some more recent and recognized work that had a concrete interest in the diffusion of Western science, such as the case of Lewis Pyenson,” because historians of science “had shown little interest in problems of appropriation, domination and explotation” (1995, 5). But, according to James Poskett, the model of Basalla of “treating the relationship between colony and metropole as relatively fixed and one-way” started to be abandoned and new influences started to change the historiography during the 1980s (2020, 235). In 1981, Arnold Thackray characterized the field of history of science as entering a new phase. There was in progress a process of “redefinition of what constitutes science” that resulted in “less emphasis on great ideas, great doctors, and great inventions, and a new awareness that science is a profoundly social phenomenon, deeply imbedded in culture” (1981, 304). Also, for the first time, those who were being trained in the discipline were not scientists first, which originated complaints about the loss of science in the field. According to this article, there was such an openness to other fields that “the subject will profit from the newer historical interest in sociological and anthropological methodology, and what Geertz has called “the interpretative turn” in the social sciences (1981, 305–306). This process had already started in the studies of science in and about Latin America; in 1983 Elena Díaz, Yolanda Texera, and Hebe Vessuri edited a compilation of eight articles, seven written by women, that provided new perspectives from the sociology of science (Vessuri 1983). Under the title Peripheral science [Ciencia periférica], it analyzed the sciences in Venezuela and its emergence from an “academicism” and “scientificism” that created a “metascience” that failed to contribute to local thought. The same had happened in the Darwin studies field where Glick had already introduced a dialogue with other disciplines, in his case anthropology, which might explain why he wrote mostly critically about the “new history of the 1980s”; he did not see the novelty in it. He insisted that Thackray’s essay supported this fact in his hinting that “the composition of the polemic between internalists and externalists resulted in a new synthetic approach to the history of science” that was different from the history of science of the past (1985, 399). Arturo Argueta Villamar’s book about comparative Darwinisms in Bolivia and Mexico identified two tendencies in the field; first, the one that affirmed the strong eurocentrism of modern science. On the contrary, the second affirmed the need of comparative studies of the reception of ideas “in order to identify cultural inflexions that they acquire when filtered by different countries and populations” (2009, 20). Among the earliest publications were Marcelo Montserrat’s work on the evolutionary mentality of the intellectual elite of Argentina known as “generación del ’80” that begun his important historiographical contributions (1980). Two years later, Bernardo Márquez Bretón published his book on the origins of Darwinism in Chile (1982), and Glick produced an analysis of reception of Darwin in Spain that

126

A. Novoa

had important connections with Spanish American countries, such as the clarification of the many translations of Darwin’s writings published in Spanish, and the publications of the Spanish anti-Darwinians that debated evolutionism (1982). Gabino La Rosa Corzo’s study of Cuba appeared in 1983 with a very interesting analysis of the debates about Darwinism in the island focusing on the reception of Darwin’s work as part of the debate among materialists and idealists in Cuba. The next year several important works were published; the Mexican historian Roberto Moreno introduced a new perspective to understand the debates about Darwin in Mexico, generating an important line of research that continues to be relevant today in terms of national reception cases (1984). Eduardo L. Ortiz, a member of the Argentine group of history of science, presented an essay on the debate among Ameghino, Holmberg, and Burmeister caused by the introduction of Darwinism, and the specific scientific reasons that were raised in its favor and against it (1984). In 1987 Rosaura Ruiz completed two important works that separated biology and philosophy in the study of Darwin in Mexico, a field in which she will continue participating in the coming years, sometimes associated with Glick (1987a, b). Two years later, Glick released a study of Darwin in Uruguay that was important because it came out in Montevideo, and in Spanish, which made his model more accessible to local researchers (1989). Around the same time, a more detailed scholarship of the Cuban case emerged with a book written by Pedro M. Pruna and Amando García González, a major contribution to the understanding of Darwin in Spanish American context because it followed Glick’s attention to biological science emphasizing the existence of a “cultural evolutionist movement,” and the role it played in the introduction of the actual science (1989, 16). The interest in the connections between Darwin’s theory and racial ideas increased when Nancy Leys Stepan’s The idea of Race came out. In it, she connected Darwin with a different understanding of race because he “himself carried out the task of accommodating the new evolutionary science to the old racial science. As a result, many aspects of the old racial science passed more or less intact into the postDarwinian decades” (1982, 52). Cultural historians like Stepan brought a different way to study race, rather “than studying elite intellectual change, historians of science argued that racial thought was embodied in popular culture” (Poskett 2020, 233). The growing scholarship on studies of reception also included the publication of a revised edition of Glick’s (1974) compilation by the end of the decade; the same essays were revised, and several comparative studies were added demonstrating the expansion of the field (1988). Another important event by the end of this decade was the growing rejection in Latin America of the center/periphery dynamic. Marcos Cueto published his doctoral dissertation, codirected by Nancy Leys Stepan, in 1989, illuminating the limitations of the concept of peripheral science had for historians of science, preferring “science in the periphery” instead. Peripheral science implied for him that the science of underdeveloped countries was “marginal to the international system of knowledge in terms of resources, number of researchers, and quality and quantity of the topics researched.” He used science in the periphery to

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

127

enhance “that not all the science of the underdeveloped countries” was marginal to the body of world’s scholarship; he proposed a model that understood differences as the product of each culture and their interactions with the international science (1989, 28–29). The 1980s also saw a very productive collaboration among scholars in the Americas that emphasized that “not all the science of the periphery was peripheral to local and world knowledge” (Cueto and Alves Duarte Da Silva 2020, 6). The organization of the Latin American Society for the Study of History of Science and Technology (SLHCT) in Puebla, Mexico, in 1982, provided the needed environment to search for a new path (Cueto and Alves Duarte Da Silva 2020, 4–5). This process continued with the renewal of science societies, and, as a result, in 1983, an important meeting took place in Bogota, the International Seminar for the Study and Methodology of the Social History of the Sciences in America Latina. [Seminario Internacional para el estudio de la metodología de la historia social de las ciencias en América Latina.] (Da Silva 2000). There were two more SLHCT congresses in 1985 and 1988 that increased the communication and debates around the best approaches for the historians of science. French scholars were also involved in the networks created at this time; Patrick Petitjean, Anne Marie Moulin, and Catherine Jami, organized in 1990 a conference in Paris about “Science and Empires” to compare Asian, African, American, and Oceanic countries that led to many publications (Cueto and Alves Duarte Da Silva 2020, 6). The growth in the scholarship was also supported by the creation of new publications; in 1984 the journal Quipu-Revista Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y Tecnología appeared, helping to increase the publications on history of science together with RBT: revista Brasileira de tecnologia and Revista da sociedade Brasileira de história da ciencia. As its name indicates, Quipu defended the idea that scientific and technological development was rooted in local contexts (Saldaña 1984). This shift in the studies of the sciences supported the training and scholarship of a new generation. Quipu’s editor, Juan José Saldaña, described how the historiography of this time could be divided into two main trends, the history of the scientific, technical, and cultural patrimony of countries and the history of the scientific contributions of Latin Americans to the development of the sciences. He also criticized the continuity of previous methodologies, and “economicist,” and “recursive” approaches to the history of sciences derived from the work of John D. Bernal who was with Boris Hessen and Edgar Zilsel responsible for a Marxist external program in the history of science (1983). In 1987 Vessuri wrote an article noticing how “scholarly work in the social study of science” had increased at “a considerable rate” (1987, 519). A “professional social study of science and technology” had emerged focusing on the “social functions of science and technology in the special historical conditions of particular national traditions” (1987, 519). This had led to the emergence “of a small cadre of sociologists and historians of science” who were professionally devoted to the social study of science (1987, 533).

128

A. Novoa

The 1990s Shift According to Glick, it was in the mid-1990s that the leadership in the field of dissemination “of Darwinism studies shifted from Europe to Latin America,” from the “core” to the “periphery,” precisely at the time when “core/periphery antinomy had migrated from economics to political science and history.” In June 1991, “the American History of Science Society met jointly in Madrid with the Spanish and Latin American societies to explore the multifaceted relationship between science and discovery” (Glick 1994). The reexamination of the traumatic relationship between the Americas and Europe reignited the interest in comparative studies, and in opening history of science to different cultural contexts. As a result, a volume edited by Antonio Lafuente, Alberto Elena, and María Luisa Ortega came out in 1993; in it a whole section was a reconsideration of Basalla’s model, including the whole context of the center-periphery analysis that resulted in a consideration of the notion of “peripheral” as not very helpful to understand the development of Latin American science. Led by Vesubi, one of the early proponents of the concept, the volume started a new cycle in the historiography of Latin American science, one in which contextual history became more prominent. (Chambers 1993). Nancy Leys Stepan made another crucial contribution when she argued that through “the study of the history of eugenics in Latin America, as a special kind of social knowledge produced out of, and shaped by, the political, historical, and cultural variables peculiar to the area, our understanding of the meaning of eugenics in general is altered” (The hour of eugenics, 1991, 4). She concluded that the terminology of “center” and “periphery” was inadequate to understand the meaning of ideas; instead, she proposed to turn cultural history on its head “by proposing that careful consideration of at least one aspect of the history of ideas and its associated social practices in Latin America will suggest new ways of conceptualizing the meaning of eugenics in the modern era” (1991, 194). The book is focused on the twentieth century, but since Darwin had used and rejected Francis Galton in Descent of Man (1871), his response became relevant in the many studies on eugenics that appeared since this publication. The first book on evolutionism and positivism in Venezuela was published by the Argentine philosopher Angel Cappelletti (1992). In 1996, a group of historians of science started to meet and collaborate to produce works on the reception of Darwin’s work in Spain, Portugal, and all of Latin America. As a result of this communication in 1997 a “Colloquium on the reception of Darwinism in Iberoamerica: A comparative Analysis,” was held in Cancún, organized by Rosaura Ruiz and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Its influence is still felt today because out of it Glick, Puig-Samper, and Ruiz edited a volume that was published in Mexico in 1999 and 2 years later in the USA (1999, 2001). Unlike what had happened in the 1970s, by this time there were excellent case studies for Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Mexico, and Bolivia; and these cases were organized thematically in three sections: reception, social Darwinism, and eugenics; and, finally, the different analytical approaches to Darwinism were discussed by Glick, who conceptualize reception as “thetic,” “antithetic,”

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

129

“corrective,” and “extensional” or a combinational of different models. More importantly, Rosaura Ruiz and Francisco J. Ayala presented “a scheme of the basic aspects of Darwinism introduced in different countries.” Their proposal was based “upon a historical and epistemological analysis of the construction of Natural Selection Theory and its most important components” (Glick et al. 2001, xii). This book was the final stage of the model that had started to be developed in the 1970s and demonstrated to be quite resilient and consistent in its understanding of history of science. By this time the scholarship on history of science and Darwin studies had underwent a “sea change,” and the focus was not so much on national reception and diffusion, but “to test the variation that ideas undergo as they pass from center to periphery” (Glick et al. 2001, ix). This comparative study on reception also made clear the weaknesses of “center/periphery dichotomy from the perspective of the diffusion of scientific ideas.” Iberian Darwin studies “were slow in getting started and in some countries reception studies suffered from a mistaken view of the nature of positivism there” (Glick et al. 2001, ix), As Glick explained, the problem was that “authors had little interest in science and did not regard it as falling under the purview of philosophy,” and also the scholars failed to recognize that in those countries with a high Comtian tradition, such as Mexico and Brazil, “the Comtian phase was followed by an equally – if not more – tenacious Spencerian phase,” which introduced Darwinism first in social thought, and second in biological terms (2001, x). While this analysis was correct, it does not recognize that the demolition of Spencerian evolutionism, and the Darwinian ideas attached to it, made many scholars of science uninterested in studying it, particularly after the modern synthesis. In 2010, Glick reviewed the scholarship on Darwinian reception produced from 1972 to 2000, concluding that in reception studies essentialist definitions were avoided and, instead, “actors’ categories” were used. The majority of persons referring to themselves as “Darwinians” in the nineteenth century could probably not have been able to present a lucid account of what that term meant. This phenomenon leads to one final finding: “Darwinism” was “socially (and culturally) constructed; and so, for that matter, is ‘Darwin,’ as in Darwin’s impact or influence on individuals and groups.” Meaning needs to be assessed contextually; moreover, “the comparative perspective runs the risk of denying terms like ‘Darwinism’ any normative meaning” (2010, 701). The scholarship produced from 2000 to today reflects this emphasis on context and openness to new ways to amplify the meaning of Darwin’s work, as Glick himself did in this century’s contributions on the study of Darwinian reception in Brazil (Sá et al. 2003).

Darwin Studies, from Diffusion to Global History The situation of historical studies by the end of the twentieth century was analyzed by Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, who concluded that over the previous two decades “the confidence of the social sciences has been sorely tested.” Moreover, the

130

A. Novoa

“epistemological, disciplinary, political, and even moral foundations of the social sciences are very much at issue” (1999, 1). It was clear that by the 1980s “new modes of analysis had begun to displace social history, inaugurating what come to be known as the linguistic or cultural turn” (1999, 2). The resultant cultural theories were mostly led by the ideas derived from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, but by this time they were under attack, particularly the latter’s study of science. Still, “attentiveness to culture” remained among scholars, the cultural turn “and a more general critique of knowledge have contributed, perhaps decisively, to the enfeebling of paradigms for social scientific research” (Bonnell and Hunt 1999, 4). Hebe Vessuri also recognized the ongoing changes, describing making history of science in the twenty-first century as marked by “a widely shared feeling that we are at a crossroad, at the end of a knowledge regime and the beginning of another that marks a change in the ways of grasping the world” (2020, 810). Meanwhile, if we examine the field of comparative studies of Darwin’s reception, we can see something different; the network of scholars interested in Darwinism in Iberoamerica continue their work without this strong sense of disruption. The second colloquium on Darwinism took place in Spain in 2001 and it was also followed by a volume that dealt with a cultural analysis of evolutionism edited by Puig-Samper, Ruiz, and Andrés Galera (2002). The next gathering took place in Brazil and the topic was the participation of Alfred Russel Wallace in the formulation of national selection; the essays were included in a book that came out in 2009 the same year that the fourth meeting took place in the UNAM, Mexico. Since this was a special year for Darwin Studies, the volume contained chapters on Darwin in America, Darwin and his collaborators, anti-Darwinism and religion, social Darwinism and eugenics Darwinism and nationalism, and its contribution to literature (Bertol Domingues et al. 2009; Puig-Samper et al. 2013). These meetings continued in Ecuador, Chile, Palma de Mallorca, Buenos Aires, and Merida, Mexico, originating more publications (Cuvi et al. 2016; Vallejo et al. 2018; Sarmiento Pérez et al. 2019). The reason that might explain this continuation is the emergence of an interest in world, transnational and global histories that merged very easily with the program of history of science derived from of Glick’s project. Patrick Manning defined the task of a world historian as “to link speculation, logic, and evidence into a coherent analysis with the goal of developing broad, interpretative, and well-documented assessments of past transformations and connections” (2003, 36). This new world history was radically different from the one that attempted to synthetized experiences, its objective was to “add incrementally to the broad picture of global patterns in human history.” There is no master narrative that leads individual studies, instead the accumulation of scholarship “can be seen to be filling in outlines of the past in some areas where it was blank and to be revising previous views of the past in other areas.” This is a dynamic approach to history that allows reinterpretations according to even tiny changes produced by new work (182). Science studies started to be approached from a global perspective that focus on circulation and communication of knowledge. In 2009, on occasion of the anniversary of the publication of Origin of species, James Secord also explained that “to

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

131

understand the phenomenon of Darwin and Darwinism it makes sense to start with communication” (2010, 37). According to him, Darwinism became “a shared context to work through highly local, specific experiences in relation to transformations across the world” (2010, 46). The journal Nature also got caught in “Global Darwin,” commissioning articles on different parts of the world; the historian Jürgen Buchenau wrote the section about Latin America, but he repeated the traditional associations about Darwin’s influence in politics and social science, mostly through different racial ideas, particularly mestizaje (racial mixing), but very little was mentioned about the actual studies on Darwinian science in Latin America (2009). It seemed that the editors of Nature understood global mostly as cultural and not so much scientific. Kapil Raj account of how “the mobility and spread of the sciences beyond their site of origin” has become a major concern for recent science studies applies for the study of Darwinism in Iberian America and Spain since 1970s (2013, 341). In this field it has also been “convincingly shown that scientific propositions, artifacts, and practices are neither innately universal nor forcibly imposed on others” through a historiographical path that was created from Glick’s original program, including changes, adaptations, debates about the intrinsic problems of center periphery over time, and the development of a methodology that better allows to understand the interactions between science and culture (2013, 341). The work produced over five decades also supports that the circulation of scientific knowledge goes “through complex processes of accommodation and negotiation, as contingent as those involved in their production” (2013, 341). Since so much could be learned from this historiographic trajectory one is left to wonder why this scholarship has not received more attention particularly when it could inform those who study science globally. It is for this reason that the scholarship on comparative reception is still growing. New books and articles about Darwin in different languages or countries are being published, such as Darwin in Arabic, in Greece, in Korea, in Argentina, in Chile, in Japan, and in China. While there is unclarity about what global exactly means, they all use Glick’s work to ground aspects related with uses of reception and the circulation of ideas, indicating that this approach is still flexible enough to be adapted to deal with the problems of cross-cultural analysis of science in a global context. (Tikhonov 2010; Novoa and Levine 2010; Levine and Novoa 2012; Elshakry 2014; Schell 2013; Zarimis 2015; Godart 2018; Jin 2019, 2020). The only problem might be for some the outdated words used to explain certain processes than the actual cultural dynamic explained; for example, there is now a preference to replace “comparative” with the word “connected” to create a more symmetrical narrative, but it remains to be seen if we can connect without comparing first, or if we need to connect first to be able to compare later. This does not imply a criticism of global history of sciences since there has been excellent research linked to the historiography of comparative reception and circulation of scientific ideas. Global Spencerism, edited by Bernard Lightman, introduced the comparative study of evolutionary science as a global history of science, paying attention to “modes of communication in different national contexts, as well as the circulation of knowledge

132

A. Novoa

worldwide,” which also helps to clarify the differences between Darwin and Spencer and why the later became a more effective communicator of evolution worldwide (Lightman 2016, 3). Lightman recognized the importance that Glick had as a model, but it also mentioned that the emphasis on “reception” tended to obscure the active appropriation of Darwin’s ideas by those claiming to be for, and against, “evolution” (2016, 4). While this might be true for the 1980s, it is clear that Glick helped to move the historiography to a contextualist model since the 1990s. This implied the existence of networks and active appropriation; the main difference seems to be that while Glick tried to find areas that had cultural links, such as Spain, Portugal, and their ex-colonies, global Spencerism allowed comparisons that result from analyzing countries that did not have direct cultural links, such as Russia, Japan, China, USA, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Scandinavia, France, and the Arab world. The result, though, is returning to a perspective that connects science to nation building, a model that historians of science in Latin America had been rejecting, preferring the use of transnational science instead (Barahona 2015). Darwin Studies in Latin America also influenced the study of the science of Iberian Empires and colonialism, an area in which a program of comparative reception and Glick’s writings on Spanish history of science were used by scholars who had renewed the field in recent years with their analysis of knowledge’s circulation in local and global contexts (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006). One area in which this historiography has been less successful, though, is in understanding the intersection of Darwinian ideas and gender in a global perspective; in general, the corpus reflects that less attention has been paid to the gendered culture that resulted from Darwinian ideas in comparison with nation building, institutions, disciplinary development, or racialization of societies.

Conclusion The scholarship of reception and comparative studies started by Glick, and continued by scholars in Europe and the Americas, provides us with an excellent case study to understand the possibilities and limitations of developing the study of global science. Removing the concerns about outdated terms and concepts, the current knowledge of how Darwin’s ideas were negotiated, adapted, and at some point dismissed offers us an exceptional trajectory to determine how new scientific knowledge is communicated, the relevance of local culture, and its links with politics, at the national and international level. The abundant historiography that was developed since the 1970s offers us a valuable model to approach the future study of science in global and transnational contexts.

References Alonso-Pavón JA, Cheé-Santiago J, Granados-Riveros ML, Ornelas-Cruces M, Rojas ET, Barahona A (2020) A brief precis of the institutionalization of history of science in Mexico. Br J Hist Sci 53(3):397–406

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

133

Argueta Villamar A (2009) El darwinismo en Iberoamérica: Bolivia y México. Editorial CSICCSIC Press, Madrid Babini J, Papp D (1961) Panorama general de historia de la ciencia. Biología y medicina del siglo XIX, vol 11. Espasa Calpe, Buenos Aires Barahona A (2015) Transnational science and collaborative networks. The case of Genetics and Radiobiology in Mexico, 1950-1970. Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam 35(2):333–58 Basalla G (1967) The spread of Western science. Science 156:611–622 Beltrán E (1952) Medio siglo de ciencia mexicana, 1900–1950. Secretaría de Educación Pública, México City Bernal JD, Mackay AL (1966) Towards a science of science. Organon 3(1):9–17 Bertol Domingues H, Romero Sá M, Puig-Samper MA, Ruiz R (2009) Darwinism, meio ambiente, sociedade. MAST, Rio de Janeiro Bonnell V, Hunt L (1999) Beyond the cultural turn: new directions in the study of society and culture. University of California Press, Berkeley Buchenau J (2009) Global Darwin, multicultural mergers. Nature 462(7271):284–285 Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto Cappelletti AJ (1992) Positivismo y evolucionismo en Venezuela. Monte Avila Editores, Caracas Chambers DW (1993) Locality and science: myths of centre and periphery. In: Lafuente A, Elena A, Ortega ML (eds) Mundialización de la ciencia y cultural nacional. Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 605–618 Chambers DW, Gillespie R (2000) Locality in the history of science: colonial science, technoscience, and indigenous knowledge. Osiris 15:221–240 Cueto M (1989) Excelencia científica en la periferia. GRADE, Peru Cueto M, Alves Duarte Da Silva M (2020) Trayectorias y desafíos en la historiografía de la ciencia y de la medicina en América Latina. Asclepio. Revista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 72(2):1–14 Cuvi N, Sevilla E, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ (2016) Evolucionismo en América y Europa. Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid D’Ardois GS (1965) Historia De La Ciencia. Hist Mex 15(2/3):269–290 Da Silva MR (2000) História e historiografia das ciências latino-americanas: Quipu (1984–2000). Revista Brasileira de História da Ciência 7(1):47–57 Darwin C (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Ser. Murray, London. De Asúa M (2018) The “conflict thesis” and positivist history of science: a view from the periphery. Zygon 53(4):1131–1148 Elshakry M (2014) Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Fox R (2006) Fashioning the discipline: history of science in the European intellectual tradition. Minerva 44(4):410–432 Glick TF (1974) The comparative reception of Darwinism. University of Texas Press, Austin Glick TF (1982) Darwin en España. Península, Barcelona Glick TF (1985) Historiography review. Isis 76(3):398–399 Glick TF (1988) The comparative reception of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Glick TF (1989) Darwin y El Darwinismo: En El Uruguay y En América Latina. Departamento de Publicaciones, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias, Universidad de la República, Montevideo Glick TF (2000) Diffusion. In: Barfield TJ (ed) The dictionary of anthropology. Blackwell, Oxford, UK. (Electronic resource) Glick TF (2010) The comparative reception of Darwinism: a brief history. Sci Educ 19 (6–8):693–703 Glick TF, Pi-Sunyer O (1969) Acculturation as an explanatory concept in Spanish history. Comp Stud Soc Hist 11(2):136–154 Glick T, Puig-Samper M, Ruíz R (1999) El Darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, México City Glick T, Puig-Samper M, Ruíz R (2001) The reception of Darwinism in the Iberian world: Spain, Spanish America and Brazil. Kluwer, Dordrecht

134

A. Novoa

Godart C (2018) Darwin, dharma, and the divine: evolutionary theory and religion in modern Japan. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu Greene JC (1975) Reflections on the progress of Darwin studies. J Hist Biol 8(2):243–273 Hull DL (1973) Darwin and its critics. The reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution by the scientific community. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Hull DL (2005) Deconstructing Darwin: evolutionary theory in context. J Hist Biol 38(1):137–152 Ingenieros J (1917) La filosofía científica en la organización de las universidades. In: Proceedings of the second Pan American Scientific Congress, Washington, U.S.A., Monday, December 27, 1915 to Saturday, January 8, 1916, vol 4. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, pp 17–27 Jin X (2019) Translation and transmutation: the origin of species in China. Br J Hist Sci 52(1):117–114 Jin X (2020) The evolution of evolutionism in China, 1870–1930. Isis 111(1):46–66 Kreimer P, Vessuri H (2018) Latin American science, technology, and society: a historical and reflexive approach. Tapuya Lat Am Sci Technol Soc 1(1):17–37 Levine A, Novoa A (2012) Darwinistas! Brill, Leiden Lightman B (2016) Global Spencerism: The Communication and Appropriation of a British Evolutionist. (2016). Brill, Leiden Lovejoy AO (1936) The great chain of being: a study of the history of an idea. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Manning P (2003) Navigating world history: historians create a global past. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Márquez Bretón B (1982) Orígenes del darwinismo en Chile. Editorial Andrés Bello, Chile McCrea RC (1917) The curriculum of a school of commerce. In: Proceedings of the second Pan American Scientific Congress, Washington, U.S.A., Monday, December 27, 1915 to Saturday, January 8, 1916, vol 4. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, pp 274–281 Montserrat M (1980) La mentalidad evolucionista: una ideología del progreso. In: Gallo E, Ferrari G (eds) La Argentina del ochenta al centenario. Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, pp 785–818 Moreno R (1984) La Polémica del Darwinismo en México. Siglo XIX. UNAM, México City Nieto M (1995) Poder y conocimiento científico: nuevas tendencias en historiografía de la ciencia. Hist Crit 10:3–14 Novoa A, Levine A (2010) From man to ape. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ortiz EL (1984) La polémica del darwinismo y la inserción de la ciencia en Argentina. In: Actas II Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias, 3 volumes, vol 1. Zaragoza, n/p: pp 89–108 Poskett J (2020) Science in history. Hist J 63(2):209–242 Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R, Galera A (2002) Evolucionismo y cultura: Darwinismo en Europa e Iberoamérica. Doce Calles, Madrid Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R, Zamudio Varela G (2013) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. Doce Calles, Madrid Quesada E (1907) Herbert Spencer y sus doctrinas sociológicas. Talleres Graficos de la Penitenciaria Nacional, Buenos Aires Raj K (2013) Beyond postcolonialism and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science. Isis 104(2):337–347 Restrepo Forero O (2009) La mundialización del Darwinismo como proceso y como texto. Acta Biol Colomb 14:41–61 Ruiz Gutiérrez R (1987a) Resistencia a Darwin en México: El caso de la biología. Omnia 3(6): 51–57 Ruiz Gutiérrez R (1987b) Positivismo y evolución: introducción del darwinismo en México. Coordinación General de Estudios de Posgrado [y] Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City Sá MR, Glick T, Domingues HMB (2003) A Recepção do Darwinismo no Brasil. SciELO – Editora Fiocruz, Brazil Saldaña JJ (1983) Hacia una crítica histórica, teórica y metodológica de la historiografía latinoamericana de las ciencias. Cienc Tecnol Des 7(3):191–444

6

Darwin, Evolutionism, and New Approaches to the Historiography of Latin. . .

135

Saldaña JJ (1984) Presentación. Quipu 1(1):5–6 Sarmiento Pérez M, Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Naranjo Santana M d C, Betancor Gómez MJ, Uribe Salas JA (2019) Reflexiones sobre Darwinismo desde las Islas Canarias. Doce Calles, Madrid Sarton G (1936) The study of the history of science. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Schell P (2013) The sociable sciences: Darwin and his contemporaries in Chile. Palgrave Macmillan, London Secord JA (2010) Global Darwin. In: Brown W, Fabian A (eds) Darwin. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 31–57 Seward AC (1909) Preface. In: Darwin and modern science: essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the origin of species. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp i–viii Soler R (1959) El Positivismo Argentino Pensamiento Filosófico y Sociológico. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, México City Stepan N (1982) Idea of race in science: Great Britain, 1800–1960. Springer, New York Stepan NL (1991) The hour of eugenics: race, gender, and nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Thackray A (1981) Science, technology, and medicine. J Interdiscip Hist 12(2):299–314 Tikhonov V (2010) Social Darwinism and nationalism in Korea. Brill, Leiden Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruíz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) (2018) Darwin y el darwinismo desde el sur del sur. Doce Calles, Madrid Vessuri H (1983) La ciencia periférica. Monte Avila, Caracas Vessuri H (1987) The social study of science in Latin America. Soc Stud Sci 17(3):519–554 Vessuri H (2020) Latin America: a commentary. In: Slotten HR, Numbers RL, Livingstone DN (eds) The Cambridge history of science, The Cambridge history of science, vol 8. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 810–822 Weismann A (1909) The selection theory. In: Darwin and modern science: essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the origin of species. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 18–65 Zarimis M (2015) Darwin’s footprint: cultural perspectives on evolution in Greece (1880–1930s). Central European University Press, Budapest Zea L (1943) El positivismo en Mexico. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México City Zea L (1959) History of ideas in Latin America: recent works. J Hist Ideas 20(4):596–600

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the Nineteenth Century Toward a “Complex” Vision Juan Manuel Rodríguez-Caso

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications of “-Isms” (or Looking for Essentialism) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diffusionism, Comparative Studies, and “Complexity Principle” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Implications of a “Complex” Vision for the History of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postcolonialism and Circulation of Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appropriation Processes and Transnational Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Geographies of Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science and Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138 141 142 145 145 147 148 150 151 153

Abstract

Since the 1970s, there has been an interest in the “introduction” and “reception” of scientific ideas comparatively. Thomas Glick’s work has been the primary reference, through the cases of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin’s ideas in different geographical contexts. The comparative method has been extensively taken up to explain the influence of Charles Darwin’s ideas in the Latin American context, with emphasis on a diffusionist view. This perspective, based on the logic of the “Darwinian revolution,” has made it possible to deepen how life sciences were developed in Latin American countries. The countries that have received the most attention are Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, and work has been done in a good part of the region. The aim of this work is, based on a search of works on the introduction and reception of Darwinism in Latin America, to make a

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso (*) Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico División de Historia, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_3

137

138

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

classification in which writings can be located according to different contemporary historiographic proposals. The point is to show how, despite starting from a common logic such as the reception of Darwin’s ideas, the different works start – or at least it seems so – from proposals beyond diffusionism. This last point also serves to reflect on the implications for the history of Latin American science, since to focus in understanding a single set of scientific ideas has resulted in the historiographic oblivion of other proposals. Another point to emphasize is the need for social and cultural history in understanding the development of science.

Introduction The US historian George Basalla began his influential article on diffusionism in this way: “A small circle of Western European nations provided the original home for modern science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries” (Basalla 1967). The impact of diffusionism on historical reconstruction, not only of science but also of society and culture in general, is undeniable. The diffusionist perspective has served above all to understand how knowledge has circulated, always under the premise that certain parts of Europe are the origin of scientific practice, and that the rest of the world is a mere spectator, who passively receives the knowledge, and thus can “advance” as a “civilized” society. However, it is important to emphasize “how” knowledge is constructed and circulated, since it is increasingly common nowadays to find alternative interpretations of the center-periphery proposal. This idea should lead us to ask how scientific practice is conceived. This question becomes more relevant, on the one hand, when science is conceived as something only within reach of a few “geniuses,” or if, on the other hand, as the result of exchange and consensus within broad communities, especially in a geographical sense. A convenient reflection on the impact of diffusionism and how, in recent years, Latin American science historians have moved away is provided by Ana Barahona (2018). An essential part of this movement is to highlight the process of decentralizing national histories and bringing them into a transnational narrative. It is no less important to point out that reflections such as Barahona’s are part of international discourse, not only because they are written in English – the lingua franca of today’s academia – but also because of the dialogue established with the work carried out by historians of science outside Europe, or with interests outside Europe despite having been trained in that region. Possibly because of the language barrier, there are Latin American science historians who may be little known outside the region. Mexican historian Rafael Guevara Fefer is one such example. Unlike other Latin American authors – not only Mexicans – Guevara Fefer defends the legitimacy of the history of science written from the geographical context itself. As he points out, “[t]oday it is about to become fashionable, if not already so, to make a cultural history of science, a perspective that is only new because there is a laziness to thoroughly understand the trajectory of the historiography of science among the various experts engaged in reporting and reflecting on the scientific endeavour” (Guevara Fefer 2014).

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

139

Today it is increasingly common to talk about the history of science in a global context. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on what that means. There is a tension, often not accepted, between the history written from what is now colonially called the “Global South” and the work developed from the “Global North.” An example of such tension can be seen in Mexican biologist and historian Francisco Vergara Silva’s response to the article published in Nature by US historian Jürgen Buchenau. As Vergara Silva points out, the intention of Buchenau’s publication, as well as others that had as a pretext 2009, Darwin’s year, was to present the “notion that Darwinism ‘came to fill a void’ in our possibility of explaining the phenomena of human culture” (Vergara Silva 2015). Buchenau, in general terms, shows that Darwinism in Latin America served liberal governments to establish a form of “Latin American social Darwinism.” However, the main criticism leveled against this argument is Buchenau’s somewhat superficial view of the complexities of Latin American history. The latter is under the consideration that we are talking about an AngloSaxon author, whose central research topic is Mexican history. In the line of Vergara Silva’s criticism, the local development of disciplines such as anthropology is overlooked, or even the importance of positivism in the development of Latin American science, which authors such as another American historian like Thomas Glick have pointed out importantly. Moreover, we must add the tension between history written by historians or history written by scientists. Although it sounds trite, it is not necessarily the same history, each scholar emphasizes a different methodological aspect, and hence there are different approaches under which science is conceived in historical terms. For this chapter, these tensions can be found in the authors who in recent years have focused on the study of Darwin’s ideas in the Latin American region. As a clarification, the indiscriminate use of the term Darwinism throughout the text will be avoided because, as will be explained later, its polysemy results in a methodological problem that must be addressed. From the 1970s onward, in a logic derived from the diffusionism proposed by Basalla, a great interest arose in understanding the impact that “great” scientific ideas had had beyond their original proposal. Such ideas are those of authors such as Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein. In geographical terms, the objective was to understand how specific proposals had emerged in the context of the “modern world,” such as Europe and more recently in the United States, to be later disseminated in other “less developed” regions in social and cultural terms. The work that gives rise to comparative studies on Darwinism is the one coordinated by the American historian Thomas Glick. Glick’s own experience began with studies for the case of Spain, which later served him to explore Latin American cases such as that of Uruguay. In that first study, initially published in 1974 and reprinted in 1988, the only Latin American case presented was that of Mexico, by Mexican historian Roberto Moreno de los Arcos. More recently, Glick (2013) presented a concise summary in which he states: “Darwinism was received in Latin America always in relationship, whether explicit or not, with positivism.” The positivist schools, both Comtism and Spencerism, served as the basis for

140

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

establishing science as an authority within Latin American societies. One crucial point is that it was lawyers and doctors who took it upon themselves to defend the Darwinian agenda, a term that “usually meant social Darwinism because, as a general rule, the debate was about human society and the primary receivers of Darwinism, lawyers.” Derived from the momentum of Glick’s research, it is important to emphasize the work that has emerged as part of a series of meetings organized by scholars from various countries of the so-called “Hispanic” world since 1997, such as Rosaura Ruiz (Mexico), Heloisa Bertol Domingues (Brazil), and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper (Spain), among others. (The case of Spain will not be addressed in this chapter, but it is important to emphasize that it is a case that must be considered when discussing the Latin American case, given the cultural and historical proximity.) These meetings aim has been the study of Darwin’s ideas in the region, as well as their impact on different areas of knowledge. (So far, eight meetings have been organized, and each has resulted in the publication of a book. Another important milestone is the establishment of the International Network for the History of Biology and Evolution (Red Internacional de Historia de la Biología y la Evolución, RIHBE, in Spanish).) Much of the knowledge that exists on the subject is due to these meetings. In recent years, especially in the historical study of the relationship between science and religion, from works such as those of historians John H. Brooke and Ronald Numbers, the so-called “complexity principle” has been discussed. As has been pointed out by Brooke: complexity is both a historical reality as well as a critique of ahistorically simplistic approaches to understanding the relationship between science and religion. A corrective to essentialism and the tendency to impose a priori models on the past, complexity is a heuristic principle that should guide our research so that we are sensitive to how different contexts shape past understandings of science, religion, and their dynamic interface. Brooke’s complexity principle, then, is intended to encourage us to undertake rigorous empirical analysis of the past before coming to any conclusions about what theses or models, if any, might apply in a particular period. (Cited by Lightman 2019)

Beyond the always complicated discussion between science and religion, “complex” aspects such as sensitivity to the different contexts of scientific practice, and above all, deepening the evidence of the past, are elements that must be part of any historical reconstruction. This chapter first presents the problem that arises on categories commonly used within historical research: the “-isms,” to highlight the limitations that have been imposed by focusing on a set of ideas and not necessarily on the broad study of a phenomenon such as evolution. Subsequently, the scope of diffusionism today is discussed in the light of recent historiographical trends, such as the geographies of knowledge and postcolonialism. Finally, this chapter focuses on analyzing a selection of publications based on these and other historiographic currents and approaches, in order to propose a reinterpretation or expansion of historical reconstructions not only on the impact of Darwin’s ideas but also on the development of life sciences and medicine in Latin American countries.

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

141

Implications of “-Isms” (or Looking for Essentialism) This section is based on the reflections put forward by the Italian historian Antonello la Vergata (1985) and the Colombian sociologist Olga Restrepo Forero (2002). There is an unavoidable discussion, and it is the one related to the central concept of all the investigations that will be mentioned in this work: Darwinism. On this point, several criticisms can be pointed out in historiographic terms. One issue worth taking up again is the very use of terminology such as “-isms.” In the strictest sense, such a termination according to a basic dictionary look is understood as: “form nouns that usually mean ‘doctrine,’ ‘system,’ ‘school’ or ‘movement.’” This definition leads us to wonder whether the movement of ideas is considered to be a process in constant movement, in addition to the assumption that “every” member of that school or movement must necessarily adhere to every precept established as essential. If we think about it in the case of Darwin himself, who does not use Darwinism in his work, in the best of cases there are references to works by other authors, in which the common denominator seems to be the idea of evolution, but not a particular mechanism. In her provocative essay, Restrepo Forero (2002) asks whether it is possible to talk about ONE Darwinism, a situation that raises another question: Has the reception been normative? In the Anglo-Saxon context, Darwin scholars such as James Moore have made it clear that, even in Darwin’s time, like the 1860s in England, it is not possible to speak of a single set of ideas that had been called Darwinism, and at the same time, was accepted without any reservations among the different members of the Victorian scientific community. Moreover, trying to focus on a supposed set of ideas has no historiographic interest. Darwinism is a concept that has been subject to construction and deconstruction since the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), for the most diverse interests. Adhering to what Darwin said in his work is more complicated than it seems. For example, although the greater emphasis is usually placed on contributions such as the mechanism of natural selection, or the importance of variation, Darwin also includes arguments such as the inheritance of acquired characters in his evolutionary explanations. In the mid-nineteenth century, there were naturalists like Alfred R. Wallace who defended Darwinism as an explanation in terms of natural selection only, reverends like Charles Hodge assuming it was an atheistic ideology, or botanists like John Stevens Henslow explaining that “true Darwinism” was based on the influence of the environment. This problem, the defense of a “Darwinian Revolution” in which Darwin and his (supposedly) ideas on evolution, is an extension of assuming in a strict sense the discussions among biologists – not necessarily historians – at least until the end of the twentieth century. la Vergata (1985) pointed out: “there is an intrinsic limitation in studying the reaction of something that is not well known in its condition before the reaction,” because the interest of the “Darwin industry” was for many years to study the reception of Darwin’s ideas in works such as the Origin and The Descent of Man (1871) exclusively. Furthermore, it is only recently that knowledge has expanded not only about Darwin and his work, but also about Victorian science in general.

142

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

How useful is it really to talk about of just one explanation, a single, definitive Darwinism? In line with what Moore said, Restrepo also reflects that as a historiographic strategy it forces us to look for theoretical elements that are supposed to be fulfilled, in order to guarantee an “authentic” reception. Moreover, this leads to the consideration that the circulation of ideas is carried out in only one direction, which reaffirms the diffusionist discourse since it reinforces ideas such as the “importance” of the development of science in “developed countries” (as the active part of the process of transmission of knowledge) as opposed to the “scarce” contribution of the “less developed countries” (as the passive part of the process of transmission of knowledge). Most ironically, sometimes there are Latin American scholars who themselves reinforce these diffusionist stereotypes. Afterward, we will discuss why, regardless of time, seeking to understand the normative reception – as proposed by Restrepo – of a set of scientific ideas in different geographical and cultural contexts, is an extension of diffusionism. A terminological issue related to the abuse of the Darwinian concept is that of evolutionism. Darwinism is often used as a synonym for evolutionism, which results in the obscuring, conscious or unconscious, of other evolutionary proposals. Moreover, it is a scarcely reflected appropriation of a discussion that for many years took place exclusively in the United States, such as the conflict between “evolutionism” and “creationism.” A related issue is a subordination involved in talking about “Spencer’s Darwinism” or “Haeckel’s Darwinism,” to mention just two examples. There is an overinterpretation since the ideas of one author seem to have less importance concerning the other. The process of translation, interpretation, appropriation, and even misrepresentation is neglected as an integral part of the circulation of knowledge. In short, the logic of diffusionism and the “Darwinian revolution” is implicitly supported. From the growing evidence that emerges day by day from work done in different parts of Latin America (even in other parts of the world), it is clear that it is becoming increasingly complicated to speak of a single set of ideas only as that which was introduced and disseminated in a particular geographical region. To return here to the idea of “complexity” necessarily implies paying attention to individuals, and how each one knew and interpreted a broad set of ideas. This view almost inevitably implies leaving behind an idealism that still prevails among some historians of science, which is to continue to conceive of science in terms of static internalism, in which scientific knowledge is governed by colonialist, hierarchical, and even doctrinal visions.

Diffusionism, Comparative Studies, and “Complexity Principle” The concept of reception is often understood in diverse ways. In the works focused on the reception of Darwinism in Latin America, there is not a clear definition in each one. Instead, there is a universal logic, which is to look for traces, sometimes as small as they seem, of what is understood as Darwinism. For example, the first mention of Darwin’s work is sometimes sought in an almost compulsive manner. Furthermore,

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

143

part of that compulsion is to look for it in the “scientific” work of each region. Speaking of compulsion, beyond the pejorative sense, is the insistence on seeking Darwin’s ideas possibly where they are not. Thomas Glick, together with Mark G. Henderson (1999), provided one of the few methodological analyses that exist on the case of reception of scientific ideas applied to Darwin’s case (and also to Freud and Einstein). The beginning of their argument is revealing: The reception of scientific ideas, especially fundamental ones such as those proposed by Darwin, Freud or Einstein – when analysed according to an affective and comparative taxonomy – can be seen as entities whose development is constrained according to easily identifiable variables. Such parameters can be categorised according to the following demarcations (some of which refer more to scientific reception than to popular reception): professional or disciplinary cultures, generational factors, philosophies of science (particularly in scientific reception), transnational dissemination, religion, level of education, political ideology, national economic or institutional infrastructures, and the personae or imagined personalities of scientists. (Glick and Henderson 1999)

Both authors argue that we must understand that there are two distinct types of reception, the scientific and the popular. Nevertheless, where are the common elements between both areas? It seems that under this premise, scientists belong to a different society, or that the so-called popular reception has different merit. In any case, Glick and Henderson understand that there is no single process of reception, but that for them, there are at least four forms: antithetical, thetic, corrective, and extensional. It is essential to understand that these are not exclusive logics, but on the contrary, they tend to overlap. For them, the antithetical “takes shape through popular and scientific resistance based on the maintenance of some pre-existing ideological position.” The thetic is an equivalent of doctrinal, “it is an attempt to grasp the original content of the scientific idea within a given scientific discipline.” The corrective “takes form as a limitation or quasi-scientific revision of the original thematic content of an idea, and/or as a combination of resistance and appropriation.” And the extensional “takes shape through cultural or artistic appropriations in political and social environments.” In conclusion, Glick and Henderson concede that receptions can be active or passive, with the former “tending to appropriate” and the latter “resisting the new.” Based on this tension between active and passive, “the normative aspect of the diffusion of scientific ideas, therefore, illustrates, below an analytical division of reception, the meta-scientific notion that science is never adopted as science in the first place, but as a product linked to the position of a particular group or individual” (Glick and Henderson 1999). Recently, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper (2018) reflected on the route that studies on Darwinism have taken in the Hispanic world. He clarifies that since the beginning of such studies, “the comparative study of scientific ideas [. . .] clearly demonstrated the weakness of the centre/periphery dichotomy, from the perspective of the dissemination of scientific ideas.” Moreover, he even goes further, pointing out the remoteness of the new historical and cultural approaches with the “primitive conceptions of diffusionism.”

144

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

He also recognizes that Eurocentrism has been a recurrent problem within these analyses and that it has contributed positively and creatively to the understanding of Darwin’s ideas. However, his reflection emphasizes the need to look even more closely at work on the cultural history of knowledge. Among the authors to consider are James Secord, Kapil Raj, and Jürgen Renn. Each of them brings new ways of understanding science in historical terms. For example, understanding the role of the circulation of knowledge implies a greater involvement with the history of books, journals, and periodicals. Also, be aware that assuming scientific practice having a European origin implies elements such as colonialism and imperialism, which over the years has resulted in adopting certain forms of scientism, understanding that other forms of knowledge are of lesser importance, and alternatively, understanding that science is a practice situated in geographical and historical terms, which implies a more precise knowledge of local history. Derived from these perspectives, “[I]t has been shown that scientific propositions and practices are not imposed on others, nor are they innately universal. Science is disseminated through complex processes of accommodation and negotiation, as contingent as those related to production” (PuigSamper 2018). Both Glick and Henderson’s and Puig-Samper’s methodological proposals emphasize, without calling it as such, the “complexity principle.” Both proposals, distant in time, go beyond a single way of understanding the reception of scientific ideas. Nevertheless, this does not mean that such plural approaches have been used in the different works that have been done to date on the reception of Darwin’s ideas in Latin America. As mentioned at the beginning, a taxonomy will be made from a selection of works, to show that, although the logic of diffusionism is maintained in most cases, it is increasingly common to find research that departs from that logic. Why is it considered necessary here to make this taxonomy explicit? First, because there is no explicit method to study the reception of scientific ideas. Unless a “normative reception” is advocated, it is necessary to look beyond it. Appealing to “complexity” implies understanding, for example, that each country – and even each geographic region that can be considered, such as a state, a province, or a municipality – has particularities, considering that hypothetical region in a historical context forces us to understand details that may be unique. Also, one must avoid considering regions in isolation, that is, knowing in detail – a debatable idea, given the amount of information involved – a country is not useful for extrapolating that knowledge to others. Even if there are similarities, care must be taken with analyses and conclusions. An example of the latter is the influence of positivism in Latin America during the nineteenth century. A first complexity is in differentiating schools of thought such as Comte’s or Spencer’s. Recently, the work edited by Bernard Lightman (2016) on “global Spencerism” shows an advance in the understanding of the diffusion of knowledge in the global context. This advance is notorious since the points on which the different essays in the collection focus are the circulation of ideas and their appropriation. In advance, these ideas oblige us to consider that knowledge and not only scientific ideas are in permanent movement, but that circulation also is not unidirectional. Knowledge must be understood in interactive

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

145

terms – that is, even scientific ideas are developed within a concrete society, so understanding that society becomes indispensable – and that there is the active participation of the different individuals involved in the circulation. In short, there are differences in the way Spencer was appropriated in distinct parts of the world. Moreover, that is not a problem but significant strength.

Implications of a “Complex” Vision for the History of Science The history of science must be understood as a reconstruction of complexities. In this section, the generalities of the different approaches, from which the taxonomy suggested in this chapter, are raised. As a clarification, considering the different historiographic methodologies does not imply that they should be taken separately. On the contrary, and although talking about a “complex” vision may be evident for scholars trained as historians, the different proposals listed below can be understood together. In this last sense, another pertinent clarification is that the works selected for this chapter can be considered in different historiographic currents at the same time. It is not intended to include here every current historiographic proposal, but to consider those that allow the understanding of the selected works beyond a diffusionist logic.

Postcolonialism and Circulation of Ideas One of the historiographic proposals that currently play a significant role in current discussions is postcolonialism. In general terms, it is the type of concept for which there is no consensus as to its definition and scope. It can be understood as a frontal criticism of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, which leads to questioning the power of European thought in the rest of the world. Even talking about European is a problem of definition, since under that geographical category only a few countries are considered, usually England, France, and Germany. In the recent history of science, authors such as Kapil Raj are an example of this discourse. However, considering the consequences of a post-colonialist discourse on the understanding of the reception of Darwin’s ideas in Latin America should lead to questioning the very idea of these studies. Why? In simple terms (too much so), Darwin was a British author, whose ideas reflect colonialist and imperialist thought itself. To insist on seeking the ideas of such an author is to reaffirm scientific imperialism. In other terms, it means that diffusionism is still present, as far as Latin American scientific work seems to depend on theories developed abroad. A less extreme assessment is that which brings together a more flexible postcolonialist vision with the circulation of ideas. By recognizing that ideas are in permanent movement, the result is that an interpretation of ideas is promoted. The idea of circulation then allows us to conceive that there are different senses for that movement, and that there are no active and passive individuals, but that all play a role in the construction of knowledge. Examples that explicitly propose an active

146

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

role for Latin American scientists and naturalists, not only in the reception of Darwin’s ideas, but also in their modification and use, are those of Cueto (1999), Novoa and Levine (2010), Levine and Novoa (2012), Guevara Fefer and Zamudio Varela (2013), Restrepo Forero (2013), Caponi (2017), and Miranda (2018). Whether from a community or a person, it is emphasized that in Latin America some naturalists and scientists understood Darwin’s ideas even before European “Darwinists.” Cueto, for example, is clear in his intention to show the influence of Darwinism on Latin American scientists and doctors, especially in the Andean region. He assumes that the discussions that took place in Peru have been less visible in historiography because they were less spectacular than those that occurred elsewhere. For historiographical purposes, the statement he makes for the Peruvian case can be extended to other regions: [. . .] it would be wrong to conclude that Darwinism and evolution had a marginal presence among Peruvian researchers. To identify and trace this presence it is necessary to stop considering Darwinism under the supposed dilemma of triumph or failure that sometimes hides behind the term “scientific revolution”, to tolerate the coexistence of various theories, some contradictory, about evolution, and to emphasise the search for patterns in the process of local adaptation and recreation.

The Argentine case, for example, with authors such as Florentino Ameghino, makes it clear that there was an influence whose sense was from South America to Europe. Ameghino’s anthropological work, establishing a genealogy for human beings with a possible South American origin, in Caponi’s opinion (2017), represents an advance in the theoretical discussion on the history of the human being during the nineteenth century. This statement is based on the fact that Ameghino’s theses were based on the evidence available at the time, and that to a certain extent, they represented an advance. Ameghino, like other Latin American naturalists, had a deep connection with Europe, both as the son of Italian migrants and as a result of having stayed in Paris, as well as maintaining continuous communication with European naturalists. On the other hand, works such as Márquez Bretón (1982), Ruiz Gutiérrez (1991), Montserrat (1999), Bertol Domingues and Romero Sá (1999), Glick (1999), Bueno Hernández, Pérez-Malváez, and Ruiz Gutiérrez ((2013), Ellero Gualtieri (2009), and Pruna Goodgall (2010, 2013) follow a logic close to diffusionism, insofar as they are defending the primacy of a “Darwinian Revolution.” Furthermore, the argument of looking for the “beginning” of “modern” science in each country perdures, which leaves aside local development, or the possible contributions of Latin American naturalists. It is even common to find a polarized discourse that defends a normative and idealized vision of Darwin’s ideas, for example, only recognizing as authentic “biologists” (derived from Glick’s early work, but above all from the methodology proposed by the French writer Yvette Conry in her work on the introduction of Darwinism in France, Latin American authors focused on understanding the influence of Darwin’s ideas exclusively in the field of the natural sciences and above all in biology. This situation has forced anachronisms, such as the categorization as biologists for naturalists. In a strict sense, the processes of institutionalization of the disciplines, which in cases such

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

147

as biology appeared formally in countries such as Mexico until the twentieth century, have been ignored. On the institutionalization of biology in Mexico, see Ledesma Mateos and Barahona Echeverría (1999). On the difference between naturalists and biologists, see Romero Sá and Benchimol (2009) and Guevara Fefer (2014).) those who “understood” the mechanism of natural selection – in the face of other evolutionary explanations, such as those derived from Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s proposal. The role of circulation in terms raised by the also mentioned James Secord opens new perspectives. Recognizing that scientific ideas were appropriated through literature allows for a broader understanding of the scope of Darwin’s ideas. For example, works such as García González (2002), Cheroni (2002), De Rezende Vergara (2009), Harrison Tupper (2018), Palma (2018), and Vallejo (2018) present books – especially novels – and newspapers in which the authors appropriate the discussions around Darwin’s ideas. A recurrent discussion in Darwinian studies has been the relationship between “scientific” and “social” reception. Authors such as Glick had insisted on drawing a line between both types of reception, on the understanding that there seemed to be no intimate relationship between them. However, the selected papers provide us with a broad view of how scientific ideas are disseminated in different contexts, without an understanding implying a strict separation between science and society, in which Darwin’s ideas were “misrepresented” or “misunderstood.” In any case, these are processes of appropriation. The work of Ruiz Gutiérrez, Rodríguez Caso, and Noguera Solano (2015) poses a situation that is insufficiently addressed in the context of Darwin and Latin America: translations. This case is, for example, an unexplored field. Although it is known that most translations of Darwin’s work – a comparable situation with Spencer – arrived in the region through French translations, there has been little discussion of this issue. Even the case of Spanish translations in distinct parts of the region is a pending issue.

Appropriation Processes and Transnational Networks The processes of appropriation and transnational networks are a further step within the proposal of the circulation of knowledge. The already mentioned collection of essays edited by Bernard Lightman (2016) on Spencer’s case at a global level is a step forward in comparative studies. As a clarification, appropriation is a process in which local actors internalize ideas coming from overseas for scientific and other purposes. In this consideration, works included here reflect the closeness that existed between the discussions on both sides of the Atlantic. One way of understanding such exchanges is the specific case of transnational networks, such as the work of Betancor Gómez (2018), Sevilla and Sevilla (2018), and Girón Sierra (2019). It is important to recognize that these works promote a vision beyond diffusionism, by reconstructing communications between groups of individuals in different geographies. One conclusion of this approach is to recognize the enormous intellectual activity in various parts of Latin America, as well as permanent communication with other cities. The case of Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro, widely recognized as

148

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

cultural centers, with the presence of academic institutions and museums on a par with the best in the world, reminds us that today more than ever it is vital to rethink the place that a region like Latin America has within the context of the history of science. Now these transnational journeys can also be understood from the contributions that overseas authors made in Latin America. Works such as Cueto (1999), West (2009), Argueta Villamar and Pardo (2013), Chabrán (2013), Sagredo Baeza (2015), and Sevilla (2016) remind us of the contributions that naturalists coming mainly from Europe made in local discussions. Even since Darwin himself traveled a good part of South America, there are continuous reminders of the role played by characters such as the captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, the Italian explorer Antonio Raimondi, the French naturalist Alfredo Dugès, the German naturalist Fritz Müller, the German explorer and Jesuit priest Franz Theodor Wolf, and the Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov, among others. Each is a different example of the understanding and dissemination of Darwin’s ideas, and its impact reached various disciplines, such as botany, zoology, and systematics. As previously discussed, the diversity of meanings of Darwinism implies recognizing the role these characters played in each context and serves to enrich the history of the natural sciences in Latin America.

Geographies of Knowledge A methodological proposal inspired by the “spatial turn” that could be particularly useful is the so-called geographies of knowledge. Indeed the focus of studies on Darwin’s ideas in Latin America starts precisely from understanding the reception of ideas in regional terms. In this respect, some assumptions are worth highlighting: When talking about the set of countries that make up Latin America, it is possible to speak of similarities as there is a “common” context, such as language (except for the case of Brazil); historical background such as having been part of Spain’s colonial territories for around 300 years; and accepting de facto an extension of the “Black Legend,” (this term refers to a historiographic proposal based on anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda.) which implies conceiving little or no scientific “development,” among other points. One of the weaknesses of many proposals is that they start from generalizations about the way Darwin was understood from what happened in one place, such as national capitals. A pending issue is to pay more attention to the provinces. In general terms, Latin American countries are characterized by profound centralism, in which the capital cities are the places where developments and advances occur in almost any area of society. However, the development of societies is exceptionally disparate, and how discussions about evolution in the provinces could have been understood, we will indeed find alternative versions. In the same vein, when talking about geographical units, most of the work has emphasized “countries,” which often leaves aside the fact that even in those cases it

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

149

is becoming generalized, by implying that in different regions within a country a similar process could have taken place. It is even sometimes forgotten that the geography of the nineteenth century (or the historical period of interest) must be considered. However, we must go further, toward a more concrete regionalization, in which even different cities may have different interpretations of the same set of ideas. Furthermore, one can even think of going much further, considering that it is individuals – and each one with particular circumstances – who will read and interpret the ideas. We must also consider the places where science is made and practiced, such as museums, laboratories, and universities. Especially the first works started from considering countries as units of study, which was the approach that Glick promoted in his 1974 study, for example, Márquez Bretón (1982), Moreno de los Arcos (1984), Glick (1988), Ruiz Gutiérrez (1991), Bertol Domingues and Romero Sá (1999), Cueto (1999), Montserrat (1999), Glick (1999), Corona (2002), Argueta Villamar (2009), Ellero Gualtieri (2009), Pruna Goodgall (2010), Levine and Novoa (2012), Pruna Goodgall (2013), Glick (2013), Restrepo Forero (2013), Ruiz Gutiérrez, Rodríguez Caso, and Noguera Solano (2015), Sevilla and Sevilla (2016), and Miranda (2018). It must be clear that an analytical approach to a national context serves to legitimize nationalist agendas. Nationalism had significant relevance in Latin American political discourses during the nineteenth century, and the role of “scientific” ideas in justifying those discourses was notorious. More than useful, nationalist discourses were part of the context of the time. However, it is tempting not to go any further, as can be the understanding of the differences of the same nationalist discourse in more restricted geographical spaces. These “national” visions do not exclude a regionalized analysis, i.e., despite talking about a country in general, the analysis can be focused on a region, a city, or a place. For example, Bertol Domingues and Romero Sá (2015) refer to the institutionalization of the National Museum to explain the dissemination of Darwinism in Brazil. Chabrán (2013) presents the work of the French naturalist Alfredo Dugès in the context of a city in the Mexican province such as Guanajuato. The case of Bolivia, presented by Argueta Villamar (2009), resumes the discussions that have taken place in academic circles in cities such as Sucre, La Paz, and Santa Cruz. Girón Sierra (2019) focuses on highlighting the circulation of information between four cities, such as London, Paris, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires. A similar analysis is provided by Betancor Gómez (2018) with the case of the Spanish anthropologist Victor Grau-Bassas, who developed his work first in the Canary Islands and later in Buenos Aires. From the selected references, over the years, analysis in geographical terms has become increasingly local. This situation may be due to the trend that exists today within the history of science, in which there are continuous calls toward a so-called global history, in which the local becomes more important for understanding the global. It is debatable how far the local can go, i.e., how detailed or specific the context of study should be. However, it is thanks to this “complexity” that it is possible to have more profound reconstructions.

150

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

Science and Religion One of the recurring historiographies on evolutionary issues is the “conflict” between science and religion, exemplified in evolutionism and creationism. One of the problems of the continued use of this historiography is to take examples from the Anglo-Saxon tradition to explain local situations, e.g., assuming that in Latin America a permanent confrontation between evolutionists and creationists was and is reproduced. This interpretation leads to the imposition of the “conflict thesis” as the only explanation under which discussions involving evolution and religion have taken place. However, in the last years, there has been a rise of historiographical alternatives, in which science and religion are understood in most diverse ways than has been accepted. Proposals such as John H. Brooke and Ronald Numbers’ “complexity principle” open new interpretations for history, showing that there are explanatory models which reflect diverse relationships between evolutionary ideas and religious contexts, such as integration. A crucial point for this historiography is the oversimplification of the alleged conflict. It is well known that the discussions that have taken place in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century have involved Protestant religious groups. In the case of Latin America, on the other hand, the dominant religion was (and is) Catholicism. The subject of science and religion is hugely controversial, and although the selected works do not present studies under this categorization, there are works that have focused on their interaction. The first extensive work done on the introduction and reception of Darwinism in Latin America was the case of Mexico by the Mexican historian Roberto Moreno de los Arcos (1984). Based on the work that was initially published in the collection edited by Glick in 1974, Moreno de los Arcos presents the discussions that took place in nineteenth-century newspapers, between those of a liberal orientation and close to positivism, and the conservatives sponsored by the Catholic Church. The aim was to show that the discussions that took place in Mexico were like those that had taken place in other contexts. Briefly, Moreno de los Arcos recovered the “conflict thesis” to emphasize the “negative” role of religion against the “advance” of Mexican society, embodied in the adoption of Darwinism. Another example that promotes the “conflict thesis” in the Mexican case is Bueno Hernández, PérezMalváez, and Ruiz Gutiérrez (2013). The writing starts from recovering a biased view of British natural theology, by assuming that the so-called doctrine of design was contrary to the ideas of Darwin. Authors such as John Brooke, through the “complexity principle,” have shown that stories about science and religion are much more complicated, as in this case, understanding that there were various natural theologies, compatible with Darwinism at different levels. It is argued that this conception of design results in what they call “anti-Darwinian positions.” According to what Restrepo Forero (2002) said, assuming dichotomies such as “Darwinists” and “anti-Darwinists” is understood within an essentialist and normative conception of science. Moreover, although it is accepted that there were conflicts between diverse groups, it is risky to establish absolute generalities, since the possibility of intermediate points within the discussions is neglected.

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

151

Other examples, such as Argueta Villamar (2009), show a vision far from a strict interpretation of the “conflict thesis.” In a similar way to contemporary explanatory models in the field of science and religious studies, a “complex” analysis of the Bolivian case shows that there were different types of reception of Darwin’s ideas among religious people and believers. In summary, the Archbishop of Sucre, José de los Santos Taborga, is characterized by Argueta as an “anti-Transformist apologist.” On the other hand, the cases of Father Selgas and Father Félix are presented, who through publications in the Catholic newspaper El cruzado defended a harmonization between evolution and belief. A similar case was that of the also priest Martin Castro, who through pamphlets he distributed in the parish of Macha (Potosi) raised the contributions of Catholicism to the progress of science. Another case is that of Sevilla and Sevilla (2016) based on the dichotomy of liberals and conservatives. As in other parts of the continent, the second half of the nineteenth century was marked by continuous disputes between the two sides. In the case of Ecuador, the “conflict thesis” is taken up again to show the radicalization of the discussions between members of the Catholic hierarchy and liberal journalists, mainly from Quito and Guayaquil. The aim of the paper, as stated by the authors, is to understand how Darwinism is used as a weapon to discredit members of the opposing side. The theory of evolution appears in the arguments of the radical press in defence of the liberal principles of popular sovereignty and against the Church, while Darwinism itself is used by the bishops in their pastorals and publications to paint a liberal, Masonic, irrational and impious enemy. (Sevilla and Sevilla 2016)

The original approach of the “complexity thesis” focused on making historical explanations of science and religion less simplistic. The liberal against conservative dichotomy is a useful way of addressing the discussion on the impact of Darwin’s ideas and religion. Not only when talking about science and religion, but also in other areas, dichotomous explanations are often preferred because they are parsimonious. However, the logic provided by complexity is that, as in the case of Bolivia, there were different reactions to Darwin’s ideas. The history between science and religion, exemplified in the conflict between evolutionism and creationism, is one of the great myths of the history of science that must be dispelled. The work of historians must focus on showing the different views involved in any discussion.

Conclusions Considerable progress has been made in the history of the reception of Darwin’s ideas in Latin America since its beginnings in the 1970s. The momentum of the “Darwin industry” brought with it what Restrepo calls the “Diffusion Industry,” which can be seen reflected in the amount of work that has been done over more than 40 years. Also, geographical diversity continues to increase, although countries such as Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil are leading the way. In this chapter, the intention is

152

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

to present some historiographical criticisms, above all based on tensions present within the Latin American academic communities themselves. These tensions, such as the specific interests of historians or scientists, have led to a variety of proposals on how to understand the history of science. The analysis set out throughout this chapter looks to emphasize this variety of approaches. However, it is clear that diffusionism is still present from the moment the research question focuses on the influence of a character like Darwin, who comes from the “center” to countries still considered “periphery.” It is possible that, given the continuing strength of the “Darwin Industry” today, it will be challenging to think about changing the question. One probable reason for such a change is no longer to focus the story on the ideas of one character but to pay more attention to other people and times. Although, as we have already seen, there are no straightforward descriptions to the different approaches taken in the works selected for this chapter, the proposed taxonomy allows us to explain the changes that the study of Darwin’s ideas has undergone. The proposal of the “complexity principle” is a call to continue deepening the history of science in the region. The challenges include leaving Eurocentrism behind and privileging a history of science made from the reality of Latin America. Although many countries are not included in the different analyses that have been done so far, we must ask ourselves if the question is being forced. That is, to what extent does continuing to ask about Darwin’s influence lead us to look in places where he is not present? Also, many disciplines are yet to be analyzed. It is possible that over time what happened to the “Darwin Industry” will happen to the “Diffusion Industry”: Although the initial focus was on Darwin and his contributions in specific works such as Origins (1859) and Descent (1872), many characters and themes were added. Knowing Darwin’s scientific work is not enough if the full extent of the Victorian context is not considered. It is worth taking up here what was said by Guevara Fefer (2014), as a response from the own history of Latin American science: The tasks ahead for the historiography of Latin American science are numerous: to deepen and broaden studies in the colonial era, to get to know the nineteenth century in its entirety and to pay more attention to the twentieth century. It is also essential to continue research on how the various scientific disciplines developed in our territory, to stop explaining science only through the capital cities, to undertake research on science education from the perspective of the history of science and not only from education, to start discussing the audiences that science has had over time, to make scientific biographies by overcoming the temptation to find great men predestined by their discoveries or by the difficulties they encountered in institutionalising science in their country. To carry out these tasks and many others that are indeed missing, we must know the trajectory of the primitive and recent historiography of Latin American science, imagined and manufactured from this region, because its theoretical and methodological assumptions have obtained results of great value both for the study of science and for those who are concerned with thinking about Latin America.

These tasks posed by Guevara Fefer are perfectly applicable to the case of the reception of Darwin’s ideas in the region. To fully understand a process of reception of ideas, it may be more important to know the history of the different regions of

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

153

Latin America than to know much about Darwin’s ideas. However, it will be desirable to have a balance between the two. In this regard, there is a common point between what has been said by historians such as Barahona, Restrepo, Cueto, and Guevara Fefer; we must turn to local history. The fact is that focusing on the local is no more complicated than proposing a global history. In the end, making local history is making a global history. The difficulty may lie in connecting the different local histories, but this is how we can arrive at a much more faithful and nonjudgmental reconstruction of historical events. Dr. Ana Barahona’s invitation to participate in this volume is gratefully acknowledged. The critical reading of preliminary versions of this chapter by Paulina Cruz Castañeda and Erica Torrens Rojas is also appreciated. Acknowledgments This research was possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of the General Direction of Academic Personnel Affairs (DGAPA) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

References Argueta Villamar A (2009) El darwinismo en Iberoamérica: Bolivia y México. Editorial CSIC, Madrid Argueta Villamar A, Pardo QA (2013) Vavilov, un darwinista soviético en América Latina (1930–1933). In: Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. UNAM, Ediciones Doce Calles, México City, pp 399–414 Barahona A (2018) Local, global, and transnational perspectives on the history of biology. In: Dietrich M, Borrello M, Harman O (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology. Springer International Publishing AG, Cham, pp 1–22 Basalla G (1967) The spread of Western science. A three-stage model describes the introduction of modern science into any non-European nation. Science 156(3775):611–622. https://doi.org/10. 1126/science.156.3775.611 Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M (1999) La introducción del Darwinismo en Brasil: las controversias de su introducción. In: Glick TF, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, CSIC, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 19–46 Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M (2015) O Museu Nacional e o darwinismo no século XX. In: Puig-Samper MA, Orrego F, Ruiz R, Alfredo Uribe J (eds) “Yammerschuner”. Darwin y la darwinización de Europa y América Latina. Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 295–308 Betancor Gómez MJ (2018) Discutibles periferias: Víctor Grau-Bassas (1847–1918) y la infraestructura trasnacional. Darwinismo entre Las Palmas y La Plata. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 195–210 Bueno Hernández A, Pérez-Malváez C, Ruiz Gutiérrez R (2013) Hacia una filogenia de las ideas antidarwinistas en el México decimonónico. In: Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. UNAM, Ediciones Doce Calles, México City, pp 365–376 Caponi G (2017) El darwinismo de Ameghino. Una lectura de Filogenia. Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis Chabrán R (2013) Alfredo Dugès (1826–1910) y el pensamiento evolucionista en Guanajuato: Darwin, Spencer y Huxley. In: Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. UNAM, Ediciones Doce Calles, México City, pp 351–364

154

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

Cheroni A (2002) Carlos Reyles: Darwinismo, política y literatura en el Uruguay del 900. In: PuigSamper MÁ, Ruiz R, Galera A (eds) Evolucionismo y cultura. Darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, Junta de Extremadura, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 65–88 Corona E (2002) El pensamiento evolucionista y la Paleontología de vertebrados en México (1790–1915). In: Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R, Galera A (eds) Evolucionismo y cultura. Darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, Junta de Extremadura, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 353–366 Cueto M (1999) La historia natural, la fisiología de altura y las ideas de la evolución en el Perú. In: Glick TF, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, CSIC, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 103–114 De Rezende Vergara M (2009) Gênero e divulgação do darwinismo n’O Vulgarizador: journal dos conhecimentos úteis (1877–1880). In: Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M, Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R (eds) Darwinismo, Meio Ambiente, Sociedade. Via Lettera Editora and Livraria Ltda, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, pp 383–396 Ellero Gualtieri RC (2009) Evolucionismo no Brasil. Ciência e educação nos museus, 1870–1915. Editora Livraria do Física, São Paulo García González A (2002) En busca del eslabón, una novela darwinista. In: Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R, Galera A (eds) Evolucionismo y cultura. Darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, Junta de Extremadura, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 89–116 Girón Sierra Á (2019) Darwinismo, política del significado y redes transnacionales anarquistas: lecturas de la lucha por la existencia entre Londres, Paris, Barcelona y Buenos Aires (ca. 1879– ca. 1910). In: Sarmiento M, Ruiz R, Naranjo MC, Betancor MJ, Uribe JA (eds) Reflexiones sobre darwinismo desde las Islas Canarias. Ediciones Doce Calles, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, UNAM, UMSNH, Madrid, pp 327–344 Glick T (ed) (1988) The comparative reception of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London Glick T (1999) La recepción del Darwinismo en Uruguay. In: Glick TF, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, CSIC, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 47–68 Glick T (2013) Darwinism in Latin America. In: Ruse M (ed) The Cambridge encyclopedia of Darwin and evolutionary thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK/New York, pp 258–263 Glick T, Henderson MG (1999) Las recepciones científicas y populares de Darwin, Freud y Einstein: hacia una historia analítica de la difusión de las ideas científicas. In: Glick TF, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, CSIC, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 289–297 Guevara Fefer R (2014) El uso de la historia en el quehacer científico. Una mirada a las obras históricas del biólogo Beltrán y del fisiólogo Izquierdo. UNAM, México City Guevara Fefer R, Zamudio Varela G (2013) Enrique Beltrán y la conmemoración en México del centenario de El Origen de las Especies. In: Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. UNAM, Ediciones Doce Calles, México City, pp 439–452 Harrison Tupper ML (2018) Una polémica en torno al darwinismo en Chile. E caso de Alfonso Nogués de la Roque y la Revista Católica (1892–1893). In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, PuigSamper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 319–330 la Vergata A (1985) Images of Darwin: a historiographic overview. In: Kohn D (ed) The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp 901–972. In association with Nova Pacifica Ledesma Mateos I, Barahona Echeverría A (1999) Alfonso Luis Herrera e Isaac Ochoterena: La Institucionalización de La Biología En México. Hist Mex 48(3):635–674 Levine A, Novoa A (2012) ¡Darwinistas! The construction of evolutionary thought in nineteenth century Argentina. Brill, Leiden Lightman B (ed) (2016) Global Spencerism: the communication and appropriation of a British evolutionist. Brill, Leiden

7

A Critical Analysis of the Reception of Darwinism in Latin America in the. . .

155

Lightman B (ed) (2019) Rethinking history, science, and religion: an exploration of conflict and the complexity principle. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Márquez Bretón B (1982) Orígenes del darwinismo en Chile. Editorial Andrés Bello, Santiago Miranda M (2018) Aspectos y contextos de la recepción diferencial de Darwin y el darwinismo en la Argentina finisecular. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 283–300 Montserrat M (1999) La mentalidad evolucionista en la Argentina: una ideología del progreso. In: Glick TF, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, CSIC, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 19–46 Moreno de los Arcos R (1984) La polémica del darwinismo en México: siglo XIX. UNAM, México City Novoa A, Levine A (2010) From man to ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920. University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London Palma H (2018) Consideraciones sobre la recepción del evolucionismo en la Argentina. El disparatado caso de la regeneración social en Quijotanía. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 267–282 Pruna Goodgall PM (2010) Darwinismo y sociedad en Cuba, siglo XIX. Editorial CientíficoTécnica, La Habana Pruna Goodgall PM (2013) Charles Darwin y Panamá. In: Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. UNAM, Ediciones Doce Calles, México City, pp 415–424 Puig-Samper MA (2018) La recepción del evolucionismo en el mundo hispánico, una revisión comparada. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 15–32 Restrepo Forero O (2002) Leyendo historias sobre el Darwinismo. In: Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R, Galera A (eds) Evolucionismo y cultura. Darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. UNAM, Junta de Extremadura, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 21–46 Restrepo Forero O (2013) Trópicos, mestizaje y aclimatación: “leyes naturales y hechos científicos” en el discurso darwinista colombiano. In: Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MÁ, Zamudio G (eds) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. UNAM, Ediciones Doce Calles, México City, pp 377–398 Romero Sá M, Benchimol J (2009) De cladóceros a anfibios: o darwinismo na produção científica de Adolpho Lutz. In: Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M, Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R (eds) Darwinismo, Meio Ambiente, Sociedade. Via Lettera Editora and Livraria Ltda, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, pp 59–72 Ruiz Gutiérrez R (1991) Positivismo y Evolución: Introducción del Darwinismo en México. Limusa, México Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Rodríguez Caso JM, Noguera Solano R (2015) Estudio comparativo sobre la recepción e introducción del darwinismo en Francia y México a finales del siglo XIX. In: PuigSamper MA, Orrego F, Ruiz R, Uribe JA (eds) “Yammerschuner”. Darwin y la darwinización de Europa y América Latina. Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 99–112 Sagredo Baeza R (2015) De “sublime espectáculo” a “cordilleras paralelas”. Darwin, Fitz Roy, Domeyko, Steffen y Holdich en los Andes. In: Puig-Samper MA, Orrego F, Ruiz R, Uribe JA (eds) “Yammerschuner”. Darwin y la darwinización de Europa y América Latina. Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 15–38 Sevilla A (2016) Un naturalista lejos de Europa: Theodor Wolf y las islas Galápagos. In: Cuvi N, Sevilla E, Puig-Samper MA, Ruiz R (eds) Evolucionismo en América y Europa. Antropología, Biología, Política y Educación. Ediciones Doce Calles, FLACSO Ecuador, UNAM, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Quito, pp 339–356 Sevilla E, Sevilla A (2016) Ángeles caídos o animales perfectibles: el darwinismo en las disputas entre liberales y conservadores en el Ecuador (1875–1895). In: Cuvi N, Sevilla E, Puig-Samper

156

J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

MA, Ruiz R (eds) Evolucionismo en América y Europa. Antropología, Biología, Política y Educación. Ediciones Doce Calles, FLACSO Ecuador, UNAM, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, Quito, pp 249–264 Sevilla A, Sevilla E (2018) Semillas andinas, invernadores escoceses y herbarios londinenses en la red de Charles Darwin. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 113–132 Vallejo G (2018) Darwin y la Divina Comedia. Evolución e imaginación literaria en Buenos Aires (1882–1908). In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo. Desde el sur del sur. Ediciones Doce Calles, CONICET, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, UNAM, Madrid, pp 245–266 Vergara Silva F (2015) Puntos ciegos transatlánticos: una respuesta al discurso de Nature sobre la influencia darwiniana en América Latina. In: Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Noguera Solano R, Rodríguez Caso JM (eds) Darwin en (y desde) México. UNAM-Siglo XXI Editores, México City, pp 100–115 West D (2009) Fritz Müller, o biólogo evolucionista pioneiro no Brasil. In: Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M, Puig-Samper MÁ, Ruiz R (eds) Darwinismo, Meio Ambiente, Sociedade. Via Lettera Editora and Livraria Ltda, São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, pp 45–58

Darwinism Its Reception and Impact in Latin America (1850–1910) Rosaura Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and Ricardo Noguera-Solano

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Geography of Darwinism in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darwinism and Science in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darwinism and Medicine in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Darwinism and Religion in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Darwinism and Latin American Politics and Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Darwinism and Early Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Darwinism in Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

158 160 162 166 168 169 174 175 177 178

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyze how Darwinian ideas, assimilated into the fields of politics, science, and medicine in Latin America, interacted with positivism and Spencerism. This process occurred in an atmosphere of expanding social, political, and economic liberalism in the region between 1850 and 1910. The assimilation of Darwinism as science was accompanied by cultural factors that were elements of this expansion in generalized liberalism, central to the transformation of Latin America. No longer colonies of Spain and Portugal and Latin America had become a region of countries supplying raw materials to other European powers, principally Britain, France, and Germany, and the United States. As a rule, Latin America was a region where science was in its very early stages. During their transition, Latin American countries abandoned the structures of

R. Ruiz-Gutiérrez (*) · R. Noguera-Solano Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_4

157

8

158

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

Spanish and Portuguese conservative colonialism and sought nationalist, liberal identities, adjusting to the new political and economic rules of Anglo-Saxon liberalism, though in general without making any effort toward scientific development.

Introduction The explanation of how species transform over time, in particular Charles Darwin’s original proposal, is one of the scientific theories that has most powerfully impacted all human activity. The influence of Darwinian thought is not limited to science but has also influenced philosophy, literature, politics, education, and art. Even a number of religions have been forced into either accepting it to a degree or combating it in various ways because of its implications for the origin of living beings, including the human race, making any supernatural explanation unnecessary. This is the reason for the widespread interest in discovering the way in which Darwinism propagated in different countries and the way in which it was received, analyzed, discussed, rejected, even applied, whether as a way of accounting for biological phenomena or as a scientific ideology. This chapter reviews the role that such a crucial scientific theory played in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. The way in which Darwin constructed his theory has been studied in great detail in the historiography of Darwinism, integrating not only knowledge deriving from the domestication of plants, animals, and fungi, but also the scientific knowledge of naturalists, taxonomists, botanists, zoologists, geologists, physiologists, and anatomists, as well as that of pioneers of research into the geographical distribution of organisms and their relationships with the environment, and similarly the studies of anthropologists, philosophers, and political economists. In this way, Darwinism absorbed knowledge that had been produced previously or at his time of writing. It is remarkable to see how Darwin’s theory is capable integrating such varied elements. Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle (1831–1836) was undoubtedly another of the sources of his knowledge. While extremely interesting in itself, the voyage via South America at a time when slavery still existed and where living conditions were so different from those in Great Britain, his discovery of the physiognomic and cultural differences of groups such as the indigenous peoples of Patagonia, the contact with the Argentines who accompanied him to collect large fossils in the pampas, the earthquake in Concepción, the collections and observations made in the Galapagos, and so on, were all of great importance for the formulation and orientation of his theory (see, e.g., Sandra Herbert on how his relationship with the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego influenced his approach to the gradualness of evolution). Bringing together his knowledge from all these areas, Darwin constructed the theory of natural selection, an explanation which has continued to be developed, reconstructed, and above all has advanced from a foundation in genetics and molecular biology. Naturally, knowing that the history of science has largely proved Darwin right is

8

Darwinism

159

an integral part of a historiographical conception that attempts to grasp how the ideas thus constructed became widespread and how they came to be applied in various fields of human activity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Knowledge of Darwinism had an unquestionably powerful impact on Latin America yet, in contrast with Europe, this impact was on Latin American politics rather than its science – still in its very early stages. While there were those who actually had read Darwin, the majority of those who criticized or assimilated his ideas had discovered them through Ernst Haeckel and Herbert Spencer. What makes this particularly important is the way in which evolutionary ideas were applied in Latin America: they had a great deal to do with what has been called Social Darwinism, that is, the use of evolutionary ideas to explain social and cultural changes. The fundamental concepts laid out in On the Origin of Species – natural selection, adaptation, variation, divergence of characters, overpopulation, the struggle for existence, and so on – were used to explain the transformation of society rather than the evolution of species or biological processes. Indeed, the majority of those who defended evolutionary ideas did not mention the role of chance in evolution; they promoted a version without contingency that led to progress. Evolution was seen as directional and chance played no role at all. The ways in which Darwinism was received, propagated, and assimilated in Latin America have been described and analyzed for several Latin American countries. These are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela. (In Latin America, Darwinian ideas diversified in more or less similar contexts. These have been described in eight books resulting from many other colloquia on “Darwinism in Ibero-America,” as well as in other research and dissemination works whose objective has been to show the introduction, appropriation, and influence of Darwinian ideas in Latin American countries.) These historical reconstructions portray the people involved and the political contexts, debates, works, writers, and the times when Darwin’s ideas became known and were debated. Furthermore, in a few cases, these reconstructions also mention when these ideas were used to explain medical phenomena, for example, by Luis Razetti in Venezuela (Barreto 1994; Rodríguez and Manuel 2010), or applied to scientific research, for example, in Brazil (Bertol Domingues et al. 2003) and in Cuba (Pruna and González 1989). The historiographical narratives of Darwinism have answered certain questions. How was it received? Who were those who welcomed Darwinism? In what context did they mention it? What were their currents of thought and where did they discuss it? Or even, where did they apply it? Considering the above as well as similar identifiable elements within the historiographical narratives of Darwinism in Latin America, it is possible to identify the cultural features in different areas of science and society, in politics and economics, and to a small extent in medical practice, that led to Darwin’s ideas being propagated, received, and either appropriated or rejected. In the main exceptions to this general rule, Brazil and to a lesser extent Cuba, there was a notable “Darwinist” program in biology. Up to a point, Uruguay is also an exception: the cattle breeding association debated the efficacy of artificial

160

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

selection versus crossing, though they did not actually discuss evolution in Darwinian terms. In a contrasting way, Paraguay was also an important exception to the general rule as there was no debate of Darwin’s work here in the nineteenth century whatsoever; it was simply rejected. It took until the early twentieth century for this rejection to be looked at from a political perspective by public figures who emphasized that the non-reception of Darwin indicated a cultural and educational deficiency (Glick 1989b). In the interactions involving the assimilation of Darwinism in Latin America, positivism was an important ideological element which accompanied political and economic discussions. Spencerian positivism in particular became widespread in some Latin American countries (Global Spencerism, 2015). Linked to the expansion of positivism, it became exceedingly common to make racist statements that justified discrimination against and the exclusion of indigenous, Afro-descendant and occasionally mestizo populations based on the supposition that certain ethnic groups were superior to others. The Spencerian idea of the survival of the fittest strengthened this belief and was an idea that Darwin had incorporated into his theory. In Latin America, it bolstered eugenic policies as part of state programs (Miranda and Vallejo 2005).

The Geography of Darwinism in Latin America The influence of Thomas Glick (1974) has been a key factor in the study of Darwinism in Latin America. His model was followed in many of the works presented, analyzing the way in which Darwinism was received in the countries in question. Ivette Conry’s approach to the introduction of Darwinism in France (1974) was also discussed at the colloquia. Conry made a clear distinction between the reception and the actual introduction of Darwinism; her interest being more closely related to the history of science in the tradition of Georges Canguilhem. She holds that it is very important to recognize when Darwinism was used to explain biological phenomena and what explains the delay in its application. She demonstrated that Darwinism was not incorporated into the explanations provided by French biology because of the immense prestige of Georges Cuvier, who, as is well-known, was an opponent of all evolutionary ideas. Although he was one of the most important scientists in history, his influence led to Darwinism being rejected in France until the twentieth century. Earlier articles have pointed out certain features common to Latin American countries (Glick 2013; Argueta Villamar 2017). (Similar analyses have been carried out in other works that attempt to account for the similarities that characterized the discussion of Darwinism in Latin America: Glick (2013), Argueta Villamar (2017), and Velázquez Fernández (2015). There is moreover a brief review on the HOSLAC website where questions are posed providing openings for research and reflection on the impact of Darwin in Latin America (HOSLAC – History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean): https://mypages.unh.edu/hoslac/book/darwin-andlatin-america-1831-1900.) Firstly, wherever there were indigenous or black

8

Darwinism

161

populations, the idea of race was significant. Darwinism was used as a scientific ideology both to argue that indigenous people and blacks were inferior and, in some cases (e.g., in Mexico), to argue that they were superior to whites). Furthermore, explanations deriving from Social Darwinism pervaded the debates about new national identities. Secondly, positivism was universal among Latin American intellectuals, with occasional exceptions such as Ricardo Flores Magón, a revolutionary anarchist, and Andrés Molina Enríquez, the “Rousseau” of the Mexican Revolution. The third was the opposition of the Catholic Church, which, though present everywhere, was weakened when faced by strong, secular scientific institutions, as was the case in Mexico. Fourthly, there was the role of universities: medical faculties and law schools were Darwinian strongholds. Fifthly, books by Darwin, Haeckel, and Huxley were read in French translation, though some libraries had English editions. Sixthly, in certain countries, there were influential foreign Darwinists, for example, the former German Jesuit Theodor Wolf in Ecuador, the German botanist Adolfo Ernst in Venezuela, the Spanish radicals José Arechaveleta and Francisco Suñer in Uruguay, Fritz Müller and the Swiss-Italian Emilio Goeldi in Brazil. To close this section, it is important to note that when Darwinism arrived in Latin America, it did so within the framework of the liberal movements of the nineteenth century. Liberalism in Latin America, particularly political liberalism, was profoundly relevant as it was the predominant philosophy in the region. From a comparative perspective, “liberalism” is a complex matter and presents significant historical differences in the most important countries where Darwinism is being analyzed (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela). Liberalism has sometimes been defined as an anti-monarchical ideology (this being why it has been confused with republicanism; it proposes a somewhat similar form of government). Liberalism has also been defined as an anticlerical position and alternatively as a system of government that sought to limit the power of the church. Most frequently, it is seen as an ideology aiming to defend individual rights (Barrón 2001, 6). In comparative studies of the various liberal movements in Latin America (Jaksic and Posada Carbó 2011), there are variations to consider in both their political and economic spheres, and differences between the types of relationships established among the various social elements, the religious component being a case in point. Despite these differences, there is nonetheless a common denominator: by the second half of the nineteenth century, most Latin American countries had achieved independence and had become republics and promoted economic liberalism which, in many cases, met with resistance and laws opposed to the nonintervention of the state in matters related to the economy and private property. In most Latin American countries, there was a debate between liberals and conservatives. In both groups, there were subtle differences (there were, for example, conservative liberals and radical liberals: while the former made concessions to the Catholic Church, the latter thought of it as a cultural element that should not be linked to political development). Sometimes the differences between liberals and conservatives were not very great in terms of substance, since in general terms, both

162

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

wanted the new Latin American republics to pursue the ideals of freedom and Progress that would overcome underdevelopment and “barbarism.”

Darwinism and Science in Latin America Although the influence of Darwinism on science in Latin America was very limited, there were some examples to the contrary: one example would be in anthropology; there were far fewer in biology. According to Pruna, Cuba may be thought of as one of the exceptions through which, on the American continent, Darwinism was introduced “into the biology of the time, mainly through biological systematization, as a means for classifying a series of “affinities,” hitherto unintelligible, and to justify them theoretically” (Pruna and González 1989, 169). This task was undertaken by Felipe Poey, an assiduous promoter of evolutionary thought in Cuba. The German biologist Fritz Müller (1822–1897), one of the most important Darwinists of the nineteenth century, emigrated to Brazil in 1852 and settled in the state of Santa Caterina in a German colony called Blumenau. From 1867 to 1874, he mainly carried out research in economic botany for the office of the governor of the province, then, from 1876 to 1891, he worked as a “traveling naturalist” for the Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. He was employed by its director, Ladislao Netto, a Darwinian evolutionist interested in botany. Müller had read On the Origin of Species in Bronn’s 1860 German translation, had been convinced by it, and set out to support Darwin with the results of his own research on comparative morphology and embryology (West 2009). Müller was one of the first recapitulationists. Based on this idea, he proposed a phylogeny of crustaceans that was considered authoritative for a long time. He did so by claiming Nauplius, the unsegmented larval stage, to be the ontogenetic reminiscence of its ancestor (Salgado and Arcucchi 2016, 119), although it was Haeckel who established the biogenetic law. Müller conducted various studies on adaptationism working with Henry Bates on mimicry. In Brazil, a country considered a natural paradise in the nineteenth century, Darwinism made a far more profound impact on science in anthropology. The list of naturalists who visited Brazil includes Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin (in the Beagle), Louis Agassiz, Henry Bates, and Fritz Müller. People interested in physical anthropology and race also pointed to Brazil as the world’s largest laboratory for the study of mestizaje, as half the population was mestizo. Such figures as the doctors João Batista de Lacerda and Rodrigues Peixoto of the Museu Nacional believed Brazilian Indians – and in particular, a group known as the Botocudos – to be among the most primitive humans (Bertol Domingues et al. 2003, 15). Lacerda and Peixoto’s focus and general interpretations were in complete agreement with Parisian anthropology of the time. What made Brazil different from other Latin American countries that Darwinism had reached was the country’s particular obsession with racial questions. It may be said that there were numerous polygenists, yet it was the monogenists, either under the influence of Darwin or the Bible, who adapted polygenist language to emphasize

8

Darwinism

163

racial differentiation (Bertol Domingues and Romero Sá 2001). An example of one of these race theorists was the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), who visited Brazil, staying for 15 months. Between 1875 and 1900, there were three major centers for the dissemination of Darwinism in Brazil: the law school in Recife, the medical school in Bahia, and the Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro. All three were consciously evolutionist: they were emphatically Darwinian as regards selection in human populations, Haeckelian in their insistence on a hierarchy of races (via Haeckel, they also adopted the Lamarckian notion of the direct impact of the environment on human evolution), and Spencerian in their opposition to metaphysics. And, like all Brazilian positivists, they also shared the obsession with the definition of the nation. On the other hand, as there were no universities in Brazil until 1920, these institutions did their work as centers of education and dissemination. The Museu Nacional, for example, was a research “institution,” having departments of natural and social sciences and, until the 1890s, the only experimental biology laboratory in the country. Under the direction of Netto (1874–1893) and his successor João Batista Lacerda (1895–1915), the Museu Nacional enjoyed a golden age, with a staff of talented foreign naturalists. Emilio Goeldi was the deputy director of zoology, and two German biologists were included in the group of “travelling naturalists,” Fritz Müller and Hermann von Ihering, the latter an evolutionist, though he did not believe in the efficacy of natural selection. Lacerda and von Ihering were hard-line racists. Lacerda was a polygenist who, following Nina Rodrigues, thought that: “the product of the racial mixture between the ‘whitest’ mestizo layers could also give rise to a hybrid population of superior character, almost as perfectible and capable of progress and cultural evolution as pure Caucasians” (Arteaga Sánchez 2009, 90). The Sociedad Antropológica de Cuba was founded in 1877 and became a center of Darwinian debate and a place where some of its members discussed the innate inferiority of blacks (slavery in Cuba was not abolished until the 1880s). One of its members, Francisco Calcagno, wrote a novel about the search for the Haeckelian missing link (In Search of the Link, 1888), supposed to be the mid-point on the path from apes to Africans (Pruna Goodgall 1999, 74). In Argentina, which Darwin had also visited during his voyage on the Beagle (and where he may have fatally contracted Chagas disease), evolutionary thought did not make a significant impact on science even though, in 1877, after almost a decade of public debate, Darwin eventually was elected as a corresponding member of the Sociedad Científica Argentina. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, its president from 1868 to 1872, was an outspoken Darwinian. Only a few days after Darwin’s death, he was the principal speaker at a massive public tribute to Darwin at the Teatro Nacional, attended by 3000 people. The second speaker was Eduardo Holmberg, a physician and Darwinist who, in 1875, had published a controversial novel entitled Dos partidos en lucha (Two Parties in Combat – in other words, the Pro-Darwinists and the Anti-Darwinists). The Argentinian case is similar to the Mexican. Perazzi sums it up as follows: “Of the transformist currents of thought that circulated in the La Plata region, Darwin’s was the best known and at the same time, paradoxically, the one that was least

164

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

noticeable in naturalists’ actual research. Beyond declarations of faith in Darwinian ideas, the practice of natural history seemed not to have changed in its basic aspects” (Perazzi 2011, 1). An important but controversial case of Darwinian thought in Argentine palaeontology was that related to the work of palaeontologist Florentino Ameghino, who had studied fossil mammal biology in Paris in the 1870s (with Paul and Henri Gervais). In 1880–1881, he published an influential but controversial volume entitled La antigüedad del Hombre en el Plata (The Antiquity of Man in the Rio de la Plata Region) in which he argued that Homo sapiens had arisen in Argentina. This led to the work being endorsed by the Conservative government, despite Ameghino’s outspoken evolutionary ideas. Unlike other authors such as Haeckel who relied on embryological data for the history of human origin, Ameghino unsuccessfully used the serialization method to reconstruct phylogenies from mathematical formulae (Salgado and Arcucchi 2016, 132–133). In Colombia, Darwinism generated interest and debates in various cultural forums but, as in other countries, without having a decisive influence on science. The debates that arose between the various groups – naturalists, doctors, intellectuals, lawyers, politicians, and university students – linked the theory of evolution to their various concerns, including their scientific and political interests (Restrepo Forero and Becerra Ardilla 1995). The first time Darwinism was mentioned in Colombia was by Enrique Cortés, a liberal author from the State of Cundinamarca. He made the reference at an academic event at the Universidad Nacional in 1872, after which it would become a fixture in numerous classes, speeches, and debates by radical liberals. This was not the first time that Cortés had presented such ideas. As Director de Instrucción Pública in Cundinamarca, he had written in his final report that man was slowly ascending from the brutal state of the cannibal to the most perfected state of civilization (Restrepo Forero 2009). Jorge Isaacs and Miguel Antonio Caro were at the forefront of the introduction of Darwin’s ideas. Jorge Isaacs was a poet who carried out an anthropological investigation and used Darwin’s ideas to address archaeological matters and cultural aspects of the indigenous peoples of Colombia. In 1866, Caro wrote his critical response to Isaac’s ideas, which had been published as travel reports under the title Estudio sobre las tribus indígenas del Magdalena in the Anales de La Universidad Nacional and the Anales de Instrucción Pública between 1881 and 1886, in the magazine El Repertorio Colombiano (Lesmes 2009, 43). Under the title “Darwinism and the missions,” Caro made severe judgments on the usefulness of Isaac’s journey as an author, on his style of writing and, of course, on his use of Darwinism as an explanatory theory dressed up as “archaeology” (Lesmes 2009, 47). The founding of the Universidad Nacional de los Estados Unidos de Colombia in 1868 and that of the Universidad de Antioquia in 1871 played an important role in the introduction of Darwinism into Colombia. This was mainly because Darwin’s ideas were included in the Natural Sciences programs and also in discussions and debates on issues related to liberalism. As was the case in other countries in the region, these ideas were a hodgepodge of Darwinism and Social Darwinism, they

8

Darwinism

165

were Spencerian in nature and included the evolutionary origin of the human being in their discussions. This brought liberalism into conflict with ecclesiastical authority (Peñuela 2009, 428), its champions including highly influential bishops. Paradoxically, those who included transformist themes in University programs were also clergymen, although they did not necessarily express support for Darwinism. Darwinism was debated during history, geography, moral philosophy, biology, psychology, and sociology courses, to such a degree that in the 1890s schools and universities run by clergymen discussed it, though always in the context of sociology, philosophy, and the natural sciences (Peñuela 2009, 428). Examples of these discussions are texts such as Estudio sobre el sistema evolucionista by Emilio Cuervo Márquez and El evolucionismo en su aspecto físico, psicológico, moral y político by Santiago Calvo (Restrepo Forero and Becerra Ardilla 1995). Even though both authors went into Darwin’s ideas in great depth, focusing mainly on his idea of evolution by natural selection, they differ in two main aspects. Cuervo doubts whether Darwin’s ideas are founded on clear scientific evidence and has reservations about his application of these ideas to the issue of the origin of the human being. In contrast, Santiago Calvo makes a clear defense of them, providing scientific arguments and citing renowned authors within the field of science to defend “the position of Darwinism’s veracity, arguing incompatibility between metaphysics and science, granting to the latter explanations of an analytical type and the postulation of laws such as that of gravity” (Restrepo Forero and Becerra Ardilla 1995). Mexico was in no sense the exception as regards the minimal influence of Darwinism on science. As mentioned by Manuel Maldonado-Koerdell and Santiago Genovés in Darwin y la antropología, various authors in Mexico learned about Darwin’s ideas through wars, including civil wars, and political problems. The few nineteenth-century examples of Darwinism on Mexican science include the work of Francisco Patiño (1876) on carnivorous plants, which stands out for including the earliest contemporary scientific references to Darwin, although his emphasis was on Darwin’s contributions to botany. Moreover, his starting point was a conception of evolution based on a defense of the “great chain of being” (Ruiz Gutiérrez 1987). Patiño believed that carnivorous plants would confirm the existence of the “great chain of being” as he thought they were intermediate organisms between heterotrophs and autotrophs (Barahona 2009, 204). Another case in point is that of José Ramírez, who thought of variation and adaptation as being synonymous (Ruiz Gutiérrez 1987). Although Ramírez did not add anything original, he laid great emphasis on the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters and introduced many of Haeckel’s ideas literally, in particular, the laws of adaptation and variation. Darwinian thought in Mexico enjoyed a happier reception in the work of the Mexico-based French naturalist, botanist, and zoologist Alfredo Dugès (1826–1910) and in that of the Mexican naturalist Alfonso L. Herrera (1868–1942), although Dugès had grave doubts and held an assortment of Lamarckian ideas. Alfonso L. Herrera, the preeminent figure in the history of Mexican biology (Beltrán 1868), studied pharmacy at the National School of Medicine though his interests inclined more toward biology. His interest in and knowledge of plants led to

166

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

his holding various positions at Mexican institutions: at the Museo Nacional and at the Instituto Nacional de Medicina up to 1900, as well as being director of Parasitology at the Department of Agriculture. In 1915, he founded the Dirección General de Estudios Biológicos, which at that time became an important center for biological research. He also founded Mexico City Zoo and participated in the reorganization of the Museo de Historia Natural. Considered the main proponent of Darwinian thought in Mexico (Ruiz Gutiérrez 1987), and the sponsor of teaching biology from an evolutionary perspective in Mexico, his interest in teaching evolutionary thinking as a part of students’ learning led him to publish the first biology textbook in Mexico in 1904, Nociones de biología. His scientific publications include Recueil des lois de la biologie général of 1897, where he presented his own interpretation of Darwinian ideas, in particular the laws of variation and adaptation, that could be thought close to Haeckel. He wrote several works on cacti in Mexico and on the acclimatization of plants that favor human activities. The powerful influence of Lamarck, Darwin, and Haeckel’s evolutionary ideas led him to develop ideas about the origin of life. In fact, his ideas on plasmogenesis and his experiments on the topic were internationally influential at the time (Cleaves et al. 2014). The earliest references to Darwin’s work in Venezuela are to be found in the minutes of the Sociedad de Ciencias Físicas y Naturales in Caracas, between 1867 and 1878, introduced by Adolfo Ernst, a German-born naturalist. Ernst gave the earliest lectures on Darwin at the Universidad de Caracas in his department of natural history. In 1893, professor of anatomy Pablo Acosta Ortiz introduced modern anatomy in accordance with the Darwinian canon. Given this Darwinian perspective, Ernst acquired enormous influence and his scientific work included founding the Venezuelan positivist school. He was instrumental in the creation of the Biblioteca Nacional and, as a professor, promoted the teaching of natural sciences at the Universidad Central de Venezuela.

Darwinism and Medicine in Latin America Discussion of evolutionary thought and Darwinian ideas were important in the practice and teaching of medicine. A number of groups of doctors in Latin America took part in these discussions. Darwinian biology was introduced at the Escola de medicina de Bahía in the 1870s by the German professor, Otto Wücherer. His student Raimundo Nina Rodrigues followed Haeckel’s views for public health matters. Silva Romero, one of the most influential Brazilian intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century, thought that mestizaje was, by and large, a good thing. In contrast, Nina Rodrigues thought it reprehensible, considering it the source of physical, mental, and cultural degeneration (de Souza Mandarino and Gomberg 2010). Believing the races to be fundamentally different, Nina pushed for the craniological identification of racial groups via a reform of the legal code based on an evolutionary logic, which he set out

8

Darwinism

167

in his book Human races and criminal liability, published in Brazil in 1894 (de Souza Mandarino and Gomberg 2010, 64). The earliest lessons on Darwinism in Venezuela were taught by Adolfo Ernst at the Universidad de Caracas. Luis Razetti, who attended his classes, was impressed by the Darwinian ideas that Ernst laid out (Glick 1984, 52) and would subsequently become a key figure in the integration and appropriation of Darwin’s ideas into the field of medicine, and virtually a spokesperson for evolution. In 1904, Razetti successfully had a public statement made at the Academia de Medicina supporting evolution in a proposal phrased in such a way that members had the option of either voting in favor of the motion or exposing themselves as nonscientific ideologues. As Glick points out, Razetti’s influence in Venezuela was enormous. Several generations of doctors not only acquired the foundations of evolutionary thought but also Razetti’s conviction that not basing anatomy on Darwinian ideas was unthinkable. “A professor of human anatomy,” wrote Razetti, “who does not teach this science in the light of the doctrine of descent, does not fulfil his strict duty, and divorces himself from the body of modern knowledge” (quoted in Glick 1984, 54). Razetti’s purpose in Venezuela was to bring Darwinism into the practice of medicine. He was successful in persuading the Academy to accept it, though not without debate and the opposition of conservative anti-Darwinist groups. Thanks to his political ability, his materialist 1906 book ¿Qué es la vida? was published under the patronage of the positivist dictator, President Cipriano Castro. Expounding Darwin’s theory, he put up a clear defense of liberal and positivist knowledge (Glick 1984, 57). As was also the case in other countries in the region, Comtean and Spencerian positivisms formed part of the discourse of the intellectual elites, particularly in the Venezuelan capital Caracas. Darwin also featured importantly in literature, as is shown by José Martí’s essay on Darwin’s death, which was published in the newspaper La Opinion Nacional de Caracas in 1883 (González 2010). However, as in other countries, positivism was a hybrid and the positivism of Comte and the positivism of Spencer were not differentiated (Glick 1984). In Cuba, doctors also had a genuine interest in spreading Darwinian ideas. The Crónica Médico-Quirúrgica was the most important medical journal in Cuba at the time and was the vehicle through which Darwinian ideas were disseminated. In general, the doctors in question were those who thought along the same lines as Darwin, though they did not practice Darwinian medicine in the sense that it could be used to explain the evolutionary origin of diseases. This was a position that would only emerge properly in the twentieth century. In Chile too, Darwinian evolutionary ideas were accepted thanks to two doctors publishing articles in the Revista Médica de Chile. Adolfo Valderrama, a surgeon (1834–1902), wrote about the concepts of evolutionary anthropology and the natural and historical evolution of the human being. Similarly, Pedro Candia Salgado, a military surgeon, wrote on the topic of spontaneous generation and also presented Darwin’s ideas (Hurtado 2009, 22). However, unlike the situation in Venezuela, Darwinism was not included in the teaching of medicine.

168

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

Darwinism and Religion in Latin America An important negative factor affecting how Darwinism was assimilated in Latin American countries in the nineteenth century was the role of the influential Catholic Church. Within the complex process of transition from social conservatism to liberalism, the Church became an antagonistic force. Even though opposition to Darwinism was not an official Vatican position, it became the position of local bishops (Gozzer 2010, 7). Although rejection by or the outright opposition of the Catholic Church was everywhere present, secular scientific institutions diminished the Church’s influence with respect to Darwin. While there was opposition to Darwinism within Catholic settings, there were also Catholic authors who contributed to the introduction and assimilation of Darwinian thought. This happened in Ecuador. The German Jesuit Theodor Wolf taught Darwinian ideas between 1871 and 1874 at the Escuela Politécnica de Quito (Cuvi et al. 2014, 17). As a geologist and geographer, and moreover interested in Darwinism, he visited the Galapagos in 1875 and 1878 (Sevilla 2017, 48). Latin America’s powerfully Catholic atmosphere was part of the cultural legacy it had inherited from Spain and Portugal. It contrasted with the liberalism of German and Dutch Protestantism, with English Anglicanism, and with French liberal deism. In Latin America, positivism became a scientific culture which sought to frame the economy, society as well as politics. It became in effect a “religion of progress” that fundamentally questioned the Catholic Church, which it considered an archaic relic destined to disappear with the advance of science and education (De Roux 2012, 20). In this religious setting, Darwinism encountered resistance that developed into bitter debate in some Latin American countries, including, in some cases, such strong intransigence that Darwinism was not even discussed. This was the case in Paraguay, where the lack of any nineteenth-century debate on Darwin became a symbol that was appropriated politically in the twentieth century as proof of the country’s underdevelopment (Glick 2010, 696). As Glick (1989) has pointed out, Uruguay provides a revealing example of the rich complexity of Darwinism in Latin America. Given its literal application of Darwinian precepts, rather than Spencerian ones, it is the only country in the region whose brand of positivism can be described as Darwinian, even though Spencer was also enormously influential there. There was no indigenous population, so the type of Social Darwinism that emerged was a literal application to economies and institutions. Although the classic debate between religious and secular society took place in Uruguay just as it had done in other Latin American countries, it had different features. Starting in 1872, the first phase of the debate took place among cattlemen. Their Asociación Rural was unique in a number of ways. In the first place, it had French and English members with secular attitudes to evolution. Secondly, the Association’s statutes prohibited any religious or ideological debate on the premises. In consequence, the debate between those advocating selection and those advocating crossing as the best method of improving indigenous criollo stock was based on objective considerations. Selectionists freely cited Darwin in their favor. Although it

8

Darwinism

169

was agreed that the criollo herd had adapted to local grasses through natural selection, the proponents of interbreeding by importing expensive strains won the debate. In time, nonetheless, interbreeding proved to be merely an expensive fad (Glick 1989). The earliest records of Darwin’s ideas in Chile are to be found in a religious text. They are attributed to the German Rudolf Amandus Philippi in his 1866 work on Natural History, a textbook for the study of Natural Sciences (Bretón 1982, 17). Without speaking in favor of Darwin’s ideas, Philippi alludes to the transformism-cataclysm debate. He does not take a position on it, but simply mentions that transformist ideas are contrary to catastrophism (Bretón 1982, 20). Philippi does not support evolutionary thought but rather doubts its validity: “The writer does not believe in this change from one species to another, except in a very limited way [. . .], but an elementary book, such as this, is not the right place to discuss issues of this nature.” He states that Natural History “reveals the Supreme Creator to us through his miraculous works” (Philippi cited in Hurtado 2009, 22). Despite these words, the text did give rise to debates on “the origin of man,” with Catholic conservatism principally represented by bishops and priests taking a stand against Darwin’s ideas. The Frenchman Emilio Littré also discussed Darwinian transformism from a positivist standpoint, affirming that positive science could not accept the transformation of species without clear evidence. Darwinism arrived in Chile in the midst of religious debates that, as Diego Barros Arana notes, were a long way from the debates centering on biology that arose in other countries. Without having much effect on the field of science or teaching, Darwinism, especially Social Darwinism, was applied “in social, legal and literary disciplines in Chile” (Bretón 1982, 28). In Mexico, there were debates between the Sierra brothers on the one hand and the Catholic Church on the other. The Sierra brothers defense of the evolutionary origin of the human being and its wholesale rejection by the Catholic clergy was of major importance (Ruiz Gutiérrez 1987).

Social Darwinism and Latin American Politics and Economics The influence of Spencer among Latin American intellectuals was crucial because he accepted the inheritance of acquired characters, recognized by Lamarck and Darwin. To Spencer, this was a far more important force in evolution than natural selection because he thought it clear that human beings’ mental and moral capacities were acquired and inherited by their descendants. As an apologist for laissez-faire, he did not think education should be the responsibility of the state, but Spencer was nonetheless recognized by many Latin American intellectuals as a promoter of education, a stance many of them shared. The impact of Spencer’s ideas on Latin America derives from the socioeconomic conditions of the region. For the ruling elites, they provided two important

170

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

arguments. Firstly, they provided justification for a system that exploited the most unprotected groups, particularly the indigenous inhabitants – in those instances where they were not actually exterminated. In Argentina, for example, extermination was justified as a struggle in which only the fittest survive. Secondly, given Spencer’s strong Lamarckism, stressing the importance of the environment in evolution, it was easy to map that idea onto a situation where there was a role for the environment in social transformation, specifically via education (despite Spencer’s position on the state not having responsibility for education). This was very clear in the case of Mexico, where the intellectuals who did promote education (Justo Sierra, Gabino Barreda, Vicente Riva Palacio, and others) argued that great social changes could be achieved via education without violence, that instead there would be a gradual evolution. There were nonetheless other authors, such as Emilio Rabasa, who argued that indigenous Mexicans were ineducable and that therefore the country’s scarce resources should not be expended on schools for them. In Brazil, for example, the fin-de-siècle intellectual movement began in the mid-1870s with the convergence of republican politics, Comte’s positivism being replaced by Darwinian evolutionary thought and Spencerism (Glick 2003, 181). The works of Haeckel, Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley were to be found everywhere among the students of the Faculdade de Direito do Recife (Recife School of Law) and the Faculdade de Medicina do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro School of Medicine). Two of the principal architects of this evolutionary culture were Tobias Barreto and his student Romero at the Recife School of Law, both openly Darwinists (Cid and Waizbort 2005; Waizbort et al. 2021). To clarify the meaning of “Darwinian” in this context, Barreto and Romero (until the end of 1890), following Haeckel, construed the struggle for existence as covering all the processes of culture and social life, and that literary work, for example, had no meaning or value outside the environment that produced it. “Environment” here meant the climate plus culture, culture being interpreted as a way of understanding the development of each race (Bertol Domingues 2009). Romero took Haeckel’s insistence on human beings’ coinciding totally with their environment quite literally. To survive in the tropics, Europeans had no option but to mix, because the hybrid mestizo adapted to the environment better. However, being culturally degenerate, the resulting mestizo society would then be in a predicament. Romero argued that writers developed ontogenetically in the context of the phylogeny of their ancestors, because they adapted to their specific environments. Romero had picked up the idea of cultural recapitulation from evolutionary social theorists such as Gabriel Tarde and Sumner Maine, but he abandoned this view in the 1890s, just when Barreto was abandoning Haeckel for a more philosophically nuanced neo-Kantianism (Glick 2010, 697). In Mexico, as in other Latin American countries, discussions of Darwinism took place in the contexts of politics, the popular press, and philosophy. The first references to Darwin in the Mexican press were published in 1870. The first mention was made in El libre pensador on May 5, 1870, by Santiago Sierra, and the second and third in El monitor republicano, on May 22 and June 19, 1870, by

8

Darwinism

171

Gustav Gostkowski. These newspaper articles made clear allusion to the human being’s natural origin. Publication of these articles came at a time of greater openness and critical thought within the liberal atmosphere promoted by the government of Benito Juárez between 1870 and 1872, and that would, in the future, set a milestone in Mexico’s political history. Since the Mexican War of Reform, liberalism as a political position had found a niche in Mexican society that it would never surrender. As Hale (2002) points out, it was the crucible within which theories such as positivism, first Comtean and later Spencerian, were able to spread and establish themselves. Mexican liberalism found a model to follow in France, both politically and culturally, and science (as was the case with positivism) was fundamental to the pursuit of change in Mexico (Hale 2002; Eastwood 2004). The development of science in Mexico was clearly not comparable with its development in France, but evolutionary ideas were highly relevant in political discussions. The same thing can be seen as regards the increase in interested parties in the social field. Almost all the members of the Gabino Barreda’s Asociación (whose members included such figures as Agustín Aragón, Porfirio Parra, Miguel S. Macedo, Luis F. Ruiz and Manuel Flores) participated in the association’s discussions on evolutionary thought. There were also other authors, such as Vicente Riva Palacio, Andrés Molina Enríquez, who fought for gradual social change, this being what they assumed to occur in terms of biological evolution. The few authors who contemplated radical change, while also defending evolutionary thinking, included Ricardo Flores Magón, who was opposed to Social Darwinism and argued that an armed revolution was necessary to achieve social change. He believed that the evolutionary position of important figures, such as Justo Sierra, who defended gradual change, was tantamount to cowardice. It is indisputable that the impact that Darwinism made on Mexico was much stronger at the intellectual and political levels than at the scientific level. The most important reasons for this are, firstly, that biology was still in its earliest stages. Secondly, the period between the Reform (1857) and the Mexican Revolution (1910) was one of constant confrontation, particularly ideological confrontation. (The Reform is the name given to the growth of Mexican liberalism under Benito Juárez.) Enactment of the Reform Laws led to the nationalization of the Catholic Church’s property and capital, and the separation of the Church and the State (1859). This defeat led conservatives to promote French intervention and the imposition of Maximilian of Habsburg as Emperor. The War of Reform came to an end when Maximilian was executed. Benito Juárez, as President of Mexico, acquired unprecedented respect and power and invited Gabino Barreda, a Comtean positivist, to take charge of education. Inspired by Comte’s ideas of Order, Progress, and Love, Barreda constructed a philosophy based on Liberty, Order, and Progress, emphasizing that order was necessary after the War and the expulsion of the French army. Barreda argued that sustained discourse in scientific knowledge was the one thing that was beyond any discussion

172

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

and could thus lead to agreement in all areas, including politics. He founded the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP) in 1867, offering a 2-year school cycle to prepare students for entrance to the University, and it was here that Darwinism was widely discussed for the first time in Mexico. The next clear stage in Mexican history was the Porfiriato. During this period the leading camps of positivist ideology maintained their positions. In spite of holding dissimilar points of view, Emilio Rabasa and Justo Sierra both used Darwin’s ideas – mainly discovered through Spencer – to justify social inequality (Rabasa), and to justify its change through a process of evolution that would gradually lead to progress. While in some Latin American countries mestizaje was thought of as degeneration, in Mexico, there were those who argued the exact opposite: that the indigenous population and the mestizo were superior. Andrés Molina Enríquez and Vicente Riva Palacio held that indigenous people had natural characteristics that surpassed the white man’s in the conditions obtaining in different areas of the country, and considered the mestizo to be the superior result of the mixing of Spanish and indigenous stock (Juárez-Barrera and Bueno-Hernández 2017). While defending the combined heritage of Spanish and indigenous people was politically important in Mexico, the contrast with Argentina was stark: Darwinian discourse in Argentina was exceedingly racist and used to justify the extermination of the majority of local indigenous people. It was argued that extinction was a natural phenomenon, and therefore the massacre of the indigenous Argentinean population could be rationalized if understood in Darwinian terms. The extinction of the Amerindians was seen as a mark of progress, as if some “natural” law ruled that a less-favored race should lose the Darwinian struggle for life. The “culture of extinction” was generalized, from government policies to written history, conceptualized nationality and even the way in which museums were organized (Novoa and Levine 2009). In Bolivia, the situation was similar to Argentina when it came to ideological debates about indigenous populations. The first text to publicize Darwinism in Bolivia was a translation from the French of L. A. Dumont’s Haeckel et la théorie de l’évolution en Allemagne of 1877, while Belisario Díaz Romero, a doctor and writer, took charge of propagating Darwinism. According to Argueta Villamar (2009, 155), Díaz Romero wrote the first article on Darwinism, La teoría de Darwin y su importancia científica en la actualidad in 1892, though, as Argueta points out, it was strongly Lamarckian. In one of the most renowned polemics in the Bolivian press of the early twentieth century, Díaz Romero confronted the conservative, P. Marabini. The most notorious opponents of the dissemination and teaching of Darwinism included Bishop Miguel de los Santos Taborga and President Mariano Baptista. In the political sphere, José Manuel Pando, geographer and president from 1899 to 1904, was a Social Darwinist who believed that the Amerindians were inferior beings and that their elimination through natural selection was a necessary prerequisite for civilization. Bautista Saavedra, the geographer-president of Bolivia from 1921 to 1925, believed that

8

Darwinism

173

the Aymara indigenous communities, based on extended families, represented an anachronistic form of social organization and should not survive. Unlike countries such as Mexico, where the impetus of the liberals (and similarly, of positivism), motivated important social changes, between 1880 and 1881, the Bolivian liberal movement could neither achieve change nor promote the study of Darwinism. Such changes as did occur came well into the twentieth century (1901, 1909, and 1913), and emphasized the proposals of Haeckel and Spencer, as was happening in all Latin American countries. Much of the early promotion of Darwinism by Uruguayan positivists took place at the Ateneo del Uruguay in Montevideo, where by 1881, according to one of the Darwinian leaders, José de Arechavaleta (a professor of chemistry at the University of the Republic and of zoology at the Ateneo), the majority of professors supported evolution. In the course he taught at the Ateneo, he used a text written by Alfred Giard, who freely mixed Lamarckian and Darwinian mechanisms, endorsing the struggle for existence and natural selection, along with the inheritance of acquired characters. Arechavaleta, a faithful devotee of Haeckel, claimed to have discovered the bathybius (a being lying between non-life and life) and whose existence Haeckel had hypothesized (Glick 2001). Lorenzo Latorre, the positivist Uruguayan dictator who ruled from 1876 to 1880, gave posts at the Ministry of Education, including the position of university rector, to Darwinists, turning the university into a “Darwinian dictatorship,” as one Catholic deputy complained. To avoid difficulties with students who had Catholic beliefs, the courses in Law and Medicine were carefully prepared by Darwinian professors to avoid problems. At the Faculty of Law, Martín C. Martínez taught natural law along Darwinian and Spencerian lines. He referred to himself as an “explanatory naturalist,” believing that Darwinian mechanisms explained social phenomena literally, and not merely figuratively. He held that both the history of law (particularly that of property) and the development of social institutions could be understood through the action of natural selection (Glick 2001). In political contexts, the common denominator of many of the speeches expressing Darwinian ideas, such as natural selection, was that they were generally defended by positivist conservative or liberal elites. Lesmes Chacón (2009), for example, points out that, at root, the controversies and debates in Colombia meant taking Darwin’s ideas and using them as a tool to help legitimize political positions for conservatives and liberals who were trying to either win or hang on to power: “Whether it is utilitarianism that is demonized or extolled, whether it is materialism that is attacked, whether it is Darwinism that divides, the intention has been to use those things loaded with truth and accuracy (the enlightened European sciences, positivism, the invariable laws of society) to put the truth to one side and create authority when speaking” (Lesmes 2009, 62). Positivism’s scientistic eloquence lent it such power that it was used by both conservatives and liberals. Both sides claimed that they based their positions on scientific truths. The debates essentially reflected the old power structure imposed by the Spanish Crown, where its powerful religion and theology faced off against the new Anglo-

174

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

Saxon-style ideas competing for the political power they could use to achieve transformations in the political and liberal economic order, though without, in general terms, annulling racist practices on either side. In Mexico, the educationalist Barreda, a Comtean positivist, argued that science was the only human activity that, given the authority derived from its methodology, could achieve social consensus. In consequence, he insisted on the introduction of scientific concepts and theories in the training of high school graduates.

Social Darwinism and Early Globalization Positivism as an ideological element accompanying political and economic speeches, and Spencerian positivism in particular – as described in Global Spencerism (2015) – was profoundly influential in certain Latin American countries, where naturally it was linked to liberal movements. The countries that have been most intensely studied are Mexico, Argentina (Novoa 2016), and Brazil (Bertol Domingues 2016). The two main currents of positivism in Latin America were Comtism (“social positivism”) and Spencerism (“evolutionary positivism”). Comtism promoted a more united and just society through the application of science, while Spencerism, associated with the ideas of Herbert Spencer and, of course, those of Darwin, promoted development (evolution-progress) based on individual competition. In Spencer’s writings, there was an emphasis on universal progress as a continuous unilinear evolution from vague primitive beginnings to human civilization. Spencer used the term “evolution” as a synonym for progress before the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859), and after reading The Origin of Species in 1864, Spencer expanded his idea: “This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr Darwin has called ‘natural selection,’ or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.” Kelly (1981) points out that Spencer’s followers saw in Darwinism: “with its natural selection of the fittest, proof of the naturalness (and hence justice) of the competitive, hierarchical, bourgeois society” (Kelly 1981, 100). If sadly the less fit masses suffered, that was regrettable but natural and necessary; alleviating suffering would engender degeneration, making ethnic cleansing and eugenics essential. Socialists and radicals, never at ease with biological analogies to society, still found some comfort in Darwinism, taking its main message to be change and thus an implicit challenge to a static society. They noted that “existing elites were by no means the fittest in any Darwinian sense. Only when everyone had an equal start, as in nature, would men be able to reach their true potential” (Kelly 1981, 101). In 1877, comparing old and new systems of land tenure in Ireland, Joseph Fisher coined the term “Social Darwinism” (Fisher 1877, 25). (From a reading of the Brehon Code on the transition from the tribal chief to the Irish Baron and the question of land tenure, and where he points out, he does not find in the Brehon Code anything like Social Darwinism (Fisher 1877).) This term would be used thereafter to unite the ideas of the “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection,”

8

Darwinism

175

bringing together biological evolution and socioeconomic evolution. These ideas were paired in a way that would predominate in Latin America and that would promote social development as the result of natural laws based on competition (Malthusian), on the survival of the fittest (Spencerian), and on natural selection (Darwinian), a theoretical mechanism to which one further component would be added, eugenics (Galtonian), even though in Latin America, eugenics would derive from proposals related to Lamarckian ideas (Suárez y López Guazo 2005; Stern 2016). These theoretical elements, coming together and interacting with “Social Darwinism,” partly shaped “Darwinian discourses in Latin America” in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. In nineteenth-century Latin America, “Darwinism” was generally taken to mean “Social Darwinism,” since the debate was generally about human society and because the key students of Darwinism were lawyers, in many cases close to political power. In the social and anthropological sphere, which was where it had the greatest impact, the spread of Darwinism was associated with the racist interpretations that were already a part of Latin America’s long history. Now referred to simply as “Darwinism,” several of its concepts were used to justify and promote the long-standing racist practices of particular Latin American elites in their ideological, economic, and political struggles with the indigenous population who constituted another significant percentage of the population, and with the black population which was, at various dates, achieving liberation from slavery (Horcasitas 1996, 102). Resulting from this, the notion of racial superiority, promoted by some supporters of Darwin, served as a specific motor for the dissemination and introduction of Darwinism. In any event, it is evident that, from these combinations of Spencerian and Darwinian ideas, the latter’s ideas were disseminated, appropriated by Latin American authors, and had a direct impact on the formation of scientific institutions, even though their influence was far greater in ideological, political, and economic and even literary contexts. Further, it may well be that, by failing to take a position on any of the varied currents of thought that co-opted his theory to support a political position, Darwin himself was responsible for his ideas finding their way into a variety of political theories (Kelly 1981).

Social Darwinism in Latin America Glick was quite right to point out that Darwinism in Latin America was more philosophical than scientific. This philosophical Darwinism was moreover part of a sociological process, which was used in Latin America in the context of what, following certain authors (Daunton 2006; Gerchunoff and Llach 2008), might be designated the first globalization (1850–1914), (Other authors give these dates running from 1870 to beyond the First World War.) a period when a new system of trade and financial investment was spreading around the world. At this time, Spain and Portugal, which had previously dominated the political and economic history of

176

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

Latin America, were replaced by the new imperialist countries, particularly Britain and the United States. The most important countries in this dynamic of trade and financial investment, which enjoyed a “golden age of economic development,” as Jeremy Adelman put it (2014), under the slogans of peace, order, and progress, were the self-same countries where philosophical Darwinism had the deepest roots and the greatest diversification. The Latin American Darwinian geography included Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela and all at the time recorded increased levels of foreign investment and raw material production. Another chapter of this expansion of capitalism occurs in Porfirio Díaz’s industrialization policies in Mexico leading, in 1910, to the Mexican Revolution. The above leads to the recognition that, rather than there being a scientific interest in assimilating Darwinian ideas, in the Latin America of that time, there was instead a deep-seated interest in justifying the “survival of the fittest” in the context of the early stages of commercial, economic, and financial globalization, whose nature was Spencerian. Once Latin American countries gained independence, the region became a magnet for financial investment. Thus, it was both economics and politics that contributed to the dissemination, introduction, reception, and the minimal adoption of Darwinism by Latin American science. The region was considered fertile ground for the exploitation of its natural resources, but not for the generation of knowledge. The cases of Chile and Panama, for example, are good illustrations of the efforts to impose new commercial and financial rules. While Darwin had in fact visited Chile, his scientific ideas did not make a significant impact on the country. This was basically because the situation in Chile was no different from other Latin American countries – they had only become countries in order to exploit the natural resources of their vast territories. “At that time, Colonial Chile, like the rest of the Latin American countries, had developed an export economy whose primary function was to provide raw materials to the world market” (Medel and Veloso 2009, 10). From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain had set in place a plan of expansion that led her to colonize certain Latin American territories. The voyages of Captain Robert FitzRoy of HMS Beagle were part and parcel of that colonial expansion. Britain’s objectives also involved encouraging Spanish colonies to pursue independence so that it could thereby “take over the new markets with its burgeoning industrial production.” Once Chile had achieved independence in 1818 and broken its ties with Spain, the country’s contacts with other European countries and with the United States expanded. The European metropolises, in the midst of their industrial revolutions, guaranteed good prices for raw materials. In return, Chile had to pledge low tariffs for the imported products of foreign manufacturing (Medel and Veloso 2009, 10). By effecting the guarantees that the foreign powers demanded, Chile was incorporated into the emerging world market, developing its role as a supplier of raw materials and as an importer of articles produced by European industry (Vitale 1991).

8

Darwinism

177

While Chile was strengthening its ties with Britain, Panama was strengthening its own ties with the United States. In both cases, as with other Latin American nations, progress, Darwinism, and social transformation dominated political discussions. In Panama, the first references to Darwin and his work are to be found in the press, published in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in a newspaper called La Estrella, whose articles “reflected American interest in imperial expansion” (Villarreal and De Gracia 2017, 114). One of its articles even mentions the United States’ interest in the “strategic” purchase of the Galapagos archipelago, based on a belief in false rumors of vast deposits of niter and guano.

Conclusion The chapter has laid out a general indication of the reception, introduction and appropriation of Darwinism in Latin American countries. Of the 33 Latin American countries, the historiography of Darwinism has been concentrated in the 11 largest. This does not mean that Darwinism was not present in the remainder. That research and that history still awaits. For example, to obtain a much more complete picture of Darwinism in Latin America, it will be necessary to ascertain what happened in other Caribbean countries, not only Cuba. In practically all the Latin American countries that have been studied, the ideas of Haeckel and Spencer accompanied the assimilation of Darwin’s theory. This occurred particularly among the lawyers and doctors who constituted a significant proportion of the intellectual elite, and were, in most cases close to the ruling governments and even, as was the case in Uruguay and Venezuela, extended to a number of presidents who were fervent positivists. This makes it entirely possible that something similar may have happened in the countries that have yet to be studied. In each of the areas studied, Darwinism in science, in medicine, in the political and economic field, as well as in the debate with theology, there remain open questions for research and reflection, and these will permit an analysis of the transition of the Latin American region in the second half of the nineteenth century in greater detail. This was a period marked by positivism, Social Darwinism, and utilitarianism, and one when these countries faced a complex social reality, having heterogeneous populations at a time when they had only just become sovereign nations. Almost invariably, standing at the forefront of power, there were groups of intellectuals sympathizing with either conservative or liberal European streams of thought, and who at times were involved in polite debate, at others in bitter animosity. Historians of Latin American philosophy had assumed that Comte’s positivism acted as an obstacle to the acceptance of Spencer’s positivism, and that this would be seen in countries where Comtism was most influential, such as Brazil and Mexico. However, in both countries, Comte was replaced by Spencer, and as a result, Darwinism was debated and subsequently assimilated and appropriated. Although positivism was influential everywhere, the specific nature of the Darwinian discourse

178

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

that emerged was nonetheless strongly conditioned by the ethnic makeup of local populations. Considering the above elements, present during the processes of the introduction of Darwinian thought, and the theoretical elements used in the different analyses of the reception and introduction of Darwinism, this assimilation may at the same time be thought of as a diversification of Darwinism in the various Latin American countries – a cultural phenomenon that diversified in parallel with contingent factors (in the sense that they could have been different) and that gave a different nuance to the reception, introduction, and appropriation of Darwinism in Latin America when compared with events in Europe and the Anglo-Saxon part of America, United States, and Canada. Explicitly or implicitly, it may be stated that Darwinism was received in a context of positivism, both Comtean and Spencerian (Glick 2013), within the framework of the expansion of economic liberalism. Considering the cultural events occurring between 1850 and 1910, it is clear that, rather than there being a scientific interest in Darwinian ideas, there was profound interest in vindicating the social order of the various Latin American countries during the early stages of commercial and financial globalization. Darwinism, and Social Darwinism in particular, was important during the early stages of globalization. However, as a scientific idea, it formally and institutionally only became part of Latin American science later, first in medicine and anthropology.

References Adelman J (2014) América Latina y el mundo: la edad de oro, de nuevo. Paper presented at the XVII Congreso Internacional de AHILA, Freie Universität Berlin, 9 September 2014 Argueta Villamar A (2009) El darwinismo en Iberoamérica: Bolivia y México. CSIC–CSIC Press, Madrid Argueta Villamar A (2017) Darwinism in Latin American: reception and introduction. In: Quiroga D, Sevilla A (eds) Darwin, Darwinism and conservation in the Galapagos Islands: the legacy of Darwin and its new applications. Springer, Cham, pp 91–108 Arteaga Sánchez JM (2009) Las ciencias y las razas en Brasil hacia 1900. Asclepio 61(2):67–100 Barahona A (2009) La introducción del darwinismo en México. Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 28(2):201–214 Barreto G (1994) The introduction of Darwinism in Venezuela. Interciencia 19:59–59 Barrón L (2001) Liberales conservadores: Republicanismo e ideas republicanas en el siglo XIX en América Latina. Prepared for delivery at the 2001 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, pp 1–22, 6–8 September 2001 Bertol Domingues HM (ed) (2009) Darwinismo, Meio Ambiente, Sociedade. Via Letera Editora, Sao Paulo Bertol Domingues HM (2016) Spencerism in Brazil: an introduction. In: Lightman B (ed) Global Spencerism: the communication and appropriation of a British evolutionist. Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, pp 192–217 Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M (2001) The introduction of Darwinism in Brazil. In: Glick T, Puig-Samper MA, Ruiz R (eds) The reception of Darwinism in the Iberian world. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 65–81

8

Darwinism

179

Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M, Glick T (eds) (2003) A recepção do darwinismo no Brasil. SciELO, Editora Fiocruz, Sao Paulo Bretón BM (1982) Orígenes del darwinismo en Chile. Editorial Andrés Bello, Santiago Chacón Lesmes NJ (2009) Las polémicas evolucionistas en Colombia a finales del siglo XIX: pasado y presente de la naturaleza, el hombre y las sociedades. Memoria y sociedad 13(26):41–62 Cid MRL, Waizbort R (2005) Miranda Azevedo e a Seleção Artificial no Brasil do Século XIX. Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de História da Ciência 3(2):172–192 Cleaves HJ, Lazcano A, Mateos IL, Negrón-Mendoza A, Peretó J, Silva E (2014) Herrera’s “Plasmogenia” and other collected works: early writings on the experimental study of the origin of life. Springer, New York Conry Y (1974) L’introduction du darwinisme en France au XIXe siècle. Vrin, Paris Cuvi N, Sevilla E, Sevilla A, Piñas F (2014) La circulación del darwinismo en el Ecuador (1870–1874). Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia 39:115–144 Daunton M (2006) Britain and globalisation since 1850: I. Creating a global order, 1850–1914. Trans R Hist Soc 16:1–38 De Roux R (2012) De la Nación Católica a la República Pluricultural en América Latina. Algunas consideraciones históricas. Memorias 9(16):1–35 de Souza Mandarino AC, Gomberg E (2010) A Escola de Medicina da Bahia ou o lugar onde Pedro Archanjo foi bedel: representações de estereótipos acerca de macumba, loucura e crime. Revista Eletrônica de Comunicação, Informação e Inovação em Saúde 4(3). https://doi.org/10.3395/ reciis.v4i3.664 Dumont LA (1877) Haeckel y la teoría de la evolución en Alemania. In: Círculo Literario (trans: Méndez J), núm. 3. Imprenta y Librería de M. C. Martínez, La Paz, pp 54–59 Eastwood J (2004) Positivism and nationalism in 19th century France and Mexico. J Hist Sociol 17(4):331–357 Fisher J (1877) The history of landholding in Ireland. Longmans, Green & Co., London Gerchunoff P, Llach L (2008) Antes y después del “corto siglo XX”. Dos globalizaciones latinoamericanas (1850–1914 y 1980s–2000s). In: XXI Jornadas de la Asociación Argentina de Historia Económica. Asociación Argentina de Historia Económica, Caseros, pp 1–52 Glick TF (ed) (1974) The comparative reception of Darwinism, The Dan Danciger publication series. University of Texas Press, Austin Glick TF (1984) Perspectivas sobre la recepción del darwinismo en el mundo hispano. In: Actas II Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias: Jaca. Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas (SEHCYT), Alcalá de Henares, pp 49–86. September 27–October 1, 1982 Glick TF (ed) (1989a) The comparative reception of Darwinism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Glick TF (1989b) Darwin y el darwinismo: en el Uruguay y en América Latina. UR. FHC, Montevideo Glick TF (2001) The reception of Darwinism in Uruguay. In: Glick T, Puig-Samper MA, Ruiz R (eds) The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World, Boston studies in the philosophy of science, vol 221. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 29–52 Glick TF (2003) O Posítivísmo Brasileiro na Sombra do Darwinismo. In: Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M, Glick T (eds) A recepção do darwinismo no Brasil. SciELO, Editora Fiocruz, Sao Paulo, pp 181–189 Glick TF (2010) The comparative reception of Darwinism: a brief history. Sci Educ 19(6–8): 693–703 Glick TF (2013) Darwinism in Latin America. In: Ruse M (ed) The Cambridge encyclopedia of Darwin and evolutionary thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp 258–263. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139026895.033 González LEM (2010) La divulgación del darwinismo en América Latina: José Martí y su ensayo Darwin ha muerto (1882). eVOLUCIÓN: Revista de la sociedad de Española de Biología Evolutiva 5(2):19–22 Gozzer S (2010) Thomas Glick. Mètode: Revista de Difusión de la Investigación 67:4–7

180

R. Ruiz-Gutie´rrez and R. Noguera-Solano

Hale C (2002) El liberalismo mexicano en la época de Mora, 1821–1853. Siglo XXI Editores, México City Horcasitas BU (1996) El determinismo biológico en México: del darwinismo social a la sociología criminal. Rev Mex Sociol 58(4):99–126 Hurtado MT (2009) Charles Darwin y el darwinismo en Chile. Theoria 18(1):19–33 Jaksic I, Posada Carbó E (2011) Liberalismo y poder. Latinoamérica en el siglo XIX. Editorial Fondo de Cultura Económica, Santiago Juárez-Barrera F, Bueno-Hernández AA (2017) La influencia del darwinismo sobre los conceptos raciales en México. Asclepio 69(1):174 Kelly A (1981) The descent of Darwin – the popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914. North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Lesmes NJC (2009) Las polémicas evolucionistas en Colombia a finales del siglo XIX: pasado y presente de la naturaleza, el hombre y las sociedades. Memoria y Sociedad 13(26):41–62 Medel R, Veloso A (2009) Establecimiento y propagación del Darwinismo en Chile: recepción y elaboración de las ideas. Gayana 73:7–18 Miranda M, Vallejo G (2005) Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino. Siglo Veintiuno de Argentina Editores, Buenos Aires Novoa A (2016) The rise and fall of Spencer’s evolutionary ideas in Argentina, 1870–1910. In: Lightman B (ed) Global Spencerism: the communication and appropriation of a British evolutionist. Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, pp 173–191 Novoa A, Levine A (2009) From man to ape. Darwinism in Argentina, 1870-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Peñuela JJ (2009) Introducción del darwinismo al contexto colombiano. Tecné Episteme y Didaxis 23:426–429. https://doi.org/10.17227/01203916.263 Perazzi P (2011) Ciencia, cultura y nación: la recepción del darwinismo en la Argentina decimonónica. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.61993 Pruna PM, González AG (1989) Darwinismo y sociedad en Cuba: siglo XIX, Estudios sobre la ciencia no. 7. Editorial CSIC–CSIC Press, Madrid Pruna Goodgall PM (1999) El evolucionismo biológico en Cuba a fines del siglo XIX. In: Glick T, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica, vol 8. Editorial CSIC–CSIC Press, Madrid, pp 69–82 Restrepo Forero O (2009) El darwinismo en Colombia: visiones de la naturaleza y la sociedad. Acta Biol Colomb 14:23–40 Restrepo Forero O, Becerra Ardilla D (1995) El darwinismo en Colombia. Naturaleza y sociedad en el discurso de la ciencia. Acad Colomb Cienc 74:547–567 Rodríguez R, Manuel J (2010) El Positivismo en Venezuela. El Caso de Luís Razetti Martínez, Médico, Docente y Político. Inf Med 12(3):117–134 Ruiz Gutiérrez R (1987) Positivismo y evolución. La introducción del darwinismo en México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City Salgado L, Arcucchi A (2016) Teorías de la evolución: Notas desde el sur, 1st edn. Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro, Viedma Sevilla E (2017) Darwinians, anti-Darwinians, and the Galapagos (1835–1935). In: Quiroga D, Sevilla A (eds) Darwin, Darwinism and conservation in the Galapagos Islands, Social and ecological interactions in the Galapagos Islands. Springer, Cham, pp 41–63 Stern AM (2016) Eugenics in Latin America. In: Oxford research encyclopedia of Latin American history. Oxford University Press, New York. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439. 013.315 Suárez y López Guazo L (2005) Eugenesia y racismo en México. UNAM, México City Velázquez Fernández H (2015) Darwinism in the second half of the nineteenth century in Latin America. In: Silva I (ed) Latin American perspectives on science and religion. Routledge, New York, pp 85–96

8

Darwinism

181

Villarreal CA, De Gracia GI (2017) La recepción inicial del darwinismo por el Panamá decimonónico. Societas 19(2):107–147 Vitale L (1991) Interpretación marxista de la historia de Chile. Volumen III. Santiago de Chile: Editorial LOM Waizbort RF, da Luz MRMP, Edler FC, et al (2021) The first brazilian thesis of evolution: Haeckel’s recapitulation theory and its relations with the idea of progress. JHB 54:447–481 West D (2009) Fritz Müller, o biólogo evolucionista pioneiro no Brasil. In: Bertol Domingues HM, Romero Sá M, Puig-Samper MA, Ruiz Gutiérrez R (eds) Darwinismo meio ambiente, sociedade, Museo de astronomia. Via Lettera Editora, Sao Paulo, pp 37–53

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

9

A Historiographical Question Gustavo Caponi

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Anomaly Entitled Filogenia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What to Do with the Naughty Florentino? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Roots of Filogenia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ameghino’s Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

184 186 189 192 196 201 201

Abstract

The studies on the history of the science made in Latin America are usually disinterested in epistemological questions. The analysis of the conceptual aspects that rule scientific developments is left in the background, and the discussions and reflections that these conceptual questions generate among the researchers involved in such developments are seldom analyzed. It would seem that this analysis lacks relevance; as if those discussions and reflections could only be the distorted echo of reflections and discussions already better developed elsewhere. A clear example of this is the relatively little importance given to Filogenia: that ambitious programmatic work in which Florentino Ameghino explains the fundamental bases of Evolutionary Paleontology. This negligence not only conspired against a correct understanding and appreciation of Ameghino’s own figure but also prevented this work from being used as a document able to facilitate a clear comprehension of the way in which the Darwinian Revolution impacted Paleontology and Natural History in general. G. Caponi (*) Department of Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_5

183

184

G. Caponi

Introduction Born in Lujan, province of Buenos Aires, on September 18, 1854 (Cabrera 1944, 10), Florentino Ameghino was the first Argentine scientist whose work got genuine international recognition (Concerning the recognition achieved by Ameghino’s researches, see: Moore (1920, 469); Piveteau (1961, 523); Simpson (1984, 79); Bowler (1996, 409) and Podgorny (2005, 250). Nevertheless, in this respect, nothing is more eloquent than the glowing review of Contribución al conocimiento de los mamíferos fósiles de la República Argentina (Ameghino, 1889) that Cope (1891) wrote for The American Naturalist). When he died in La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires, on August 6, 1911 (Cabrera 1944, 10), the results of his researches on South American dinosaurs and fossil mammals were a significant piece in the edifice of that Evolutionary Paleontology that had begun to be built after the advent of Darwinism: an Evolutionary Paleontology which, both because of its cognitive objectives and its guiding assumptions, was definitely Darwinian and not just “evolutionist.” Nevertheless, despite the magnitude of his work, and regardless of the international acknowledgment achieved by that work, the posterity was rather ungrateful with Ameghino. Because of the overwhelming number of fossil genera and species he identified and classified (Reig 1961, 78), Ameghino was always valued as a stubborn and prolific fossil hunter (cf. Reig 1961, 76). However, at the same time, it has been very common to portray him as somewhat confused, and perhaps incoherent, as regards the theoretical foundations of his research. This judgment, however, is not the result of a simple oversight. It is the symptom of a limitation that usually afflicts a considerable part of the historical research concerning the science produced in Latin America: the neglect of the epistemological questions that can be relevant to understand the conceptual frameworks that effectively guided the production of this science and determined its validation. Negligence that, in Ameghino’s case, is especially striking, because far from being unclear or careless, regarding those more general theoretical issues, Ameghino gave them great importance, and this was reflected in Filogenia: principios de clasificación transformista basados sobre leyes naturales y proporciones matemáticas (Ameghino 1915[1884]) (The complete title of the work is Filogenia: principios de clasificación transformista basados sobre leyes naturales y proporciones matemáticas. That is: Phylogeny: principles of evolutionary classification based on natural laws and mathematical proportions). This was an early programmatic work, published in 1884, in which Ameghino exposes the theoretical objectives and the more general methodological principles of Evolutionary Paleontology, and its reading not only allow us to understand the insertion of his works in that framework, but it also can help to appreciate the shock generated by Darwinism in that disciplinary field. Nevertheless, and unfortunately, that work had been very little considered by those who dealt with Ameghino’s contributions; and that represents a pitiful misuse. Such disinterest not only obstructed a thorough understanding, and a proper epistemological evaluation, of Ameghino’s work; but it also prevented Filogenia from being used as a document whose relevance goes far beyond the understanding of a

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

185

local development of Evolutionary Paleontology. In fact, this work was an effort to understand the far-reaching changes that the Darwinian revolution was bringing to Paleontology, and it was a successful effort that would deserve to be considered in any interpretation of that abrupt transformation that the advent of Darwinism generated in the whole of Natural History. From then on, this disciplinary field becomes a genuine History of Nature, unified and oriented by the great theoretical aim of reconstructing the tree of life (Bowler 1996), something that before On the origin of species (Darwin 1859) was unthinkable and whose imposition triggered a radical reorganization of Comparative Anatomy, Comparative Embryology, Biogeography, Taxonomy, and Paleontology itself. Until that point, they had been sciences of synchronic correlations, but from that moment on, those disciplines became sciences oriented to reconstruct genealogical relationships. And it is that revolutionary reorganization that Filogenia enables us to understand. Ameghino indeed focused on Paleontology, which he considered the leading discipline of that “phylogenetic program” that, after Darwin, began to guide the development of Natural History (The term “phylogenetic program” could be used in contraposition with the term “adaptationist program” (cf. Caponi 2011). This latter program was rather delayed in the Evolutionary Biology of the nineteenth century (Caponi 2011). The main tasks of that Evolutionary Biology were the phylogenetic reconstructions; that is: the development of the phylogenetic program). However, Ameghino’s analysis allows us to understand, and to measure, the impact that Darwin’s theses and proposals had in this whole disciplinary field. Filogenia, to put it another way, shows how Darwin’s work leveraged the passage from that Natural History whose main references were George Cuvier, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Richard Owen to that new Natural History whose great champions were Ernst Haeckel, Carl Gegenbaur, Felix Anton Döhrn, or Edwin Ray Lankester. Naturalists whose commitment to the phylogenetic program delineated by Darwin, as Filogenia helps to see, could not be clearer. Reading it, no longer as a mere local expression of an evolutionism imported from abroad, but rather as a movement within a wider game involving a scientific community of transnational dimensions, Filogenia allows not only to appreciate the importance of the role played there by Ameghino, but it even allows to understand the rules of that entire game. That is: to neglect the epistemological aspects of History of Science not only precludes the complete understanding of the developments and results of the science produced in Latin America, but it also inhibits the possibility of using those developments and results for understanding the conceptual evolution of the disciplinary domains in which they find their foundation and validation. For this reason, besides inquiring about the possible motivations for this neglect, here, Filogenia will be considered as an example for showing the relevance that the study of the more general theoretical features of the scientific knowledge produced in Latin America may have. Insofar as it is inserted in a transnational production process, science made in Latin America does not have to be considered as the delayed echo, or as a mere replication, of what is thought elsewhere. On the contrary, it can and should be considered as an active part of that process (cf. Barahona 2018). A process in which it obtains its intelligibility and its basis; and to whose legitimacy and general foundation it contributes.

186

G. Caponi

An Anomaly Entitled Filogenia Florentino Ameghino is a clear example of how Latin American scientists have developed their work by integrating themselves into a network of transnational circulation of knowledge that provides them with a framework within which their research made sense, also operated as a legitimizing instance of that work, and also of the results arising from it. Furthermore, this legitimization, which is often expressed as a clear and notorious international recognition, can also be taken as an indicator of the excellence achieved by the science produced in Latin American countries (cf. Cueto 1989, 29; 1994, 28). However, this transnational integration of Latin American scientific communities often occurred in a way that deserves to be mentioned. Not infrequently, and perhaps in most cases, this insertion and legitimization of researches developed by Latin American scientists have taken the most general features of that “subordinated integration” pointed by Pablo Kreimer (2006, 209). Kreimer, it is true, appealed to that notion to characterize the regime, formally established by international cooperation agreements, which today usually rules the work of some research groups seated in Latin American institutions. In these cases, says Kreimer (2006, 209), often an “international division of labor” prevails; and there, the groups located in Latin America are assigned to “activities of high content and technical specialization” that “are subsidiary to scientific and/or productive problems already defined.” But, in some sense, that “subordinated integration” whose hardest expression Kreimer (2006) points out in the current international research networks, could also be glimpsed in other historical moments; even without the existence of international cooperation agreements that formally set up such division of the research tasks. It would be, rather, a spontaneous and informal subordinated integration, resulting from how the research, from its beginning, is projected and developed by those who conceive and execute it. Under such “spontaneous subordination” and attending to different demands and limitations proper to the context in which they develop their activities, scientists working in Latin America, delineate and assume research projects that always suppose the acceptance of conceptual and methodological coordinates previously and elsewhere defined (Vessuri 1983, 17): a conceptual framework delineated, and already legitimated, in countries whose scientific traditions and communities are more consolidated and have already conquered more reputation (cf. Vessuri 1983, 16). Within this conceptual framework, not subject to controversy, the research of these scientists located in Latin America finds its raison d’être, and it is also under these theoretical references that the results of their research may be validated and considered relevant. This conceptual conservatism, furthermore, is often reinforced by the recurring demands for potential applicability that so commonly condition the researches carried out in less economically developed countries (Vessuri 1983, 16; Cueto 2015, 21). Thus, rarely at the forefront when it is a matter of conceptual developments, the science made in Latin America always reached its higher level of excellence in the exercise of normal science: solving “puzzles” whose approach assumes theoretical

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

187

coordinates, explanatory objectives, and also methodological ideals, already discussed and defined elsewhere. In this sense, it is true, the science made in Latin America does not differ from most of the science produced in the so-called central or developed countries: the normality of science is always normal science. Moreover, within this framework of normality, there is room for research of different degrees of relevance and theoretical centrality: the puzzles to be posed can be more or less fundamental, and their resolution can have a high theoretical impact. Bernardo Houssay’s physiological research and Federico Leloir’s biochemical research, both Nobel Prize winners (Cueto 1989, 29; 1997, 238), are good Latin American examples of this type of high-impact normal science (cf. Cueto 1994; Lorenzano 1994), and it is also the case of Ameghino’s researches. They are a typical case of that normal science developed under the regime of “spontaneous subordinated integration.” Ameghino’s works on the fossil mammals found in the Pampas region, and on the Patagonian dinosaurs, were considered relevant because they followed the established methodological guidelines and the cognitive objectives of Evolutionary Paleontology. But in addition to that, Ameghino’s works also presented a characteristic that has often been a condition that eases the transnational recognition of the science produced in Latin American countries: they referred to evidence that could only be compiled in situ (cf. Vessuri 1983, 17–8). In other words, Florentino Ameghino’s works, not only could be described as the specification of a program previously thought by European paleontologists; but they also seem able to be considered as something that, at last, is not very different from the observations and collections that a traveling naturalist, or an opaque foreign correspondent, makes for the institutions of a scientific metropolis. Thus, conceiving and carrying out his research, the Latin American scientist would not be showing any merit of his own, nor would he be making a theoretical choice worthy of mention or analysis; he would only be taking profit from his closeness with something that, for a mere matter of distance, the scientists of the metropolis could find difficult to study. The main scenario was elsewhere, and the Latin American scientist was limited to taking advantage of his proximity and familiarity with a secondary scenario, to see if, from there, he could add something, even if it was a humble footnote, to that enterprise always led by others. And it is by the tacit suspicion that this subaltern and marginal situation is the typical condition of the science made in Latin America, that the historian usually addresses it. If dealing with the effective production of knowledge resulting from this scientific activity, the historian will examine the empirical results, giving very little importance to the most fundamental theoretical options that can give meaning to those results. Of course, all of this epistemological disdain is unjustified, but the fact is that it seems to condition much of the literature regarding the science produced in Latin America. In this literature, the analysis of the theoretical and methodological coordinates of the researches carried out by scientists established in Latin America usually takes a second or third place; as if, regarding this topic, such researches were not of much interest. This may explain the scarce consideration with which

188

G. Caponi

Filogenia was treated by those who had dealt with Ameghino’s work. The fact of assuming that the insertion of its author in the construction of Paleontology should respond to a regime of subordinated, and even marginal, integration in a disciplinary background already constituted and thought of by others, may have led to neglect that ambitious theoretical work; even leading to the suspicion that there the only thing to be found is an outdated jumble of misguided lucubrations, not too rigorous and a little bizarre. That is to say, the classical portrait of Ameghino, which represents him as a purely empirical scientist and somewhat negligent about the theoretical foundations of his research, could come to prevail and to persist because it fits with the idea that the excellence of the science made in Latin America only depends on its efficiency and diligence in the development of research programs already established and outlined in the so-called “developed countries.” It must be said, however, that this devaluation of the work of Latin American scientists is not simply a historian’s mistake. This depreciation reflects a presupposition of that international division of scientific work in which Latin American science always seems destined to occupy a subordinate role. Within that order of things, the humble and hard-working Latin American scientist appears to be the executor of a program conceived by others. Thus, that scientist does not need to think too much about the foundations of such a program: only what may be necessary to perform efficiently the subordinate role of errand boy. Because of this, the theoretical works of Latin American scientists do not seem to be too interesting for their colleagues, and as a possible outcome of that, they do not seem to be very relevant for the historian of science either. Everything would indicate that those works are only the reverberation of something already said before and with greater clarity. Moreover, if the function of the Latin American scientist is to produce and organize data to be interpreted overseas, their incursions into the analysis of the theoretical coordinates that would guide that interpretation can only be of secondary interest. Therefore, the fact that a book such as Filogenia was “less widely disseminated in Europe and the United States than other works by Ameghino” was not, contrary to what Julio Orione (1987, 453) said, “a strange coincidence”; nor it was due only to the fact that its French edition was not published until 1919. The same is true for the little attention that the historians gave to that work: Filogenia was not so considered as other works by Ameghino because it was not an empirical work. It was nothing that could be treated as the inventory and orderly description of irreplaceable findings. Filogenia was the conception of a theoretical program, not its mere execution. It was an ambitious theoretical and methodological work whose goal was to outline the program to be followed by that Evolutionary Paleontology that had begun to be articulated after the publication of On the Origin of Species, and the fact that it has been written carries with it the assumption that that program was not yet properly clarified and explained. Other naturalists from different countries were already developing it, but it still seemed pertinent to make explicit the theoretical and methodological reference that guided their research. At least that was the view of a young naturalist who was speaking from the end of the world.

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

189

What to Do with the Naughty Florentino? Assuming a firm commitment with the program of an Evolutionary Paleontology that was still being consolidated, Ameghino took up the cognitive objectives, the conceptual basis, and the methodological guidelines that, to some extent tacitly, were ruling the construction of that disciplinary field. For this reason, if this Paleontology guided by the Phylogenetic Program is regarded as the theoretical framework of reference, Ameghino may be considered as a normal scientist, who was engaged in a new normality, still in the process of articulation, but whose contours were already defined. However, despite this commitment, which would fit into the context of a typical subordinated integration, Ameghino considered pertinent the realization of a reflexive effort aimed to better elucidate and demarcate the theoretical assumptions, and the methodological principles, involved in this new way of doing Paleontology. A way of doing Paleontology, perhaps it is suitable to remember this, structured by the Darwinian thesis according to which similarity is explained by common descent, and guided by the goal of reconstructing the tree of life: the complete phylogeny of all life forms (cf. Piveteau 1961, 515; Bowler 1996, 313; Buffetaut 1998, 75). Moreover, Ameghino not only considers that this reflective effort was necessary, but he decides to face it himself; and it is this presumption that prevents, or at least makes it difficult, for Filogenia to fit well in the type of studies that are usually dedicated to the history of the science made in Latin America. As it is the case, however, of Contribución al conocimiento de los mamíferos fósiles de la República Argentina (Ameghino 1889), or of other works like that. Filogenia is an anomalous book and, if seen as its author, Ameghino ends up looking like a somewhat anomalous figure. On the other hand, if he is considered as the author of the Contribución, everything seems clearer: it is assumed that everyone understands what Ameghino was trying to do there. The historian does not doubt about what can be done with that work: the results there exposed may be summarized; the institutional framework in which the research was developed may be analyzed; the vicissitudes that accompanied that process are worthy of being narrated; and the impact that the work had on the scientific community can be evaluated and weighed. In that version, Florentino Ameghino looks more compatible with the standard of the “good Latin American scientist.” As in fact always happens with his brother Carlos, and perhaps this is what explains that George Gaylord Simpson (1984, 75) seemed to feel more sympathy and respect for the latter than for Florentino. The fact is not without some historiographical interest. Carlos Ameghino [1865–1936] was indeed a tireless fossil collector whose findings, besides having been decisive for the development of his brother’s work, also contributed to the enlargement of the collections of the Museum of Natural Sciences of La Plata (Reig 1961, 73; Simpson 1984, 60). Maybe it was for this reason, because of his condition of judicious and modest field naturalist divested of any theoretical hybris unworthy of a South American scientist, that Simpson tended to see more value in the humble figure of Carlos than in the pretentious and controversial Florentino. That in Argentina there was a tendency to think of Carlos Ameghino only as a secondary character in the biography of his celebrated brother

190

G. Caponi

was, according to Simpson (1984, p.75), rather unjust. For Simpson, that certainly was thinking in his double condition of paleontologist and historian of Paleontology, the fossils discovered by Carlos Ameghino were more useful than the theoretical reflections written by Florentino: Argentineans to the bones, that concepts are our business. That is “subordinated integration.” Here, it is also worth mentioning how this widespread way of considering the work of Latin American scientists came into collusion with the hagiographic ways of making the history of science that once prevailed, and persist, although more subtly, in Latin America. Given the conditions of indigence, penury, and uncertainty, in which science often develops in this region, the scientific profession was often seen as a kind of epic, and even as a kind of laic apostolate. This is very common, above all, in certain literature that tends to exalt those who, against all the difficulties, and despite ingratitude and misunderstanding, were engaged in scientific activities. There, sacrifice, perseverance, self-denial, and even obedience, are presented as the greatest and most outstanding attributes of those scientists. Their excellence would lie, not so much in intellectual virtues but above all in ethical virtues; which can be seen in the various vicissitudes of a life as troubled as a scientist whose career occurs on the poor side of town should always have. For this reason, biographies of scientists like Ameghino abound (cf. Caponi 2017, 5 n. 17), and usually focused on ethical virtues, they pay very little attention to the effective contribution to the advance of science that could have been made by those long-suffering characters that are the Latin American scientists. Furthermore, the ethical virtues are easily identifiable because they are manifested in anecdotes and attitudes, and that explains the little care with the “intellectual virtues.” These are always harder to identify because they are manifested in boring research results and arduous scientific arguments. Things which understanding requires a general knowledge of the area of research in which the scientist under study developed his activity; but, above all, a precise knowledge of the problems that effectively guided the scientific research developed in the period that it is pertinent to analyze. Thus, the hagiographic enthusiasm, better or worse contained, of some biographers of Latin American scientists ends up converging with the epistemological disregard often inspired by the science produced under the regime of subordinated integration. The truth, however, is that the neglect of the epistemological aspects of science made in Latin America can be sustained without the complicity of those naive, and obsolete, approaches to the History of Science. Concerning that, it is interesting to see that, even when historians clearly and definitively overcome the hagiographic approach, this is usually done to develop studies that do not focus on epistemological questions either. This is the case, for example, of the profound and rigorous studies that are being made on the institutional spaces in which research has been developed. This topic, in the case of Ameghino and of the whole Argentine Natural History of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has been brightly and exhaustively analyzed by Irina Podgorny (2005, 2009). But, even assuming this kind of approach, most of the studies concerning the scientists working in Latin America seem to be still marked by the tacit assumption that the conceptual developments that they could eventually afford lack value and interest for an epistemological study. Thus,

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

191

approaches of cognitive sociology as the one that Dominique Guillo (2003, 16) dedicated to the Pre-Darwinian French Natural History seem something whose wait would be vain. Furthermore, in the specific case of scientists whose work was linked to Evolutionary Biology, this situation is also very influenced by the prominence always given to the repercussion that evolutionary theses have outside the scope of scientific circles. Thus, on many occasions, when the topics of the “introduction,” the “reception,” or the “appropriation” of Darwinism in Ibero-American countries are examined, the History of Science tends to slide into cultural studies that, in some cases, border the picturesque. There, what is analyzed is not what a scientific community did, or did not do, with Darwinism, as was the case in Yvette Conry’s (1974) famous book on the introduction of Darwinism in France. In general, these studies prefer to analyze how these scientific ideas were seen and interpreted in various exoteric circles. Thomas Glick’s (1982) Darwin en España gave a great impetus to this type of works, and among them, “social Darwinism” and eugenics were themes that always occupied a central place. Many of these studies seem to assume that, in certain countries, there were neither groups nor individuals for whom Darwinism could be a guide and a path for the development of genuine scientific work. Even when they speak about individuals who developed researches oriented by the evolutionist perspective, it often happens that such research is less examined than their discursive interventions in exoteric circles. In the case of Ameghino, for instance, this explains the importance given to works like “Mi credo” (Ameghino 1917a[1906]) and other writings similar to it. In this perspective, the history of evolutionism becomes the history of an ideology; or the history of a worldview. It becomes a history of “evolutionary thought” (cf. Monserrat 1993), and not of an Evolutionary Biology that with more or less brilliance, originality and amplitude, could be made in those countries. In this case, science gets out of the picture and its place is taken by the ideological discourse, the popularization, and the provincial enthusiasm of doctors, lawyers, journalists, politicians, and even apothecaries or priests, who are enthusiasts, or detractors, of evolutionism. The study of Darwinism in Latin America has received a great impulse thanks to the international colloquia on Darwinism in Europe and America sponsored by Rosaura Ruiz and Miguel Angel Puig-Samper. These meetings gave rise to a long and valuable series of collective books that, up today, constitute an inescapable reference for anyone who wants to research this subject (cf. Puig-Samper 2018). Its pages, meanwhile, clearly reveal that limiting thematic: at least as far as Latin America is concerned, most of the chapters are devoted to the cultural and ideological impact of Darwinism. There is very little there on the impact of Darwinism on the scientific communities and institutions of Latin American countries: little on the institutional dimension of that impact and almost nothing on its epistemological dimension. In many cases, there, History of Science is conflated with a chapter on the history of political ideas, ideological formations, and opinions in general. Considering that, it is not strange that even the unhappy postulation of a South American origin of man in which Ameghino, as is well known, incurred (cf. Caponi

192

G. Caponi

2017, 161), seems to have raised more interest than Filogenia. That dead-end that was Ameghinian Paleoanthropology (cf. Ameghino 1917b[1915]), very marked by ideological questions and by the lack of any empirical support (cf. Caponi 2017, 205), seems to deserve more attention than the dense pages of that remarkable book in which the whole way of making Evolutionary Paleontology is presented and developed. A part of that ungrateful posterity of Ameghino, referred at the very beginning, has to do with his unhappy speculations about the pampa origin of man. Recently, for example, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper (2018, 20) reduced Ameghino’s relevance to such theses. That is, Ameghino’s relevance is reduced to his less rigorous and valuable works. Fortunately, although widespread, the tendency to reduce the history of Latin American Darwinism to Cultural Studies (Of course, this is not an impugnation of the Cultural Studies of science. Science is also a cultural product; so, that approach is very pertinent. The problem is not to see that this is only a possible approach; even in the case of the science made in Latin America) has not taken space away from other types of approaches. Not everything that has been done is reduced to insisting on the ideological uses of Darwinism and evolutionism, and Podgorny’s works are a good example of that. However, besides those works of Podgorny, it is not uncommon to find many other works that are also devoted to the institutionalization of Darwinian scientific researches in the different Latin American countries. Again, even in these cases, there is a tendency to neglect the epistemological examination of the knowledge whose institutionalization is being examined and nor rarely, the analyses that are made in this works are based on epistemological suppositions that conspire against the very accuracy of the institutional approach itself. In Ameghino’s case, however, the magnitude of his work, and the recognition that it achieved, have contributed to restraining that tendency. Leonardo Salgado (2011) has made a very good job concerning the theoretical dimensions of Ameghino’s work. Nevertheless, without dismissing his excellent works, and considering that Salgado analyses are a valuable and unavoidable reference in the study of Ameghino, Filogenia still deserves much more careful and epistemologically better-grounded studies than those she has had so far. The conceptual axis on which Ameghino’s best researches orbited continues without being properly estimated and examined in its condition of theoretical and methodological work, and also, in its condition of an eloquent document about the nature of that Evolutionary Biology that developed in the five decades after 1859, and whose main objective was the reconstruction of the tree of life (cf. Russell 1916; Bowler 1996; Caponi 2017).

The Roots of Filogenia Certainly, Filogenia justified the honoris causa doctorate that the University of Cordoba conferred to Ameghino in 1885, shortly before assigning him the chair of Natural History, his first position as a professional scientist (cf. Mercante 1936, 65). However, it also justifies the fact that its author may be considered one of the naturalists who most quickly and clearly understood the nature of the challenges

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

193

and changes that the Darwinian perspective brought to the science that Cuvier had founded in the early nineteenth century. Cuvier’s Megatherium and Ameghino’s Glyptodonts, although geologically speaking they have been embedded almost simultaneously in the same ravines of Lujan River, their fossils are part of two differentiated periods of the History of Paleontology. And Filogenia allows understanding the difference between both conceptual regimes. The first of them, the Cuvierian, has to do with the very establishment of that discipline, and the second, with the reformulation that the Darwinian Revolution imposed on it. In Cuvier’s Paleontology, what mattered was to reconstruct the Megatherium, inserting it in a Taxonomy based on organizational types (Caponi 2017, 61). Meanwhile, in Ameghino’s Paleontology, what mattered was the insertion of glyptodonts in a phylogeny (cf. Caponi 2017, 90). The significance of Ameghino’s understanding of the impact of Darwinism on Paleontology, and on all of Natural History, does not lie in the fact that such understanding may come to express a picturesque Argentine singularity or a bizarre appropriation of the scientific knowledge that can be taken as the peculiarity of a “provincial science.” On the contrary, the pages of Filogenia show that the vast empirical work carried out by Ameghino was guided by a clear understanding of how Paleontology should be inserted within a Natural History reorganized by the Darwinian perspective; contributing, in this way, to the development and definitive consolidation of that evolutionary perspective. That is why the reading of Filogenia may be so relevant for the History of Evolutionary Biology. The Argentine Florentino Ameghino may be read as the British Thomas Huxley, the American Edward Cope, and the French Albert Gaudry are read, and as far as certain topics are concerned, with much more profit. Regarding several issues that are very relevant to the historical-epistemological studies of the Darwinian Revolution, Ameghino was much clearer than any of them. That parity, however, cannot, and must not, raise too many eyebrows. Although young when he wrote Filogenia, Ameghino was no longer a neophyte in the field of Natural History. Maybe, it could be possible to portray him as an autodidact, but never as a dilettante. By the time he finished that work, he had spent a long and laborious séjour in Paris, from 1878 to 1881, and there he was involved in many research projects developed at the National Museum of Natural History (Mercante 1936, 57; Casinos 2012, 403). Those researches, as Casinos (2012, 382) pointed out, resulted in important publications like Les mammifères fossiles de l’Amérique du Sud (Ameghino and Gervais 1914 [1880]) and La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata (Ameghino 1918[1881]). Moreover, it was during this period that Filogenia began to be written before being finished at Buenos Aires in 1882 (cf. Cabrera 1944, 21; Marquez-Miranda 1951, 82; Monserrat 1993, 53). Filogenia is not the work of an alleged inspired visionary. Filogenia is not an improbable flash of lucidity that sparks in the glooms of a poor and opaque intellectual life. Filogenia arises from Ameghino’s effective contact, not only with the whole tradition of that classical Paleontology that still survived in the Jardin des Plantes of Paris but also with the works of some of the main architects of the first evolutionary Paleontology (cf. Orione 1987, 459; Grimoult 1998, 151). Filogenia is

194

G. Caponi

not, and it could never be, the work of an isolated man who, with childish and provincial ingenuity, tries to reconstruct a whole science from a couple of personal and supposedly brilliant intuitions. This is made very clear by Ameghino himself (1915 [1884], p.13) when, already in the prologue, he notes the intellectual debt he owes to the naturalists whose works have provided him with “the greatest amount of data.” Although it is worth emphasizing that it was not so much a matter of data, but rather of concepts and theoretical references. Without neglecting to mention Hermann Burmeister, who had been established in Argentina since 1861, Ameghino (1915 [1884], 13) points out that, while “for the study of the structure of vertebrates,” he had “made use of the works of Cuvier, Blainville, Owen, Gervais, Waterhouse, Agassiz, Gray and Flower,” concerning the “genealogy of mammals” his main references were “the works of Flower, Gaudry, Leidy, Cope, and Kowalesky.” Moreover, in some cases, Ameghino’s connection with these naturalists was personal. Such was the case of Paul Gervais, Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages, Edward Cope, William Flower, Giuseppe Sergi, and Gabriel de Mortillet (cf. Simpson 1984, 78; Casinos 2012, 67), but none of these relationships could have been more relevant than the one Ameghino established with Albert Gaudry (Piveteau 1961, 523; Podgorny 2005, 253). At least, as far as the writing of Filogenia is concerned. This work, as it was already said, is a program, a guide, and a methodology for the development of an Evolutionary Paleontology, a Paleontology that engaged in the agenda that Darwin proposed as the main vector of all Natural History, and Gaudry was one of the pioneers in this new way of studying fossils (Buffetaut 1998, 81). Gaudry, who since 1872 occupied the chair of Paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History, was indeed a true pioneer in the evolutionary study of fossils (Conry 1974, 221–222). He was undoubtedly one of the first to use paleontological methods as the basis for establishing filiations between taxa (cf. Gaudry 1868, 15–16). Like many other paleontologists of the same period, he disagreed with Darwin regarding the causal mechanisms involved in evolution (cf. Buffetaut 1998, 81). He even embraced an opaque theistic evolutionism (Piveteau 1961, 517; Buffetaut 1998, 82). However, in the actual exercise of his paleontological work, he always was engaged in the Darwinian program of reconstructing the tree of life (cf. Gaudry 1878). It is there, in that work obsessively devoted to establishing the relationships of filiation between the lineages he studied (Piveteau 1961, 517; Buffetaut 1998, 82), that Gaudry’s Darwinism must be sought. Fortunately, his sterile theistic speculations never influenced, nor could they influence, his contributions to Evolutionary Paleontology, and these were the exemplars that guided Ameghino’s first evolutionary research and reflections. A work such as Les mammifères fossils de l’Amérique du Sud (Ameghino and Gervais 1914 [1880]) could have been written by a Cuvierian paleontologist. However, after Filogenia, the Darwinian Ameghino emerged, and Gaudry had something to do in that conversion that had nothing to do with personal convictions but with ways of doing Paleontology. Therefore, in 1878, even though evolutionists was still a minority both at Paris National Museum of Natural History and at Sorbonne (cf. Simpson 1984, 100), in that very moment being able to have direct

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

195

contact with Gaudry was one of the best ways to become familiar with the emergent Evolutionary Paleontology. Regarding that, and contrary to what Orione suggested (1987, 459), Ameghino had not fallen into a bad place; he had fallen in the right place at the best moment. At least for him, the chapter of Evolutionary Paleontology to which Ameghino could contribute more, and better, was the Paleontology of Mammals (cf. Marquez-Miranda 1951, 127; Reig 1961, 79). The most accessible and remarkable fossils of the Argentine Pampa were the remains of this group of vertebrates (Reig 1961, 79), and to study them nothing could be more useful than a close familiarity with Cuvier’s paleontological works, which were predominantly devoted to this taxon (cf. Cuvier 1992[1812]). It was not by chance that Mammals was the group to whom Gaudry (1878) dedicated the first volume of Les enchainements du monde animal, published in the same year that Ameghino arrived at Paris. In other words, the National Museum of Natural History in Paris was a great center for the development of Mammal Paleontology, and nothing could be better for someone whose scientific work would be devoted to the remains of Macrauchenias, Milodonts, and Glyptodonts. Within the walls of the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology, at rue Buffon, were accumulated the results of almost a century of research on this subject, and Gaudry proposed a phylogenetic reading of this already accumulated and decanted knowledge, and it was that reading that Ameghino understood and also developed. The fact, anyway, is that Ameghino’s relationships are less important than the conceptual references articulated and displayed in Filogenia. These conceptual coordinates are so significant because they allow understanding the transition from classical Paleontology to Evolutionary Paleontology that was still being experienced; very especially in French Natural History, but also in all the scientific community devoted to this domain of research. Regardless Ameghino could be more or less close to this or that paleontologist, more or less famous, eminent, or recognized; what should be pointed is that Filogenia constitutes, in each of its paragraphs, an unbeatable document to understand, not only that transition that Natural History was going through, but also to understand how the new ways of doing Paleontology co-opted and subordinated those other ways of practicing that science that was being surpassed by the development of Evolutionary Paleontology. That is, Filogenia provides keys that allow understanding the modifications in the ways of making Natural History brought about by the Darwinian Revolution. This turning point implied a drastic reformulation, an enlargement, and a rearticulating of the questionnaire that had guided the work of naturalists since the end of the eighteenth century, and Ameghino showed two important aspects of that great transformation. The first aspect was the re-signification of the results and rules of inference inherited from classical Natural History. That Natural History whose great first guidelines, and fundamental exemplars, were established by George Cuvier (cf. Caponi 2017, 63–4) and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (cf. Caponi 2017, 77). The second aspect, meanwhile, was the extension of these rules and the establishing of new exemplars, new paradigmatic solutions of research problems, which had to be applied in previously unthinkable puzzles. Regarding that, and confirming what was said above, this book of Ameghino has an unusual clarity,

196

G. Caponi

which is not easy to find in the works of other evolutionists of the same period. In this sense, it is worth remembering Osvaldo Reig when, in the context of the celebration of the first centenary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, he referred to Ameghino and said: In this year of Darwinian celebration, it is worth remembering his book Filogenia and his other evolutionist essays. Ameghino not only introduced and fought for evolutionism in Argentina; he was also a pioneer at world scale in the elaboration of the principles of evolutionary Paleontology and Morphology. Filogenia is a book of philosophical Paleontology and Morphology, as it was used to say at the time. Its value and meaning are not less than that of more or less contemporary works of outstanding European and North American evolutionary scholars; and it is much earlier than great works of similar purpose and subject, such as Gaudry’s Paléontologie Philosophique, published in 1886. (Reig 1959, 35)

It is impossible, however, to grasp the “value and meaning” of Filogenia without considering or without paying attention to something that Ameghino (1915 [1884] 69) has understood very clearly: the cognitive target that guided the progress of what Bowler (1996, 1) described as the “first Evolutionary Biology,” which was the development of the phylogenetic program (Caponi 2011, 4). Only by inserting Filogenia in this titanic cooperative research agenda, without insisting on the anachronism of giving to the question of the mechanisms a place that it did not have in the Evolutionary Biology of the nineteenth century (Novoa and Levine 2010, 98), it will be possible to understand Filogenia and the epistemological vector that guided Ameghino’s researches. No less than the history of the science made in France, in the United States, or Japan, the history of the science made between the Rio Bravo and the Cabo de Hornos also deserves the epistemological precautions that are required for its correct understanding and even for its proper valuation.

Ameghino’s Darwinism The idea that Florentino Ameghino was not very rigorous, and somewhat confused, regarding his theoretical commitments often has to do with the alleged Lamarckian remnants that would overshadow his Darwinism. Angel Cabrera (1944, 31) (Concerning the career of the Madrilenian Angel Cabrera [1879 1960], and his role in the growth of Argentine Paleontology, see the obituary written by Jorge Crespo (1960)) stated that Ameghino: He paid homage to Darwin, in whom he seemed to see something like the main apostle of evolutionism, but, by a singular paradox, he was a true Lamarckian and Lamarckian of a high mechanistic hue. In his Filogenia there is nothing of natural selection nor of the struggle for life; everything is based on adaptation and inheritance of somatic modifications. After going through its pages, the reader cannot help but wonder if the author knew the foundations of Darwin and Wallace's evolutionism.

This assessment by Cabrera, despite expressing a clear misunderstanding of Ameghino’s work and its context, has been widely accepted and repeatedly ratified

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

197

(Just for instance, see: Marquez-Miranda (1951, 136); Reig (1961, 77); Orione (1987, 457); Casinos (2012, 98)); without perceiving that it derives from a very distorted vision of what it meant “to be Darwinist” at the time when Ameghino outlined his research program. Nevertheless, if that distortion is avoided, it is possible to recognize Filogenia as a lucid and ambitious proposal destined to make viable a complete accomplishment of those epistemic objectives that Darwin proposed in On the Origin of Species (1859), for Natural History. Unfortunately, this distortion did not lack sponsorship. It has been reinforced by a reading of the Evolutionary Biology of the nineteenth century, and of the first decades of the twentieth century, that was largely favored by the advent of the New Synthesis. The revision of the history of Evolutionary Biology promoted by authors such as Julian Huxley (1942) and Ernst Mayr (1980) gave excessive prominence to the controversies regarding the hereditary factors and the causal mechanisms that produced evolutionary changes; and that attitude led us to think that, from Darwin onwards, Evolutionary Biology had been anxiously obsessed, and almost immobilized, by the problems that the New Synthesis had finally solved. As Bowler (1996, 2) remarked in Life’s splendid drama: “the selection-centered viewpoint of many earlier studies was whiggish in that it assumed a straight line of development leading from Darwin to the modern genetical theory of natural selection.” The point, however, is that Peter Bowler himself had echoed this view in his influential works The Eclipse of Darwinism (Bowler 1983) and The Non-Darwinian Revolution (Bowler 1988). Both are widely read by those historians that work on the Latin American manifestations of evolutionism and both are too focused on disputes that existed, but that was not so crucial for the main part of the researches undertaken in the Evolutionary Biology developed from the decade of 1860, until the rise of the New Synthesis. Thus, regarding his interest in the non-selectionist causal explanations of evolution that were conceived by many biologists, Peter Bowler (1996, 2) admitted that he was “influenced by the traditional interpretation,” which “was still focusing on the mechanism of evolution.” Thus, rectifying that position, and trying a subtle self-criticism, in Life’s splendid drama, he recognized that, for many years: Our standard histories of the impact of Darwinism have been skewed by a concentration on the debate over mechanisms at the expense of the debates that arose over how to interpret the course of life’s evolution. The first generation of evolutionary biologists was primarily concerned to reconstruct the history of life. on earth (Bowler 1996, 2–3)

In other words, what that standard vision of the history of Evolutionary Biology had left in the background was no more and no less than the main research agenda of that Evolutionary Biology developed from Darwin until the first decades of the twentieth century. That first Evolutionary Biology – as Bowler so properly labeled it – was a space of controversy, but also of cooperation, which was articulated around the reconstruction of the history of life on earth. Nevertheless, this history of life, it is necessary to emphasize it, was seen in a very specific way. It was understood as the trace of a great genealogy: as the reconstruction of a single great phylogeny that had

198

G. Caponi

to be recomposed as a gigantic mosaic in which all the particular phylogenies of the different groups of living beings would be progressively and coherently inserted. Within the framework of this program, originally conceived and proposed by Darwin (1859, 486–7), the fundamental questions were genealogical: Do vertebrates descend from ascidians or annelids? (cf. Russell 1916, 271–274; Bowler 1996, 141–147); Do the four lineages of arthropods descend from an exclusive common ancestor? (cf. Bowler 1996, 115). Or recalling a case of those studied by Ameghino (1915 [1884], 373–374): armadillos descended from glyptodonts, or was it the opposite? (Caponi 2017, 136). As Bowler (1996, 14) himself showed in Life’s splendid drama, for most of the evolutionists of the twentieth century, the genuine Darwinian commitment was to develop that phylogenetic program. For doing that, the morphological analyses, proper to two already recognized and consecrated disciplines such as Comparative Anatomy and Embryology, could be reinterpreted in such a way that they allowed a reformulation of the objectives of those disciplines and of the objectives to which Taxonomy, Paleontology, and Biogeography responded (Russell 1916, 247; Bowler 1996, 14). A reformulation that was also a unification and coordination. By associating unit of type with common descend, Darwin showed how all these disciplines, already consolidated, could be reoriented, together, towards the tracing of phylogenies (Caponi 2011, 101); and this facilitated the adhesion that quickly conquered the phylogenetic program (Caponi 2011, 102). With Darwinism, that constellation of disciplines which was Natural History, not only became unified in its bases but also in its objectives; which also became more ambitious than they were before. That was the Darwinism of Thomas Huxley, of Ernst Haeckel, of Carl Gegenbaur, of Edwin Lankester; and Anton Dörhn (cf. Russell 1916; Bowler 1996); and it is in that context that the standard view of the history of Evolutionary Biology failed to capture properly, that Filogenia should be placed. Going the same for Ameghino’s Darwinism. The history of the scientific knowledge produced in Latin America cannot be made without problematizing the history of science in general. Although sometimes it could be not very conspicuous in its accomplishments, the science made in Latin American Science still deserves that courtesy. Otherwise, such a study may incur in an uncritical importation of historiographical errors that will provoke confusion and misdirection, and the topic raised by Ameghino’s supposedly lax Darwinism is a good example of that. Considered in virtue of that standard vision of the History of Evolutionary Biology that Bowler proposed to revise, Ameghino appears as a scientist who is not very rigorous in his theoretical commitments and that fits very well with what can be expected from a naturalist whose works were typical instances of integrated subordination. Nevertheless, by considering Ameghino in this way, the reading of Filogenia is misused: instead of considering it as a document that would facilitate that historiographical review proposed by Bowler, it is considered as the expression of a theoretical misconception that reinforces the standard narrative. To doubt, as Cabrera did, that Ameghino knew the foundations of Darwinism is not a sign of meticulousness; it is only a symptom of misunderstanding. It can only indicate that Cabrera, and his repeaters, had not understood, neither which were the

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

199

theoretical assumptions and objectives that guided the Evolutionary Biology in which Ameghino’s worked, nor the theoretical assumptions and objectives to which the writing of Filogenia obeyed. For dissipating Cabrera’s suspicion, it is enough to remember, again, that, in On the Origin of Species, what is proposed as a conquest, and it is capitalized on as an achievement, is the theoretical unification, by the explanation of the unity of type by common descent, of the evidence of Biogeography, Paleontology, Comparative Anatomy and Embryology (Darwin 1859, 413). Darwin saw there his highest card; and, of his fundamental theses, that was the one that more immediately and deeply affected the ways of doing Natural History (Bowler 1996, 7). Beyond the disagreements about the mechanisms of evolutionary change that arose in the following years, that whole field of researches committed, jointly and promptly, with the thesis of the common descent and assumed the ambitious agenda of reconstructing the tree of life. In that context, it must also situate the alleged “Lamarckism” of Ameghino. Regarding the topic of evolutionary mechanisms, he was as eclectic and pluralistic as most of his contemporaries (Salgado 2011, 122); among which the so-called Neo-Lamarckism was very common (Buffetaut 1998, 83). This is especially true for Filogenia, which, concluded in 1882, was published just in 1884: the year after Weissman’s first publication questioning the hereditary transmission of acquired characters. That is, Filogenia was published long before the Weissman’s theses could have any significant impact on the way by which paleontologists visualized their positions. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ameghino was somewhat vague on these issues (cf. Salgado 2011, 134) and careless about the polarization that occurred in those years that, long after, Julian Huxley (1942, 22) portrayed as “the eclipse of Darwinism.” That attitude, moreover, is perfectly understandable. In the first place, and above all, because, as has been said so many times, Darwin (1859, 134) himself had not discarded those mechanisms that were later labeled as Lamarckian or Neo-Lamarckian. Further, it is necessary to keep in mind that all these questions about the mechanisms involved in the evolutionary processes were not relevant and pertinent for making phylogenetic reconstructions (Novoa and Levine 2010, 98). As far as these reconstructions are concerned, what was very relevant were the instruments that could be used to establish ancestor-descendant relationships between lineages and to reconstruct the sequences of changes in character states. And that was the issue of those laws enunciated in Filogenia (cf. Caponi 2017, 125). Before the advent of Darwinism, paleontologists determined and reconstructed fossils based on those functional correlations highlighted by Cuvier but also presupposing the morphological constants on which Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had insisted (cf. Guillo 2003, 160). And this would continue to be like that in the framework of Evolutionary Paleontology (cf. Huxley 1893, 86). The novelty was the possibility of using these reconstructions, as well as the functional and morphological knowledge involved in them, for reconstructing phylogenies; and this was the main matter of Ameghino’s Filogenia. Ameghino (1915 [1884], 7–8) aimed to enunciate laws that would allow reconstructing relations of filiation with certainty and precision (cf. Ameghino 1915 [1884], 68).

200

G. Caponi

The enunciation of those laws of phylogenetic seriation constituted, according to Ameghino (1915 [1884], 502–503), the core and the main contribution of Filogenia (Orione 1987, 455). These laws were important not because they revealed causal invariants involved in the evolutionary processes, they were not causal laws (Caponi 2017, 105), but because they individualized sequential invariants that defined irreversible successions in the states of certain characters (Ameghino 1915[1884], 7). These invariants made it possible to serialize, phylogenetically, such states (Ameghino 1915[1884], 67): something crucial in the mapping and validation of ancestry relationships between taxa (Ameghino 1915 [1884], 8). Cuvier (1992[1812]) had shown that by following certain laws concerning the functional correlations of organic parts, it was possible to achieve relatively reliable reconstructions of whole organisms having as reference only fragmentary bone debris of those living beings (Caponi 2017, 62). The fragments of an herbivore’s teeth led to infer a certain conformation of the digestive system; the presence of remains of horns and hooves confirmed that inference. Further, that same dentition could also indicate that the animal in question must be a placental mammal. Another form of dentition could have indicated that the animal to be reconstructed was a carnivorous marsupial; that would also allow us to know something about the shape of its pelvis. However, all those ways of reasoning, and the correlations that guide them, refer only to the form and parts of individual organisms. Often, they can allow us to reconstruct the profiles of a previously unknown species of which only fragmentary traces remain; but they tell nothing about the genealogical relationships of that species (Ameghino 1915[1884], 69). To discover those relationships, with rigor and precision, Ameghino thought (1915[1884], 10–11), that were necessary laws of another kind: laws of the evolutionary succession of states of character (cf. Ameghino 1915[1884], 234) and not laws of coexistence of parts as the Cuvierian correlations or as the morphological constants pointed out by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. These laws, of a newer type, should point out sequences of evolutionary change that, without manifesting themselves in all lineages, would be such that, once initiated, they would never be reversed, even if they could be stopped (Ameghino 1915[1884], 231). Thus, in case of knowing these laws, it will be possible to order, in a true evolutive sequence, the different states of any character for which those laws were pertinent. Of course, this is not the place to analyze those laws. What is important here is just to remark that the effort to enunciate those laws responds to a very precise theoretical framework; which those same laws also allow understanding. The correct reading of Filogenia requires a good comprehension of the Evolutionary Biology in which that work is inserted and takes on its theoretical significance and that, besides allowing to understand and to place Ameghino in that framework, also allows a better understanding of the theoretical universe in which all his works, conceptual and empirical, were produced. What is valid for Lankester, or Haeckel, is no less valid for Ameghino.

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

201

Conclusion The reading of Filogenia shows that Ameghino’s Darwinian commitment was not just firm but also lucid and coherent: based on a rigorous theoretical reflection and fully engaged with the main theoretical objectives of the Evolutionary Biology that was developing during the years when he worked as a paleontologist. For that, the arguments developed in Filogenia helps to understand how that first Evolutionary Biology was: its reading is quite relevant for the epistemological history of Evolutionary Biology in general, and Paleontology in particular. Filogenia shows how the Darwinian perspective allows the use of the methods already established by pre-evolutionary Anatomy and Paleontology in the development of that new research agenda that is the reconstruction of the tree of life, and this is done with remarkable clarity. Maybe, that can be explained, at less in part, by the relatively marginal position that Ameghino occupied in that transnational network in which Evolutionary Paleontology developed. The very situation of having to appropriate knowledge whose guidelines were defined, within the framework of overseas institutions and foreign traditions may demand a significant intellectual effort. In doing that, little can be considered obvious and established. Moreover, this effort of understanding is often associated with the need to train other researchers for participating in the production of knowledge. That is why this effort of appropriation may come to produce works capable of allowing these new researchers to understand the problems, concepts, and fundamental objectives of the science to whose construction they must be actively integrated. Those works may take the form of simple manuals, or they can be a little more ambitious, as it was the case of Filogenia. However, in both cases, they may be of great interest to the historian of science. They will serve to understand how an area of research is developing within the scientific community under consideration; but, beyond that, the reading of these works can help to understand more general and fundamental questions. Topics that, going beyond the study of what goes on in a narrow scientific community, involve the more general aspects of the History of Science.

References Ameghino F (1889) Contribución al conocimiento de los mamíferos fósiles de la República Argentina. Academia Nacional de Ciencias de la República Argentina, Córdoba Ameghino F (1915[1884]) Filogenia: principios de clasificación transformista basados sobre leyes naturales y proporciones matemáticas. La Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires Ameghino F (1917a[1906]) Mi credo. In: Doctrinas y descubrimientos. La Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, pp 215–236 Ameghino F (1917b[1915]) Origen y emigraciones de la especie humana. In: Doctrinas y descubrimientos. La Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires, pp 167–212 Ameghino F (1918[1881]) La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata. La Cultura Argentina, Buenos Aires

202

G. Caponi

Ameghino F, Gervais H (1914[1880]) Les mammíferes fossiles de l’Amerique du Sud. In: Obras completas y correspondencia científica de Florentino Ameghino, vol II. Taller de Impresiones Oficiales, La Plata, pp 511–645 Barahona A (2018) Local, global, and transnational perspectives on the history of biology. In: Dietrich M, Borrello M, Harman O (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology, Historiography of science, vol 1. Springer: Online first., Berlin. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31974456-8_19-1 Bowler P (1983) The eclipse of Darwinism: anti-Darwinian evolution theories in the decades around 1900. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Bowler P (1988) The non-Darwinian revolution. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Bowler P (1996) Life’s splendid drama: evolutionary biology and the reconstruction of life ancestry. Chicago University Press, Chicago Buffetaut É (1998) Histoire de la Paleontologie. P.U.F, Paris Cabrera Á (1944) El pensamiento vivo de Ameghino. Losada, Buenos Aires Caponi G (2011) La segunda agenda darwiniana. Centro Lombardo Toledano, México Caponi G (2017) El darwinismo de Ameghino. Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis Casinos A (2012) Florentino Ameghino: un evolucionista en El Plata. Universidad Maimónides, Buenos Aires Conry Y (1974) L’introduction du darwinisme en France au XIX siècle. Vrin, Paris Cope E (1891) Ameghino on the extinct Mammalia of Argentina. Am Nat 25(296):725–727 Crespo J (1960) Ángel Cabrera: 1879–1960. J Mammal 41(4):540 Cueto M (1989) Excelencia científica en la periferia. Grade-Concytec, Lima Cueto M (1994) Laboratory styles in Argentina Physiology. Isis 85(2):228–246 Cueto M (1997) Science under adversity: Latin American medical research and American Private Philanthropy. Minerva 35:233–245 Cueto M (2015) An asymmetrical network: national and international dimensions of the development of Mexican Physiology. J Hist Med Allied Sci 0(0):1–21 Cuvier G (1992[1812]) Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (Discours préliminaire). Flammarion, Paris Darwin C (1859) On the origin of species. Murray, London Gaudry A (1868) Cours annexe de Paléontologie: leçon d’ouverture. Baillière, Paris Gaudry A (1878) Les enchainements du monde animal dans les temps géologiques: mammifères tertiaires. Hachette, Paris Glick T (1982) Darwin en España. Península, Barcelona Grimoult C (1998) Évolutionisme et fixisme en France: histoire d’un combat, 1800–1882. CNRs, Paris Guillo D (2003) Les figures de l’organisation: sciences de la vie et sciences sociales au XIX siècle. Press Universitaires de France, Paris Huxley J (1942) Evolution: the modern synthesis. George Allen & Unwin, London Huxley T (1893) Darwiniana. Appleton, New York Kreimer P (2006) Dependientes o integrados: la ciencia latinoamericana y la nueva división internacional del trabajo. Nómadas 24:199–212 Lorenzano C (1994) Por los caminos de Leloir. Buenos Aires, Biblos Márquez-Miranda F (1951) Ameghino: una vida heroica. Nova, Buenos Aires Mayr E (1980) Some thoughts on the history of the evolutionary synthesis. In: Mayr E, Provine W (eds) The evolutionary synthesis. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, pp 1–48 Mercante V (1936) Florentino Ameghino. In: Gimenez Á (ed) Ameghino. Sociedad Luz, Buenos Aires Monserrat M (1993) La sensibilidad evolucionista en la Argentina. In: Ciencia, historia y sociedad en la Argentina del Siglo XIX. Ceal, Buenos Aires Moore R (1920) The works of Ameghino. Science 1920:469 Novoa A, Levine A (2010) From man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920. Chicago University Press, Chicago

9

How to Read Ameghino’s Filogenia?

203

Orione J (1987) Florentino Ameghino y la influencia de Lamarck en la Paleontología argentina del Siglo XIX. Quipu 4:447–471 Piveteau J (1961) La Paleontologie des vertébrés. In: Taton R (ed) La science contemporaine 1/le xixe siècle. Puf, Paris, pp 503–523 Podgorny I (2005) Bones and devices in the constitution of Paleontology in Argentina at the end of the Nineteenth Century. Sci Context 18:249–283 Podgorny I (2009) El sendero del tiempo y de las causas accidentales. Prohistoria, Rosario Puig-Samper M (2018) La recepción del evolucionismo en el mundo hispánico, una revisión comparada. In: Vallejo G, Miranda M, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper M (eds) Darwin y el darwinismo desde el sur del sur. Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 15–32 Reig O (1959) La celebración darwinista: antecedentes nacionales y responsabilidad presente. Holmbergia 4(14):29–36 Reig O (1961) La Paleontología de vertebrados en la Argentina. Holmbergia 6(17):67–128 Russell E (1916) Form and function. Murray, London Salgado L (2011) La evolución biológica en el pensamiento y la obra de Florentino Ameghino. In: Fernicola J, Prieto A, Lazo D (eds) Florentino Ameghino. Asociación Paleontológica Argentina, Buenos Aires, pp 121–135 Simpson G (1984) Discoverers of the lost worlds. Yale University Press, New Haven Vessuri H (1983) Consideraciones acerca del estudio social de la ciencia. In: Díaz E, Texera Y, Vessuri H (eds) La ciencia periférica. Monte Ávila, Caracas, pp 9–35

Palaeontology in South America Bureaucracy, Adventurers, and the Discovery of Fossil Mammals in the Early Nineteenth-Century Colonial Archives

10

Irina Podgorny

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Palaeontology: A New Word for Vanishing Worlds and Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Strange Things, Strange People, and Strange Animals: The Normality of Bureaucracy . . . . . . Paper and Rule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . An Animal in Seven Boxes and in Two Pieces of Paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Vicar’s Bones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

206 210 214 214 216 219 221 222

Abstract

Historiography has tended to connect the fossil animals discovered in the soil of the Americas with the evidence of the theory of evolution. This chapter reveals the problems created by this perspective for understanding the questions at stake. An introduction to the main historiographical issues is followed by a perspective on the emergence of the nineteenth-century neologism “palaeontology” that discusses the locations where this term was first proposed and used, as well as unsolved questions regarding its circulation. The discussion reveals how important it is to go beyond the main characters identified by historians and beyond intellectual centers in Britain and France. The discussion turns to the discovery of the fossil genus Megatherium in a context where “palaeontology” did not yet exist as a discipline and where fossils did not provide evidence for evolutionary theory. The meaning of those bones must be understood in a context without Darwin’s Origin of species. Examining a series of episodes about the extraction of the skeleton that was going to be known as Megatherium, this chapter reflects I. Podgorny (*) Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata/CONICET, La Plata, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_6

205

206

I. Podgorny

upon how historiography has ignored many agents, ideas, and interests at stake, most importantly the crucial role of Spanish bureaucracy and bureaucrats. It examines what happened in Buenos Aires after the departure of the skeletons, how the news circulated in the region – in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, and Lima. The result provides a new perspective on the generation of ideas as well as the communication and the flow of scientific news across places.

Introduction Palaeontology is a science dealing with the life of past geological periods as known from fossil remains. To many of our contemporaries, palaeontology can be summed up in the dinosaurs’ mighty skeletons sold by the main auction houses of England and the USA, mounted in museums or touring the world as special events that reunite science and marketing strategies (Brinkman 2010a; Tamborini 2016). In the last decades, for instance, the dinosaurs from Patagonia’s Jurassic and Cretaceous strata became a landmark of Argentina. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, palaeontology was connected to the fossil mammals that the Tertiary formations – today renamed as Pleistocene and Quaternary – were revealing all over the world. The skeletons, depictions, and models of mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, and woolly rhinoceros were by then the greatest attractions of museums and world fairs, having conquered popular imagination and the illustrated press. They spoke not only of lost species but also of vanished worlds, amazing anatomists, and the lay public alike (Rudwick 1992; Rupke 1994). Siberia, Central Europe, and the Americas had revealed the strangest kinds. In that context, South America, in general, and the Argentine Pampas, Tarija in Bolivia, and Minas Gerais in Brazil, in particular, became the spots of reference for travelers and locals, professional anatomists and vocational collectors, dealers in old bones, and museum dissectors interested in the skeletons of the new animals revealed by the new disciplines and professions that related to their study and extraction (Podgorny 2017; Brinkman 2010b). The first half of the nineteenth century – the object of this chapter – witnessed much discussion about those objects, leading to new fields of knowledge: Were the objects part of geology and the study of nonliving matter? Or should they be part of the study of living beings? What was the relationship between petrifactions, minerals, and living bodies, between the geological past, the historical times, and the present? Should the study of fossils stop when history – namely, the beginning of writing and written records – began? Was extinction (a matter of fact for early nineteenth-century naturalists) a phenomenon still occurring in the present or did it stop in the remote past? (von Baer 1860; Podgorny 2016). Historiography on palaeontology in South America has disregarded these questions in part because the success of the theory of evolution transformed the fossil animals

10

Palaeontology in South America

207

extracted from the soil of the continent into “Darwin’s fossils” (Lister 2018), as if they were essentially linked to the destiny of evolutionary theories. This chapter deals with the initial years of that new domain and the professions that emerged which were linked to the fossil bones in the context of the American postcolonial period and also the turmoil of the new chemistry of organic matter (Klein and Lefèvre 2007). Historians have noted that the fossil mammals found in South America attracted much attention in the Northern Hemisphere. The first specimens were found late in the eighteenth century, when they were described and exhibited as petrifactions. Then the early 1820s opened a new world of lost animals. This is the time that just followed the political revolutions separating Spanish America from the Peninsula and the emergence of the independent Brazilian Empire. In 1822, the government of the United States of America – preceded by the Portuguese court seated in Rio de Janeiro – recognized the independence of the Spanish provinces, soon followed by Great Britain, France, and the Kingdom of Piedmont. As a result, the repositories, archives, and private and public collections amassed and documented in colonial times became available variously for sharing, selling, copying, or dealing in those things that the Spanish administration had kept concealed from foreigners. With the arrival of consuls, traveling naturalists, foreign missions, and European and American agents, South American natural samples in general, and fossil bones in particular, were taken out of Spanish circuits and inserted into a new order of both knowledge and rule, namely, the new disciplines that were chaotically emerging parallel to the equally chaotic formation of the new South American republics. South Americans wanted to incorporate their products into commercial and scientific transactions. The mighty bones found in South America became an object of inquiry and commerce that contributed to shaping the new discipline of palaeontology. In a context of international museum rivalries, the findings triggered the desires of worldwide anatomists for possessing and describing these precious and weird things (Podgorny 2001, 2010, 2011, 2013). As remarked by American evolutionary palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1980, 2), there was an intrinsic reason for such an interest: South America had been the habitat of a series of extinct mammals that lived nowhere else on earth, a situation comparable to Australia, but in a continent that – at least in historical times – was not an island. In Simpson’s words: There are many strange mammals now in South America, fascinating to almost everyone: opossums, armadillos, tree sloths, anteaters. . . tapirs, peccaries, llamas and other humpless camels. . . to name just a few. . . . It is a mixture, and that is an essential part of the history. Some of those animals have had ancestors and relatives confined to South America at the beginning of the Age of the Mammals and long thereafter. (Simpson 1980, 1)

The unanticipated form of South American fossil mammals posed taxonomic and anatomical questions to the new disciplines in the making: How these animals related to the extant species? What kind of relationship existed between the lost and the living ones? Kinship? Ancestry? How should time be introduced into the classification schemes that characterized natural history?

208

I. Podgorny

In the 1820s, there was a very specific reason for that curiosity, an eagerness focusing on a single genus discovered near Buenos Aires late in the eighteenth century: Megatherium, a beast defined by Georges Cuvier in 1796, which was then the rarest mammal of very great size. Until the 1830s, the single specimen of the genus was held in Madrid: There was no comparative anatomist or museum in Europe and North America that did not try to get something like it. And, indeed, consuls arrived in South America with that desideratum as a special mission. They succeeded and populated London, Paris, Copenhagen, Turin, and Berlin with the requested skeleton and many others discovered by chance in a “fossil fever.” This is at the time when Darwin was studying without much enthusiasm at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh. Historiography has ignored the many contexts in which these discoveries were made, presented, negotiated, and exhibited. It has also passed by the agents involved in the transactions of bones and papers that were going to define the new genera and species of monsters extracted in those countries. Historiography has focused on the new taxa as “things found in nature” and on the famous “discoverers” of theses bones. Charles Darwin has occupied central stage, followed in relevance by the French Alcide d’Orbigny and the Prussian Friedrich Sellow (Boulinier 1995; Zischler et al. 2013). Locals such as Peter Lund in Brazil, Dámaso Larrañaga and Teodoro Vilardebó in Uruguay, and Florentino Ameghino and Francisco Javier Muñiz in Argentina (Simpson 1984) are the main protagonists of nationalist historians who have told different stories. Some historians insisted on the isolation of their compatriots, on their “peripherical” conditions, or on their role as national models for emulation. Other historians focused on exclusion from global historiographies. Still others have included these topics as part of the comparative reception of Darwinism, a subject inaugurated in the 1970s by Marcelo Montserrat in Argentina and by Thomas Glick on a more global scale. Since then, many bricks have been added to the edifice intended to portray the reactions to Darwin’s Origin of Species in different contexts. In particular, since the late 1990s, Latin American and Spanish scholars have gathered to discuss their national cases, publishing several volumes in Spain, Brazil, and Mexico. The recent 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin sparked not only a prosperous “Darwin industry” but also a new wave of interest on Darwinism in a national context. Documentaries, films, exhibitions, and publications blossomed. The topic remains linked to the history of ideas, national traditions, and the preoccupation with questions regarding the relationship “center/periphery.” This counterhistorical methodological focus misses vital questions: the study of scientific practices (what Barahona et al. (2011) called “the art of doing science”), the impact of Darwinism on classification and scientific observation (Ochoa and Barahona 2014), the concrete articulation between the global and the local scales, or even the “controversy” studies from the 1980s and early 1990s, as mastered by Martin Rudwick, David Oldroyd, and James Secord in the history of the classification of geological strata and the study of the earth’s past. Thus, a teleological vision of history, centered around the figure of Darwin, created connections where there were none and saw antecedents in things that did not lead to the Origin of Species.

10

Palaeontology in South America

209

Focused as they were on the figure of Darwin, this methodology did not pay attention to the sociability of collectors of natural history that existed in colonial times, preceding Darwin and other travelers in the study of discrete parts of nature. In any case, a detailed study of the uses of Darwinian mechanisms among Argentinean palaeontologists, zoologists, and botanists is still lacking (Podgorny 2017). Historiography, one can say, disconnected the local practices from the international networks in which practitioners worked (Rudwick 1997b). In the case of South America, these stories are variations on one theme: a skeleton shipped from the field to Buenos Aires, then to Madrid, Paris, or London, after which South America vanishes from the scene. But history is about illuminating distinct settings at the same time. What happened in Buenos Aires after the departure of the skeletons? Did the news circulate in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, or Lima? In other words, how do historians think about the communication and the flow of scientific news circulating across places? The idea of “isolation” has in fact permeated South American historiography, in part fed by the assumption that Spanish America was just a provider of raw materials for European museums and a consumer of already digested (or at least chewed) news. The seminal work of Margaret Lopes, however, has taught that more attention should be given to the exchanges SouthSouth (Lopes and Podgorny 2000). There is a reverse side to this medal: Historians of French or Anglo-Saxon palaeontology, geology, or comparative anatomy, with the exception of an article by José María López Piñero and Thomas Glick (1993), have not considered connecting their stories with the historiography produced in other contexts, a model proven fruitful by Maria Margaret Lopes (2010) in her the work on the Brazil-based Danish naturalist Peter Lund. It is true that while South American scientific practices are now attracting North American and European PhD students and researchers on Latin America, South American national historians – with the exception of Gustavo Caponi (2009) – have avoided connecting their interest with the history of “central science,” a constraint that could be partially explained not only by the lack of primary and secondary sources in the local libraries but also by the focus on national events promoted at Latin-American universities. This situation is now changing because of new opportunities provided by digital libraries and repositories (Podgorny 2020). The following pages show how South American historians can illuminate the practice of science and history far beyond local, national, or regional historiographies. 1) The discussion begins with a revision of the emergence of the nineteenth-century neologism “palaeontology” that discusses the diversity of locations where this term was first proposed and used, as well as the unsolved questions regarding its circulation and final acceptance. It shall be seen that innovation happens also in the provinces and can be connected to “secondary” characters located in diverse linguistic and scientific contexts. 2) The discussion proceeds to a revision of the discovery of Megatherium in a context where “palaeontology” did not yet exist as a discipline and fossils were

210

I. Podgorny

not the evidence of the evolutionary theory. By introducing episodes connected to the extraction of the gigantic skeleton, this chapter reflects upon how historians have ignored crucial agents, ideas, and interests.

Palaeontology: A New Word for Vanishing Worlds and Words Palaeontology is a recent term – a nineteenth-century neologism – created for the study of ancient life (from Greek palaios, “old, ancient,” ontos, “being, creature,” and, logos, “thought, study, speech”). Historiography has that it was used in English for the first time around 1833, then transferred into other European languages through the work of English geologist Charles Lyell, who translated Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville’s (1877–1850) term “palæontologie,” coined about 10 years earlier (Appel 1980). A more complex story still looks for a historian willing to pick up the explorations of German palaeontologist Karl von Zittel early in the twentieth century. Von Zittel (1901, 363) dated the term to 1834 and attributed it to not only Blainville but also to Saxony-born naturalist Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim (1771–1853), director of Moscow University’s Natural History Museum since 1804. Blainville first used the term in 1822 for referring to a promising subfield of geology. In a report on the main scientific works published in the previous year in his Journal de Physique, de Chimie, d’Histoire Naturelle et des Arts, Blainville introduced the term without defining it: It was just a title of a paragraph that summarized the highlights of the past year. It denoted the use of fossilized organized bodies for determining and classifying sedimentary geological formations. It provided evidence of the relevance that the study of geology had gained in the field of natural history, after William Smith, Alexandre Brongniart, and Georges Cuvier had revealed the significance that is attached to fossils as organic relics of successive geological epochs. In half a page, Blainville listed the most important achievements from 1821: the second edition of Research on the Fossil Bones of the Viviparous and Oviparous Quadrupeds by Georges Cuvier – Chair of Comparative Anatomy at the Paris Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle; Samuel T. von Sömmering’s (1755–1830) description of his discovery of an almost complete skeleton of a giant lizard (today called Geosaurus) in the mines of Meulenhard (Mannheim); the debates about a peculiar animal called “ichthyosaur” which until recently had been described as a crocodile; a series of reports on different findings including Louis Augustin D’hombres-Firmas’ (1776–1857) note on fossil human bones found in the cave of Durfort; the accumulation of rattlesnakes bones in a cave in North America; and finally, some notes on the emerging study of vegetal fossils (Blainville 1822, 54). Thus, in 1822, “palaeontology” was just the name used for an entry that included news arriving from all over the world about animal, vegetal and human ruins, relics, or remains, terms equivalent to today’s “fossils.” But far from Paris, in Moscow, Fischer von Waldheim – very well acquainted with Alexander von Humboldt, the work of Cuvier and the Paris Muséum – devoted

10

Palaeontology in South America

211

part of his work to list Russian repositories. In 1829–1830, he entitled his catalogues and bibliographies on petrifactions as Prodromus Petromatognosiae Animalium Systematicae, Continens Bibliographiam Animalium Fossilium, “petromatognosy/ petromatology” being equivalent to the German “Petrefaktenkunde,” the study of petrifactions. Two years later, in 1834, the date identified by Zittel, he employed “palaeontology” in his Bibliographia Palaeonthologica Animalium Systematica. Fischer von Waldheim, a Wernerian scientist, kept the term “Oryctology” just for the description of minerals sensu stricto, as can be seen in his Oryctographie du gouvernement de Moscou (1830–1837). The subsequent itineraries of the French (Blainville’s) and Latin (Fischer von Waldheim’s) terms are questions to be solved: Who detected them, and why they were accepted and used if this was the case? In the Paris Muséum, for instance, the chair of palaeontology was created against the will of the faculty only in 1853, Alcide d’Orbigny being the first holder and one of the main promoters of the term (von Zittel 1901). Blainville, who in 1832 replaced Cuvier at the chair of comparative anatomy until his death in 1850, never used the term for entitling any of his works. Rather, his most conspicuous and voluminous publication was named Ostéographie, a work that was used worldwide as a “paper museum” in the sense of Rudwick but a term that no one adopted (Podgorny 2016). Blainville, being a very skillful draftsman, observer, and taxonomist, was an inspired creator of neologisms, most of which died with their creator, except for “palaeontologie,” which by a path still unknown became an independent discipline that combined the methods of zoology, comparative anatomy, and botany to the investigation of the remains of fossil organisms. Perhaps the answer is to be found by the study of the readership and reception of the several American and European journals devoted to summarize, translate, and replicate the scientific news in as many settings as possible. Private enterprises were devoted to compiling and abstracting scientific news from all over the world such as the Parisian Férussac’s Bulletin and the Dictionaries of Natural History, as well as the compilations published in German provincial cities, and all these initiatives acted as amplifiers and propagators of what had been published around the world. It was a process that occurred in parallel with the discarding of the several concurrent naming options that were appearing and disappearing as well as the new meaning of the term “fossil,” the vanishing of the German term “Petrefaktenkunde,” and the decline of “oryctology” and “oryctognosy,” the Wernerian disciplines that late in the eighteenth century studied fossils (Rudwick 1972). “Fossil,” which from the 1610s onward was used for anything dug up or obtained by digging, such as coal, salt, etc., was imported into English through the seventeenth-century French term “fossile,” from the Latin “fossilis,” or “dug up.” It was a term that included minerals as well as those strange figures that were classified according to the animals and plants they resemble or were attributed to, namely zooliths (quadruped bones, teeth, and antlers), entomoliths (prints of insects and crabs), ichthyoliths (skeletons, prints, and teeth of fishes), crustaceae, testacea, zoophytes, transmutated wood, etc. In the nineteenth century, “fossil” transferred from the mineral to the organic domain.

212

I. Podgorny

Oryctology and oryctognosy were not very old terms and were used by a range of authors attached to Werner’s framework, such as the Spanish mineralogist Andrés del Río (Elementos de orictognosia, o del conocimiento de los fósiles según el sistema de Bercelio; y según los principios de Abraham Góttlob Werner para uso del Seminario Nacional de Minería de México, 1795 and 1832; Escamilla-González and Morelos-Rodríguez 2020) and British surgeon James Parkinson (Outlines of Oryctology: an Introduction to the Study of Fossil Organic Remains, especially of Those Found in British Strata, 1822 and subsequent editions). Although not exactly a Wernerian, British anatomist Richard Owen used this term for the discipline in which he situated the description of Darwin’s South American fossil mammals (1840). According to the Collins Dictionary, the use of oryctology in English started early in the nineteenth century, with its maximum frequency in the 1850s. “Palaeontology,” on the other hand, seems to have become visible and countable around 1840, showing an increasing occurrence all along the decades and century to come. That would mean that in the 1840s and 1850s both terms were equally used in English and that the extinction of “oryctology” happened very late. Zittel, on the other hand, remarked that in the German countries, “Petrefaktenkunden” und “Petrefaktologie” held their place for many decades and that the first “paleontological” association is due to the founding members of The London Clay Club (est. 1836), who in 1847 moved their activities to the new Palaeontographical Society, devoted to the description of British organic fossils and specially those discovered in the London clay. It survives today with that name. These terms are related to the will of various individuals for defining new names and subfields that they wanted to command and where they wanted to find refuge from detractors and to search for allies (Rudwick 1997b). The terms also relate to the place of “fossils” in the changing conception of nature and living matter that occurred in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Organic fossils in general and fossil vertebrates in particular were emerging as animal kinds at the same time that the Swedish chemist Berzelius differentiated organic compounds (those containing carbon) from inorganic compounds, a crucial differentiation that helped in taking the former “strange figures” out of the mineral kingdom – a process reflected in Waldheim’s work on Russian oryctology. Palaeontology in fact was a discipline that embraced all former living beings. They were inanimate but of organic genesis. It is worth remembering that in the Linnaean classifications (1735–1796) the empire Natura was divided into three kingdoms – Animalia (animals), Vegetabilia (plants), and Lapides (minerals). Petrifactions were minerals. The concept of a taxon uniting all living organisms (i.e., animals and plants) was first expressed by JeanBaptiste Lamarck (1801–1822), but he did not give a formal name to it. The senior names for the taxon are objective synonyms and originating in Sicily: Somobialia and Vitalia published in French spelling as “l’Empire Somobial” and “l’Empire Vital” in the book about a system of nature by Rafinesque (1815). In fact, the French-Turkish polymath Constantin Samuel Rafinesque-Schmalz (1783–1840) while he was living in Palermo coined those terms as well as “Somiologie”

10

Palaeontology in South America

213

(Rafinesque 1814, 1815). Somiology – an equivalent to what we today call “biology” – was the science which considers organic nature from all points of view. Rafinesque proposed as well the relative adjective to the things related to this science (somiologique) and the name for their practitioners: “somiologistes” (Rafinesque 1814, 8). Even though “somiology” did not achieve currency, 3 years later, Blainville in “Sur les ichthyolites ou le poissons fossiles,” an article he wrote for the 28th volume of the Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle (1818), proposed the term “paléosomiologie,” for the study of fossil-organized bodies, the most reliable tool in geognosy. Blainville had recently given a course on the subject at the Collège de France, a course that replaced that offered in the chair of geology and mineralogy by Jean-Claude Delamétherie until his death in 1817 (see Corsi 2020). The term – as we see – was soon abandoned even though Blainville’s article on ichthyoliths was a program for what he conceived as a new discipline devoted to the study of fossils, according to the meaning the term had acquired for French mineralogists: fossilized organized bodies. Blainville – like Parkinson – realized that it was a term difficult to define but crucial for geology and zoology in the sense that “there have been in the past animals that we miss nowadays, resulting in gaps in the animal chain of being” (échelle). In his lecture course, Blainville discussed the tools Paleosomiology needed, namely objects of comparison, and consequently an extensive collection of skeletons and shells, without which it was almost impossible to do anything positive, but with which, the task became merely difficult. It was important to know the nature of the geological strata, though their formation was much more difficult to handle. Following these preliminaries, he considered fossils under five aspects: (1) chemical or mineralogical composition, (2) form or conservation, (3) the gangue in which they are encased, (4) the geology or layer of the earth of which they are more or less characteristic, and (5) the natural history or the group of organized bodies to which they belonged. From the point of view of chemical or anatomical composition, Blainville divided the fossils into a number of groups: those that have experienced no change in their tissue, chemical and mineralogical compositions; those that have lost only and entirely the animal matter; those that have the same chemical composition minus the animal matter, but that have lost their structure and form; those which have experienced changes in the anatomical tissue and in the chemical composition, even in the acid of the earthy salt that formed them; those who have lost nothing in the organic structure, have been completely changed in the chemical composition; and those that without having experienced changes have been impregnated with a metallic substance, showing how relevant chemistry was. The section that follows is devoted to one paradigmatic episode that historians have taken as a departure point for palaeontology in Argentina and also for the confirmation of extinction as a natural process. By considering the many stories around the genus Megatherium – created when the idea of a discipline devoted to the study of ancient beings was not on anybody’s horizon – this section analyses the problems posed by historiography and offers some ideas for further investigations.

214

I. Podgorny

Strange Things, Strange People, and Strange Animals: The Normality of Bureaucracy In 1829, the Scottish chemist and scriptural geologist Andrew Ure (1778–1857) defined Megatherium as one genus “whose osteology was first completely understood, in consequence all its bones being found assembled in one place, and of their being immediately mounted into a skeleton with the utmost care” (Ure 1829: 545). He continued: “To the praise of the Spaniards they first gave that useful lesson on how to mount an unknown animal in the Royal Cabinet in Madrid, since followed the Philadelphia painter Thomas Peale in the American Mastodon and the Russian naturalist Michael Friedrich Adams in the Siberian mammoth” (Ure 1829: 545–546). These rare but complete skeletons, arriving from such remote geographies contributed to shape a “new system of geology, in which the great revolutions of the Earth and animated nature were reconciled at once to modern science and sacred history” (Ure 1829; see Cohen 2004). Megatherium – a new fossil genus defined by Georges Cuvier in 1796 on the basis of the depictions of the Madrid skeleton – has been the subject of countless monographs and works (Pimentel 2010). In the historiography of comparative anatomy, it is linked to the increasing visibility and power that Cuvier was gaining by the description and collection of large vertebrates, such as this elephant-sized, extinct mammal. Chauvinistic histories in Argentina have considered Megatherium as the beginning of local science or even a reason to mock the Spanish king, who upon reception of the skeleton reportedly requested a “live or stuffed” specimen (Ameghino 1889), a desideratum repeated by Darwinians later working in Argentina. The lines that follow attempt a more nuanced story showing how this “thing” reveals practices in diverse learned and governmental regimes. In that sense, “Megatherium” can be understood as an articulating construct or artifact that assembled people, interests, and ideas.

Paper and Rule Over the past 30 years, Spanish and Mexican historians of science – followed by their colleagues in Europe and the USA – have reversed the notion of a “Black Legend,” in which the Peninsula abandoned its former territories to a state of darkness in terms of science. This notion was disseminated during the Revolution and Independence and adopted by late nineteenth-century historians (López Piñero 1993). Current research has revealed the complex dynamics of the expeditions sponsored by the Crown and the enormous quantity of materials about “the three kingdoms of nature” collected during the last third of the eighteenth century in the Royal Cabinet, in the Royal Pharmacy of Madrid, and in the major cities of the viceroyalties. An analysis of the products from the Indies in medicine, commerce, and mining as well as the dispersal of experts to the area reveals a history of knowledge as long and complex as that of the Dutch or British.

10

Palaeontology in South America

215

Paradoxically, that earlier historiographical notion consolidated because of the very nature of the most important innovations implemented by the Spanish Monarchy: bureaucracy, the archive, and the technology of long-distance government, and, within this framework, the secretive nature of the administration of the Indies. This earlier historical vision ignored not only the series of initiatives from Madrid to gather data about the nature and commerce of Indies, but also – and more importantly for the argument here – the continuity between the “old” ways of the Spanish Monarchy and the new culture of the American revolutionary governments. Indeed, the discourse on the rupture of the colonial order often ignores the fact that the agents in charge of describing the natural and social Ibero-American world changed flags, but not names or interests. The same priests, physicians, topographers, pilots, and engineers who botanized, made maps, and gathered insects and meteorological data before Independence then swore loyalty to the new Republics and continued the same methodology in their work, trying with varying degrees of success to find a State who would sponsor them. Intentionally or not, they brought the practices and knowledge learned in the academies, schools, and administrative offices of the late colonial Ibero-American world into the new political order. Thus, the true protagonists of this story are the incumbents of bureaucracy and the flow of paperwork where data about nature in the Americas were generated and took shape. There, the instructions and networks established by the offices for remote governance would appear along with yet unknown animals, plants, rivers, ancient cities, and islands. What expectations did this world of papers and bureaucracy create so that the agents of the royal service would go out to collect plants, minerals, and animals? This question becomes more significant after the overthrow of the colonial administration because these people continued with the same activities despite the fact that their expectations could no longer be met. The history of natural history practices articulates the sovereign’s political curiosity (to know and control “everything”) and the interests of those individuals who, as Arndt Brendecke (2009) recalls, appealed to this curiosity for combining the promise of new knowledge with the opportunity to promote their self-interest. Perhaps, as Brendecke himself maintains, these data were hardly used, but the history of these instructions illuminates how the interests and expectations of those individuals were shaped by the practices in which they were immersed and how the instructions became independent of their “author.” In this sense, the instructions, as forms of bureaucracy, defy any attempt to assign them to a certain historical period, based on the ruptures of political order, and instead demonstrate the continual recombination of knowledge and norms from different domains and moments in time (Podgorny 2019). The different instructions issued in the second half of the eighteenth century reflect the changes taking place in the classification systems of the natural world. In 1768, the instructions referred to a vague nomenclature: The Linnaean vocabulary is absent from the Real Orden sent to Havana, Lima, Cartagena, and Buenos Aires, using instead more figurative expressions: “producciones de mar y tierra,” “conchas y caracoles de colores varios y diversas conuraciones,” and “arbolitos o plantas, nacidas debajo del agua en piedras.”

216

I. Podgorny

In the 1770s, however, they partly adopted the categories created by Linnaeus in 1735, for whom the natural bodies or the “empire of nature” could be divided into three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral. Minerals (Regnum Lapideum) included petrifactions (petrificata, which show the imprinted image of an animal or vegetable) such as phytolitus, zoolithus, and artifacts (artificiales), namely ceraunia or thunderstones, nowadays defined as archaeological tools. Thus, in May 1776, Joseph Gálvez y Gallardo, newly designated Secretary of State of the Universal Office of the Indies, printed and circulated the “Royal Order Notice for the Remission of Natural History Curiosities to the Royal Cabinet” (1776–1777). To be collected were “Animals, Vegetables, Minerals, rare Stones and whatever Nature produces in his Majesty’s vast Domains,” and they had to be gathered and sent to the Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. The “love of Royal Service” spread throughout the channels and networks, created by the post and the body of civil servants, and included a series of agents whose biographies can barely be traced beyond the papers that they signed or sent. An instruction, like the one meant to enrich the Royal Cabinet, arrived for the viceroys or governors who were then supposed to retransmit it in their domain via judiciary officials, priests, and anyone else necessary to meet the order’s objective. Moreover, the instruction was supposed to be maintained through time, left in place, so subsequent groups of civil servants would also comply with it. As long as the instruction was not cancelled, it continued to act and model practices, subjectivities, customs, objects, and papers. The definitive instructions received by the viceroys added and omitted species and included the request for “petrified objects” and “curiosities of art” (dresses, weapons, instruments, furniture, machines, and idols), both excluded from the natural kingdoms. In this way, the instructions show the adaptations and partial incorporation of the Linnaean vocabulary. Petrifactions, as a term that designated minerals in the form of a plant or animal, existed before Linnaeus. The instructions about taking them out of the mineral kingdom placed them in a frontier-class, somewhat like Linnaeus’s paradoxa. Shortly afterward, with the methods of comparative anatomy and the definition of fossil animals by Georges Cuvier, petrifactions would disappear into the world of animals and plants.

An Animal in Seven Boxes and in Two Pieces of Paper It was a result of these instructions that, in 1788, the Viceroy of Buenos Aires Nicolás del Campo, the Marquis of Loreto (1725–1803), accompanied a shipment of objects with two documents for Antonio Porlier (1722–1813), justice minister for the Indies who had served in Peru: one, dated in March, attached the design “in parts and according to how it should look after the skeleton is put together” of a very large and unknown animal and announced that the bones would follow in a future shipment. The other, from May, ratified the first and was a guide to the shipment of seven boxes on board the mail frigate, Cantabria. In those letters – “Remesa de osamentas de un animal mui corpulento” – the marquis reported:

10

Palaeontology in South America

217

Don Manuel Warnes First Alcalde of this city informs us that Brother Manuel de Torre of the Order of Predicadores has discovered the skeleton of a corpulent animal chiefly unknown in this part of America, where no species is to be found that it could be compared to, adding besides that the friar intended to acquaint me of it. I immediately decided to hear him, upon which, by his mere narrative I found the discovery to be a valuable one and that it might also help to prove erroneous the belief some had entertained in previous occasions when some loose bones happened to have been found that they belonged to the human species notwithstanding the enormous stature they were supposed and I determined therefore that this skeleton should be dug up from the place in which it was found and should be brought to my abode in the fort with the least possible damage, because the dampness of the soil caused some the parts to be very apt to moulder of, especially the head and ribs. All this was carefully entrusted to the said Friar, and after having obtained through the exposure to the air to consolidate that which was not found already mouldered, I have determined all to be packed up in seven cases, that as they must necessarily be large on account of the size of some of the bones and the great amount of the Straw necessary for their preservation if they were to be reduced to a smaller number would make it more difficult to be transported. In each of the cases the contents are labelled in conformity with what is expressed and numbered in the first leaf of the annexed memorandum. The second leaf shews the figure that it is supposed to have if joined together and in these leaf notations are made on the place in which the discovery took place and the inferences made to consider it as a novelty compared with other known animals. Lately some of the Caciques or chiefs of the infidels of the pampa and the Sierra have happened to come to this city. I took care they should see these bones in the manner they had been placed in order to complete the shape of this animal, and they seemed to be astonished asserting afterwards they could not be of this country as they had no knowledge of them and they had always been under the belief that some bones that had been found belonged to their forefathers. But it is very natural to infer that the latter if the animal were mischievous and not numerous should have destroyed them when they were the sole possessors of this land.

This was a translation of the papers purchased in Seville ca. 1833, when the remaining furniture from the Marquis of Loreto’s house was sold after a fire in 1827. The translation was sent by Manuel Williams, son of Julian Benjamin Williams, British vice-consul in Seville and an active dealer in Spanish works of art, to the London Royal College of Surgeons where it is kept in their file on Megatherium as part of the documentation used for studying the famous skeleton (on Williams, Lleó Cañal 2008). The original document in Spanish is found in Archivo General de Indias (Indiferente General, Buenos Aires, 76, Folio 31), dated March 2, 1788. As the letter reveals, the marquis was aware of the relevance of this complete skeleton proving that the fragments, instead of having belonged to a human giant as proposed by gigantology, the science of giants (Pelayo 2002), were of animal nature. Unknown, bulky, and rare, but not human. There is no depiction of the mounting of the skeleton in Buenos Aires, but the letter proves that the joining of the skeleton first happened in the furthest southern capital of the Spanish monarchy, where there was no museum but where people were acquainted with vertebrate anatomy. Because Buenos Aires was a center for exporting cattle hides, it would have been relatively easy for the marquis to find people who knew how properly to reconfigure the disarticulated bones of cows, horses, and other beasts. The sensible marquis wondered whether the animal had been part of native

218

I. Podgorny

traditions. The Indigenous chiefs confirmed to him that the animal was unknown to them and their ancestors. Friar Torre discovered the enormous bones on the Luján River, about 5 miles from the town of the same name and about 60 km from Buenos Aires. It was a place connected to a miracle (an appearance of the so-called “Virgen de Luján”), where the Dominican Order wanted to establish a sanctuary (Podgorny 2021). Torre in fact was there for this undertaking. As one of the individuals “activated” by the royal instructions, before removing the bones, he requested that the viceroy send a draftsman to “extract them to paper.” The Marquis of Loreto granted the request and further ordered that the articulations and parts in the picture also be numbered in order to identify the corresponding bone. The dimensions were to be taken and the skeleton described in detail, giving the name and distance from the nearest town and from the Río de la Plata. The skeleton was so immense that speculation began as to what the animal’s body mass might have been with flesh and hide. Until that time, there had been no other reports in the Americas of a creature with similar characteristics, and it was not known whether this was an amphibious or aquatic animal, although it was assumed to be terrestrial based on the size of its nails. It bore no resemblance to the elephant, except in terms of size, nor to the rhinoceros, or the South American tapir (Podgorny 2018). Animal bones had been found in the vicinity from smaller specimens of the same species. The gigantic bones were packed in hides and sent to Buenos Aires, where several experts reassembled them as a mounted skeleton. Finally, they were shipped off to Madrid in seven boxes, where the Royal Cabinet dissectors submitted the skeleton for exhibition in the petrifaction hall. Sketches of animal eventually ended up in the hands of Georges Cuvier. Based on this, in the comparative-anatomy laboratories of Paris, the great beast of Luján would be classified as belonging to a new genus: Megatherium, a name invented specifically to describe its grandeur and to substantiate the enduring notion of “lost species.” Cuvier, in his famous paper, stated that the plates were transmitted from Madrid to the Abbé Henri Grégoire (1750–1831) by a certain Citoyen Roume, whom Rudwick (1997a) has identified as Philippe-Rose Roume de Saint-Laurent (1743–1805), a former friend of Jean-Paul Marat. In the 1780s, Marat had used his influence in Spain to obtain the directorship of the Academy of Sciences in Madrid for Roume. Roume is thus part of Marat’s biography and described as the founder of “a brilliant Spanish colony from which the very name of the Inquisition was banished.” He evidently was in close relations with the Spanish Court and was subsequently French National Commissioner in the colony of Santo Domingo. Roume was in fact an Antilleanborn adventurer, one of many who took advantage of the revolutions happening on both sides of the Atlantic to forge a new identity and exploit the Spanish archives for financial gain. Profiting from the instability and opportunities that revolutions open, he acted as a mediator or broker between the Spanish and French metropolis and their territories in the Caribbean. Skillful entrepreneur, he adopted the egalitarian topics of the turn of the century and rewrote his biography as many times as needed. In 1796, he was in Madrid, when he bought, copied, or stole the plates that he was going to dispatch to Paris.

10

Palaeontology in South America

219

Juan Bautista Bru, the supposed author of the plates, is the object of many monographs by Valencian historian López Piñero. More recently, Mónica Vergés, a Spanish zoologist, has revealed that Bru was not the author of the fish plates that he published as his own work (Vergés 2019). Taking into consideration the modus operandi of Bru, future research may clarify whether the sketch received by Cuvier was in fact a recycled version of the depiction made and shipped from Buenos Aires. Not much is known about the discoverer, the artist, the Indians, and those in charge of mounting the skeleton in the capital of the viceroyalty; their names are barely registered in the administration’s records. But these brief indications nevertheless reveal a range of agents and actions involved in the discovery. We will see below that the papers created by bureaucratic practice track forward in the comparative anatomy debates of the 1830s.

The Vicar’s Bones After the fall and dissolution of the Spanish Empire, several colonial bureaucrats and public servants whose work involved producing and safeguarding papers and files stayed in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, transformed into “civil servants in search of a State,” according to the expression coined by Jorge Gelman. The instructions from 1812 together with an attempt to establish a museum in independent Buenos Aires and the circulation of the drawings and papers related to Megatherium provide an opportunity to examine the process in depth. A circle of erudite priests around Dámaso Larrañaga (1771–1848) and Bartolomé Muñoz (?–1831) animated the founding of museums and libraries in the Río de la Plata region and interacted with travelers and publicists who arrived on their shores. Through these priests and their access to old archives, colonial knowledge was introduced into the comparative anatomy debates of the Old World. Larrañaga and Muñoz stand out as avid readers and consumers of the books that arrived from Europe and from Rio de Janeiro, where the Portuguese court had a natural history cabinet. The interest was such that European travelers and expatriates filled their suitcases with books, sure to sell them at a good profit. Collectors of manuscripts, devices and instruments, meteorological observations, plants, petrified objects, and animals, they exchanged data, papers, and drawings. After 1810 and the break with Spain, many of these religious men would divide their time between their commitment to revolution and their endeavors as naturalists. They were placed in charge of the public libraries in Buenos Aires and Montevideo (1816) and in planning for future museums. While Muñoz donated his collections to establish a museum that never opened its doors, Larrañaga’s private collection received many visitors. Both men compiled, read, translated, and copied drawings and manuscripts, accumulating and organizing a vast corpus of documentary materials. They also extracted articles from the many books they purchased, such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle, the Flora Peruviana y Chilense by Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, the works by Azara, Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier, and the 13th edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae, published between 1788 and 1793 by Johann Friedrich Gmelin (1748–1803).

220

I. Podgorny

Larrañaga was fascinated by plants. The world of the Bourbons and the Spanish Enlightenment encouraged clerics and pharmacists to study the medicinal and commercial properties of Indigenous plants in the Americas. The Flora Peruana, or the plant collections of the botanists from the expedition of Alejandro Malaspina, arrived in Buenos Aires through the accounts and papers that were gathered and transcribed from the region’s curates. This copyist culture, forming as it did part of clerical education, shaped the study of natural history, in which the new methods of observation were combined with the practices of reading and extracting notes from manuscripts and printed materials. These priests drafted various treatises on natural history in dictionary form, bringing together different points of view organized in alphabetical order, embracing the many innovations that they added with each new reading. They also prepared tableaux, classification tables for the zoology, botany, and mineralogy of the country, which were amended with the inclusion of new specimens. Furthermore, they illustrated and colored their observations. Flowers, insects, and birds sprang back to life through the clergy’s ink. One such drawing that they copied, from the colonial archives, was a colossal skeletal figure, which Larrañaga recorded in his journal in 1814 as the discovery “new bones of Megatherium.” He subsequently translated a description published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1810 that emphasized the paradoxical nature of this beast and an English article from 1806 that discussed the similarities of the animal to sloths and elephants. Muñoz, in copying the drawing from the Buenos Aires archive, noted that the beast was now known as “megatherium.” Hence, through the colonial archives and publications, intellectuals became aware of the debates about the controversial zoological classification of this monster. Armadillos were one of the mammals to which the instructions had paid particular attention. In 1768, the Royal Order had requested their shipping to Madrid using all the names present in the Americas: tatú, quirquincho, and clacuache. From 1808 on, the priests studied comparative anatomy and the classification of mammals to develop a local picture of armadillos, combining various systems with their observations and those of Spanish military engineers. This led Larrañaga to think, in the early 1820s, that the animal from Luján could have had an armadillo-like shell. Larrañaga, the future vicar of Montevideo, kept his collections in the housemuseum on his family’s property, where he received traveling captains and naturalists, to whom he showed his most precious objects. These visitors or correspondents included Aimé Bonpland (1773–1858), the French botanist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire (1779–1853), and Friedrich Sellow (1789–1831), commissioned by the Portuguese and Prussian courts to collect samples from the provinces of Rio Grande do Sul and the Cisplatine province. They spread Larrañaga’s views in ever widening circles. To no surprise, Cuvier quoted a letter from “un savant Brésilien” in offering his opinion about Megatherium. In Larrañaga’s museum, Sellow and Saint-Hilaire saw fragments of a bony coat of mail or tessellated armor, belonging to the back and tail of a very large animal. Seizing upon the clergyman’s ideas, they reported to Berlin and Paris that these pieces likely belonged to Megatherium. Thus began a disagreement about the anatomy of this burly animal that lasted almost 20 years and reveals the impact of

10

Palaeontology in South America

221

oral tradition on the culture of natural history. The conversations and readings went back and forth between Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Asunción, by way of various ports and cities, where new meanings were attached to them. The colonial bureaucratic papers were used in both in the metropolis and also in Río de la Plata. They were examined by those interested in the region’s natural history, being published for the first time in Buenos Aires in 1835 by the topographer Juan María Gutiérrez (1809–1878) to illustrate an article in Museo Americano, a periodical directed by César Hipólito Bacle (1794–1838). Gutiérrez gave several people credit for putting together the skeleton, including the collector, politician, and journalist, Joaquín José de Araujo (1762–1835), whose papers included a copy of the drawing attributed to Brigadier José Custodio de Sá y Faría († 1792), a Portuguese engineer active in marking the borders of the colony. Historians have tended to refer to these early findings as the prehistory of evolutionary ideas. This tendency, far from revealing how those things found in the Pampas, the caves of Brazil, or the Bolivian provinces became scientific objects, has obscured the fact that bones were used, described, interpreted, and traded for particular purposes. Understanding those purposes is our collective task.

Conclusion In the making of the nineteenth-century global world, museum collections were treated as crucial parts of Western centers of assessment. It is time to recognize that nineteenth-century collections are much wider, more nuanced, and complex than given in current historiography. As Pietro Corsi (2020, 1) recently said, “Almost inevitably, successive generations of historians, together with national and international professional associations and journals, have established a variety of (often contradictory) criteria of relevance, lists of issues and actors worth spending time on. With notable exceptions, the study of actual practices of knowledge of the past has rarely attracted sustained attention.” This chapter has highlighted those neglected actors, events, contingencies, and spaces that shaped fossil collecting. Museums and collections generated a flow of data, natural specimens, and artifacts that, through their relationship with people, traveled to diverse places, and in a variety of directions. This has often been overlooked, with the result that many important movements remain almost invisible. Against this background, this chapter suggests a change of perspective, proposing to explore those many collections that came to smaller cities and institutions. Interested in the flow of information, namely bones, papers, plates, and fossil prints as well as the movements of people and things, this chapter promotes global narratives for shaping future research agendas arguing that some museums in fact acted as centers of fragmentation, confusion, and dispersion. This chapter aims at furthering our understanding of the diverse ways in which certain collections connected places and people in unexpected ways, generating new sociabilities. It highlights how these collections, through their relationship with people, traveled and connected the world in the

222

I. Podgorny

nineteenth century, creating networks that were not necessarily centralized around either the European metropolises or national museums. Worth investigating is how some well-known nineteenth-century palaeontologists used the sale of fossil specimens to fund their fieldwork, career, or even their everyday life. One significant way of building and increasing fossil collections, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was through exchange and purchase of fossils, either between institutions or between individual palaeontologists or fossil dealers. Many factors acted to bring about nineteenth-century palaeontological collections in settings beyond the big cities of Europe. It is important to revise the idea of the collections as a mere by-product of colonialism and imperialism. Collections were constructed “on the move.” South American fossil mammals in European museums owe their presence to entrepreneurial individuals who acted beyond centralized, colonial norms. Fossil collecting reflected political agendas closely linked to various colonial endeavors, but the movement could not have succeeded without the promise of new knowledge tied to self-promotion. People collect things but collections bring people together. Collecting united people with objects, crossing borders of all kinds: national, local, disciplinary, and theoretical. It is important to detect hubs where such encounters happened and how new knowledge related to these sociabilities. There is profit for global historians in turning toward specific places, which, upon closer inspection, are translocal. Microhistorical approaches can help us write global history in new ways. This is one outcome of focusing on palaeontological collections and collectors and connecting bones with archival documentation. We can begin to understand why the extinct mammals that characterized the Tertiary of South America became icons for illustrating the continent’s deep past and also, at the same time, metaphors, symbols, and precious objects of trade and exchange. It is a process by which sabre-tooth tigers, glyptodonts, and giant sloths, all those strange, hairy, and extinct creatures, slipped into the imaginative realms of the arts, where they have a place today as fantastic things once found in nature. Acknowledgments This chapter is part of the H2020-MSCA- EU RISE Project SciCOMove (Scientific Collections on the Move – Project Number 101007579) and the PIP 0153 (CONICET). I would like to thank the comments on earlier drafts of the chapter by Ana Barahona, Pietro Corsi, Margaret Lopes, and Richard Fariña.

References Ameghino F (1889) Contribución al conocimiento de los mamíferos fósiles de la República Argentina, Actas de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Córdoba. Impr. de P.E. Coni é Hijos, Buenos Aires Appel T (1980) Henri de Blainville and the animal series: a nineteenth century chain of being. J Hist Biol 13(2):291–319 Barahona A, Suárez E, Rheinberger H-J (eds) (2011) Darwin, el arte de hacer ciencia. UNAM, Mexico City

10

Palaeontology in South America

223

Blainville HD (1822) Analyse des principaux travaux dans les Sciences physiques, publiés dans l’année 1821. J Phys Chim Hist Nat 44:54 Boulinier G (1995) Les leçons du tatou: d’Orbigny et Darwin en Amérique du Sud. In: Laissus Y (ed) Les naturalistes français en Amérique du Sud XVXIe–XIXe siècle. CTHS, Paris, pp 277–290 Brendecke A (2009) Imperium und Empirie. Funktionen des Wissens in der Spanischen Kolonialherrschaft. Böhlau, Cologne Brinkman P (2010a) The second Jurassic dinosaur rush: museums and paleontology in America at the turn of the twentieth century. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Brinkman P (2010b) Charles Darwin’s beagle voyage, fossil vertebrate succession, and the gradual birth & death of species. J Hist Biol 43(2):363–399 Caponi G (2009) George Cuvier. Un fisiólogo de museo. Limusa, Mexico City Cohen C (2004) The fate of the mammoth: fossils, myth and history. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Corsi P (2020) A chair for two: Georges Cuvier and Jean-Claude Delamétherie at the Collège de France. In: Darwin au Collège de France [online]. Collège de France, Paris. http://books. openedition.org/cdf/7311. Accessed 21 Jan 2020 Escamilla-González F, Morelos-Rodríguez L (2020) Bringing Werner’s teachings to the new world: Andrés Manuel del Río and the Chair of Mineralogy in the School of Mines of Mexico (1795–1805). Earth Sci Hist 39(2):246–261 Klein U, Lefèvre W (2007) Materials in eighteenth-century sciences: a historical ontology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Lister A (2018) Darwin’s fossils. Discoveries that shaped the theory of evolution. Natural History Museum, London Lleó Cañal V (2008) Julian Benjamin Williams y el comercio de arte en la Sevilla del XIX. Bol Acad Sevillana Buenas Letras 36:187–204 Lopes MM (2010) Parentesco entre los muertos y los vivos nas cavernas de Lagoa Santa, no Brasil. Anu IEHS 25:353–337 Lopes MM, Podgorny I (2000) The shaping of Latin American museums of natural history. Osiris 15:108–118 López Piñero JM (1993) La tradición de la historiografía de la ciencia y su coyuntura actual: los condicionantes de un congreso. In: Mundialización de la ciencia y la cultura nacional. Actas del Congreso Internacional Ciencia, Descubrimiento y Mundo Colonial. Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 23–52 López Piñero JM, Glick T (1993) El megaterio de Bru y el presidente Jefferson, Cuadernos Valencianos de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia 42. CSIC, Valencia Ochoa C, Barahona A (2014) El Jano de la morfología: de la homología a la homoplasia. Historia, debates y evolución. Centro de Estudios V. Lombardo Tolesano, Mexico City Owen R (1840) The zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Part 1. Fossil mammalia. Smith Elder, London Pelayo F (2002) El Orden Natural y los Gigantes: la “Gigantologia Spagnola Vendicata” (1760) de José Torrubia. Archivo Teol Granadino 65:129–186 Pimentel J (2010) El Rinoceronte y el megaterio. Marcial Pons, Madrid Podgorny I (2001) El camino de los fósiles: las colecciones de mamíferos pampeanos en los museos franceses e ingleses. Asclepio 53(2):97–116 Podgorny I (2010) Mercaderes del Pasado: Teodoro Vilardebó, Pedro de Angelis y el comercio de huesos y documentos en el Río de la Plata, 1830–1850. Circumscribere 9:29–77 Podgorny I (2011) El león de Hércules: Francisco X. Muñiz, Charles Darwin, Richard Owen y el género Machairodus. In: Barahona A, Suárez E, Rheinberger H-J (eds) Darwin. El arte de hacer ciencia. UNAM, Mexico City, pp 95–115 Podgorny I (2013) Fossil dealers, the practices of comparative anatomy, and British diplomacy in Latin America, 1820–1840. Br J Hist Sci 46(4):647–674

224

I. Podgorny

Podgorny I (2016) Recyclen. Vom Schrott der Ausrottung zur Ökonomie der (Sub)Fossilien. In: Güttler N, Heumann I (eds) Sammlungsökonomien. Vom Wert wissenschaftlicher Dinge. Kadmos, Berlin, pp 23–46 Podgorny I (2017) Manifest ambiguity: intermediate forms, variation, and mammal paleontology in Argentina, 1830–1880. Stud Hist Phil Biol Biomed Sci 66:27–36 Podgorny I (2018) The elk, the ass, the tapir, their hooves, and the falling sickness: a story of substitution and animal medical substances. J Glob Hist 13:46–68 Podgorny I (2019) Bureaucracy, instructions, and paperwork. The gathering of data about the three kingdoms of nature in the Americas, 1770–1815. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. https:// journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/75454 Podgorny I (2020) La guerre, la paix et la querelle. Les sociétés paléontologiques d’Auvergne sous la Seconde Restauration. Colligo 3(3). https://perma.cc/C6ZK-TQF Podgorny I (2021) Los argentinos vienen de los peces. Ensayo de filogenia nacional. Beatriz Viterbo, Rosario Rafinesque C (1814) Principes fondamentaux de Somiologie ou les Loix de la nomenclature et de la classification des animaux et végétaux. Abate, Palermo Rafinesque C (1815) Analyse de la Nature, ou tableau de l’univers et des corps organisés. Abate, Palermo Rudwick M (1972) The meaning of fossils: essays in the history of paleontology. Elsevier, New York Rudwick M (1992) Scenes from deep time: early pictorial images of the prehistoric world. Chicago University Press, Chicago Rudwick M (1997a) Georges Cuvier, fossil bones, and geological catastrophes. New translations & interpretations of the primary texts. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rudwick M (1997b) Recherches sur les ossements fossiles: Georges Cuvier et le collecte des alliés internationaux. In: Blanckaert C, Cohen C, Corsi P, Fischer J-L (eds) Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Archives/Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, pp 591–606 Rupke N (1994) Richard Owen. Victorian naturalist. Yale University Press, New Haven Simpson GG (1980) Splendid isolation. The curious history of South American mammals. Yale University Press, New Haven Simpson GG (1984) Discoverers of the lost world: an account of some of those who brought back to life South American mammals long buried in the abyss of time. Yale University Press, New Haven Tamborini M (2016) “If the Americans can do it, so can we”: how dinosaur bones shaped German paleontology. Hist Sci 54(3):225–256 Ure A (1829) A new system of geology: in which the great revolutions of the Earth and animated nature are reconciled at once to modern science and sacred history. Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, London Vergés M (2019) El dibujante de peces Manuel Clos y la impostura de Juan Baustista Bru. Naturalmente 24:47–53 von Baer K (1860) Über das Aussterben der Thierarten in physiologischer und nicht physiologischer Hinsicht überhaupt, und der Untergang von Arten, die mit den Menschen zusammen gelebt haben. Bull Acad des Sciences 3:1367–1396 von Zittel K (1901) History of geology and palæontology to the end of the nineteenth century. Scott, London Zischler H, Hackethal S, Eckert C (2013) Die Erkundung Brasiliens: Friedrich Sellows unvollendete Reise. Galiani, Cologne

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

11

Fabiola Jua´rez-Barrera, Ana Barahona, and Carlos Pe´rez-Malva´ez

Contents Introduction: An Outlook on Historiography in Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neither Darwin nor Wallace: A More Inclusive Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Synthetic Historiography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Creationism Versus Transmutacionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . First Biogeographic Explanations on the Complexity of the Mexican Biota . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

226 228 232 236 237 239 241

Abstract

The study of the history of science has been of great interest and has diversified and become specialized since the last decades of the twentieth century. The research on the history of biogeography is relatively recent, as is the autonomy that this discipline has achieved in the recent past. Since the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented scientific revolution in comparative biology took place. Systematics and biogeography were properly constituted as independent sciences. This paved the way to a series of historical works regarding biogeography. The main objectives of this chapter are to deepen into the main historiographical approaches to biogeography, and into the ways in which Mexican historians have made history of this discipline. The analysis of the discursive F. Juárez-Barrera Facultad de Superiores Zaragoza, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] A. Barahona (*) Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] C. Pérez-Malváez Facultad de Estudio Superiores Zaragoza, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_8

225

226

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

construct that has been locally performed over the history of biogeography can share elements to know better the circulation process of knowledge in a broader geographic context. The central histories on biogeography that have been performed in Mexico are analyzed. Throughout the history of biogeography, different schools or approaches have developed, mainly dispersalist biogeography, panbiogeography, cladistic biogeography, and phylogeography, to name the most significant ones. Within these approaches, different postures and debates have emerged. A historiographical analysis is carried out focusing on the pioneer Mexican academics interested in biogeography, in order to highlight how they have tackled the different biogeographic approaches from its history.

Introduction: An Outlook on Historiography in Mexico The study of the history of science has been of great interest and has diversified and become specialized since the last decades of the twentieth century. The research on the history of biogeography is relatively recent, as is the autonomy that this discipline has achieved in the recent past. The historiography of science is the study of the diverse ways in which the past of science has been approached, or rather, the study of how people have written about science (Christie 1990). However, in the last decades, these definitions have been overtaken. The history of science has attempted to expand its horizons, and its interest no longer focuses solely on the intellectual history of science. Beyond the intrinsic interest of the historical study of the scientific rationality, significant momentum has been acquired by the historical study of the scientific practices and by the social construction of knowledge, which includes the social, cultural, and political components that have made such practices possible. This tendency has resulted in the study of the history of science becoming more diverse and specialized. The history of biogeography is the study of the explanations given to the geographic distribution of organisms through time, and it consists of a particular plot within the broad field of science. Two aspects that have been of particular interest to historians are, on the one hand, the process of discovery, description, and testing of biogeographic patterns, and attached to this, the history regarding the interpretations given to such patterns and their nature. Biogeography can be generally regarded as the study of the spatial patterns of biodiversity, and all its components and scales. Because of this, the study of the distribution of organisms on Earth’s surface is much older than that of biogeography as an institutionalized discipline. With the Enlightenment, rationality started to displace faith in terms of explanations based on physical conditions. The ancient Thomist natural philosophy, which attempted to pinpoint the natural order based on the biblical narratives, began to lose supporters. Meanwhile, the number of secular naturalists gradually increased. Within the idealist Christian tradition, prominent naturalists, such as Linnaeus, attempted to explain the distribution of animals and plants with the Book of Genesis as inspiration. In the early nineteenth century, some

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

227

noteworthy works from secular naturalists appeared, presenting interpretations supported by empirical evidence based on physical causes, both contemporary and historical, and setting metaphysical manifestations aside. The study of the distribution of life on Earth has had different names through time. In the early nineteenth century, “botanical geography” made its appearance in encyclopedias of natural history. In 1855, the first book focusing on the subject, Reasoned Botanical Geography by Alphonse de Candolle, appeared. In the early twentieth century, the terms phytogeography and zoogeography were already in use. Later on, Léon Croizat (1958) proposed the term panbiogeography as an attempt to unify the discipline without a taxonomic distinction. Since the 1960s, the term became simplified as biogeography, but it appears as a mere appendage in standard ecology texts (for instance, Krebs 1978; Andrewartha and Birch 1961). It was not until biogeography set its own questions, concepts, and methods, that it became an independent discipline. Even in the late 1970s, Gareth Nelson (1978) considered biogeography to be a rather strange discipline, without a defined identity of its own. There were no institutes or departments dedicated to its study, and this discipline was an appendage of departments such as Comparative Biology or Evolutionary Biology, at best. There were no professional biogeographers nor academic institutions issuing college degrees on biogeography either (for a contrasting view, see Sluys 2020). Until the last half of the last century, biogeography was not made up by biogeographers, but rather by taxonomists (botanists and zoologists), ecologists, palaeontologists, and geographers. It was not until the last decades of the twentieth century that specialized books and magazines about this topic increased. In spite of the appearance of the Dutch magazine Blumea in 1934, the last decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence of other new titles, such as the Journal of Biogeography in 1974, Global Ecology and Biogeography in 1991, and Diversity and Distributions in 1993. As for current publications, there is The International Biogeography Society, founded in England back in 2001. In Mexico, the first biogeography courses were taught by Spanish immigrants that had fled the Franco totalitarianism, such as Federico Bonet de Marco (1906–1980), who joined the National School of Biological Sciences (Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas, ENCB) of the National Polytechnic Institute (Instituto Politécnico Nacional, IPN) in the 1950s and had a strong influence over those who would later on develop important contributions to Mexican zoogeography, the Spanish-born Mexican entomologist and taxonomist Gonzalo Halffter (1932–), and phytogeography, the Polish-born Mexican botanist and first president of the Botanical Society of Mexico, Jerzy Rzedowski (1926–). In Mexico, the interest to undertake historiographic studies on biogeography arose from a small group of practicing researchers of this discipline, who were interested in studying the naturalists that influenced the acknowledgment of biogeographic patterns and processes. Among them, the attention is brought towards the entomologist, taxonomist, and biogeographer from the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM), Jorge Llorente-Bousquets, who made his doctorate thesis under the tutorship of José Ramírez Pulido, professor of the Metropolitan Autonomous University (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, UAM), and who was also taught

228

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

by the Mexican arachnologist Anita Hoffman and entomologists Alfredo Barrera and Gonzalo Halffter. Since the late 1980s, Llorente decisively promoted the training of researchers in the systematics and biogeography fields. The incorporation of the Argentinean-born Mexican entomologist and biogeographer Juan José Morrone, who had studied with the Argentinean botanist Jorge Crisci at the Universidad de la Plata (Universidad de la Plata) in Argentina, into the Zoology Museum “Alfonso L. Herrera” of the School of Sciences of the UNAM, back in the 1990s, also gave place to a noticeable interest towards both the biogeographic research and the history of biogeography (research). These days, Morrone is avowed for his work within the international community of biogeographers. Alfredo Bueno and David Espinosa made their postgraduate studies under the tutorship of Jorge Llorente-Bousquets, focusing on the study of comparative biology. In this chapter, the central histories on biogeography that have been performed in Mexico are analyzed. Throughout the history of biogeography, different schools or approaches have developed, mainly dispersalist biogeography, panbiogeography, cladistic biogeography, and phylogeography, to name the most significant ones. Within these approaches, different postures and debates have emerged. A historiographic analysis is carried out herein focusing on the pioneer Mexican academics interested in biogeography, in order to highlight how they have tackled the different biogeographic approaches from its history.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace: A More Inclusive Historiography The first approach to emerge from biogeography was dispersalist biogeography. Its dominant paradigm was to pinpoint centers of origin and track the dispersal routes for each of the taxa analyzed. This paradigm was the monopolizing approach that prevailed for over a century. Some historians have considered the origin of this movement to be the publishing of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species in 1859. We cannot deny the fact that Darwin used the geographic distribution of organisms as critical criteria to support his evolution idea and to explain the differentiation of species through dispersal, isolation, and under a fixed position. However, as mentioned by Janet Browne (1983) and Gareth Nelson (1978), in order to appreciate the real input of Darwin’s work and to understand the historical development of the life sciences, it is important to study those naturalists who worked before him, along with their contemporary peers, who developed some of the concepts that helped solidify this movement. Among the Mexican historians that have tackled this approach, and who have focused on the historiographic study of the naturalist ideas that helped consolidate the acknowledgement of biogeographic patterns before and alongside the evolutionary theory, the works of Alfredo Bueno-Hernández and Jorge Llorente-Bousquets (2003, 2004, 2006), who developed a history of biogeography, can be referred to. They acknowledge naturalists preceding Darwin, whose input to the knowledge on the geographic distribution of organisms was a pillar to the establishment of current biogeographic ideas. In one of their works (Bueno-Hernández and Llorente-

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

229

Bousquets 2006), they perform a thorough analysis of the biogeographic ideas of Charles Lyell, who in the second volume of his Principles of Geology, elaborated on an extensive biogeographic model parting from his uniformitarian principle. In this article, they deduce that Lyell was the pioneer of the dispersalist tradition in historical biogeography. The second volume of Principles of Geology can be considered as the first treatise on biogeography that set the basis for this discipline in Great Britain in the mid-nineteenth century (Bueno-Hernández and LlorenteBousquets 2003). In the first volume of Lyell’s Principles from 1830, he took the principle of the vera causa, developed by John Herschel (1830) and William Whewell (1847). He disqualifies the potential of the catastrophic ideas of explaining geologic issues. Later on, in his second volume in 1832, under the principle of the Earth surface being prone to long-term continuous changes, he states that the organisms have also been subjected to changes within their geographic distribution areas (Bueno-Hernández and Llorente-Bousquets 2006). They conclude that Lyell’s work is a brilliant synthesis of geology and the geographic distribution of organisms, in which the author sets the conceptual and methodologic backbones of biogeography. Lyell represents a group of naturalists that committed to the empirical evidence and avoided speculations to develop their interpretations, within which they also highlighted Alexander von Humboldt, Augustin de Candolle and his son, Alphonse de Candolle (JuárezBarrera et al. 2018). Bueno-Hernández and Llorente-Bousquets (2003) approached the biogeographic model of Lyell through a comparative history, in which they analyze and contrast two rivaling empirical approaches against each other, catastrophism and uniformitarianism. A distinct influence in the works of Bueno-Hernández and LlorenteBousquets (1991, 2000, 2003, 2004) and Bueno et al. (1999) is the history of biogeography carried out by Janet Browne (1983). Bueno and Llorente agree with this author on the criticism of the whiggish narrative developed by neo-Darwinian biogeographers (Matthew 1915; Darlington 1957; Simpson 1965), according to which biogeography had emerged only through the seminal works of Darwin. Brown leans towards an approach that redeems the accomplishments of naturalists preceding Darwin and who were interested in explaining the geographic distribution of organisms. Faced with the whig thesis made by the neo-Darwinian dispersalist biogeographers, such as Darlington (1957), according to which the scientific biogeography originates from Darwin and Alfred Wallace, Browne redeems, as Nelson (1978) previously had, the research of a series of earlier naturalists, making it clear that both Darwin and Wallace had reached beyond the ecological determinism of natural theology thanks to the accomplishments of the naturalists that preceded them. This spawns a general coincidence between Bueno-Hernández and LlorenteBousquets (1991, 2003, 2004) on one side, and Browne (1983) and Nelson (1978) on the other, that shows a knowledge transmission route from Anglo-Saxon literature to the Latin American one: biogeography does not originate from Darwin but from the input of authors like Augustin de Candolle who, back in 1820, made an important conceptual distinction between stations, as abiotic causes that aid in the growth of plant life (humidity, temperature, soil conditions), and habitations, which are broad

230

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

separate areas with their own species identities. Like Nelson (1978), the authors acknowledge the important contribution that the French naturalist Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon made, by noticing that mammals in the “New” and “Old Worlds” were entirely different from each other, despite dwelling within the same latitudes and with practically the same climates. Such a distinction marks the beginning of the rupture with the implied ecological determinism in the conception of natural theology. This empirical discovery was later on named by the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt as Buffon’s Law. On the other hand, as previously outlined, Nelson (1978) was also a relevant influence on Bueno-Hernández and Llorente-Bousquets (2003). Like this, the narrative these authors develop matches with the purpose presented in the biogeography histories performed by both Nelson and Browne, which is to redeem pre-Darwinian naturalists as pioneer biogeographers under the premise of displaying general principles and concepts that form the identity of this discipline, which mainly emerge with the work of Augustin de Candolle in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This also led them to criticize the history constructed by dispersalist biogeographers, from Matthew and Darlington to Mayr, which is read as a biased history that glorifies Darwin and Wallace as the fathers of biogeography. Bueno and Llorente revisit some of the core questions that have been set through the research of the history of biogeography: How were the alternative ideas for the neo-Darwinist dispersalism dismissed, even though Augustin de Candolle, Charles Lyell, and Joseph Dalton Hooker had already reached the important deduction that neither the dispersal capacities of the taxa nor the possible dispersal episodes could satisfactorily explain the affinity among markedly discontinued areas? Why did the research on this tendency not continue throughout the entire Darwinian-Wallacean period, bypassing Scatler’s idea of looking for ontological divisions (also known as genealogical) of the Earth surface? How was it that Wallace went from a warm embrace of the regions as proposed by Sclater, to later seeing them as mere tools for pedagogical use? How did the empirical knowledge of the biogeographic issues become articulated with the dispersalist model promoted by Darwin and developed by Wallace? What led Wallace to separate himself from his former extensionist inclinations, sensu Fichman (1977), to settle finally for a strictly fixist posture? Which were the sociological, cultural, and academic conditions that determined the prevalence of the Darwinian-Wallacean model? Why, after the system of endemism regions presented by Augustin de Candolle in the first half of the nineteenth century, conceiving such regions as having their own historical and biological identities, did they end up being perceived, under the Darwin-Wallace scheme, as merely random additions of taxa with particular and independent dispersal histories (Nelson 1978)? All these questions have an intrinsic value within the history of biogeography. Furthermore, Bueno and Llorente consider there is already extensive research on the issue of the influence biogeography decisively had on the elaboration of the evolutionary theory, though there is not much analysis on how the evolutionary model conditioned the biogeographic ideas with the embrace of a dispersalist model, which owes its most refined version to Wallace. Furthermore, though organic distribution is acknowledged as having represented as the most crucial empirical

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

231

support for the transmutation ideas of both Darwin and Wallace, Bueno and Llorente point out that, in the end, the dispersalist model ended up prevailing over any other explanation as to the most coherent process according to the idea of natural selection. As previously mentioned, Bueno-Hernández and Llorente-Bousquets (2003) agree with a broad conclusion shared by Nelson and Browne, according to which there is a tendency that begins with Buffon, continues with Augustin de Candolle, and is recovered by Lyell, Darwin, and Wallace: the geographic distribution of both plants and animals could not be explained by only environmental conditions. BuenoHernández and Llorente-Bousquets (2004) argue that the history of the neo-Darwinian dispersalist biogeographers carries a historical bias, as it presents the dispersalist model promoted by Darwin and Wallace as the natural progression in the knowledge of the distribution issues. However, it dismissed the essential distinctions and changes that the most outstanding Darwinian biogeographer went through, Wallace. Bueno and Llorente draw attention to the evident change in the biogeographic conceptions of Wallace throughout his research and highlight his transition from a clear extensionist posture (sensu Fichman 1977) in his first works, to end up becoming a devoted defendant of fixism, which was the posture Darwin consistently held. Bueno and Llorente develop a series of works, both as books and articles, that seek to accurately analyze this change through the epistolary evidence, and they outline some of the possible causes for this noticeable shift in the biogeographic conceptions of Wallace. Recently, Ebach (2015) realized the historical reconstruction of Nelson as a biased interpretation that favored the cladistic establishment. “Rather than acknowledge Darwin and Wallace, who had by now become the ‘fathers’ of evolutionary biology and the Modern Synthesis, Nelson claimed that status for Buffon, which Larson is correct in believing was through ‘selective reading’” (Ebach 2015: 7). These authors, along with Nelson Papavero and Dante Martins-Texeira (Papavero et al. 2004), have also tackled the history of pre-evolutionary naturalists. In their book History of the Biogeography, the Preevolutionary Period, the authors open with the revision of the first biogeographic ideas in the Genesis bible, where the seminal ideas of the center of origin and dispersal originated. The Flood myth tells the story of how, following the events of Noah’s Ark, the different organisms became scattered all over the then known lands. A millennium and a half later, when the American biota was discovered, contradictions with the biblical tale arose, and the causes for the biogeographic distribution were thought over. New principles and hypotheses were proposed, among which were the extensionist ideas attempting to explain the biota present in the “New World” through its dispersal from the stranding point of Noah’s Ark in Mount Ararat. Even back in the sixteenth century, the Jesuit Joseph de Acosta had made thoughtful observations on the dwellers of the “New World,” which inspired Buffon to propose his “law”: different species inhabit different areas, no matter the environmental conditions at play. Papavero, Martins-Texeira, Llorente-Bousquets, and Bueno-Hernández (2004) also approach the ideas of Karl von Linnaeus, who was one of the pioneer naturalists to propose an explanation for the biogeographic patterns. The authors analyze the

232

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

naturalists who had a substantial influence on the history of biogeography, as is the case of the botanic arithmetic developed by Humboldt, or the ideas of Augustin de Candolle in his work Botanical Geography, where he makes an important conceptual distinction between stations and inhabitations. The authors, two Brazilian and two Mexican, prove the importance of learning the perspective of this series of pre-Darwinian naturalists aiming to rethink the construction of biogeography, and how ideas, methods, and concepts have gradually transformed through time, and above all, how there were naturalists who put forward important ideas that helped build this new discipline, even before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species. Recently, from the perspective of Mexican authors, the issue on the discovery, description, and submission to the testing of different biodiversity spatial patterns has been tackled (Juárez-Barrera et al. 2018). These authors analyzed the ideas of three naturalists who set important foundations for biogeography, Alexander von Humboldt, Augustin de Candolle, and Alphonse de Candolle. Opposed to a generalized idea, they concluded that their works were not merely descriptive. Despite their attachment to the prevailing inductivist canon, they ventured into proposing a hypothesis. A closer analysis to his arguments reveals that his method leans closer to the deductive thought than to the orthodox inductivism, as they were based on a hypothesis on the existence of patterns that others authors had presented, submitting them to empirical testing. Juárez-Barrera and his collaborators (2018) point out that, though the practices and methods of biogeography have substantially changed, the patterns studied since the nineteenth century remain the same. They identify five patterns that have persistently caught the attention of experts on the spatial distribution of taxa: (1) geographical gradients of richness and biotic replacement, (2) spatial gradients of functional groups, (3) geographical variation of the phenotype, (4) geographical patterns of expansive-differentiated individual lineages, and (5) biogeographical homology.

Synthetic Historiography The different biogeographic movements are classified into two broad groups, the ecological biogeography and the historical biogeography. While the former analyzes spatial and temporary patterns on a smaller scale, the latter does so on a broader scale. However, authors like Crisci (2001) and Morrone (2004) consider this division to be rather conventional, the same as with the strict dichotomy facing dispersalism (seen as the expansion of the distribution area of a taxon) against vicariance (seen as the emergence of ecological and geological barriers, or barriers of any other kind, that trigger the fragmentation of the distribution of ancient species, which, in turn, gives ways to the origin of new ones). The intense debate between dispersalism and vicariance started in the late 1970s. The first one is triggered by the ideas of DarwinWallace, and its research program has two objective: to recognize origin centers and to track dispersal routes; meanwhile, the second one is based on the concept of biogeographical homology, where the patterns are the result of vicariant events.

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

233

Within the vicariance stance, we can find panbiogeography and cladistic biogeography. Panbiogeography is based on the principle of vicariance, that assumes that barriers evolve along with their biota. Cladistic biogeography looks for common vicariant patterns in various taxa. Though the authors of these two latter approaches have tried to separate themselves from each other, it is possible to read them as complementary approaches, as we can get through the first one the primary biogeographic homology by submitting to test the spatial congruence between the distribution of two or more taxa. In contrast, the second one can provide the secondary homology by inferring the historical relations between the patterns of the primary homology. Regarding these dichotomies that have emerged within the biogeographic discussion, Morrone has taken a critical posture and has denied having sided with any of them, arguing that he refuses to participate in what he considers to be an unnecessary reductionism. He has instead chosen to dissect the biogeographic complexities and proposed an approach he calls evolutionary or integrative biogeography, presenting the possibility of merging dispersal and vicariance within a single and broader research program (Morrone 2007). In his historical works, Morrone has attempted to break with these dichotomies. In one of them (Morrone 2003), he analyzes both dispersalist authors and the panbiogeography of Léon Croizat, and he revisits the question posed by Savage (1982): Did dispersalism exist as a formal model or was it a product of the selfappointed vicariancists? Morrone has been devoted to the analysis of authors like the Mexican Gonzalo Halffter, as well as the Argentinean Raúl Ringuelet and Osvaldo Reig (2001, 2003, 2005, 2015). Likewise, he has focused his interest on analyzing the work of Croizat. Morrone highlights the relevance of the contributions of Reig, as he introduced some details about the biogeographic concepts. Reig revisits, now within Latin American biogeography, the term “cenogenesis,” coined by Sukachev (1958) to refer to the development of biotic groups built throughout geologic time (Reig 1962). Reig coined the terms “cenocron” which synthesizes in its etymology the notions of community and time, and “lineage” which he uses as means to be able to distinguish the groups of different origin from each other within one shared cenocron. With these conceptual details, Reig (1962) breaks down the distinctive elements that have taken part in the formation of the tetrapod South American wildlife. Morrone has specially analyzed in his historiographic papers the development of the biogeographic views of Reig and Halffter, and has pointed out the maturity their works gradually reached. He states that, in both cases, a change in their perspectives can be noticed after the arrival and acceptance of the tectonic plates theory during the 1960s, which gave way to a scientific revolution in the development of the historical biogeography. Morrone recontextualizes Reig and other authors who are traditionally perceived as strictly dispersalist within an alternative approach. He agrees on this point with Crisci, one of the pioneers on carrying out an analysis of the previously numerical taxonomy that would later shift into a cladistic one in Latin America, with whom he shares the vision of trying not to become stuck in the heated-up debates and different postures that originated in the 1970s (i.e., ecological

234

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

biogeography versus historical biogeography, or biogeographers who saw dispersal as a process with the potential to explain certain biogeographical patterns versus orthodox vicariancism who roundly dismissed it). Instead, both Crisci and Morrone had taken an intermediate stance that acknowledges the input put forward by biogeography, both from the dispersalist and vicariancist approaches to the research of current biogeography. Morrone (2015) argues that the view of the transition from a dispersalist approach to a vicariance one could be seen not only on Reig but in several different authors, such as Halffter and Savage. They show through their publications a similar tendency, from a dispersalist posture that later on turn into an integration between dispersalism and vicariancism. This thought shift also matches the growing acceptance and more significant explicative potential of the continental drift theory. Morrone (2015) has pointed out that no complete and formal characterization of dispersalism that would allow distinguishing the differences in the alternative biogeographic approaches has been made. This way, he argues that rather than settling on one of the two approaches, what is truly required is to analyze both of them thoroughly. More specifically, Morrone committed to the analysis of the development of Halffter’s biogeographic ideas regarding what is today known as the Mexican Transition Zone (MTZ), as he has contributed to its knowledge more than any other author (Morrone 2005, 2010). Since 1962, Halffter proposed a coherent theory that explained how the taxa groups that evolved in different geographic areas and at different moments (cenocrons) had been assembled within the MTZ. Morrone has pointed out the relevance Halffter’s ideas have had for evolutionary biogeography. Same as in the case of Reig, the views Halffter held gradually shifted, reaching higher levels of refinement and clearness in his latter contributions. At first, his perspective leans more towards dispersalism. However, as the continental drift theory gained more supporters and gathered more empirical evidence to support itself, Halffter ended up embracing it in order to explain the origins of the South American fauna. Morrone recognizes two distinct phases in Halffter’s evolution of thought: the first phase showing an entirely dispersalist approach, where he distinguishes three dispersal elements or patterns: (1) Typical Neotropical dispersal, (2) Plateau dispersal, and (3) Nearctic dispersal. Almost every species Halffter analyzed could be assigned to any of these patterns. Likewise, Halffter found a contrast within the Mexican Plateau, where the vertebrate species were clearly Nearctic, while the insects had a Neotropical origin. In 1974, Halffter explicitly accepts continental drift as an explanation to the South American distribution patterns. Some authors supported the idea that all South American taxa having originated in the “Old World,” from where they scattered to North America, and finally arrived in South America. In contrast, others leaned towards the idea of them emerging from the austral continents. This way, as Morrone points out, Halffter assembled a synthetic theory, accepting the coexistence of both Gondwanan and northern immigrating taxa in the Mexican Transition Zone (Morrone 2010). Morrone (2015) considers the presence of a certain similarity shared among the ideas of Halffter and those of Rappoport, Reig, and Miklos Udvardy. In 1974,

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

235

Halffter reclassified the distributed taxa in the Mexican Transition Zone in four dispersal patterns. (1) Nearctic dispersal pattern, (2) Paleoamerican dispersal pattern, (3) Mexican Plateau dispersal pattern and Ancient South American (Neotropical) origin, and (4) Neotropical dispersal pattern and recent origin. In 1978, he depicted a fifth pattern which he named Mountain Mesoamerican pattern, to adjust to the elements of the mountain forests of Central America. It is evident that while Halffter only acknowledged dispersal patterns through the 1960s, by the late 1970s (Halffter 1978), he accepted both the concepts of dispersal and vicariance as causes of biogeographical patterns. Like the previously mentioned authors, Morrone also rejects the need to decide between dispersal and vicariance as single and exclusive alternatives to the evolution of life, a common thought during the 1970s and 1980s among dispersalist and cladistic biogeographers, as well as panbiogeographers. This dispersal-vicariance model, supported by Morrone, states that both processes are relevant and should be analyzed. Juárez-Barrera, Espinosa, Morrone, Escalante, and Bueno-Hernández (2020a) also analyzed the history of the interpretation on the MTZ from the nineteenth century naturalists to the modern concept of Halffter. The authors go through different attempts to explain the intricate distribution of the Mexican biota taxa. They find three ways in which the MTZ has been conceived, from Wallace, who conceived the Mexican subregion as fauna in an expansion process, moving on to those who saw the transition between the Nearctic and Neotropical regions as a mere overlap of taxa with different dispersal capacities and belonging to either of the two regions, up to the concept presented by Halffter, who interprets the transition zone as an area where biotas of different origin and evolution timings and distinct from each other, overlap. These faunal groups were named as fauna or horofauna by Hobarth Smith (1941), as cenocrons by Reig (1968), and as dispersal patterns and, later on, distributional patterns by Halffter (1978). Morrone highlights this parallelism of ideas that have been present in Mexico and Argentina. He analyzes the point of view of Florentino Ameghino, who was also interested in explaining the origin and distribution of the South American mammal fauna. This author contrasted the biogeographic theories discussed at the time in Europe and the United States. His ideas, though controversial, caused the South American fauna to become a fundamental component in the biogeographic debate in the early twentieth century (Morrone 2011). Faced with the dominating dispersalism promoted by North American biogeographers, Ameghino argued that the area where the main mammal groups had originated would have been Patagonia, with the groups scattering from that region to expand through the globe in four main migration events, each set in a different time and direction: (1) Cretaceous dispersal to Australia, (2) Cretaceous-Eocene dispersal to Africa, (3) Oligo-Miocene dispersal to Africa, and (4) MiocenePliocene-quaternary dispersal to North America. Before fully accepting the idea of the continental drift, Ameghino supports the idea of intercontinental bridges to explain some of his proposed dispersal events. Despite his numerous opponents, who considered most of his principles to be unsustainable (one of the most

236

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

outstanding ones being the influential North American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, who bitterly criticized Ameghino for having mistaken a fish fossil for a primate one), the fact that he set forward some valuable elements cannot be denied, for instance, the acknowledgment of native elements in the successive dispersal events, or the taxa originated outside South America. Though Simpson admits that Ameghino’s work accurately portrays the stratigraphic sequence, he agreed with several authors in arguing that his correlations with other faunas led him to propose consistently older ages. Ameghino also pointed out some cases of evolutive convergence between South American and “Old World” taxa. He states that the taxa found in Patagonia belonged to ancient forms of both the “Old World” and South America. Even with the harsh criticism, Ameghino was met with, Reig considered his biogeographic theory to consist of a set of empirically supported and structured hypotheses. The development of Ameghino’s view was based on the hypothetic-deductive method, and his input in historical biogeography of South American mammals must be regarded as a pioneering theory (Morrone 2011).

Creationism Versus Transmutacionism The historical study on the debate of creationism versus transmutation, seen from a specifically biogeographic perspective, has been close to nonexistent and has only been tackled in a collateral manner. It was precisely within the debate against creationist ideas that evolutionism took, in good measure, its current form. The relevant biogeographic work performed by creationist and transmutation-leaning naturalists contributed in a significant manner to the mold of our current vision on the geographic distribution of the organisms. The importance of breaking the history of these debates down aids in the examination of ideas to be able to comprehend the fixed creationist explanations on the geographic distribution of organisms carried out during the eighteenth century. Some historiographic works tackling the development of this debate have been produced. Papavero and Llorente-Bousquets (2004) revisited the creationist conception that was developed in the eighteenth century in particular, which could be seen reflected in the biogeographic explanations elaborated by naturalists like Johan Friedrich Gmelin, Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann, and Karl Ludwig von Willdenow. On the other hand, and more specifically, Juárez-Barrera, Llorente-Bousquets, and Bueno-Hernández (2016) published a book titled El Creacionismo de Luis Agassiz y sus concepciones biogeográficas (The Creationism of Louis Agassiz and His Biogeographic Concepts), in which they tackle the issues of the origin, development, and highest peak of the creationist theory of this Swiss naturalist, who relied on biogeographic patterns to attempt to give support and credibility to the basic beliefs within it. Louis Agassiz was an outstanding naturalist specialized in comparative anatomy, geology, and paleontology, considered to be one of the founding fathers of science in the United States, given that after staying in Paris under the tutorship of Humboldt and the naturalist and comparative anatomy specialist

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

237

Georges Cuvier, he migrated to the United States to work at Harvard University. He was also a resolute opponent of the evolutionary and “developmental” notions, as he used to call them, and used biogeography as a means to debunk them. He pointed out that animals were distributed within fixed borders, despite possessing the means of locomotion, which he interpreted as proof that their confinement was predetermined within God’s plan. The fossil record also provided him with arguments against Darwin’s transmutation theory. He stated that different groups, of both vertebrate and invertebrate animals, had displayed great diversity in the past, with even more complex forms than the current ones, which disproved Darwin’s development theory. Another paleontological argument Agassiz used was that the fossil records revealed a simultaneous appearance of new groups in varying levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, which contradicted the concept of gradual change that Darwin supported. This way, Agassiz supported the four fundamental types of morphological organization, proposed by his teacher Cuvier (Vertebrata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Radiata), with no middle points among them. Agassiz brought the attention to the fact that the fossil record revealed forms which had endured long periods while conserving their same shape, without suffering from gradual changes. He used biogeography as a means to promote a metaphysical reading of the conception of nature. The data on the geographic distribution of organisms was the hard proof for his deist interpretation of the organic world, as he found in biogeography the fourth parallelism revealing God’s plan, with growing levels of complexity, and which also could be found in embryology, paleontology, and taxonomy.

First Biogeographic Explanations on the Complexity of the Mexican Biota In the nineteenth century, a group of naturalists became interested in knowing the Mexican biota. Its complexity, given both for its notorious diversity and its numerous endemic forms and intricate distribution patterns, set questions that several outstanding personalities from the field of natural history would tackle down. Despite the valuable studies that have been performed about the reception of Darwinism in Mexico (Genovés 1959; Maldonado-Koerdell 1959; Moreno de los Arcos 1984; Ruiz 1987; Glick et al. 1999; Puig-Samper et al. 2002; Barahona 2009), the workings of the complex process of diffusion, reception, and assimilation of different ideas and biogeographic concepts in Mexico through the nineteenth century remains largely unknown, even with the participation of both Mexican and foreign naturalists. In research conducted by biogeography historians, the ideas of Humboldt, Augustin and Alphonse de Candolle, Darwin, and Wallace regarding those studying the Mexican biota during the nineteenth century are analyzed. This analysis focuses, in particular, on their biogeographic ideas, arranged in two categories: (1) the theories set forward to explain the distribution of Mexican flora and wildlife and (2) the theoretical and methodological basis the former ones used to support themselves.

238

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

Within the interest of performing historiography on the ideas that both European and Mexican naturalists brought forward in the study of the complexity of the Mexican biota, we can highlight the work of Espinosa Organista, Ocegueda Cruz, Aguilar Zúñiga, Flores, and Llorente-Bousquets (2008), who carried out a study on the history of knowledge on the Mexican biota, and analyzed the diversity of ecosystems and their genetic richness, placing Mexico in a privileged spot. They ascribe this high biodiversity to its great physiological complexity and its complex geologic and climatic history. The authors recreate the different classification systems proposed for the Mexican territory since the nineteenth century. For instance, the different regionalizations proposed by De Candolle (1820), Martens and Galleoti (1842), Grisebach (1876), Hemsley (1887), and Smith (1941) are all analyzed. The inventories were of great importance, as they noticeably aided in the increase of collections in botanic gardens and natural history cabinets, and to the development of particular theories, such as the classification put forward by Linnaeus or the idea of the degeneration of types, supported by Buffon. Papavero and LlorenteBousquets (2004, 2005) tackle the issue of institutionalization of science in America and highlight the importance of acknowledging the scientific past of Latin America, and the need to keep on preserving the labor performed by Enlightenment men in this region, which played a part in building part of the Mexican culture. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, several foreign botanists and zoologists permanently settled down in Mexico and made important contributions to the knowledge of the Mexican biota. Within the context of the economic crisis, both world wars, and other wars and internal revolutions occurring in several countries, Mexico also took in some Spanish personalities who would strengthen the new scientific institutions, such as the entomologist and botanist Faustino Miranda, the marine ecologist Enrique Rioja Lo Bianco, the entomologist Cándido Bolívar, and the paleontologist Federico Bonet de Marco, among others. Their ideas would come to represent an important referent on the studies of upcoming generations of students and researchers. Within these personalities, the biogeographic works of Faustino Miranda (1905–1964) stand out. Miranda was a botany professor both at the UNAM and at the IPN. One of the works related to the biogeographic views of this author can be found in the work of Pérez-Malváez, Espinosa, and Bueno-Hernández (2007). The authors bring two distinct phases in the biogeographic views of Miranda to the foreground. In the first one, he explains the distribution of different vegetal sets through agents entailing the physiologic conditions of the environment, such as the height, humidity, type of climate, among others. In this phase, Miranda sees the ecological factors as the best explanation to geographic distribution. In a later phase, after his “possible significance of the percentage of bi-continental genera in Tropical America” article, his intention to portray the historical conditions as the cause of the geographic distribution can be perceived. Unfortunately, Miranda had an untimely death. Nevertheless, his works on the vegetation of Mexico found geographic distribution patterns that led him to suggest complex historical connections that could be considered to be vicariancist. He acknowledged that regions like the Low Mixteca and the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Valley, which collide in the northwest section

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

239

of Oaxaca, as well as the southeast region of Puebla, belonged to two distinct hydrological basins (Balsas and Papaloapan, respectively), but that they were most likely amalgamated in the past (Miranda 1947). Miranda (1959), asides from using terms such as ecological connotation, also drew upon historical causes to elaborate on his biogeographic interpretations. He proposed three alternative explanations further to understand the vegetation patterns in Mexico: (1) a long-distance migration, such as the exchange between the southern regions of America and Africa; (2) a hypothetical continental bridge crossing the Atlantic; or (3) an ancient link between both continents that would allow the communication between both areas. Recently Juárez-Barrera, Luna-Vega, Morrone, Bueno-Hernández, and Espinosa (2020b) studied several naturalists that had researched the biogeographic patterns of Mexico. The complexity of the Mexican biogeographic patterns had already caught the attention of nineteenth century naturalists, who tried to make out some order within this biotic complexity. Humboldt read the complexity of the Mexican biota as the result of the interaction between southern and northern flora; Augustin P. de Candolle saw it as a taxonomic peculiarity, Alphonse de Candolle and Sumichrast as the result of a full biotic replacement, and Wallace as the outcome of different dispersal stages. The authors point out that before the evolutionary theory was accepted, different biogeographic patterns (endemism, diversity, and taxonomic replacement gradients, among others) have already coexisted without conflict. With the work of Sclater (1858), the botanical and zoological regions first acquired a connotation as creation areas; later on, the broader distributions (mainly disjoint distributions) became the backbone of the hypotheses on the historic connection among biotas based on the dispersalist model. However, during the twentieth century, the interpretations of the nineteenth century naturalists and the definition of the limits between regions were primarily dismissed, with a new dynamic perspective that conceived regions as mere temporal devices in constant change due to continuous migrations. It is from Halffter’s work that the Mexican biota is understood as a result of several asynchronous events of expansion-speciation of lineages forming several sets of taxa historically integrated.

Conclusions During the last half of the twentieth century, geological evidence on the spatial dynamism of Earth was gathered. The ideas of Wegener suffered a transformation towards the new tectonic plate theory. In biology, the acceptance of the mobility of the continents had a decisive impact on the interpretation of the biogeographic patterns. The tectonic plates theory was compatible with the ideas of Camp, Jeannel, and Croizat, who highlighted evidence on geographic disjunctions. This matching implied that the explanation of biotic distribution patterns based on physical geography, starting from dispersal events, would turn out to be somewhat contrived. In Mexico and other Latin American countries, the idea of a simultaneous evolution of Earth and biota quickly found acceptance among biogeographers.

240

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

Since the mid-twentieth century, an unprecedented scientific revolution in comparative biology took place. Systematics and biogeography were properly constituted as independent sciences. The contributions of Hennig (1968) with his phylogenetic systematics, of Croizat (1958) with panbiogeography, and of Rosen (1978), Nelson and Platnick (1981) with cladistic biogeography, represented an advancement for comparative biology that proved to be both theoretical and methodological. It is under this new perspective that a series of historiographic works regarding biogeography were developed. This aim is a task that recently took place due to the interest of some researchers for the development of this discipline. The history of biogeography has been written more by biogeographers than historians. Some of the works focus on specific and particular aspects (Bueno-Hernández and Llorente-Bousquets 2003, 2004, 2006). They analyze in great detail the biogeographic ideas of outstanding naturalists in this field, namely Lyell, who had previously been studied for his geological model, and Wallace, who had drawn more attention to himself as an evolutionist than as a biogeographer; likewise, Juárez-Barrera, Bueno-Hernández, and Llorente-Bousquets (2016) performed a particular analysis on the biogeographic ideas of the creationist model of Louis Agassiz. The ideas and concepts analyzed throughout the historiography of biogeography in Mexico have had great relevance in regards with current biogeography, as they have enabled the appreciation, with a new perspective, of authors from the nineteenth century and how their works have stood the test of time and are still valid in current discussions about the discipline. In these works, special attention is brought to the way the dispersalist model based on a fixed conception of the Earth surface, frowned upon by Darwin since the nineteenth century, gradually lost momentum as the theory of the continental drift and tectonic plates became more and more reliable. It is evident how, through this new point of view, new models arose in the second half of the twentieth century, both in Croizat’s panbiogeography and in the vicariance model promoted by Rosen, Nelson, and Platnick, with a greater explanatory value and, above all, with the ability to transcend the mere narrative and the competence to be empirically refuted. Another aspect that stands out in this joint of analyzed works is the fact that there is an evident bias towards the history of the historical biogeography. There have been practically no historical studies performed on ecological biogeography. It can be concluded that, in spite of its intrinsic value, the historiographic studies provide a context that allows appreciating current discussions thoroughly. Above all, in a country such as Mexico, where a complex geological history exists, the acknowledgment of patterns proves to be rather complicated, and this can be seen from the naturalists that have studied the case of Mexico from the nineteenth century all the way up to the present, with the study of the Mexican Transition Zone. There is still much history left to research upon. However, the works mentioned in this chapter must be acknowledged, as they have cleared the path to the development of the history of biogeography in Mexico.

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

241

References Andrewartha HG, Birch LC (1961) The distribution and abundance of animals. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Barahona A (2009) La introducción del darwinismo en México. Teorema 28:201–214 Browne J (1983) The secular ark: studies in the history of biogeography. Yale University Press, New Haven/London Bueno A, Morrone JJ, Luna-Reyes MM et al (1999) Raíces históricas del concepto de centro de origen en la biogeografía dispersionista: Del Edén bíblico al modelo de Darwin-Wallace. Sci Tech Perspect 3(1):27–45 Bueno-Hernández A, Llorente-Bousquets J (1991) El centro de origen en la biogeografía: historia de un concepto. In: Llorente-Bousquets J (ed) Historia de la biogeografía: centros de origen y vicarianza. Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, pp 1–33 Bueno-Hernández A, Llorente-Bousquets J (2000) Una visión histórica de la biogeografía dispersionista con críticas a sus fundamentos. Caldasia 22(2):161–184 Bueno-Hernández A, Llorente-Bousquets J (2003) La biogeografía de Lyell. In: Morrone JJ, Llorente-Bousquets J (eds) Una perspectiva Latinoamericana de la Biogeografía. Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City, pp 19–28 Bueno-Hernández A, Llorente-Bousquets J (2004) L’evoluzione di un evoluzionista. Alfred Russel Wallace e la geografia della vita. Bollati Boringhieri, Torino Bueno-Hernández A, Llorente-Bousquets J (2006) The other face of Lyell: historical biogeography in his Principles of Geology. J Biogeogr 33:549–559 Christie J (1990) The development of the historiography of science. In: Olby RC, Christie J, Hodge J (eds) Companion to the history of modern science. Routledge, Oxford, UK Crisci JV (2001) The voice of historical biogeography. J. Biogeography 28:157–168 Croizat L (1958) Panbiogeography, Vols. 1 and 2. Caracas: Publicado por el autor Darlington JP Jr (1957) Zoogeography: the geographical distribution of animals. Wiley, New York De Candolle AP (1820) Essai élémentaire de géographie botanique. Dictionnaire des Sciences Naturelles Vol. 18. F. Levrault, Paris, pp 1–64 Ebach MC (2015) Origins of biogeography: the role of biological classification in early plant and animal geography. Springer, New York/London Espinosa Organista D, Ocegueda Cruz S, Aguilar Zúñiga C et al (2008) El conocimiento biogeográfico de las especies y su regionalización natural. In: Soberón J, Halffter G, LlorenteBousquets J (coop) Capital natural de México. Vol. I. Conocimiento actual de la Biodiversidad. CONABIO, Ciudad de México, pp 33–65 Fichman M (1977) Wallace: zoogeography and the problem of land bridges. J Hist Biol 10(1): 45–63 Genovés S (1959) Darwin y la antropología. Rev Soc Mex Hist Nat XX(1–4):31–41 Glick TF, Ruiz R, Puig-Samper MA (eds) (1999) El darwinismo en España e Iberoamérica. Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid Grisebach A (1878) La végétation du globe. D’après sa disposition suivant les climats. Librairie J. -B. Baillière et Fils, Paris, 905 pp Halffter G (1978) Un nuevo patrón de dispersión en la zona de transición mexicana: el mesoamericano de montaña. Fol Entomol Mex 39(40):219–222 Hemsley WB (1888) Introduction. In: Godman F.D. & Salvin O. (eds.) Biologia Centrali-Americana; or, Contributions to the knowledge of the fauna and flora of Mexico and Central America. Botany, Vol. I: IX–LXI Hennig W (1968) Elementos de una sistemática filogenética, Eudeba. Buenos Aires Herschel J (1830) A preliminary discourse on the study of natural philosophy. Longman, London (reprinted edition by The University of Chicago Press, 1987) Juárez-Barrera F, Bueno-Hernández A, Llorente-Bousquets J (2016) El Creacionismo de Luis Agassiz y sus concepciones biogeográficas. Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas. Físicas y Naturales, Bogota

242

F. Jua´rez-Barrera et al.

Juárez-Barrera F, Bueno-Hernández A, Morrone JJ et al (2018) Recognizing spatial patterns of biodiversity during the nineteenth century: the roots of contemporary biogeography. J Biogeogr 45:1–8 Juárez-Barrera F, Espinosa D, Morrone J et al (2020a) La evolución del pensamiento biogeográfico de Gonzalo Halffter. Rev Mex Biodivers 91:913402 Juárez-Barrera F, Luna-Vega I, Morrone JJ et al (2020b) Unravelling the complexity of Mexican biogeographical patterns by naturalists in the 19th century: from Alexander von Humboldt (1769—1859) to Francis Sumichrast (1829—1882). Phytotaxa 456(3):244–255 Krebs CJ (1978) Ecology: the experimental analysis of distribution and abundance. Joanna Cotler Books, Mishawaka Maldonado-Koerdell M (1959) Linnaeus, Darwin y Wallace en la bibliografía de ciencias naturales. I. Primeras referencias a sus ideas en México. Rev Soc Mex Hist Nat 1(4):63–78 Martens, Galleoti (1887) Observaciones sobre la distribución geográfica y geológica de los helechos en México. La Naturaleza, tomo VII: 29–37 Matthew WD (1915) Climate and evolution. Ann N Y Acad Sci 24:171–318 Miranda F (1947) Estudios sobre la vegetación de México V. Rasgos de la vegetación de la cuenca del rio de las Balsas. Rev Soc Mex Hist Nat 8(1–4):95–114 Miranda F (1959) Posible significación del porcentaje de géneros bicontinentales en América tropical. Ann Inst Biol UNAM 30(1–2):117–150 Moreno de los Arcos R (1984) La polémica del darwinismo en México: siglo XIX. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City Morrone JJ (2001) Halffter’s Mexican Transition Zone, beetle generalized tracks, and geographical homology. Journal of Biogeography 28(5):635–650 Morrone JJ (2003) Las ideas biogeográficas de Osvaldo Reig y el desarrollo del “dispersalismo” en América Latina. In: Morrone JJ, Llorente J (eds) Una perspectiva latinoamericana de la biogeografía. Las Prensas de Ciencias. UNAM, México City, pp 69–74 Morrone JJ (2004) Homología biogeográfi ca: las coordenadas espaciales de la vida. Cuadernos del Instituto de Biología 37, Instituto de Biología, UNAM, México, D.F. 199 p Morrone JJ (2005) Hacia una síntesis biogeográfica de México. Rev Mex Biodivers 76:207–252 Morrone JJ (2007) Hacia una biogeografía evolutiva. Rev Chil Hist Nat 80:509–520 Morrone JJ (2010) Fundamental biogeographic patterns across the Mexican Transition Zone: an evolutionary approach. Ecography 33:355–361 Morrone JJ (2011) La teoría biogeográfica de Florentino Ameghino y el carácter episódico de la evolución geobiótica de los mamíferos terrestres de América del Sur. Asoc Paleontol Argent Publ Esp 12:81–89 Morrone JJ (2015) Halffter’s Mexican transition zone (1962–2014), cenocrons and evolutionary biogeography. J Zool Syst Evol Res 53(3):249–257 Nelson G (1978) From Candolle to Croizat: comments on the history of biogeography. J Hist Biol 11(2):269–305 Nelson G, Platnick N (1981) Systematics and biogeography: Cladistics and vicariance. New York: Columbia University Press Papavero N, Llorente-Bousquets J (2004) Historia de la Biología Comparada. Vol. VII. El siglo de las luces (Parte III). Primera edición. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México Papavero N, Llorente-Bousquets J (2005) Historia de la Biología Comparada. Vol. VIII. El siglo de las luces (Parte IV). Primera edición. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México Papavero N, Martínez-Teixeira D, Llorente-Bousquets J, Bueno-Hernández A (2004) Historia de la Biogeografía. I. El periodo preevolutivo. Fondo de Cultura Económico, México City Pérez-Malvaéz C, Espinosa D, Bueno-Hernández A (2007) Las ideas biogeográficas de Faustino Miranda. In: Dosil-Mancilla FJ (coord) Faustino Miranda, una vida dedicada a la Botánica. Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Morelia, pp 233–257 Puig-Samper MA, Ruiz R, Galera A (eds) (2002) Evolucionismo y cultura. Darwinismo en Europa e Iberoamérica. Junta de Extremadura, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid

11

Historiography of Biogeography in Mexico

243

Reig OA (1962) Las integraciones cenogenéticas en el desarrollo de la fauna de vertebrados tetrápodos de América del Sur. Ameghiniana 2:131–140 Reig OA (1968) Peuplement de vertebres tetrapodes de l’Amerique du Sud. In: Delamare Debouteville C, Rapoport EH (eds) Biologie de l’Amerique Australe, vol 4. Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, pp 215–260 Rosen DE (1978) Vicariant patterns and historical explanation in biogeohraphy. Zoological Systematics 24:431–464 Ruiz R (1987) Positivismo y evolución: introducción del Darwinismo en México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México City Savage JM (1982) The enigma of the Central American herpetofauna: dispersals or vicariance? Ann Mo Bot Gard 69:464–547 Sclater PL (1858) On the general geographical distribution of the members of the class Aves. J Proc Linn Soc Zool 2:130–145 Simpson GG (1965) The geography of evolution. Clinton, Philadelphia/New York Sluys R (2020) Reflections on the nature, framing, and testing of historical biogeographic hypotheses. Species Divers 25:361–367 Smith HM (1941) Las provincias bióticas de México, según la distribución geográfica de las lagartijas del género Sceloporus. Anales de la Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas 2:103–110 Sukachev VN (1958) On the principles of genetic classification in biocenology. Ecology 39:364–367 Whewell W (1847) The philosophy of the inductive sciences, founded upon their history. Parker, London

Part III Natural History and Art

Between History of Art and History of Science

12

A New Appraisal of Jose´ María Velasco Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

Contents Science and Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Homo sapiens in the National Institute of Geology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The New Species Siredon Tigrina from the Lake of Santa Isabel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Perspectiva Artificiale of the Valley of Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond the Metamorphosis and the Views . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

248 250 252 255 260 266

Abstract

José María Velasco (1840–1912) not only was an outstanding naturalist but also an exceptional artist. During a long time, he considered both professions as being of his overall interest. He is recognized as being the foremost landscape painter of the Valley of Mexico and was the first Mexican scientist to study the axolotl in its natural environment. Besides, his work shows a continuous development of his visual and scientific interests until the end of his life and, in particular, issues of geology and water management come to the fore. In the twenty-first century, in which the limitations among art and science are increasingly placed in the center of research, Velasco’s work results to have a very actual dimension. His concentration on the changes of the natural environment of the Valley of Mexico, today completely covered by metropolitan urbanization, as well as his reluctance toward the global evolutionary paradigm of Darwinism makes Velasco not only a man of the nineteenth century but, surprisingly, one of the current one, in which such parallel experimental practices of visual creation and scientific scrutiny are very much studied. This implies that in the contempo-

I. Phaf-Rheinberger (*) Institut für Romanistik, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Giessen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_9

247

248

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

rary global horizon, Velasco is not only relevant as a Mexican professional but has to be considered within a worldwide fascination in this new field of specialization in art and science.

Science and Art José María Velasco (1840–1912), the outstanding scientist and painter, was born in Temascalcingo, a small town at the South West of Mexico D. F. Thanks to María Elena Altamirano Piolle, his great-granddaughter, we know many details about his life. She published the two volumes of the National Homage. José María Velasco (1993a) in English and simultaneously in Spanish (1993b), for which she could make use of the abundant number of documents in the family archive. When Velasco was 9 years old, the family moved from Temascalcingo to the capital. There, he discovered his interest in design and insisted on entering the Academy San Carlos, first as a student in the evening hours, and 3 years later, in 1858, as a regular student. The beginnings of his studies coincided with the arrival of the Italian painter Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879) at the Academy, a decisive event. Landesio was the first professor of landscape painting ever in Mexico, and Xavier Moyssén resumes that, since “his encounter with Landesio, Velasco’s destiny as an artist was well-defined” (Moyssén et al. 1991, 9). (. . . “su encuentro con Landesio su destino como artista estuvo bien definido” (1991, 9). The translations from Spanish to English, if not indicated otherwise, are from the author of this chapter.) Landesio introduced in his teaching the concept of working “on the spot” in the surroundings of the city and these trips contributed to the fact that Velasco developed his interest in natural science. In 1865, parallel to his studies in San Carlos, during the reign of Emperor Maximilian called the Royal Academy of Visual Art, he started studying physics, zoology, and botany at the School for Medicine. Three years later, he finished his art education and was appointed as a professor for Perspective and later also for Landscape, as the successor of Landesio, who retired in 1873 and, after 19 years of service, went back to Italy. In the same year of his appointment as a professor of Perspective, Velasco was accepted as socio in the recently founded (on 29 August) Mexican Society of Natural History, in whose official journal, La Naturaleza, he collaborated with illustrations, comments, reports, and essays. He became so involved that he was elected secretary (1880–1881), vice-president and interim president (1881–1882). Meanwhile, he also started working as a designer-copyist in the National Museum, from 1877 to 1910, and, then, in the Museum of Natural History, from 1910 to 1912, the year of his death. In these Museums and in the Society, Velasco was permanently in contact with historical, geological, paleontological, biological, and archeological research in and on Mexico. This brief overview of his career shows that, besides of being a teacher and artist, he was equally active as a scientist. In his introduction to the National Homage, Fausto Ramírez emphasizes the importance of this combination of activities:

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

249

The landscape artist’s interest for deeply understanding the world of nature, the raw materials of his pictorial vision, caused him to become actively involved into the analysis of natural sciences, which he began to study in 1865, enrolling in the subjects of zoology and botany, which were taught at the School for Medicine, while he pursued his courses in landscape painting at the Academy. This simultaneity is very significant. From now on, he alternated his artistic and scientific activities, transgressing the broad experiences from one field to the other. (Ramírez 1993, 27)

Ramírez’ argument is repeated in another text on Velasco. In his book Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (2006), Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra dedicates a large part of his seventh chapter “Landscapes and Identities, Mexico, 1850–1900” to Velasco and judges that, obviously, there exists a lack of information: “Despite the many volumes published about him, Velasco and his work still remain poorly understood” (149). Cañizares-Esguerra does not specify this lack of understanding but briefly discusses his importance referring to the axolotl published in La Naturaleza and fully documented in the volume José Maria Velasco. Un paisaje de la ciencia en México (1992, 229–245) by Elías Trabulse. In the opinion of CañizaresEsguerra, Velasco’s work on the axolotl justifies his judgment on the quality of his scientific interest as one of the “leading natural historians of Mexico” (151) and he adds: Like any other “Victorian” bourgeois, Velasco wrestled with the erosion of providential narratives by nineteenth-century evolutionary ideas. Although steeped in the science of his age, particularly geology and natural history, Velasco was a deeply conservative and religious man who found the sacred in nature, and he rejected most of the insights of the Darwinian revolution. (151)

In consideration of his artistic career, Cañizares-Esguerra offers a detailed description of the historical dimension in Velasco’s paintings, for which the central valley serves as a metonym of the nation (see also Larrucea Garritz 2016, 162–172). This remembers the comment of Ignacio Altamirano in 1880 on the painter’s apparently almost exclusive limitation to this central valley, prophesying that he would get tired of painting always the same object (Rodríguez Prampolini 1997, 33). Hence, when taking those judgments seriously, Velasco seems to be quite limited in his visual repertoire and a traditionalist in his scientific work. In this chapter, I would like to inquire this debate by arguing that, independently of his religious and conservative beliefs and supposedly monotone thematic, it is important to emphasize that Velasco’s work is the result of a parallel interest in art and science. The already stated simultaneity is responsible for the fact that he left traces which are still or even more relevant today. On the basis of extensive research in the last three decades from different perspectives by María Elena Altamirano Piolle (1993a), Xavier Moyssén et al. (1991), Omar Olivares Sandoval (2019), Fausto Ramírez (2017), Ángel Silva Bárcenas (1991), and Elías Trabulse (1992), among others, it is possible to formulate a renewed outlook on Velasco’s oeuvre and the time frame, in which his life developed.

250

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

The Homo sapiens in the National Institute of Geology As mentioned before, albeit he mentions Velasco’s anti-Darwinism, CañizaresEsguerra does not specify this argument further. Most probably, Velasco became already acquainted with Darwin’s arguments around 1870, when a first publication came out about Darwinism in Mexico, followed by a polemical public debate in the press between Justo Sierra and Gabino Barreda between 1877 and 1879 (Moreno 1989; Ruíz Gutiérrez et al. 2014, 8–13). In view of the Educational Reform, proclaimed by the Juárez government, the Catholic Church was no longer the state religion and the laic educational programs demanded other parameters. Moreno mentions that, in La Naturaleza (primera serie, 1882–1884), Darwin’s essay “The Formation of the Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms” (La formación de la tierra vegetal por la acción de los gusanos) was published, as well as the antiDarwinist text “Darwin and Anthropology” by Rudolf Virchow. The discussions on Darwinism among Mexican scientists might have influenced the composition of the ten canvases (two marines; one amphibians; three plants; two mammals; two men), painted by Velasco for the National Institute of Geology in Mexico D. F., on which he represents his vision on the various stages of the origins of life. This pictorial cycle was commissioned for the inauguration of the Institute in September 1906, to contribute to the splendid architecture of the building with images that would serve as an adequate decoration for the exposed minerals and fossils. Velasco conceived ten different geological periods: (1) Silurian and Devonian Paleozoic Period; (2 and 3) Carboniferous Paleozoic Period; (4) Triassic Mesozoic Period; (5) Jurassic Mesozoic Period; (6) Cretaceous Mesozoic Period; (7) Miocene Cenozoic Period; (8) Pliocene-Pleistocene Quaternary Period; (9) Paleolithic Inferior Quaternary Period; (10) Paleolithic Superior Quaternary Period. These paintings on the origin of life were new in Mexico and Velasco’s periodization follows the then generally accepted schema in the academic circuits of paleontology. Altamirano Piolle mentions that Velasco created the first seven images to the model of seven black-and-white postcards of Josef Hoffmann (1831–1904) from Vienna. He interpreted them by giving them colors and extending the squares to a vertical format to adapt them to the height of the walls. They were first painted in a small format as designs (23  15 cm) and then in oil on canvases (260  110 cm), so that they could be exposed on the walls of the first floor of the lobby in the monumental entrance of the Institute. The geologist Reinhard Weber (1996) writes that, after a conversation with Altamirano Piolle, he contacted the Museum of Natural History in Vienna to obtain more information about Hoffmann. He was told that Hoffmann’s images – the models for Velasco’s postcards – are in the collection since the Museum’s inauguration in 1889. Weber suggests that the Mexican geologist José Aguilera (1857–1941), the first director of the Institute, after visiting a congress in Austria in 1903, might have given Hoffmann’s postcards to the painter commissioning him to realize copies. And indeed, notwithstanding that Velasco added some variations of his own, reducing the number of elements and giving them more vertical space, he seems to have used them as his models, a procedure analyzed in great detail by Omar

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

251

Olivares Sandoval (2019, 312–339). It is not known whether Velasco knew Hoffmann’s booklet archived in the Department of History of Science of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, in which this Austrian painter comments on his representations (Riedl-Dorn 1998, 194ff, 278–279, 289). However, knowing the primary source of Velasco’s first seven images, Olivares Sandoval mentions his choice for brighter colors and giving the impression of a global environment without local attachments. He specifically emphasizes the fifth painting on the Jurassic Mesozoic period, on which Velasco eliminated whatever indication to the presence of Saurians, and he characterizes the paintings as a combination of landscape painting, still life, and scientific illustrations. In his opinion, the last three images on the Quaternary Period, the “final trilogy” (340–348) as he calls it, are completely different. According to the paleobiologist Ángel Silva Bárcenas, in these images something “new” is emerging that is closer to the world we know today: “One assists to a promising world with its new distances, in which the successes of evolution will translate into the form of future intelligence, which the artist already preluded in the landscape.” (“Se asiste a un mundo prometedor con sus distancias nuevas, en donde los éxitos de la evolución se traducirán en la forma del futuro inteligente que el artista ya preludía en el paisaje” (Silva Bárcenas 1991, 53).) On these last three images, the action of mammals and humans prevail. On the first canvas (Nr. 8) of this “trilogy,” we observe a small monkey sitting high above in a tree and below him two huge tigers with very sharp teeth in a more or less wild landscape, in which there is no sign of human intervention. Olivares Sandoval describes that, obviously, it concerns here an American tiger who is preparing to chase the monkey, looking for prey just as his fellow tiger. (Olivares Sandoval mentions as a possible source for this image the book Nebula to Man (2019), written by the English scientist Henry Robert Knipe and illustrated by different artists. For the last two images of Velasco, he also points to other possible models. However, in this case the influences of those sources are not as decisive for the compositions as it was the case for the first seven images, which seems to have given Velasco more space to develop his own ideas in these last three ones.) Then, on the following one (Nr. 9), the Homo neanderthalensis is depicted at dusk being part of a group – maybe a family according to Olivares Sandoval – dressed in fur and standing high above on a rock while hunting the bears below with stone blocks. And, finally, on the last image (Nr. 10), those hunting panoramas have disappeared. We now see a human group dressed in textile clothes peacefully sitting around the fire at night: two women are doing handwork and the other three persons – two men and a woman – inscribe letters on the fossil teeth of a mammoth. You can read the letters H and S, that is, Homo sapiens. The cold light of the full moon shines on this nocturnal scenery, emphasizing the effect of the orange-yellow fire placed under the rock, warming the group and giving the impression of a domestic and peaceful atmosphere. Olivares Sandoval stresses the importance of the rock formations with caves on the last two images, completely in line with the general approach of that moment (see also Ramírez 2017, 115). He states that geology, at that time in Mexico, was the most fully developed science, considerably influenced by Alexander von Humboldt’s visit to Mexico and his later publications. According to Ramírez, this cycle of ten

252

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

paintings reflects a slow and complex evolutionary process that took millions of years and demonstrates how the new paradigm of Darwinism becomes visible in Velasco’s work. They are not only scientifically interesting but equally reveal his capacity to depict these developments with a poetical vision (Ramírez 2017, 113).

The New Species Siredon Tigrina from the Lake of Santa Isabel In relation to the debate concerning “evolution,” Velasco’s texts on the axolotl, published long before his paintings in the Institute of Geology as a Memory to the Mexican Society of Natural Science, on 26 December 1878 and 27 February 1879, are particularly interesting. He writes that he started studying this mudpuppy, which could transform into a salamander, immediately after entering the School of Medicine in 1866. His professor, José Barragán, had given him a recently published text of Augusto Duméril, who describes the metamorphosis of the amphibian into a reptile in detail: “From an aquatic animal, with gill respiration, into an animal with only lung respiration, being the gills absent” (Trabulse 1992, 229). ([. . .] “de animal acuático, de respiración branquial, en animal de respiración solamente pulmonar, por ausencia de las branquias” (Trabulse 1992, 212).) Velasco’s written Memory is almost completely concerned with giving a reaction to Duméril’s opinions, motivated by the fact that, albeit the axolotl is an animal living in Mexico, it is only studied outside of the country (Reiß 2020, 33–44). Due to this situation, he felt it as an obligation to the Mexican Society of Science to study this – as he says – “new” mudpuppy found in the lake of Santa Isabel, in its natural surroundings, and not in the artificial entourage of an aquarium as Duméril had done. In accordance with Trabulse, Velasco’s study on the axolotl obeys the rules of comparative biology anterior to Darwin, when the objective was to obtain an inventory of animal forms, to classify them, and to analyze their structure, development, and relationship with the environment, a tradition which emphasizes the morphological and anatomical aspects of the object under study. He argues that Velasco redacted his observations at a moment when Darwinism could not yet give a satisfying explanation of the metamorphosis of the axolotl because of the inexistence of genetics, a science only developed afterwards. In his Memory to the Society, Velasco describes his findings concerning the 70 examples of the axolotl, collected in the lake of Santa Isabel together with his brother, and also mentions to have contact with researchers who collect axolotl in other places in Mexico. Trabulse does not establish a relationship between the text of the Memory and Velasco’s illustrations of the axolotl, published in the same issue of La Naturaleza. Notwithstanding, in his first chapter on scientific illustrations in Mexico in general, Trabulse refers to the influence of Darwin’s book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): This work, and others with a similar theme, notably influenced the zoological iconography at the end of the nineteenth century, because the representation of an animal required to catch his “expression”. In some mammals, this expression was indicated by the position of the ears

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

253

and the general attitude of the body such as Darwin had exposed when treating the emotions of dogs, cats, monkeys and horses. In such a way, for instance, the position of the eyes, the mouth and the legs were indicating signs of a certain emotional situation that the artist had to take into account. In the design of the birds, the expression was indicated by the position of the head and the aspect of the feathers. Batrachians and reptiles could also be depicted in positions of fear or lying in wait, with a scientific realism without comparison in zoological iconography. This realism, which looked at representing the “expression”, is one of the most reliable indicators of the grade of diffusion that had obtained the new biological and psychological theories in a scientific community in the last third of the century. (Trabulse 1992, 15) (“Esta obra, y otras de tema similar, influyeron notablemente en la iconografía zoológica de fines del siglo XIX, ya que la representación de un animal exigía captar su ‘expresión’. En algunos mamíferos esta expresión quedaba indicada por la posición de las orejas y por la actitud general del cuerpo tal como Darwin lo había expuesto al tratar las emociones de perros, gatos, monos y cabellos, Así, por ejemplo, la posición de los ojos, la boca y las patas eran signos indicadores de una peculiar situación emocional que el artista no debía pasar por alto. En el dibujo de aves la expresión quedaba indicada por la posición de la cabeza y el aspecto de las plumas. Batracios y reptiles también podían ser captados en posiciones de acecho o de miedo, con un realismo científico sin parangón en la iconografía zoológica. Este realismo, que buscaba representar la ‘expresión’, es uno de los indicadores más confiables sobre el grado de difusión que habían alcanzado en una comunidad científica las nuevas teorías biológicas y psicológicas del último tercio del siglo” (Trabulse 1992, 15).)

This same expressive realism in scientific illustrations applies to Velasco’s lithography of the Siredon tigrina, to this “new” gender of axolotl living in the lake of Santa Isabel. (For the lithography see: https://pinterest.ru/pin/452471093790167126/. Accessed 10 July 2020).) Its movement of running fast, suggested by the position of the legs, expresses that this animal is in a hurry to hide himself under the rocks or in other dark places, because of evading daylight, a characteristic mentioned several times, whereas Velasco gives great emphasis to the different colors of the animal in its respective state, and of its tiger colors in particular. Obviously, as a scientist, Velasco concentrates on local habits, emotions, and the different shades of the animal, details which might be of less interest to other naturalists in Europe. For Darwin, however, to study face muscles and emotions did certainly serve scientific objectives. In his introduction to The Expression, he explains his research method by way of: (1) observing infants; (2) studying the mentally disabled; (3) analyzing photos and comments on them by observers; (4) analyzing painting and sculptures; (5) compiling information on different races sending queries requesting material to different continents; (6) observing animals. Darwin distinguishes between the media and concludes that, for him, sketches are good to visualize emotional reactions of animals and photos for those of men. Works of art, in contrast, are not very rewarding for studying human emotions: “in works of art, beauty is the chief object; and strongly contracted facial muscles destroy beauty” (Darwin 1965, 15). The “beauty” of the axolotl, obtained by the movements of the legs, the position of the eyes, and the colors in Velasco’s illustrations, reveals the scientist’s familiarity with his object of study. He examined many of these animals nearby, even keeping a number in his own house. In his words, it was necessary to inspect them in and around the lake of Santa Isabel, a lake that is not very deep and falls dry in February,

254

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

March, April, and May. The villagers who live close to its shore told him that the axolotl already starts getting out of the water in October and November. Trabulse mentions that Velasco got assistance from Manuel María Villada (1841–1924), a founding member of the Society, a naturalist, the editor of La Naturaleza, and the medical house doctor of Velasco’s family, being his neighbor. With Villada, he also collected axolotl in the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco (Trabulse 1992, 159–160). However, in the largest part of his Memory, in “Observations concerning their customs” (Observaciones acerca de sus costumbres), Velasco discusses the axolotl in the lake of Santa Isabel, emphasizing the stages of the metamorphosis in relation to the different conditions of nature and, after his long and detailed presentation, he concludes: With this said, it seems to me that it is sufficient for being convinced that these animals can live voluntarily in the water, as long as they find there the indispensable elements for their development, conservation, etc., and that they can transform themselves at any age, as long as their lungs have the appropriate dimensions to realize the hematosis without the support of the gills, which condition is indispensable, and that their metamorphosis happens because of the instinct that the Creator has given to these beings, in order to effectuate it when they have the opportunity, so that they have a individual medium of conservation, and, therefore, of the species that they represent. (Velasco 1879, 245) (“Con lo dicho me parece que basta para convencerse de que estos animales pueden vivir voluntariamente en el agua, mientras tienen en ella los elementos indispensables para su desarrollo, conservación, etc., pudiendo transformarse en cualquiera edad, con tal de que sus pulmones tengan las dimensiones convenientes para hacer la hematosis sin auxilio de las branquias, cuya condición es indispensable, y que su metamorfosis es debida al instinto que el Creador ha dado a estos seres, para efectuarla con la oportunidad debida, a fin de tener un medio de conservación individual, y por tanto, de la especie que representan” (Velasco 1879, 245).)

In a second text, “Annotations and observations on the work of August Weismann” (1881), Velasco’s tone is less descriptive. In 12 numbered paragraphs, he reacts to Weismann’s article published in the same issue of La Naturaleza in a translation and again repeats that his own observations prove that the metamorphosis is due to “intrinsic causes, that is to say, to the genuine development of these animals” (272). He refutes Weismann’s argument that the mutations were exclusively the result of changes in environmental conditions (water level in the lakes), neither does he agree on that the axolotl converted into salamander is sterile, comparing this argument again with the results of his own observations. Velasco criticizes the exaggerated generalizations of the representatives of the evolutionist theory, in contrast to his own experimentation in situ. Once again, to enforce his arguments, he dedicates large paragraphs to the natural condition of the animals. Velasco’s critical position toward Weismann resulted from the fact that he was irritated that Weismann and other evolutionists did not pay attention to the many details found in the local natural environment. In Trabulse’s opinion, “the essence of his refutation was in the numerous facts that he could present and that Weismann evidently did not know.” (. . . “el meollo de su refutación está en los numerosos datos que aportó y que Weismann evidentemente desconocía” (Trabulse 1992, 216).) This specifically concerned the point of regression of the species in the evolutionist theory

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

255

of Weismann, an argument, which Velasco opposed to and this was later confirmed by his colleague Villada, as the affirmation of that the axolotl after their metamorphosis into salamander were “two different genders and that the ajolote was not the state of the larva of a more advanced and perfect gender (. . . “eran dos géneros diferentes, y que el ajolote no era el ‘estado larvario’ de una forma ‘más avanzada y perfecta’” (Trabulse 1992, 204)), but just a different gender (Trabulse 1992, 204). Olivares Sandoval does not completely agree with some of Trabulse’s findings and continues debating them by comparing Weismann’s and Velasco’s research in the context of different opinions on evolution in those days (2019, 158–204).

The Perspectiva Artificiale of the Valley of Mexico Velasco’s comments on the axolotl result from his attachment to the natural environment of the Valley of Mexico, the natural laboratory for his scientific and also artistic experiments. He is a master in suggesting the “beauty” – paraphrasing Darwin – of the “face muscles” of the Valley, in accordance with the classical rules of the art of perspective. For each of his oil paintings, Velasco designed a geometric and perspectiva artificiale, constructed from a vanishing point, the point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge. He learnt this technique from Landesio who arrived in Mexico with a solid academic education in this respect. In the opinion of Hubert Damisch in The Origin of Perspective (1987), this method was introduced by the architect Filippo Burnelleschi in Florence as early as the beginning of the fifteenth century and testifies to artistic as well as scientific preoccupations referring to measurement and calculations: “All evidence suggests that perspective theory belongs to that class of cultural products to which scientific formations belong, and the sciences themselves, as well as works of literary art” (Damisch 1995, 161). Altamirano Piolle reproduces many of Velasco’s drafts and sketches produced as preparations for a later painting, on which vanishing points and diagonal lines are drawn to indicate the adequate proportions. Those scientific-artistic and rational constructions correspond with the mindset of positivism, declared as the liberal state doctrine by president Benito Juárez (1806–1872), when signing a series of laws about the separation of religion and state institutions, the Ley Lerdo in 1856. These laws of secularization were followed by the War of Reforms (1858–1861) and, subsequently, the Empire of Maximilian of Habsburg (1864–1867). Back in power 11 years after his first tenure as president, Juárez proclaimed the Educational Reform and it was in this patriotic spirit that Velasco was educated, full of enthusiasm for developing scientific and artistic knowledge in his country. On his canvases, he reproduces the ideas of progress and technology as the instruments of modernization: train rails, tunnels, bridges, big farms or haciendas with plantations, and locomotives or factories with plumes of smoke in dark or white. He immediately became familiar with them when entering the Academy because Landesio, after arriving in Mexico, received commissions from Nicanor Béistegui, son of the businessman Juan Antonio de Béistegui Arrospide, involved in the booming textile

256

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

and mining industry. According to Ramírez, already 2 years later, Landesio exposed ten landscapes of Béistegui’s haciendas in the tenth yearly exposition of the Academy (1857–1858): These pictures were meant to recreate the picturesque and wild landscape of this rich mining district visited by Humboldt, Ward, Egerton, Rugendas and other travelers who left testimony of its aspect. (Ramírez 1985, 56–57) (“Formaban pues un conjunto pictórico en que se quiso recrear lo pintoresco y áspero paisaje de este rico distrito minero visitado por Humboldt, Ward, Egerton, Rugendas y otros viajeros que dejaron testimonio de su aspecto” (Ramírez 1985, 56–57).)

Landesio, the teacher, became friends with Velasco, his most promising scholar, as he would repeatedly state. One of Landesio’s oil paintings, El Valle de México desde el cerro de Tenayo (110  170 cm, 1870), left a profound impact on his student. It might have been one of the first views from the perspective of the Tenayo hill, only anticipated by Pedro Calvo in 1825. (Vista de la capital de México (Ramírez 1985, 20–21). Two copies of this painting, dated 1825, are in the collection of the Prussian Foundation of Cultural Property in Berlin-Potsdam (PhafRheinberger 2004, 145; see also Ramírez 1985, 20–21).) The difference between the works of Calvo and Landesio is obvious. The latter knows how to construct the proportions in the Valley, with the mountains, the hills, and the lakes, with much more precision. The hill of Tenayo is a legendary place in Mexico; it was there that the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in 1521 and left her image in his ayate (agave fiber bag), then copied by an indigenous painter. (The Spanish priests educated indigenous painters of codices, the “tlacuilo,” to reproduce their Christian symbols. This mostly happened on an anonymous base.) The historian David Brading (2002) reconstructed the sources that relate the event. He remembers the archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, who mentioned in his preaching in 1556 the devotion to this painting in a chapel at the foot of the Tepeyac. Some 20 years later, the famous Franciscan father, Bernardino de Sahagún, revealed that the local people saw in the Virgin a substitute of Tonantzin, the mother of their gods, who was venerated in a temple on that same place before. In pre-Columbian times, a road at the foot of the Tenayo hill led to the city of Tenochtitlán on the island in the lake of Texcoco. This area was a market place being the transit point for entrance to and exit from the city. Velasco knew the history of this hill very well and was familiar with its religious meaning. Three years after Landesio, he showed this in his own interpretation, presenting a similar panoramic view of the Valle de Mexico desde el cerro de Atzacoalco (152  220 cm, 1873), this time from a further distance. His painting contains a religious episode because, besides the natural environment and portraying the Basilica next to the Tepayo hill, with the church on the hillside, Velasco depicts the veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A small group of persons dressed in indigenous garments stands in the foreground wearing her portrait and performing a ceremony. Altamirano Piolle mentions that, as a preparation for his painting, Velasco first made sketches and a small painting, a gift for his friend and colleague Santiago Rebull:

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

257

Again, he made compositive studies in pencil of the landscape increasing height, in order to enhance the composition, carefully describing the scene, and writing down in alphabetical and numerical codes the names of the different places, as well as the colors. He altered the landscape not only to create a balance and variety of elements, but also with the idea of achieving a display where ‘all objects entering the composition assume a role where some contribute more and others less, embellishing and enhancing the matter of the painting. Each object has to play its role naturally and precisely, according to the action in the scene corresponding to it. (1993a, vol. 1, 184) (Altamirano Piolle quotes here from the manuscript El arte de la pintura, written by Velasco in 1908 and never published.)

Velasco, with the painting of his professor in mind, made meaningful changes. Not only the colors and the buildings, but he also depicted the dust and the smoke plumes of the train and the textile fabrics in the valley, showing that this was a contemporary and modern view. With this canvas, Velasco won a Gold Medal in the exhibition of the National School of Fine Arts (the former Academy San Carlos), the highest distinction in Mexico at that time. Two years later, on a second canvas, he presented El Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel (137.5  226 cm, 1875) from an even more distant perspective. Although characterized by Velasco as a “memory of the former” (memoria del anterior), the religious scene is absent and the Basilica and the church are now seen from far. Instead, the presence of the lakes is much more pronounced and their colors are reflected in the transparent shades of the clouds. This view is repeated with other details in Velasco’s third and largest panoramic landscape, El Valle de México desde el cerro de Santa Isabel (160  229 cm, 1877) (see Internet: https:// picturingtheamericas.org/painting/view-of-the-valley-of-mexico-taken-from-santaisabel-hill/?long-es. Accessed 10 July 2020). The two volcanoes Popoctépetl and Iztaccíhuatl covered with snow are placed on the left horizon and the precision of the clouds in the air and the water in the lakes is extraordinary. Taking into account that these three compositions were produced in the years of Velasco’s research on the axolotl in the lake of Santa Isabel, the increasing presence of the lakes in his most famous “triptych” seems to be significant. Notwithstanding, after 1880 we do not find another scientific text from Velasco, which does not mean that he was not interested in science any more. As mentioned before, not only was he elected secretary, vice-president and interim-president of the Mexican Society of Natural History thereafter, but Trabulse registers his regular presence in its weekly meetings, for instance, when a Committee reported on the changes in the ecological system of the Valley of Mexico, in 1882 and 1883. These scientists observed the degradation of the air, the contamination of the lakes, and the problems with inundations. This last one was a permanent issue. When the Spaniards entered the Valley for the first time, there were five lakes: Xochimilco and Chalco with fresh water; and Texcoco, Zumpango, and Xaltocan with salt water. The Aztecs had constructed dikes and dams with aqueducts and roads to give entrance to Tenochtitlán, the city on an island in the lake, surrounded by other artificially constructed floating islands covered with cultivated gardens. During the conquest, the Spaniards destroyed most of the drainage system of the Aztecs, which constantly caused complications thereafter. The historian of science, José Sala Catalá, describes the work of the Super Intendancy of Drainage in New

258

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

Spain in his volume Ciencia y técnica en la metropolización de América (1993). This Intendancy was an important institution in New Spain because of the urgency to solve the eternal water problems. Cañizares-Esguerra on his turn pays particular attention to Salá Catalá’s descriptions of its hydraulic technology: Salá Catalá reconstructs the multitude of complex technologies involved in the Spanish urban communities in America in a convincing and ingenious manner. His large and beautifully illustrated narrative of the works of hydraulic engineering to drain the Central Valley of Mexico by cutting slices of the massive mountains that surround the valley is particularly revealing. (2006, 44) (“Persuasiva e ingeniosamente, Salá Catalá reconstruye la multitud de complejas tecnologías involucradas en los asentamientos urbanos españoles en América. Su largo y bellamente ilustrado recuento de las obras de ingeniería hidráulica requeridos para drenar el Valle Central de México cortando rebanadas de las masivas montañas que rodean el valle es particularmente revelador” (Cañizares-Esguerra 2006, 44).)

During the Viceroyalty, Mexico City was called the “Mexican Guadalupe.” In the title of his chapter on Mexico, Salá Catalá refers to “one of the most important ideological texts of New Spain in the seventeenth century” (198), the Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), written by the priest of the hermitage of Guadalupe, Miguel Sánchez. This treatise relates the history of the “successful image: the Mexican Gualalupe rescued from the waters” (“imagen lograda: Guadalupe Mexicana salvada de las aguas,” 195). According to Salá Catalá, the Virgin of Guadalupe became the symbol of protection against the permanent inundations of the city and he argues, following the general opinion, that Virgin/ Mother/Metropolis is the earliest expression of a patriotic culture in Mexico. The metamorphosis from a valley with lakes into the contemporary platform of urban constructions started in the decade of the 1870s. When painting his landscapes, Velasco was daily in direct contact with this transformation. (Velasco does not seem to have expressed an opinion in this respect, but his active participation in the Society for Natural Science as well as his friendship with professionals, such as Fernando Altamirano, certainly made him sensitive for this problem.) One of his good friends in the Society of Natural History was the medical doctor and naturalist Fernando Altamirano Carbajal (1848–1908), the founder and first director of the National Institute of Medicine from 1888 until his death (Altamirano Piolle, I. 257–259; II. 371). Velasco illustrated Altamirano’s Contribución al estudio de la farmacología nacional: leguminosas indígenas medicinales (contribution to the study of the national pharmacology: indigenous leguminous medical plants, 1878), Altamirano’s thesis for finishing his studies at the National School of Medicine. Many years later, Altamirano edited Estudios referentes a la desecación del lago de Texcoco (studies concerning the drainage of the lake of Texcoco, 1895), in which he contributed an essay on the evaporation of the lake and reproduces his continuous measurements of the water level and the temperature of the water in the lake. Also Velasco, in his study on the axolotl, reproduces the numbers of his precise quantifications of the temperature of the air and the water in the lakes of Chalco and Xochimilco (Velasco 1881b, 283).

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

259

As Salá Catalá explains, the lakes in the valley, with its rivers, pounds, hills, and different altitudes, were like communicating vessels in the months of the rain period from May to September or October. The Spaniards, suffering from inundations, even planned to move the capital of New Spain to another place but, because of their policy of building their churches and cities on the ruins of the holy places of the local people, they abandoned this idea. These inundations were still a problem in Velasco’s time until, finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, Porfirio Díaz started with the realization of a long-planned huge project to drainage the lake of Texcoco and the new installations and the canal were inaugurated in 1900. Taking into account that Velasco knew these projects, his sense of precision toward the water landscapes and the air is even more compelling as reflected in Moyssén’s observation: It is well known, although the reason is not given, that the Valley of Mexico was the theme of most paintings of José María Velasco. He observed and painted it from different places, heights and time of the year. As a moral and aesthetic principle for his art, he considered that the landscape painter had to situate himself in front of nature as an apprentice and not as a master. Consequently, it was not permitted to modify what he saw before his eyes; notwithstanding, he sometimes had to do it to solve some problems with the composition. Today, it is difficult to verify these modifications because the valley has changed so much; the rivers and lakes have disappeared, the extensive cultivated territories of the haciendas do not exist anymore because these haciendas have been split up into installments; the air has forever lost its transparence acclaimed by Alfonso Reyes. The extension of the valley, including the heights of its hills, has fallen apart into an urban spot. (“Es bien sabido, aunque no explicada la razón, que el Valle de México fue el tema del que el mayor número de cuadros de José María Velasco. Lo vio y lo pintó desde distintos lugares, alturas y épocas del año. Él tenía como principio moral y estético para su arte, el que el paisajista debía situarse ante la naturaleza como aprendiz y no como maestro. En consecuencia, nada le era permitido modificar de lo que se presentaba antes sus ojos; no obstante, debió hacerlo para solucionar, en algunos casos, problemas de composición. Tal hecho resulta hoy difícil de verificar por lo alterado que está el valle, han desaparecido los ríos y los lagos, los extensos sembradíos de las haciendas no existen al ser fraccionadas éstas; el aire ha perdido para siempre la transparencia aclamada por Alfonso Reyes. La extensión del valle, incluyendo las alturas de sus cerros, se ha fragmentado en una mancha urbana” (Moyssén et al. 1991, 19).)

Moyssén mentions Alfonso Reyes, who wrote his influential essay Visión de Anahuac (1916) in Madrid, of which the first sentence is famous: “Traveler, you have arrived at the most transparent region of the air” (“Viajero: has llegado a la region más transparente del aire,” 11). Anahuac is the Aztec name for the Valley of Mexico, meaning “land on the edge of water,” and its transparent air from the time of the Spanish arrival, when the lakes occupied most of its territory, is still suggested in Velasco’s paintings. However, while dedicating paragraphs to the process of drainage, Reyes does not mention Velasco’s work. This signals that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Velasco’s paintings felt into oblivion; he did not expose them anymore and was not even invited to show them at the 1910 exhibition to commemorate 100 years of Mexican independence, organized spontaneously by Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo, 1875–1964), who had the nickname “the Agitator” at the former

260

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

San Carlos Academy, now called the National School of Fine Arts since 1867, and is known today as the Father of the Muralists.

Beyond the Metamorphosis and the Views Moyssén annotates that, when the art historian Justino Fernández tried to reconstruct photographically Velasco’s panoramas after 1912, this was not possible, presumably due to the complete transformation of the territory. Carlos Pellicer, as a poet and art lover, knew however that Velasco’s view “never is photographically exact; it is the living presence” (García Barragán 1997, 253) (“jamás es la exactitud fotográfica: es la presencia viva” (García Barragán 1997, 253)) of the elements, composed along the rules of the perspectiva artificiale. Velasco was familiar with photography and even tried to make extra money with portraits for a short period at the beginning of the 1870s (Debroise 1989). Yet, he abandoned this occupation quite rapidly nor did he take photos for his scientific activities. Trabulse mentions that critics like Octavio Paz, Raquel Tibol, Carlos Pellicer, or Alfonso Sánchez were attentive to the combination of his interests in art and science. However, only since Trabulse’s volume on Velasco’s scientific contributions it is possible to grasp their importance. Trabulse starts with giving an overview on the history of scientific illustrations in Mexico. In the following, he gives details on Velasco’s scientific activities and, in the last part, he reproduces the texts of Velasco’s four scientific essays (two of them on the axolotl, one on the pitahaya cactus, and one on the false jalap plant), published in La Naturaleza, as well as his speech and report addressed to the Society in 1879 and 1880. In the first decades of his career, Velasco actively participated in the Society with scientific research of his own, in the same way as the other members with various professions, who dedicated their spare free time voluntarily to organizing research, meetings, conferences, and publications. Their goal was to get to know as much as possible of the possibilities of science in Mexico, and of the Mexican contributions in particular. By no means it was a provincial Society. Trabulse enlists the impressive number of 25 international institutions, with which existed a regular exchange, such as the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, the Geological Society in London, the Library of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, with Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Moscow, Madrid, and institutions in many other countries. According to Trabulse, Velasco started with his scientific illustrations in a period, in which, under the influence of Juárez’s Ley Orgánica from 1867, metaphysical doctrines had to make place for objective analysis in public education. Many new publications and reviews came out and Velasco fully identified with this new dynamic. Not only did he start to investigate the axolotl in 1868, but he also began to realize his plan to compose a catalogue of the Flora of the Valley of Mexico, of which he published several items. Although he had to abandon this project due to the lack of subscribers, he still mentions it in his speech when leaving the vice-presidency of the Society, in addition to the necessity of composing a Flora of the Surroundings of Mexico (Flora de los alrededores de México, Velasco 1882, 320), which project never came through. Trabulse confirms that Velasco’s special

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

261

role consists in the fact that he made scientific illustrations into an independent art and, subsequently, had considerable influence on later generations. As a draftsman for the National Museum on a daily base for more than three decades, Velasco did not only illustrate flowers and plants but was also occupied with zoology and geology. In addition, his activities concerning pre-Columbian architecture, monuments, and art are remarkable. Trabulse mentions his first scientific expedition to Metlaltoyuca from 19 July until 13 August of 1867, when the painter was traveling as a draftsman with a group of engineers, photographers, medical doctors, and other scientists. Altamirano Piolle reproduces some of his annotations during the different stages of this trip such as on the food, the environment, the people, and many other details which went far beyond a report of professional activities. From his drawings, she deduces his fascination for indigenous garments, especially of women, which motif repeatedly came back in the small figures on his landscape paintings. Martínez Marín (1989) gives an overview of Velasco’s work on archeological objects and states that the only periods he was absent from his duties in the National Museum was during his trips to Paris (1889) and Chicago (1893) and after an accident in 1901, when he needed some time to recover. This author reproduces Velasco’s lithographs of the temples of the Sun and the Moon in Tenochtitlán, vases, plates, or water cans, ornamented with religious symbols, pointing to the scientific expedition organized to Cempoala and Tajín in 1890 in view of the upcoming 1892 Historic-American Exhibition in Spain, to celebrate 400 years of “discovery.” Velasco did not participate himself but he copied objects from photographs, which drawings were later exposed in Madrid. Also, during his frequent short trips to different regions of Mexico, he constantly made sketches in different places, in order to elaborate on them later. His incessant activity of drawing what he saw and writing down information and impressions makes research on Velasco’s work largely rewarding. Moyssén points to the important collection of “drawings in the loft,” that is to say the considerable number of sketches, drawings, paintings, drafts, letters, and other objects he kept in his house, situated in the upper part of a room adjoining his studio (Moyssén et al. 1993, 40). They were carefully archived by his family and, as Altamirano Piolle writes in her introduction, she grew up with the paintings and other work of her great-grandfather hanging in the houses of aunts, uncles, and other family members. In contrast to the general impression, the variety of Velasco’s visual motifs is enormous. Except all kind of plants, trees and flowers, he depicts mountains, volcanoes, rocks, rivers, cloud formations, waterfalls, buildings, pyramids, canyons, streams, places, boulders, woods, self-portraits, as well as religious and archeological objects and architecture, such as the Cathedral in Oaxaca or the bath of Netzahualcoyotl. In this sense, he can compete with Dutch landscape-painting of the seventeenth century – the avant-garde of this genre – of which Peter Sutton writes: “At no other time have such modest geographical resources inspired such varied interpretation of nature” (1988, 3). Those painters, born in a rigorously organized Calvinist country, certainly had a similar religious vision on nature as Velasco who, in the last decades of his life, lived almost next to the Basilica in the

262

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

Guadalupe village, then and now a magnet for pilgrims coming from all regions of Mexico and beyond. He went to mass daily and must have known the oral stories on syncretism, along which the Virgin was identified with the pre-Columbian goddesses Tonantzin or Chalchiutlicue. (In Salá Catalá’s volume, the Virgin of Guadalupe is identical with Chalchiutlicue, the goddess of the water (50, 118).) He was even permitted to do research on the original version of the famous painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Basilica and found out that she “is painted in tempera and the most remarkable parts of the image are done in oil” (II. 380). Altamirano Piolle adds that this mixed procedure dates from the epoch corresponding to the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Especially Velasco’s traveling to the Universal Exhibitions in Paris and Chicago were important stages in his life, never having left his native country before or after. The exhibition in Paris in 1889, dedicated to the 100-year celebration of the French Revolution, concentrated on the progress of technology and science. The most prominent example was the Eifel Tower, and there were presentations of trains, machines, and new industrial products. Marco Antonio Silva Barón (2010) describes the impact of the Mexican delegation in this event, headed by Velasco, Santiago Rebull (painter), Gabriel Guerra (sculpture), and Ocampo (engraver), all professors at the National School of Fine Arts. They had been busy with the preparations since March 1888 and Mexico inaugurated its pavilion shaped in the mode of pre-Columbian architecture on 22 June 1889, 1 month after the official opening of the Exhibition. Velasco complained about the lack of Latin Americans in the jury of 40 members. Silva Barón suggests that one of its consequences was that little attention was paid to the Mexican contributions. Velasco did not sell even 1 of the 66 (!) oil paintings he brought to Paris, more than any other of the approximately 1000 artists at the Universal Exhibition. Notwithstanding this lack of attention in the very-well visited Fair, Velasco received a high Honor from the French government, with which he was extremely pleased. In addition, while accomplishing his duties in Paris, Velasco traveled to various other European countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria in Germany, and Italy, visiting buildings, musea, and galleries, so that the 8 months of absence from Mexico filled him with many new impressions. His participation to the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 was a different kind of experience. Again, it was a big event: “no exhibition of this size has been organized in the United States before” (Altamirano Piolle 1993a, II. 401). Now Velasco showed 13 paintings and observed that this Exhibition was not as crowded as the one in Paris. Again, the members of the jury were all North Americans. He did not travel to any other city during the 2 months of his stay in Chicago and repeatedly mentions his amazement for the pragmatic way of living in his letters. He clearly felt more comfortable in Europe than in this protestant country in the North. Ramírez divides Velasco’s professional life as an artist in the following periods: (1) his first years as a student from 1855 to 1868, when he is appointed to professor of Perspective; (2) then comes the period of exams, from 1868 to 1876, in which he emancipated himself from his maestro Landesio and developed his own style, a process exemplarily shown in his three large views of the Valley of Mexico; (3) 1877 to 1889 are the years of the “harvest,” in which he constantly made short trips from

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

263

about 14 days during the Easter- and the end-of-the-year vacations to different places in Mexico for drawing and doing research, in this way expanding his repertoire of motifs considerably; (4) then, from 1890 to 1902, he experiences the summit of his professional life with much recognition; (5) followed from 1902 to 1912 by his withdrawal from public life little by little and, notwithstanding his series of paintings in the National Institute of Geology, the absence of public interest. The painful process of his professional problems is described in detail by Altamirano Piolle and Ramírez. This last decade of Velasco’s life was deeply influenced by the changes in the social and cultural area. He died 2 years after the beginning of the Mexican Revolution, which meant the violent end of the Belle Epoque at the end of the nineteenth century, giving way to utopian visions, of which the muralists would become the most prominent representatives. It is striking that from a contemporary point of view this negation of Velasco’s role has turned upside down completely. As described before, we saw that he perceived the Valley of Mexico as a natural laboratory for his visual and scientific work, clearly outlined by Ignacio Altamirano in his critical comment on the monotony of Velasco’s view in the Academy’s Exhibition of 1880. Not much later, however, Altamirano offers a more favorable description of Velasco’s valleys: From those he has presented this time, the first that calls attention is the last one, which, as we know, represents lake Chalco; at the first sight, the motif seems very simple, but when you examine this painting more closely, you feel an unspecified impression, it seems that the observer breathes a certain environment of freshness that dominates in this representation of one part of our superb Valley. Mister Velasco is wonderful in the distances! (“De los que ha presentado esta vez, el primero que nos llama la atención es el último que, según sabemos, ha ejecutado y que representa el lago de Chalco; el motivo a primera vista es sumamente sencillo, pero cuando se examina este cuadro detenidamente, se siente una impresión indefinible, parece que el espectador respira cierto ambiente de frescura que domina en esta representación de una parte de nuestro soberbio valle. ¡El señor Velasco es admirable en las lontananzas!” (Rodríguez Prampolini 1997, 66).)

Diego Rivera, who had been the scholar of Velasco – as well as other famous muralists, such as José Clemente Orosco and David Alfaro Siquieros – makes this observation even more concrete in an enthusiastic letter addressed to the “Seminario de la Cultura Mexicana” in 1943. He defends Velasco against the opinion of a certain Bergamin (probably a fictive person invented for supporting Rivera’s argument), who claimed that Velasco’s work has nothing to do with modern painting: From there [1889], the rise of Velasco is continuous. From then on, you can truly say that his painting has connections neither with modern painting nor with the antique; but, to be exact, we should have to say that neither antique nor modern painting are by now able to connect to that of Velasco. At the scale of values, the colored chiaroscuro with the spectrum of warm colors in contrast to the cold ones, but established in the space of the painting, clear to clearer, which equal, although brighter, the old gradation of black and white; Velasco did not substitute the old through a new scale but his new intrinsic valuation of color, for itself, occupies a place in the space of the painting in accordance to the elements it contains. Velasco created a palette which different tones when done on her had a certain place in the

264

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

space of the painting, apart from the relations of value (because there is always a value inherent to the color) they could have with the rest of the composition. This had no precedent in the whole history of painting nor was there another one yet. Velasco became, and still is, unique in the life of human art. (Rivera 1986, 235–236) (“Desde allí [1889], la ascensión de Velasco es continua. A partir de entonces sí puede decirse realmente que su pintura no tiene conexiones con la pintura moderna, ni con la antigua; pero para ser exactos deberemos decir que tanto la pintura antigua como la moderna ya no alcanzan a conectarse con la de Velasco. A la escala de valores, al claroscuro colorido hecho con la gama de colores cálidos en contraste con los fríos, pero establecidos en el espacio del cuadro, claro a más claro, que equivalía, aunque en más luminoso, a la antigua gradación de negro y blanco; Velasco sustituyó no una nueva escala sino una nueva valoración intrínseca del color, el que, de por sí, ocupa un lugar en el espacio del cuadro según los elementos que contiene. Creó Velasco una paleta cuyos diferentes tonos al ser hechos sobre ella tenían ya un lugar determinado en el espacio del cuadro aparte de las relaciones de valor (puesto que siempre hay un valor inherente al color) que pudieran tener con el resto de la composición. Este hecho no tenía precedente en toda la historia de la pintura ni ha tenido consecuente todavía. Velasco llegó a ser y permanecer siendo único en toda la vida del arte humano” (Rivera 1986, 296–297).)

Rivera discovers a geometry in space transmitted through the color, which implies that the perspectiva artificiale was constructed and/or stressed by the placement of certain colored details. He mentions the two paintings Atlantic Sea (1889, 61  45 cm) and View of the Bay of Havana (1889, 64  46 cm) made during Velasco’s journey to Europe, and compares their outstanding quality with that of the masters of Impressionism in Europe. On his turn, also Ramírez admires the quality of these canvases, because they show a different use of color and brushes as in Velasco’s former work. The painter continued painting in this different, more emotive and less scientific style in the last years of his life, more in line with the upcoming aesthetics of modernismo, the important aesthetic movement in Latin America at the turn of the nineteenth century. He now designed the View on the Valley of Mexico on small postcards or on cardboards of small dimensions, very different in comparison to the rational logic of his canvasses from earlier years: From a technical and expressive viewpoint, the paintings with a small format surprise us for their modernity. Their execution is synthetic and bold: only a few coarse big spots of color, very well-orchestrated, wisely spread over cardboard to reproduce the particularity of a location and evoke the intense subjective impression that this place, this hour and this atmosphere awake in the soul. (Ramírez 1993, 34)

This stylistic flexibility challenges opinions that Velasco was conservative in his art. As a devote Catholic and patriot, he had gone through the Juárez administration, the Empire, and the Díaz regime, which all held the San Carlos Academy, the Royal Academy of Art, or the National School of Fine Arts in high esteem. In the year of Velasco’s death, in 1912, the country was in uproar and social inequality was rampant. Elisa García Barragán (1989) writes that, when after his tenure as rector of the UNAM José Vasconcelos was appointed to Secretary for Education in 1921, 90 percent of the Mexican population could not read and write or speak properly Spanish. Science and progress now began to be promoted on monumental murals, but none of those artists was a scientist himself as was Velasco.

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

265

This silence on Velasco, with some minor exceptions, finally was broken when the poet Carlos Pellicer (1897–1977) organized a retrospective of Velasco’s work in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico D. F. in 1942 (158 oil paintings, 7 aquarelles, 15 designs, 19 studies, and 45 “apuntes al natural,” García Barragán 1997, 248). Pellicer, a close friend of painters, among whom Mateo Herrera (1867–1927), a former student of Velasco, dedicated many poems to the Valley of Mexico among which three sonnets to Velasco. He was also responsible for the subsequent exhibitions of Velasco’s work in Philadelphia (1944) and New York (1945). This initiative of Pellicer was a real break-through and explains Rivera’s enthusiasm when writing about his former teacher in 1943. Since that year, publications became more frequent until the art historians Xavier Moyssén and, then, Fausto Ramírez and María Elena Altamirano Piolle made Velasco’s work one of the main topics of their research in the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the UNAM. Moyssén organized the book José María Velasco. Homenaje (1989) and wrote the prologue for Altamirano Piolle’s Homage (1993a), in which he makes a remarkable statement: There is a strange case for which I have not yet found a satisfactory explanation: even though he [Velasco] was interested in the currents of rivers and waterfalls, he oddly ignored the spectacle of the maritime coast. It is true that in his production there are two paintings executed during his trip to Europe: Mar Atlántico (Atlantic Ocean) and Bahía de La Habana (Havana Bay), but these are paintings due to circumstance and not to a constant motivation for marine themes. (1993a, I. 93)

The ocean and the sea, of course, were part of Landesio’s teaching program at the San Carlos Academy (Altamirano Piolle 1993a, I. 78) and Velasco was aware of the fluid dynamics of water management since the beginning of his career (Olivares Sandoval, 78). But only when traveling to Europe, he concentrated on the sea in his compositions and, for that, started to use his brushes in a different, impressionist way, which became even more pronounced later in his series of postcards (Ramírez 2017, 117–119). To summarize my findings, in the first place, the most general assumption that Velasco exclusively applied a rationalistic and scientific vision in his artistic work and, therefore, is not innovative artistically is seen in a new light today, because the relationship between science and art is very much under discussion. To emphasize the aesthetic quality of Velasco’s scientific illustrations is one of the most important endeavors in Olivares Sandoval’s manuscript. Today, in the general discussion, it is argued that art and science both focus on experimentation. The experiment is the key and when listening to the French biologist and Nobel Prize winner François Jacob, for instance, we see how important this is in his daily practice: Doing experiments turned into a mania, a drug I could not do without. Al Hersley, one of the most brilliant American specialists on bacteriophage, said that, for a biologist, happiness consists in working up a very complex experiment and then repeat it every day, modifying only one detail. (Jacob 1988: 236)

In Practicing Art/Science, Experiments in an Emerging Field (Sormani et al. 2019), the editors present many varieties of this “emerging field” and distinguish

266

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

between “playful experiments,” “poetic scientism,” and “critical intervention.” New players are discovered and one of them, certainly, is Velasco, because his experimental research concerning the valley of Mexico is unique, as Diego Rivera rightly stated. Velasco perceives the Valley of Mexico as a vanishing point between the coordinates of past and present, so that it still lights up in the contemporary, mediaconditioned urban horizon of Mexico. We have also seen that Velasco, apparently, reacted to the discussions on Darwinism. In his work on the axolotl he argues that the experimental value of the local natural environment equally counts to test evolutionary processes. In addition, when depicting humans in his series of paintings for the National Institute of Geology, their group situation seems to have priority. It cannot be expected that he would paint such hermaphrodite beings as is the case in the work of the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), whose Triton and Nereide (1873/1874) arise naked from the waters (Kort 2009, 125). For Velasco, obviously, humans start living in caves in rocky and arid surroundings, in this way drawing the attention toward the geological condition in his last two canvasses in the Institute of Geology, the only ones of the series in which this background appears. Velasco seems to suggest that humans – whether they are Neanderthalis or Sapiens – are imbedded in such a geology, a statement that still counts in the light of current interpretations. And then, finally, although today Velasco’s work belongs to the National Heritage of Mexico, Ramírez observes that his work in this last period of his life, after 1889, is not yet sufficiently studied and put in relationship with his earlier creations. He analyzes Velasco’s fantastic sceneries, volcano eruptions, religious motifs, and impressionist use of colors (Ramírez 2017, 116–121). They show that Velasco was still in the process of developing his pictorial capacities until the end of his life, never leaving alone the “visions” on the Valley of Mexico, of which a study concentrating on the relationship between the lakes, the clouds, and the air is still missing. Therefore, a further reconstruction of the scientific and artistic dynamics – of which a number of distinguished Mexican researchers mentioned in this contribution already gave many valuables proofs – might discover more “secrets” of interrelationships in this respect. Altogether, this further research might place the work of this landscape/painter/scientist in an international perspective, in the scope of the work of his contemporary and other colleagues in the twenty-first century, for whom the dynamics between art and science are increasingly getting close attention.

References Altamirano Carbajal F (ed) (1895) Estudios referentes a la desecación del lago de Texcoco. Secretaría de Fomento, México City Altamirano Piolle ME (1993a) National homage. José María Velasco (1840–1912): landscapes of light, horizons of the modern era, vol 1–2. Museo Nacional del Arte, México City Altamirano Piolle ME (1993b) Homenaje Nacional. José María Velasco (1840–1912). Paisajes de luz, horizontes de modernidad. Museo Nacional del Arte, México City Brading DA (2002) La Virgen de Guadalupe. Imagen y Tradición. Taurus, México City

12

Between History of Art and History of Science

267

Cañizares-Esguerra J (2006) Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Damisch H (1995) The origin of perspective (trans: Goodman J). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London Darwin C (1965 [1872]) The expression of emotions in man and animals. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Debroise O (1989) José María Velasco y el paisaje fotográfico decimenónico. In: Moyssén X et al (eds) José María Velasco. Homenaje. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, México City, pp 103–121 García Barragán E (1989) Fortuna crítica de la obra de José María Velasco. In: Moyssén X et al (eds) José María Velasco. Homenaje. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, México City, pp 305–318 García Barragán E (1997) José María Velasco en Carlos Pellicer. Lit Mex 8(1):247–260. https://revistasfilologicas.unam.mx/literaturamexicana/index.php/lm/article/view/269. Accessed 10 July 2020 Hoffmann J (n.d.) Erläuterungen zu den Gemälden. Die Bildungs-Epochen der Erde und Charakterbilder für Asien und Central-Africa, Cyclus von neun Ölgemälden für das neue K.K. Naturhistorische Hof-Museum ausgeführt. Verlag von Josef Hoffmann, Vienna Jacob F (1988) The statue within. An autobiography (trans: Philip F). Basic Books, New York Kort P (2009) Arnold Böcklin, Max Ernst und die Debatten um Ursprünge und Überleben in Deutschland und Frankreich. In: Kort P, Hollein M (eds) Darwin. Kunst und die Suche nach den Ursprüngen. Wienand Verlag, Köln, pp 24–91 Larrucea Garritz A (2016) País y paisaje. Dos invenciones del siglo XIX mexicano. UNAM, México City Martínez Marín C (1989) José María Velasco y el dibujo arqueológico. In: Moyssén X et al (eds) José María Velasco. Homenaje. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, México City, pp 203–223 Moreno R (1989) La polémica del darwinismo en México en el siglo XIX. Testimonios. UNAM, México City Moyssén X et al (eds) (1989) José María Velasco. Homenaje. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, México City Moyssén X et al (1991) José María Velasco. Un estudio sobre su obra. In: Moyssén X (ed) José María Velasco. Fondo Editorial de la Plástica, México City, pp 7–22 Moyssén X et al (1993) Introduction on José María Velasco’s artistic achievements. In: Altamirano Piolle ME (ed) National homage. José María Velasco: landscapes of light, horizons of the modern era, vol I. Museo Nacional del Arte, México City, pp 37–40 Olivares Sandoval O (2019) Imagen y conocimiento científico en el siglo XIX: Láminas y paisajes de José María Velasco. PhD dissertation. UNAM, México City. Internet (2017): https://ru.dgb. unam.my/handle/DGB.UNAM/TES01000787353 Phaf-Rheinberger I (2004) Sobre los orígenes del imaginario de la urbanización en México: José María Velasco. In: Maihold G (ed) Las modernidades de México. Espacios, procesos, trayectorias. Porrúa, México City, pp 129–151 Ramírez F (1985) La plástica del siglo de la independencia. Fondo Editorial de la Plástica, México City Ramírez F (1993) Introduction on José María Velasco’s artistic achievements. In: Altamirano Piolle ME (ed) National homage. José María Velasco: landscapes of light, horizons of the modern era, vol I. Museo Nacional del Arte, México City, pp 23–34 Ramírez F (2017) José María Velasco, pintor de paisajes. FCE/UNAM, México City Reiß C (2020) Der Axolotl. Ein Labortier im Heimaquarium 1864–1914. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen Riedl-Dorn C (1998) Das Haus der Wunder. Zur Geschichte des Naturhistorischen Museums in Wien. Verlag Holzhausen, Vienna Rivera D (1986) In: Moyssén X (ed) Textos de arte. UNAM, México City Rodríguez Prampolini I (ed) (1997) La crítica del arte en México en el siglo XIX. Estudios y documentos (1879–1902), vol 3. Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, México City

268

I. Phaf-Rheinberger

Ruiz Gutiérrez R, Noguera Solano R, Rodríguez Caso JM (2014) Estudio comparativo sobre la recepción e introducción del Darwinismo en Francia y México. In: Puig-Samper MÀ, Orrego F, Reina R, Uribe JA (eds) “Yammerschuner”. Darwin y la darwinización en Europa y América Latina. Doce Calles, Madrid, pp 99–112 Salá Catalá J (1993) Ciencia y técnica en la metropolitanización de América. Ediciones Doce Calles, Madrid Silva Bárcenas Á (1991) La paleobiología en las pinturas de José María Velasco. Sociedad Mexicana de Paleontología, México City. Publicaciones especiales, no. 2 Silva Barón MA (2010) Pinturas mexicanas en París 1889. CONACULTA, México City Sormani PS, Carbone G, Gisler P (eds) (2019) Practicing art/science. Experiments in an emerging field. Routledge, London Sutton PC (1988) Introduction. In: Sutton PC (ed) Masters of 17th-century Dutch landscape painting. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, pp 1–62 Trabulse E (1992) José María Velasco. Un paisaje de la ciencia en México. Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca Velasco JM (1879) Descripcion, metamorphosis y costumbres de una especie nueva del género siredon. La Naturaleza, primera serie, vol IV. In: Trabulse 1992. Apéndice documental, pp 229–246 Velasco JM (1881a) Anotaciones y observaciones al trabajo de A. Weismann sobre la transformación del ajolote mexicano en Amblistoma. La Naturaleza, primera serie, vol V. In: Trabulse 1992. Apéndice documental, pp 271–291 Velasco JM (1881b) Informe que rinde el primer secretario a la Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural de los trabajos presentados en los anos de 1879 y 1880. In: Trabulse 1992. Apéndice documental, pp 293–215 Velasco JM (1882) Discurso pronunciado por el senor José Maria Velasco al dejar la vicepresidencia de la Sociedad. In: Trabulse 1992. Apéndice documental, pp 319–320 Velasco JM (1908) El arte de la pintura. Manuscript, not published Weber R (1996) Review of Macropterygium Schimper [. . .] and a new species from the Upper Triassic of Sonora, northwestern Mexico. Rev Mex Cienc Geol 23(2):201–220 Weismann A (1881) Transformación del ajolote mexicano en Amblistoma. La Naturaleza, primera serie, vol V. In: Trabulse 1992 (trans: Davis J). Apéndice documental, pp 247–270

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and Appropriation of Deep Time Thinking in Mexican Porfirian Geology

13

María Ruiz-y-Limo´n and Erica Torrens-Rojas

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Images in Science: Velasco As an Example of the Intersection Between Science and Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evolutionary Thinking and Deep Time in Nineteenth-Century Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Velasco in the Context of the Creation of the Mexican National Geological Institute . . . . . . . . Evolutionary Thinking in the Visual Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific Internationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socio-Professional Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

270 274 277 280 282 284 286 288 289

This text was produced as part of the PAPIIT Project IN405819 “Scientific Visual Culture: Conceptions of Race and Gender in the Teaching of Biological Evolution in Mexican Basic Education from 1970 to the Present” of the UNAM. We would also like to thank the CONACyT project number CB-2017-2018-A1-S-8786-H-4180 “Transnational Science and Collaborative Networks in the Study of Life Sciences in Mexico, 1960–1990.” It is an adaptation of the manuscript prepared for the memories of the IX International Congress “on Darwinism in Europe and America” by the authors. M. Ruiz-y-Limón (*) · E. Torrens-Rojas Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_33

269

270

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Abstract

The main objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with a novel vision of the link between science and art, which has much to say about the state of science and the public perception of it at a given historical moment. Through a review of different historiographies about the life and work of famous Mexican painter Jose María Velasco and a novel narrative that makes use of the tools of transnational historiography and the circulation of knowledge, the authors offer a panorama of the state of the geological sciences, the evolutionary ideas, and of landscape painting in the Mexico at the end of nineteenth century, all set in this character. This will highlight the different factors that played important roles in the production of Velasco’s famous series of paleontological landscapes that currently decorate the Geology Museum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Introduction Today, no one doubts that images are a central part of the construction and development of science (Hanson 1958; Kuhn 1962; Lynch and Woolgar 1990). Research on the production, use, and circulation of visual representations offers an opportunity to look, on the one hand, at a part of the plurality of activities, concepts, and assumptions that science encompasses, and on the other, at the public perception of science. Within the universe of scientific disciplines, biology is particularly visual because it makes extensive use of illustrations, diagrams, maps, models, drawings, and so forth in the construction and communication of scientific concepts (Ruse 1996; Perini 2005). For disciplines of a historical nature such as evolutionary biology, geology, paleontology and archaeology, visual images and even works of art have been fundamental not only for their emergence and professionalization (Rudwick 1976), but also for showing evidence and theoretical concepts (i.e., the reconstruction of the past would be unthinkable without images). It is for this reason that such disciplines have, since their inception, developed a distinctive visual language (Moser 1992), part of which can be seen in the work of José María Velasco developed for the National Geological Institute (NGI) (1906). Known as the “maximum exponent of Mexican landscape painting,” José María Velasco (1840–1912) was born during the height of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. Although considered primarily European, the effects of this movement are perceptible in Velasco’s introspective art, in which nature takes on a singular prominence. However, in his work there is no concept of the sublime, no fury of nature, no storms or volcanic eruptions, and no romantic nationalism framed by the struggle of the people against invaders. For this reason some scholars also link Velasco’s work to a sort of Neoclassicism (Zaldivar 2016). He lived at a time when, as in other parts of the world, artists were progressively incorporating scientific discoveries in both subject matter and production techniques (Leach 2016), and the incredible adherence to reality of his works led Octavio Paz to refer to him as “an amphibian who lived between art and science” (Paz 1942). Moreover, Velasco was fortunate to perhaps appreciate how Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

271

published in 1859, was beginning to revolutionize both art and science (see, for example, Larson and Brauer 2009; Gamwell 2020). “This impact of science on art occurs in two streams through the 19th century: a realist stream informed by photography, and technologies of assisted vision; and an abstract stream as concepts about the nature of reality became more familiar and led to the development of a poetic, interpretative response to the notion of an unseen reality” (Leach 2016:63). In this artistic context and in the midst of the rise and strengthening of scientific institutions promoted by the government of Porfirio Díaz, Velasco was commissioned to produce large works for publications and scientific institutions. He painted, between 1905 and 1906, a series of ten murals for the recently inaugurated building of the NGI (today the Museum of the Institute of Geology of Fig. 1 Flora and fauna of the Silurian and Devonian periods. (1906) José María Velasco. Oil on canvas. 2.60  1.40 m. (Museum of the Institute of Geology, UNAM)

272

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Fig. 2 Flora and fauna of the Miocene period. (1906) José María Velasco. Oil on canvas 2.6  1.37 m. (Museum of the Institute of Geology, UNAM)

the UNAM), in Mexico City (see Figs. 1, 2, and 3), which is the main subject of this manuscript. This series represents different episodes of the history of life on Earth, which were integrated into the architecture of this building by occupying the walls of the high corridor of the enclosure. This text presents a history around these “palaeolandscapes,” seeking to highlight the networks of collaboration that were established between the Mexican scientific community and the global circumstances at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. It also calls attention to the significance of this artwork in that particular space, as it addresses an important theoretical biological question related to the context of the reception, discussion, and

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

273

Fig. 3 Scene from the Upper Paleolithic Quaternary period. (1906) José María Velasco. Oil on canvas 2.6  1.4 m. (Museum of the Institute of Geology, UNAM)

reconfiguration of theories on both, the history of the Earth and biological evolution in the last third of the nineteenth century. To achieve the above, we also offer a brief review of different historiographies about the life and work of Jose María Velasco. There are important biographical works on Velasco that address the relevance of his oil paintings in the NGI, among them are those of Elena Altamirano (1993), Elías Trabulse (2012), Fausto Ramírez (2017), and Omar Olivares (2019), as well as the paleobiological study by Ángel Silva (1991). In the first four sources, it is noted that the first seven of the Velasco’s canvases are an adaptation of postcards (photographs) of a pictorial cycle made by the Austrian painter Josef Hoffmann for the Natural

274

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

History Museum of Vienna, inaugurated in 1889. The works in art history by Altamirano (1993) and Ramírez (2017), offer a measured description of each painting, while Olivares (2019) made an iconographic trace of the elements that make up the series by Hoffmann and Velasco. On the other hand, Trabulse (2012), in his approach to the “scientific life of Velasco,” provides a brief history of the series. Finally, Silva’s study (1991), offers a proposal on the taxonomic identification of some of the organisms represented. In this context, the reader will find in this chapter a “local-transnational” history about Velasco’s series, with the aim of enriching the knowledge about the ways in which visual culture was linked to nineteenth-century scientific practices in Mexico. It is based on three axes or conceptual categories: The concept of “circulation of knowledge” (Secord 2004; Fan 2013), which recognizes that the construction of scientific knowledge involves processes of communication, negotiation, feedback, and reconfiguration, and that the journey of scientific ideas is not exclusive to theories or people, but also to the material objects that embody that knowledge. Second, a reflection on the importance of visual representation in science focused on the areas of biology and geology; and third, a research on the Mexican geological context (especially on its relationship with the notion of deep time and evolution) and the concept of “palaeolandscape,” understood as a type of scientific visual representation that projects images on the planet’s past life forms, and which arises from the collaboration of multiple actors with their diverse specialties. For all these reasons, this manuscript deals with the importance of visual representation in science in general and in geology in particular, to understand the great contribution that Velasco made in both art and science. Later, with the aim of contextualizing the series, an account of the state of the Earth Sciences and its relation to evolutionism in nineteenth-century Mexico is given, as well as a brief historical background of the NGI. Finally, it offers an analysis of the paleolandscapes from the particular transnational and circulation historiography, for which the subject of scientific internationalism and international politics in Velasco’s time will be briefly touched upon, as well as the nature of its socio-professional networks. The conclusions offer a reflection on this research aimed at three important questions: firstly, that the realization of the series mirrors the way in which evolutionary thought, under a scheme that recognizes the change of living beings over geological time, permeated the imagination of Mexican geologists. Second, that the series, besides serving as a tool for the public that visited it, also served as a political means that sought to strengthen ties between Mexico and Austria-Hungary. And thirdly, that the study of this visual work contributed to the defense of the image of science as a social construction.

Images in Science: Velasco As an Example of the Intersection Between Science and Art Natural history and present day science are highly dependent on the generation of images, not only for their epistemic value in the construction of scientific knowledge, but also because they are essential tools of thought, theorization, creation, and

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

275

communication within and outside the scientific field. In this sense, the value of visual representations in science is judged by their functionality to solve problems, to enable communication between scientists, and to facilitate the transmission of their production to the general public (Pauwels 2006). This last point is of great importance, since images, being essential components of the scientific discourse, play a crucial role in the efforts to make this knowledge not restricted to privileged circles, but more accessible to society. When we speak of scientific representations, we generally evoke those images that are the direct result of experimental, theoretical, or observational practices carried out by researchers, but there are also scientific representations in art, which have an important role to play in the critical reception of science by the nonspecialist public. The present research on the history of Velasco’s paintings for the NGI starts from recognizing them as an expression that resulted from the association between different areas of knowledge and were, therefore, a process that reflected the style of thought of a scientific community, which corresponded to aesthetic and artistic norms, as well as to contemporary scientific philosophy and ideology. However, before fully addressing Velasco, whose link between art and science is particularly strong, it is important to briefly outline two examples that show how the intersection between these two fields is an attractive issue for various disciplines, such as the history of science or art history, sociology, anthropology, among others. An example from geology, which shows the way in which scientific theories have both a pictorial and an aesthetic scope, is the case of the discussions on geological theories that took place in the nineteenth century; since, by revealing a new vision of the Earth, the creative imagination of landscape painters changed considerably. The recognition of the Earth’s surface as the result of a profound history, full of dramatic changes over time, led to the development of new pictorial strategies that expressed a transformed understanding of the Earth (Bedell 2009) (Fig. 4). Another subtle approach to the subject is Susan Dackerman’s “Prints and the pursuit of knowledge in Early Modern Europe” (2011), which offers a careful examination of the involvement of renowned artists during the scientific explorations of the sixteenth century, through the scrutiny of the exchange of ideas and collaborative production between the artistic and scientific communities. In her research, Dackerman challenges the artificial boundaries of interpretation traditionally established between science and art, while questioning the perception of artists as mere assistants for scientific practitioners. She proposes instead a more fundamental role for artists whose work facilitated the conceptualization of ideas through the representation of various scenes and objects in the natural landscape. This link between science and art is particularly visible in José María Velasco, not only due to the pictorial result of his work but also because of his professional training. As Phaf-Reinberger (2021) has established in the previous chapter, Velasco had the good fortune to coincide with the Italian painter Eugenio Landesio (1810–1879), when he entered the San Carlos Academy (SCA) in 1858. Landesio was the first professor of landscape painting in Mexico and he inspired Velasco to delve into this style that by the end of the nineteenth century was already solidly

276

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Fig. 4 Edward William Cooke, Triassic Cliffs at Blue Anchor, North Somerset (1866) The age of the Earth was one of the most debated topics during the nineteenth century and of considerable interest to British and American landscape painters. As a result, geological outcrops, sites where the most visible signs of the Earth’s antiquity were found, were painted very often. Their depictions highlighted the differences between the strata which, in addition to expressing the new temporal perception of the Earth’s surface, also spoke of the changing environmental conditions in which the rocks had formed. Oil on canvas. (Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London (C.36))

institutionalized in several countries. Velasco’s landscape production is one of the most outstanding among his artwork, especially the scenes reminiscent of the Valley of Mexico and its surroundings. Themes such as the orography and geology of the terrain, volcanoes, and plant motifs are recurrent in his work (Moyssén 1997). From the 1860s onward, Velasco became increasingly interested in scientific disciplines (for example, he became a member of the newly founded Mexican Society of Natural History in 1868 and later worked at the Museum of Natural History until 1912) and began to incorporate elements mainly from botany and zoology into his artistic work, as he was familiar with historical, geological, paleontological, biological, and archaeological research in and about Mexico. Having shown Velasco’s artistic and scientific interest, we will now focus on his paleolandscapes, which epitomize his efforts to represent a total conception of the landscape. Paleoart is considered to be “all the original artistic manifestations that intend to reconstruct or represent prehistoric forms of life according to the knowledge and scientific evidence existing at the time of creating the work” (Ansón et al. 2015: 28). According to Ansón and collaborators, the term was introduced in the late 1980s by natural history illustrator Mark Hallet. Likewise, paleontology is a discipline that is closely related to images, since the recreation of scenes from past life is one of its main objectives. Just as in landscape, the themes that are integrated under this pictorial (and sculptural) genre are very diverse, from the reconstruction of scenes about past ecosystems, to the unique representations of fossils that paleontologists use to communicate their research. In this sense, the “palaeolandscape” images have their origin in the continuous collaboration between artists and scientists from multiple areas, such as paleo-biology and geology.

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

277

“Palaeolandscape,” in this text, is a term used in reference to the dual character of Velasco’s pictorial series: on the one hand, it alludes to Velasco’s outstanding identification with landscape painting, and on the other, to the specific theme that the series touches; that is, the representation of different episodes of life on Earth throughout geological time. In order to resume Velasco’s participation in the NGI, it is necessary to briefly address the Mexican context of the time. The study of the decorative construction of the geological institution at the beginning of the last century leads us to consider the way in which the representations of paleolandscapes are not only works of art in themselves, but also represent the influences of certain research and theories of the time. To this end, we will proceed to present a brief description of such theoretical influences, which encompass the general knowledge that was held about evolution and its relationship to the history of life on Earth toward the second half of the nineteenth century.

Evolutionary Thinking and Deep Time in Nineteenth-Century Mexico The historiography of evolutionary thought in Mexico maintains various narratives that initially reflected on the reception, introduction, and diffusion of evolutionary ideas in the country (Puig-Samper et al. 2018). In particular, according to PuigSamper (2018), the case of Darwinism has been studied mainly under an approach that seeks to reject the historiographic tradition of the center-periphery through the analysis and presentation of a comparative cultural history. Although Charles Darwin’s theory of biological evolution by natural selection was well received by the Mexican scientific community, in many Hispanic countries the reception of Darwinism was mediated by Lamarckism, Haeckelian monism, Krausism, Spencerian evolutionism, etc. (Moreno 1984), which meant that the process of reception of evolutionism was marked by numerous events of ideological confrontation (Barahona 2009). The last decades of the nineteenth century were marked by constant contrasts around Darwin’s ideas, mostly discussed by philosophers, physicians, and naturalists. On the other hand, Carlos Ochoa proposes that the history of evolutionary thought in Mexico should be told as the introduction of evolutionism and not of Darwinism, in order to be able to appreciate “the evolutionary pluralism characteristic of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and in which strict Darwinism is not sustained” (Ochoa 2017). Although evolutionary ideas were already a frequent topic among some scientists in the country and it has been recognized that Darwinism greatly modified the orientation of scientific research, the first repercussions of this style of thinking stood out mainly in the field of anthropology and medicine (Moreno 1984), rather than in questions of geological history. Susana Esparza (2014) states that in Porfirian Mexico, the language of the natural sciences, particularly that of “evolutionary thought,” constituted one of the referential frameworks for knowing,

278

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

thinking, imagining, and interpreting the natural and social world. According to Sosa (2005), the positivist members concerned about the future of Mexico, shared the idea of remaking the nation from the analogies with “organic evolution.” However, as mentioned above, the study on evolutionary thinking must recognize the diversity of discussions and contexts in which it was shaped. In this sense, Esparza proposes that evolutionary thought during nineteenth century was a conceptual system containing ideas and reflections from various different theoretical fields, such as natural history, natural philosophy, natural theology; sociology, economy and probability, individual historicity, common ancestry, circumstance and interactions, and descent with modification (Esparza 2014). For this reason, it can be understood why Mexican geologists and naturalists who were interested in paleontology were not exactly in favor of Darwinist ideas, but they were aware of the implications that faunistic succession had in the evolutionary field (Corona-M 2002). As for the concept of deep time in relation to the history of the Earth, it has its origin in the investigations carried out by the Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797) in the second half of the eighteenth century, who proposed a theory of the Earth that became known as “uniformitarianism,” which establishes that the same natural laws and processes that act on the Earth and are observed today are the same as those that occurred in a past time, and that these processes and changes occur gradually over time. The idea was taken up, deepened, and popularized by the English geologist Charles Lyell, in his best known work Principles of geology (1830). The conception that the Earth’s surface, its flora and fauna have changed over time, constituted a dramatic turn in the attitude that eighteenth century naturalists and philosophers had toward nature, mainly because this recognition was a great challenge to the traditional vision of divine creation (Bowler, 2000: 118). Eighteenth century discussions that offered an explanation of earthly conditions and fossils were present in Mexico; for example, the influence of the Neptunist school of Abraham Werner (1749–1817) was used as a theoretical basis under which it began to be taught at the Royal Seminary of Minas in 1792 (Morelos and Moncada 2015). Geological sciences and natural history, and later the study of the evolution of organisms, are two fields of knowledge that have been deeply intertwined since their inception. In fact, as Torrens points out, referring to the historian of science, Julia Voss, “the first representation of the history of organisms comes from Geology. From the fossils of plants and animals embedded in the rock strata, naturalists began to recreate, in great detail, the past history of the Earth” (Torrens 2018: 50). An example of this is the study of the natural history of the second half of the nineteenth century within the Mexican context, which shows that geological knowledge shared the same space of discussion with questions of the history of life. In the analysis of the Catalogue of the Chair of Natural History (1884) of the Scientific and Literary Institute of Toluca by the historian Rafael Guevara, a “juxtaposition of theories, ideas, concepts and categories of nineteenth-century geology, physiology, embryology, botany and zoology” can be observed (Guevara

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

279

2002: 118). Another example of this is that of Lucero Morelos, who describes that in the course of Mineralogy and Geology, proposed by Antonio del Castillo (1820–1985), a distinguished mining engineer and promoter of geological sciences in Mexico, paleontology was included as a “branch of knowledge effective for the determination of geological age through fossils” (Morelos 2014: 34). Fossils are one of the main elements involved in understanding geological time. Since the first decades of the nineteenth century, it has been well documented that the recognition of them as extinct beings was already a wellaccepted idea by the scientific community. Once again, within the Mexican context, it is possible to appreciate such an affirmation by pointing out that around the year 1867, at the National Museum of Mexico (founded in 1825), the study of fossils was part of a systematic work that promoted the creation of fossil collections at the museum (Corona-M 2002). Likewise, in the journal of The Mexican Society of Natural History, (founded in 1868), between 1870 and 1900, there are extensive and varied descriptions for the sections of mineralogy, geology, and paleontology, where one can read the recognition of the image of nature as a continuously changing system, with a profound history and whose earthly structure is closely related to the action of natural phenomena in the course of time. An example is the Description of a fossil crustacean of the genus Spheroma (Spheroma Bukarth) and a geological description of the Ameca Jalisco Valley, by Mariano Bárcena (1842–1899), who refers to the geological circumstances of the locality and suggests some historical hypotheses of the current terrain using fossils (Bárcena 1874). At this point it is worth remembering that scientific culture must be recognized as the product of philosophical, historical, political, and economic negotiations that take place in various contexts, in such a way that “the practices and images of science are built on these dialogues and reflect the conventions and values established by the socio-cultural dynamics of a historical space” (Esparza 2014: 10). The scientific visual culture that was built around the new way of conceiving the history of the Earth toward the beginning of the nineteenth century arose from the tradition of illustrating prehistoric scenes that, in artistic terms, derived from a well-established tradition in natural history illustrations (Rudwick 1992). The possibility of depicting scenes of deep time in a retrospective sequential arrangement was suggested by the English geologist William Buckland (1784–1856), for which fossils were essential tools. Likewise, the idea that each period or epoch should have distinctive characteristics (according to the fossil evidence), and that these could be represented and made accessible to the public, was initially materialized in the work of the Austrian botanist Franz Xaver Unger (1800–1870) in his book Die Urwelt in ihren verschiedenen Bildungsepochen (The Early World in its Different Periods of Formation), published in 1851. An example of the iconographic tradition of representing prehistoric life is the drawings for the Elizabeth Marsh Museum of Geology and Archeology by the artist Benjamin Waterhouse, which form a series of paintings on the geological eras (see Fig. 5).

280

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Fig. 5 Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Age of coal plants or Carboniferous age, (1875). Copy of a pencil drawing. Ewell Sale Stewart Library, Academy of Natural Sciences. (Reproduced from https://ansp.org/research/library/archives/0800-0899/hawkins803/)

Velasco in the Context of the Creation of the Mexican National Geological Institute Before proceeding with the analysis of Velasco’s work in the NGI, and due to the fact that the pictorial series has remained, since its first exhibition in 1906, in the premises of this institution, it is necessary to offer a brief background of it. The genealogy of the NGI dates back to the creation in 1792 of the Royal Seminary of Mining of Mexico, which became the National College of Mining (in 1821), and later the National School of Engineers (in 1867). The initiative to create an institution dedicated to the geological knowledge of the country is deeply linked to the activities of the extractive and mining industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. In particular, “the extractive industry and its relationship with academic mining produced the concurrence of several pieces of knowledge whose usefulness inspired the creation of instances for scientific-technical instruction, exploration and exploitation of natural resources” (Morelos and Moncada 2015). The Porfiriato is known as the period in which the Mexican nation was under the presidential mandate of General Porfirio Díaz, between 1876 and 1911. This period was marked by a boom in scientific activity and the introduction of innovations aimed at the industrialization of the country. As reported by Morelos and Moncada (2015), the foundation of the geological institute “implied, according to the government, the need to study in detail the approach, the reorganisation and the personnel that would integrate it, through the study of the european geological institutes.” In 1888, by decree of General Porfirio Díaz, the National Geological Institute was founded, and its first director was the engineergeologist Antonio del Castillo (1820–1895).

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

281

Once the institute was created, construction of the building began in 1900 under the direction of the architect Carlos Herrera López (1868–??) and in collaboration with the engineer and geologist José G. Aguilera (1857–1941), who drew up the plans and distribution of the areas. From 1903, the institute had a larger budget, mainly because it was Mexico’s responsibility to organize and host the tenth International Geological Congress, which took place in 1906. The building was designed to house, in addition to the research and administrative staff, important collections of minerals and fossils that were collected during the explorations of the various commissions. By the time the NGI was created, José María Velasco already had a long career in both the artistic and scientific spheres of the country. From his youth, he was interested and actively involved in the natural sciences of Mexico, while learning and exercising his artistic affiliations with his painting production and teaching within the San Carlos Academy. In particular, Velasco participated in the evolutionary debates regarding the metamorphosis of the axolotl, a topic in which foreign personalities such as the German biologist August Weismann were also involved. It should be remembered that the issue of the evolution of species, after the second half of the nineteenth century, became a hotly debated topic among intellectuals studying the natural world, its classification and order. Altamirano (1993) and Ramírez (2017), express that, during José María Velasco’s last pictorial stage, between 1901 and 1912, his artistic production was no longer “the result of his artistic excursions and his long hours of isolation and tranquility in the countryside, but of his work in the workshop” (Altamirano 1993: 143). During the first years of the twentieth century, José María Velasco, who was over 60 years old, continued his work as a draughtsman at the National Museum, as well as continued to teach landscape painting and perspective at the National School of Fine Arts (Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, ENBA). However, the accident that caused him to break his leg in 1901 (which kept him in his home for several months), plus the artistic transformations derived from the administrative and political changes in ENBA’s management during the turn of the century, initiated in Velasco a period that marked the beginning of the retreat of his fame and intervention in the affairs of the fine arts in Mexico. The scientific and artistic knowledge cultivated by Velasco throughout his life, as well as the communication networks, both personal and professional, which he established in the different settings where he worked, are a first indication that brings us closer to the analysis of the landscape painter’s collaboration for the NGI. In this sense, following José María Velasco’s career became a starting point that made it possible to approach the history of the paintings, so the analysis presented below focuses on highlighting the connections between him and various characters involved in the Mexican geological environment, who were motivated to present artistically, within the architecture of the building, a style of thought that corresponded to a new way of conceiving the history of the Earth under the notion of deep time, as well as a pictorial tradition that is framed in the boom of the emergence of new spaces of research.

282

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Evolutionary Thinking in the Visual Discourse As various authors have established, Velasco’s pictorial series keeps a direct reference to the cycle painted by the Austrian Josef Hoffmann, for the Room Ten (X) of the Natural History Museum of Vienna, carried out during the first years of the 1880s (Kruspel and Olivares 2017). The first seven paintings are an adaptation of the photographs taken by the Austrian Josef Löwy from the Hoffman series. From these photographs, Velasco painted the sketches that would be transferred to the final canvases, which are now in the National Museum of Mexico. Likewise, Olivares (2019: 339–349) suggests the work of the Englishman Henry Knipe (1905), Nebula to Man, as the iconographic basis for the last three paintings. There are two important differences to mention about the adaptation of the Hoffmann cycle painted by Velasco. First, the adaptation of the paintings from a horizontal format used by Hoffman, to a vertical one that was adapted to the space destined in the NGI building. And second, in the case of Hoffmann’s work, the cycle closes with the visual reconstruction of “ethnographic landscapes” and archaeological themes from Africa, India, and Greece (Olivares 2019: 339–361). In the case of the Velasquian series, the last two canvases have to do with the representation of human figures in an action that insinuates “the human dawn” (Ramírez 2017: 113). This choice is an excellent reference that allows us to appreciate the traditional approach to the evolution of the species toward the last decade of the twentieth century: “a hierarchical, ordered and progressive interpretation,” in which the human figure is considered as the ultimate end of the evolutionary process (Torrens 2018: 79). One of the first questions about Velasco’s oil paintings that the present research sought to answer was to understand the meaning of staging a pictorial series on the history of life on Earth within a geological site. To this end, a first approach is found by studying the way in which geology and life history issues were related during the period. The decision to capture a pictorial work with an evolutionary theme in the architecture of the Geological Institute is as important as the purpose with which the different spaces that were initially built in its building were planned. To begin with, the concept in which geology was understood by Mexican geologists during the second half of the nineteenth century, included, in a convincing manner, the study of “the history of the Earth in all its extension, investigating its origin and its relation with the celestial bodies and the diverse creations that have populated it” (Bárcena 1885: 11, quoted by Morelos 2014). As Guevara points out “the intention to know the stories of the Earth and of life was already rooted in the scientific community of Mexico City during the late nineteenth century” (Guevara 2002: 123). The question of evolution, understood as a change in the flora and fauna over geological time, was a topic widely discussed and commented on by the geological community, both in Mexico and in other countries, mainly under a relation with the idea of progress, in which “some appear and others disappear” and “progress is always the gradual displacement of a system: man is the culmination of that system” (Guevara 2002: 115).

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

283

The motivation of the engineer José Aguilera, who was the director in turn of the NGI and who directed and supervised Velasco’s work for the institution, to show some evolutionist program that was part of the installations, parallels his interest in evolutionary issues, which can also be read in the lines expressed in his memory about the VIII International Geological Congress (held in the city of Paris in 1900), in which Aguilera describes in detail the discussions that were held about the purpose of “standardising the procedures, methods, nomenclatures, classifications and graphic representations” of geological science. Thus, in the case of the age of the Earth, a proposal was discussed that defined it as between 90 and 100 million years, and later on it was pointed out that: With regard to the nomenclature of the five orders of hierarchical subdivisions of land, the following was tested: The divisions of first order chronologically represent eras and stratigraphically groups, they will be called Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, [. . .] The divisions of second order called, respectively, Periods and Systems, will have a very general value, and their paleontological characters should indicate an organic evolution particularly characterized by the study of pelagic animals. For a stratigraphic division to be erected into a system, the succession of faunas it contains should be susceptible to well-marked subdivisions. (Aguilera 1900: 578)

This description is a strong argument for recognizing, on the one hand, the affiliation that a Mexican geologist had for evolutionary ideas, and on the other hand, the strong link between nineteenth-century geological knowledge and the development of evolutionary thought. The external architecture of the building can also tell us about this link, since, as the historian David Livingstone (2003) mentions, “the external iconography of a museum can speak to the society in which it is located.” Thus, the architecture of a museum (and in this case of the Geological Institute around 1906) “is not simply a set of structural responses to practical problems,” but is “itself a symbolic site,” that is, “a place of scientific writing of space” (Livingstone 2003: 37–38). In this sense, César Esparza (2019), in his analysis of the architecture of the NGI, points out that the work of representing fossil remains, as part of the architectural decoration within this institution, “sought to express the destiny of the enclosure” (Esparza 2019: 79). The quarry reliefs that accompany the main façade are already a first indication that interest in extinct organisms was a well-consolidated reality. Some examples that detail this are the skeletal reliefs of the flying reptile Pterodactylus crassirostris, or the group of ammonites carved into the coffers of the three arches of the portico (Esparza 2019: 70). Once again, it is possible to say that scientific theories can be embodied in different material identities. In this case, evolutionary thinking, with its different aspects, took place in the making not only of Velasco’s pictorial series, but also left traces in the paleo-biological iconography of the NGI’s architecture. To conclude this section, a last reference that tells us about the importance that the evolutionary discourse, and the understanding of the deep time, had not only for the geological sciences of the time, but that was also part of the style of thought that politicians and intellectuals embraced in their speeches about the modern nation, is

284

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

the discourse made by the American geologist William M. Davis before important Mexican delegates during a celebration of the X Geological Congress, who expresses: What astronomy has done for the extension of space, geology has done for the duration of time. If the age of our mother Earth smiles, as it does in this wonderfully beautiful country, it is not the smile of youth, but of benign immortality. What biology has done for the structure of animals and plants, geology has done for its ancestors and their development. In this way we have learned that death is not the punishment of sin, but is, like birth, an essential part of the system of nature on this planet. [. . .] Of all this we are proud, but we must at the same time be humble; humble in recognising our smallness in the misery of time and space that we occupy, but proud in recognising the faculty with which the good God has endowed us to probe the immensity of space and time. (Davis 1906: 51)

Scientific Internationalism A second important historiographical issue that has allowed a deeper understanding of the history of the painting series has been to broaden the international and local context, which explains the reproductive character of the oils. In this sense, the study of the paleolandscapes made it possible to observe an aspect of the nature of scientific practices during its period, which saw an increase in international scientific congresses. Scientific internationalism was (and continues to be) one of the fundamental values in the development of scientific dynamics (Livingstone 2010: 89–90; Turchetti et al. 2012). The last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century witnessed a boom in global meetings with various themes and purposes. The historian Fa-Ti Fan (2013) suggests that the emergence of nationalism in Europe, Latin America, and Asia evolved alongside the formation of scientific internationalism, where scientific conferences and international organizations expanded with great enthusiasm from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth century. These meetings provided spaces for the circulation and exchange of ideas and knowledge. For Fan, the transnational discourse of science “derived its authority from its claims to objectivity, modernity, practical utility, universal truth and global validity,” represented in the scientific congresses (Fan 2013: 233). This atmosphere of scientific exchange and international communication can be seen in the “international projection” that Mexico sought by participating in the geological congresses and, especially, in the invitation made by the Mexican delegates at the IX International Geological Congress held in Vienna (1903) to be the host country of the next meeting (Morelos 2014: 170). The public policies of the Porfirian regime in terms of scientific activities were aimed at strengthening them with the objective of achieving “a modernisation of the nation, through the improvement and promotion of its image abroad” (Morelos 2014: 170). The recognition of the importance of establishing links with other nations from the scientific aspect can

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

285

be read in some of the speeches found in the compte rendu (memories) of the X Congress. For example, the words of the President of the City Council, Fernando Pimentel, when he expressed his concern for achieving an “international brotherhood” that would benefit the “advancement of science.” Another is the speech of the President of the Consejo Superior de Salubridad, Dr. Eduardo Licéaga, who said that: Congresses like the one that now, happily brings us together in our homeland, are much more effective in making truth the universal brotherhood [. . .] As science does not know the borders of nations, it makes those who cultivate it consider themselves as brothers, whatever their origin, the language they speak and their social position; the lack of a common language for all men is hardly missed, so much so that they are brought closer to their scientific ideals. (Licéaga 1906: 49)

Under the internationalist context, the explanation of why an Austrian work was chosen to be reproduced becomes clearer, considering that by 1906, paleontological knowledge of the territory was quite advanced, studies in this field, at least since the 1870s, already made up a rich number of publications by different scientists in Mexico (Guevara 2002: 113–116), and a series could well have been outlined based on paleontological knowledge of Mexico. The reason for this choice, from the authors’ point of view, is a result of the search by Mexican intellectuals to show the scientific vanguard to which the country aspired, as well as a political issue that is explained below. In their study of Velasco’s oil paintings and their relationship with the Hoffmann series, Kruspel and Olivares (2017) point out that in some of the paintings in the series the signature “Velasco copied” is legible, which “gives the impression that it was intentional to leave testimony of the fact that a type of reproduction was being made.” From the transnational viewpoint, a relevant event must be specified for this question. In 1901, Mexico and the Austro-Hungarian Empire resumed diplomatic relations after a 34-year interruption. On this occasion, the building of the Chapel of Cerro de Las Campanas (hill of bells) in Querétaro was inaugurated, the place where the execution of Maximilian of Habsburg took place in 1867 (Galeana 2012: 501). José María Velasco was invited to attend this ceremony and painted Cerro de las Campanas (1901). In gratitude for this, in August of the same year he was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Francis Joseph by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Later, in 1902, Velasco painted Vista de Querétaro desde el Cerro de las Campanas as a reciprocal appreciation (Altamirano 1993: 529; Ramírez 2017: 93–95). In this way, the invitation made by Mexico in 1903, during the ninth geological congress held in Vienna, to be the country that organized the tenth congress, is a reflection of the measures that the “Supreme Government” took to strengthen the recently recovered link with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this context, the suggestion we make acts as an example to reaffirm what historians Gorbach and Beltrán stated about the “negotiating” nature of science, in which the geology produced during Porfirian Mexico was a “cultural practice inserted in complex power relations” (Gorbach and Beltrán 2008: 19).

286

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

It should be noted that Velasco’s series should not be seen as a simple reception of Austrian works. The last three paintings being completely different from Hoffmann’s series, is relevant to understand that the circulation of the postcards, really meant a process of reconfiguration of scientific knowledge, and in this sense, the transformation of the last three canvases, allows us to appreciate that José Aguilera’s intention was not precisely to imitate, but to show internationality and to negotiate.

Socio-Professional Networks A third question about the history and historiography of the paleolandscapes has to do with the analysis of Velasco’s life during his last years and the context of changes in the artistic trends in Mexico during the first decade of the twentieth century. Fausto Ramírez (2017), describes that between 1902 and 1912, Velasco lived a moment of “withdrawal” influenced mainly by the emergence of modernism as “the most appropriate artistic expression for Mexico in the times that were passing,” which gradually displaced the acceptance of the painter by the academic sphere. Although it has been pointed out that the pictorial production of Velasco’s intercentury period increasingly gave way to a creative process that emphasized the adoption and reconfiguration of the avant-garde movements that emerged in Europe, such as impressionism, symbolism, art nouveau, among others, the figure of Velasco was portrayed for his realistic approaches to nature and his “almost scientific observation of the constitutive elements of landscape” (Ramírez 2017: 88). Changes in the country’s artistic trends led to the modification of the curriculum implemented at ENBA, which relegated Velasco’s activity in that institution. In addition, his participation in the Mexican Society of Natural History (SMHN), as well as in international artistic events, decreased considerably (Ramírez 2017: 97–104). Why, then, would Velasco be entrusted with the task of painting the series for the NGI, taking into account that the date of production (1905–1906) corresponds to a period in which Velasco ceased to be a central figure in the country’s artistic scene? The reasons that made Velasco the author of the series go beyond recognizing him as a “true naturalist” (Trabulse 2012,) or as the “ideal artist” given his scientific career (Kruspel and Olivares 2017: 275). The socio-professional networks that Velasco wove in the course of his life and his local circumstances were the triggers for this choice. To show this, we will briefly mention some of the people who intervened in the country’s geological context and who were linked to Velasco. A pivotal character was the architect Carlos Herrera López, who was in charge of the construction project of the NGI building. Velasco first became acquainted with Herrera because he was the son of the renowned naturalist Alfonso Herrera, who co-founded the SMHN together with the geologist Antonio del Castillo and other personalities of the Mexican scientific elite in 1868, and with whom Velasco maintained constant communication within the scientific practices in which he was involved between 1870 and 1880. In addition to this, during the years that Herrera worked on the building project he was also a colleague of Velasco at ENBA, where both became joint synodal students.

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

287

Another important person was Manuel María Villada, Doctor of Medicine and Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at the National Museum, and full member of the SMHN. Villada and Velasco maintained a deep friendship that continued until his death in 1912. Altamirano (1993), Trabulse (2012), and Ramírez (2017) point out that the commission for the paintings for the NGI was made through the National Museum, due to the fact that since 1880, Velasco worked as a draughtsman for the institution, where he also made various plates on paleontological themes that Villada used in his classes. Villada also attended the X International Geological Congress. This character is also important because in reviewing his life, through the research of Rafael Guevara (2002), we can see that the study of biological evolution was a field closely related to the studies of geology and paleontology of his times (Guevara 2002: 110–115). Finally, some people who stand out within the socio-professional networks that connect Velasco to the series were the engineer geologist Leandro Fernández (1851–1921), who, as Secretary of Communications and Public Works between 1903 and 1911, participated in the organizing committee of the tenth Geological Congress (and possibly in the preparations for the construction of the NGI). This engineer was the same who, in 1889, promoted the assignment of José María Velasco to be head of the Works of Art team that attended the Universal Exhibition in Paris. Fernández was appointed as head of the team but resigned his post arguing that “although he had collected the artistic works for the exhibition, an artist should judge their qualities,” which is why Velasco was appointed in his place (Tenorio 1996: 50). It should also be added that during the process of preparations for the Paris Exhibition, Velasco, as group leader, was in direct contact with General Carlos Pacheco and the engineer Manuel Fernández Leal, who at the time were Minister and Vice-Minister of Economic Development, and who made most of the decisions in consultation with Porfirio Díaz (Tenorio 1996: 51), and who in later years promoted the work of the Geological Institute. Velasco’s participation in this exhibition was relevant because it positioned him as a very important figure within the international outlook (Altamirano 1993: 109), since, as Tenorio expresses, the Mexican government’s purpose in attending the universal exhibitions was to “show Mexico’s progress” in order to “attract foreign investment and immigration from Northern Europe” (Tenorio 1996: xii). José María Velasco was a character who continually moved between different objects and actors who were connected in different spaces, as they were, since his youth: the intellectual circle of the SMHN, his teaching work at the ENBA, his work at the National Museum, as well as his collaboration in international competitions. Furthermore, the SMHN was a space where several important figures for both geology and biology coexisted. In this sense, the pictorial series was also a space where such meeting points were made to coincide. Velasco was the author of the series, not only because of his professional experience in portraying naturalistic iconography with a sharp brush, but also because he gained recognition cultivated over several years with different characters and in various settings. Velasco’s relationship with all these characters plus the link he had in the socio-political affairs of

288

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Mexico and Austria-Hungary, can be seen as possible factors that intervened in the decision of Engineer José Aguilera to ask Velasco to make the paleolandscapes.

Conclusions This chapter sought to show the influence that certain scientific discoveries can have on art; and above all that it is important to maintain a critical look at different historiographic styles in order to reveal social actors, situations, material culture, and institutions that were overshadowed or whose importance had not been duly noted. Thus, we hope that the network of factors that intervened in the development of José María Velasco’s series of paleolandscapes, found today at the UNAM’s Museum of the Institute of Geology, has been duly reflected to account for the complexity behind any artistic and/or scientific result and the growing importance of multidisciplinary and intersectional studies. In particular, this text presents a marked interest in highlighting the connections and scenarios involved in Velasco’s work from an international view of the history of science. The focus on different objects, persons, and scenarios allowed us to appreciate Velasco’s pictorial series not as a mere reproduction or unidirectional transference of Hoffmann’s postcards but as an exchange of knowledge that was influenced by the social, scientific, and political circumstances. In this regard, Velasco’s series on the History of life on Earth for the ING was a process of reconfiguration in which intervened the political aspirations of a government and a scientific community, which sought to highlight its internationality and modernity. On the other hand, regardless of the fact that part of this series involved the replication of an Austrian work, this is one of the first representations that allude to the conception of deep time in the history of life in our country. Likewise, this study made possible the visualization of socio-professional networks that made it possible to rescue the locality from space and at the same time, to complicate the processes of circulation of images. Since the study of this work involved not only the monitoring of Velasco’s trajectory, but also the analysis of other objects and subjects, such as architects, geologists and naturalists. It is also important to mention that the paleolandscapes at the Geological Institute go beyond a decorative program. In addition to offering a space for geological research, the institute building also served as a museum space that connected the general public with current knowledge of the matter. So the series was integrated into a museum script and therefore served as a dissemination artifact that embodied and circulated information about the history of life. Finally, although most of the historical studies on José María Velasco have been made from the perspective of art history, in recent years there has been a growing interest in studying his life and work from the history of science. However, for nonspecialized audiences, Velasco’s figure is mainly associated with his landscape painting, particularly of the Valley of Mexico. His works for La Naturaleza or his archaeological plates for the National Museum are mostly unknown. For this reason we hope this study might act as an invitation to look at Velasco not only as the greatest exponent of Mexican landscaping, but also as a mediator of agreements and

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

289

dialogues, with a binary identity between science and art. When we think about his work, we must do so not from a strict separation of his “artistic training” and his “scientific vocation,” but as someone where the tasks of painting, researching, creating, and communicating alike intersected.

References Primary Sources Aguilera J (1900) Reseña de los principales trabajos del 8 Congreso Geológico Internacional. Memoria de la Secretaría de Fomento (1897 a 1900), pp 575–580 Aguilera J (1905) Informe de los trabajos ejecutados por el personal del Instituto Geológico Nacional, de Julio de 1900 á Junio de 1904. Anexo No. 36. Memoria de la Secretaría de Fomento (1901–1904), pp 285–304 Bárcena M (1874) Descripción de un crustáceo fósil del género Spheroma (Spheroma Bukarth) y reseña geológica del Valle de Ameca Jalisco. La Naturaleza III:355–361 Davis W (1906) Toast de M. Le Prof. Compte Rendu. (1907) 1:50–52 Licéaga E (1906) Toast de M. le Président du Conseil Suérieur de Salubrité. Compte Rendu. (1907) 1:48–50 Personal del Instituto. Anales del Museo Nacional (1903–1905), vol II Pimentel F (1906) Toast de M. le Président du Ayuntamiento. Compte Rendu. (1907) 1:47–48

Secondary Sources Altamirano-Piolle ME (1993) José María Velasco: Paisaje de luz, horizontes de modernidad, en Homenaje nacional, José María Velasco (1840–1912), vol II. MUNAL, México Ansón M, Hernández M, Saura P (2015) Paleoart: term and conditions (a survey among paleontologists). Current Trends Paleontol Evol:28–34 Barahona A (2009) La introducción del darwinismo en México. Teorema: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 105:201–214 Bedell B (2009) The History of the Earth: Darwin, Geology and Landscape Art. En Donald D, Munro J (Eds.). Endless forms: Charles Darwin, natural science and the visual arts. Yale University Press. p. 49–80 Bleichmar D (2016) El imperio visible: expediciones botánicas y cultura visual en la ilustración hispánica. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México Bowler P (2000) Historia Fontana de las ciencias ambientales. Trad. Elier Roberto. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México Corona-M E (2002) El pensamiento evolucionista y la paleontología de vertebrados en México (1790–1915). In: Puig-Samper M, Ruiz R, Galera A (eds) Evolucionismo y cultura: darwinismo en Europa e Iberoamérica. Junta de Extremadura: Universidad Autónoma de México, Ediciones Doce Calles, México, pp 353–365 Dackerman S (ed) (2011) Prints and the pursuit of knowledge in early modern Europe. Harvard Art Museum/Yale University Press Donald D, Munro J (eds) (2009) Endless forms: Charles Darwin, natural science and the visual arts. Yale University Press, London, pp 1–3 Esparza M (2014) La cultura científica en México: imágenes del pensamiento evolutivo en el periodo porfiriano. Doctoral dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México Esparza C (2019) La arquitectura del Instituto Geológico Nacional a través de la categoría revival (1900–1906). Bachelor dissertation, UNAM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, México

290

M. Ruiz-y-Limo´n and E. Torrens-Rojas

Fan FT (2013) Circulating material objects: the international controversy over antiquities and fossils in twentieth-century China. In: Bernard L, Gordon MO, Larry S (eds) The circulation of knowledge between Britain, India and China. Brill, Leiden, pp 209–236 Galeana P (2012) El imperio napoleónico y la monarquía en México. Siglo XXI, México Gamwell L (2020) Exploring the invisible: art, science, and the spiritual–revised and expanded edition. Princeton University Press, Princeton Gorbach F, y López-Beltrán C (2008) Saberes locales: ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacán, México Guevara R (2002) Los últimos años de la Historia natural y los primeros días de la biología en México. La práctica científica de Alfonso Herrera, Manuel María Villada y Mariano Bárcena. México: Cuadernos 35. Instituto de Biología. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Hanson NR (1958) The Logic of Discovery. J Philos 55(25):1073–1089. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 2022541 Kruspel J, Olivares (2017) The primeval world by the Austrian painter Josef Hoffmann (1831– 1904) – A cross over between art and science and its export to Mexico. Jahrbuch Der Geologischen Bundesanstalt 157:169–299 Kuhn TS (1962) La estructura de las revoluciones científicas. Trad. Solís, C. (2015) México: Fondo de Cultura Económica Larson B, Brauer F (eds) (2009) The art of evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and visual culture. University of Chicago Press/University Press of New England, Chicago Leach HS (2016) Scientific imagining: studio based research into genre images of science and how art might interpret modern Science. Doctoral dissertation, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne Lerín S (2014) Práctica científica y visual en el Porfiriato: estudio de la obra de Manuel Ortega Reyes en México, 1877. México: Llull: Revista de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas 37:80 Livingstone D (2003) Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge. University of Chicago press, Chicago, pp 37–38 Livingstone DN (2010) Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge. University of Chicago press Lynch M, Woolgar S (eds) (1990) Representation in scientific practice. MIT Press Morelos L (2014) Historia de las ciencias geológicas en México: de entidad gubernamental a instituto universitario (1886–1929). Doctoral dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México Morelos L, Moncada O (2015) Orígenes y fundación del Instituto Geológico de México. México: Asclepio 67:2 Moreno R (1984) La Polémica del darwinismo en México, siglo XIX: testimonios. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 1 Moser S (1992) The visual language of archaeology: a case study of the Neanderthals. Antiquity 66 (253):831–844 Moyssén X (1997) José María Velasco, el paisajista. Consejo Nacional para la cultura y las artes, México Ochoa C (2017) La Introducción del Evolucionismo en México a través de los libros de texto de biología: Dugés, Herrera. Ochoterena y la Revolución No Darwiniana. In: Torrens E, Barahona A (eds) La evolución biológica en los libros de textos mexicanos. UNAM, Facultad de Ciencias, Centro de Estudios Filosóficos, Políticos y Sociales Vicente Lombardo Toledano, México, pp 15–57 Olivares O (2019) Imagen y conocimiento científico en el siglo XIX: láminas y paisajes de José María Velasco. Doctoral dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, México Pauwels L (ed) (2006) Visual cultures of science: rethinking representational practices in knowledge building and science communication. University Press of New England Paz O (1942) Pinturas de José María Velasco. Hoy 290

13

Jose´ María Velasco’s Paleontological Landscapes: The Circulation and. . .

291

Perini L (2005) Visual representations and confirmation. Philos Sci 72(5):913–926. https://doi.org/ 10.1086/508949 Puig-Samper M, Ruiz R, Zamudio G (eds) (2018) Darwinismo, biología y sociedad. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México Raj K (2013) Beyond postcolonialism. . . and postpositivism: circulation and the global history of science. Isis 104(2):337–347 Ramírez F (2017) José María Velasco: pintor de paisajes. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México Rudwick MJS (1976) The emergence of a visual language for geological science 1760–1840. Hist Sci 14(3):149–195 Rudwick MJ (1992) Scenes from deep time: early pictorial representations of the prehistoric world. University of Chicago Press Ruse M (1996) “The Darwin Industry: A Guide.” Victorian Studies, vol 39, no. 2, Indiana University Press, pp 217–35 Secord J (2004) Knowledge in transit. Isis 95(4):654–672 Silva Á (1991) La paleobiología en las pinturas de José María Velasco. Sociedad Mexicana de Paleontología. Publicación especial. No. 2 Sosa I (ed) (2005) El Positivismo en México: antología, vol 140. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México Tenorio M (1996) Mexico at the world’s fairs: crafting a modern nation, vol 35. University of California Press Torrens E (2018) Los árboles de Darwin. Árboles evolutivos en la cultura visual popular. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Las Prensas de Ciencias, México Trabulse E (2012) José María Velasco: Un paisaje de la ciencia en México. Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca Turchetti S, Herran N, Boudia S (2012) Introduction: have we ever been ‘transnational’? Towards a history of science across and beyond borders. Brit J Hist Sci 45(3):319–336 Zaldivar HB (2016) Velasco y el romanticismo. https://www.academia.edu/28033784/Velasco_y_ el_romanticismo. Accessed Jan 2021

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

14

The Mexican Axolotl between Eighteenth Century Natural History to Twenty-First Century Biosciences Christian Reiß

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Animals and History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Histories of Animals in the Life Sciences and Medicine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The History of the Natural History of the Mexican Axolotl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Mexican in Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Transformation and the Question of Two Axolotls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Axolotl Becomes a Laboratory Creature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Europe to the World and Back to Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

294 296 297 301 302 304 306 308 309 309

Abstract

The Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is an amphibian species that is endemic to Mexico and is almost extinct in its natural habitat. At the same time axolotls live in aquariums all over the world as pets and laboratory animals. This chapter uses the history of this paradoxical situation to introduce animal history as a historiographical perspective on to the history of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America. It offers an overview of different approaches to writing the history of animals and shows the diverse ways in which the Mexican axolotl has been investigated in its history in science and how these ways have not just changed the understanding of the animals but also the animals themselves.

C. Reiß (*) Universität Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_10

293

294

C. Reiß

Introduction “No popular experimental animal is more misunderstood [. . .] than the axolotl” (Smith 1969: 593) the US-American herpetologist Hobart M. Smith (1912–2013) writes in 1969. Two years later, Smith and his wife Rozella (1911–1987) would publish the first volume of their “Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of Mexico” (Smith and Smith 1971), a book entirely dedicated to the literature on the Mexican axolotl. In his assessment, Smith points to the complicated taxonomical history of the species, today known as Ambystoma mexicanum. And it is a rebuke for his laboratory colleagues, who – carelessly, in Smith’s eyes – did not care too much about the precise scientific name of the species they use. Rather, they went with the vernacular name “axolotl,” which they used quite generously. The herpetologist was puzzled. How is it possible that there are so many scientific publications – the Smiths counted 2750 – on a taxonomically imprecise animal? Obviously, Smith exaggerated his case for the sake of the argument, trying to reconnect the natural history of the species Ambystoma mexicanum with the history of the Mexican axolotl as an experimental animal. His aim was to finally sort out the confusion that he had initially set out to solve in the early 1960s. In 1963, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature had decided to erase a number of species and names that were acknowledged to be synonymous. They were merged under the name that is still in use today: Ambystoma mexicanum (Smith 1969: 594–596). After the unification of the species, Smith wanted to highlight the need for a unification of the knowledge about the species and the knowledge generated with its help. Smith offered a very particular version of the history of the Mexican axolotl, emphasizing his natural history and the history of its taxonomy. This inevitably led him to point to the history of the scientific investigation of the animals and its cultural relevance. But as a taxonomist, Smith’s main focus was the history of the axolotl as a species and thus the history of a scientific representation. But there is also the potential for other histories of the axolotl. The Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is an amphibian species that lives endemically in the lakes of Xochimilco and Chalco on the southern edge of Mexico City. The two lakes are remnants of the large aquatic system that used to cover the entire Valley of Mexico, known as Lake Texcoco (Bride et al. 2008). The Valley of Mexico has a long history of human settlement and thus also of transformations induced by this settlement. Water was always crucial to this process in various ways, as a large part of the basin consisted of water. Tenochtitlan, the capitol of the Aztec empire, was located on an island in Lake Texcoco. It was destroyed in the conquest of Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) and Mexico City was erected on its ruins. In the course of the following centuries, the city literarily grew over Lake Texcoco, reducing it to a set of small lakes such as Xochimilco and Chalco, which are now only a system of canals between artificial islands, the so-called chinampas or floating gardens. These islands are used for agriculture, as a recreational area for the inhabitants of Mexico City and, as they belong to the Xochimilco World Heritage Site, as a major tourist attraction. The axolotl population suffers from the effects of this usage. The species is thus listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (Zambrano et al. 2010).

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

295

Historically, the axolotl played a significant role first in Aztec culture and later in Mexican culture. The animals were an important food source since Lake Texcoco lacked other edible aquatic animals. They were regarded as a delicacy and reports on the axolotl as food were the first European descriptions available of the axolotl (Aguilar-Moreno 2006; Tate 2010). Furthermore, in Aztec mythology, the deity Xolotl, twin brother of the central deity Quetzalcoatl, was related to the axolotl (Smith 1969; Moreno 1969). Today, the axolotl is a pet and laboratory species living all over the world, while it is almost extinct in its natural environment (Reiß 2020). The animals live in aquariums in zoos, laboratories, and private homes. Axolotls were used in research on questions of evolution, as an experimental animal in embryology and in the context of the discovery of the endocrinological function of the thyroid gland. In the course of the twentieth century, the axolotl became part of the experimental systems of (molecular) developmental biology, regeneration research, and evolutionary developmental biology (Reiß et al. 2015). In parallel, it made its way into the film theory of André Bazin (1918–1958) and into the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Giorgio Agamben (*1942), where it served as model and metaphor (Reiß 2020). But the axolotl also has a life in literature and as an icon in pop culture. The animal was immortalized in Julio Cortázar’s (1914–1984) 1968 short story “Axolotl” as a symbol of the colonial situation (Cortázar 1968), an interpretation that was subsequently taken up by postcolonial scholars (Vinas and Bartra 2011). Its popularity was a key to make it into a flagship species for its vanishing habitat in Mexico, i.e., a symbol and marketing instrument to promote the conservation of more complex and thus less representable ecosystems (Bride et al. 2008). How do you write the history of an animal? Do animals have a history? And what would be the subject of this history? Would it be the history of the entire species, of a particular population or of individual animals? Using the example of the history of the Mexican axolotl, this chapter introduces approaches of animal history and particularly the historiography of animals in science and medicine with a focus on Latin America. Using a particular approach to animal history, it focuses on the history of the material animals and their circulation between Mexico and Europe from the early modern period until the twenty-first century. It demonstrates the ways in which the scientific investigation of axolotls at different times depended on the materiality of the animals, their location, and the place of the investigation. This will show, how tightly the history of modern biomedicine is interwoven with colonial natural history and how the various histories of an animal species in time and space contribute to our understanding of this organism today. With this particular approach to the material history of animals and their agency, this text presents a new way of bringing together the natural and the cultural history of animals and of reintroducing animals as biological entities into history. The chapter will start with an introduction of the approach of animal history. It will then focus on the historiography of animals in the life science and medicine. In the central part, the history the circulation of axolotls between Mexico and Europe and within Europe will show the various ways in which animals were brought as

296

C. Reiß

specimens into natural history and how their condition as preserved specimens or living animals interacted with the respective research methods. The last part will show how the axolotl became a laboratory creature in the 1870s and how this created two different axolotls, one in Europe and one in Mexico. The investigation of the animal’s mysterious transformation by August Weismann (1834–1914) and Marie von Chauvin (1848–1921) in European laboratories is contrasted with the investigation of axolotls by José Maria Velasco (1840–1912) in Mexico.

Animals and History Summarized under the term “animal studies” or “human-animal studies,” the humanities and social sciences developed a number of critical methods to incorporate animals into their research (Kalof 2017). History is one of the fields, where the animal perspective is particularly thriving (Kalof and Resl 2007; Kean and Howell 2018). Here, the discursive role of the animal and animals is as much investigated as are animals as historical actors. Redefining nonhuman animals as actors opens up new sources and new perspectives on old sources. But it also raises more fundamental questions, namely, whether animals can be historical actors at all and what this means for their agency (McFarland and Hediger 2009). The concept of agency is a key concept in history when looking at human actors. Extending it to nonhuman actors questions the very boundary between the human and the nonhuman, at least when it comes to the traditional Western perspective (Latour 2005). This boundary is deeply informed by scientific accounts of animals as they were produced since the European scientific revolution and the subsequent rise of mechanical philosophies. Histories of Western science and medicine are an important aspect of animal histories and animal studies more broadly. At the same time, critically reflecting on the historical genesis of the Western understanding of what it means to be an animal shifts attention to non-Western cosmologies with less dichotomous and more nuanced views on the relation between human and nonhuman animals. An animal perspective thus should not only inform and be informed by approaches from the history of science and medicine. It is particularly relevant in transnational and postcolonial history of this kind. Since the European conquest of the Americas, the animals of Latin America have changed in two ways. First, the knowledge about them has changed. There had already been a profound body of knowledge in existence that preceded the European conquest. The European sciences and other forms of learned knowledge took hold of it and worked on integrating the new fauna into its existing body of knowledge. Even though it was mostly asymmetrical, this was by no means a unidirectional or one-sided process. Rather, it has to be understood as a mutual process. The European and American knowledge influenced each other. Only in hindsight this process was portrayed as a European and predominantly empirical quest for knowledge about nature (Arredondo and Bauer 2019). This conquest of knowledge that was not restricted to the Americas famously overburdened the existing systems of natural order and led to profound changes. The open taxonomy of Carl Linneaus

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

297

(1707–1778) is a colonial product, reflecting the challenges to the Eurocentric system (Müller-Wille and Charmantier 2012). But it was not just the reception and representation of nature that changed drastically after 1492. The animals themselves – and the entire nature – of the Americas changed materially due to the “Columbian Exchange” (Crosby 1972). While the consequences of the first change were indirect, the consequences of the introduction and the export of plants and animals has deeply altered the nature and the human–animal relations in Latin America (Few and Tortorici 2013). At the moment, the pre-Columbian animal history of Latin America is still very much dominated by paleontology and zooarchaeology (Vergara 2018). These approaches are often informed by scientific methodologies, thus emphasizing a nature-culture dichotomy. An animal history would help to develop a broader understanding of these events and their causes also for the cultural history of the Americas. The history of the axolotl could be related to all of these topics. In the following, the focus will be on the various appearances of the axolotl in the history of science and its gradual materialization outside of Mexico and the ways in which this created two different axolotls.

Histories of Animals in the Life Sciences and Medicine But how do you write the history of the Mexican axolotl? Animal history offers approaches to address this question on different levels. One could imagine a biography, i.e., the history of individual animals (Chrulew 2018). The other side of the continuum would be the history of the entire species, today known as Ambystoma mexicanum. In contrast to iconic animals like the counting horse Clever Hans (ca. 1895–ca. 1916) or the sea anemone Granny (1828–1887), there is no individual axolotl, whose story could be told. Likewise, the level of the entire species seems too large for a history to tell. By asking what difference the presence of axolotls in specific historical contexts made, the concept of agency helps to find a way in between. Focusing on agency opens a perspective on axolotls as actors in the scientific process. After all, animals, or more generally organisms, are the central objects of studies in the life sciences and medicine. But history of science is still very much a human-centered enterprise. From the perspective of animal history, the existing literature has two closely related problems. Many studies address animals merely in the sense of representations and not as material beings. But it is important to keep in mind their existence as biological entities and the ways in which this materiality influences their history. The other problem is that a large part of the literature with an epistemological interest is focused on the cognitive and thus human aspects of scientific knowledge production. In contrast, an important part of animal agency in the process of scientific knowledge production is happening before that stage or in between the two. Emphasizing the agency perspective helps to differentiate between the animals’ roles as representation and in practice, and to keep their biological presence in mind.

298

C. Reiß

The pool of possible examples in the history of science is not as large as it should be. With respect to the early modern period, the focus of the literature is on the European natural history of the nature of the Americas (The history of these natural histories of the Americas is mostly dealt independently (Arredondo 2019; Varey et al. 2000)). Miguel de Asúa and Roger French have published a detailed study of the “New World of Animals” (2005), where they reconstruct the ways in which early modern naturalists have tried to bring the unknown fauna of the Americas into accordance with their European view of nature. The most elaborate body of literature in the history of science and medicine dealing with animals are the studies of the histories of laboratory or experimental animals (Kirk 2018; Ankeny and Leonelli 2019). But still only part of these publications pays close attention to the process of their integration into the research process or the experimental systems more specifically (Birke 2012; Reiß 2012). Or, to put it differently, the historiographical and philosophical interests of these studies vary to a great degree and thus it is not always the history of the experimental animal(s) in the narrow sense (Ankeny and Leonelli 2019). An exception is the literature on model organisms, which pays attention especially to the way they became integrated into the laboratory as almost technical instruments and the ways in which they were used in the production of knowledge (Ankeny and Leonelli 2019). In the most famous of these histories, Robert Kohler studies the history of Drosophila melanogaster research in early genetics (Kohler 1994). The possibility to keep and also breed organisms in specialized spaces was, as Kohler argues, a prerequisite for their integration into experimental systems and distinguishes them from what he has called “found objects” (Kohler 1994, 6), i.e., animals, which are not bred in the laboratory, but regularly collected and then used for research. Among other things, the coherency of this body of literature stems from the fact that all examples are suited in the context of classical and molecular genetics of the twentieth century. Apart from Kohler’s Drosophila, there are studies on the laboratory rat Rattus norvegicus (Logan 2019) and the mouse Mus musculus (Rader 2004). Their transformation into laboratory animals was closely connected to breeding practices in the context of early genetics and the problems their supply by pet breeders brought with them. Similarly, the chicken Gallus gallus (Lopez-Paleta and Súarez-Diaz 2014), the zebra fish Danio rerio (Meunier 2012), and the African clawed toad Xenopus laevis (Gurdon and Hopwood 2000) have histories as live stock or ornamental species with the respective breeding cultures around them. The only exception is the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (Ankeny and Leonelli 2019). Here, the organism was systematically chosen with a particular research program in mind that should bring together molecular biology and neurobiology. At first sight, these studies have very little to do with the history of science and medicine in Latin America, or even outside of Europe. This is has three reasons. First, these studies focus on a small set of organisms that are today well established and therefore ignore the abundance of organisms that have been used, often

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

299

unsuccessfully, in the experimental life and biomedical sciences. Second, they rely on the laboratory as the established place of experimental research, thereby ignoring other places and forms of investigation. A third reason is their strong focus on epistemological questions of the use of particular organisms and their function as models in the life sciences. Even though there are exceptions (Gurdon and Hopwood 2000; Rader 2004), broader questions from a more culturally oriented history of science, as well as from environmental history, colonial history, and animal history are often given less attention. The legitimate interest of this literature in philosophical questions thus created a highly Eurocentric and anthropocentric history. Again, Kohler’s study of Drosophila illustrates this point very nicely. He goes into some detail in the question of the life of the flies before they enter the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) via a glass jar with ripe banana on a window sill. But instead of fully integrating the fruit flies’ journey along global routes of fruit trade, he classifies it as a “pre-history” of Drosophila and narrates it as the natural history of a commensal species. Indeed, many of the experimental animals already had some sort of relations to humans prior to their life in the lab, be it as domestic animals, pets, pests, or commensals. For an animal history of science and medicine, this broader perspective is crucial. Jim Endersby wrote his “A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology” (2007) around several central species in biological research, also including the colonial context and the broader cultural significance of many of them. Likewise, John Gurdon and Nick Hopwood trace the history of Xenopus from an amphibian in southern Africa to a pet and a living pregnancy test into a model organism (Gurdon and Hopwood 2000). Similarly, the zebra fish has a history as an aquarium pet (Meunier 2012). These examples illustrate that one of the most crucial aspects of establishing a new research organism is the ability to integrate it into the laboratory (Reiß 2012; Schlünder et al. 2014). And a perspective from animal history highlights the many aspects that need to come together for this to work. It is a process of co-construction that depends as much on research questions as it relies on research infrastructures. But it also depends on the relation between organism and environment. Thus, it is the moment when animal agency becomes most visible. While difficulties can be balanced out financially, successful laboratory animal colonies depend on a certain degree of self-sustainability. This becomes most obvious in cases where this has failed. The attempts of the German physiologist Emil Dubois-Reymond (1818–1896) to use electric fish for experimental research is a good example, also highlighting the colonial dimension of this research (Dierig 2006: 216–223). DuBois-Reymond had already received electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus) from the African river Niger in 1857. Three animals had been caught in a side arm of the river by Scottish missionaries. The wife of one of them took the living animals with her on her trip back to Europe, where they arrived alive despite a ship wreck. From Edinburgh, the anatomist John Goodsir (1814–1867) took one animal with him to Berlin to DuboisReymond. The other two followed separately. Even though the Berlin physiologist

300

C. Reiß

was able to mobilize considerable efforts to keep these animals alive, all three died within a year. Since he was not able to establish a colony of electric fish in Berlin, he tried to move his laboratory to where the fish lived. Equipped with DuBoisReymond’s entire experimental arsenal, his assistant Carl Sachs (1853–1878) traveled to the tropical grassland plain Llanos in Venezuela to study the electric eel Electrophorus electricus in its natural habitat. Despite the enormous financial and technical effort, this endeavor failed entirely. First, the rain season made work impossible. Then, catching the fish turned out to be much more difficult than expected. DuBois-Reymond and Sachs relied on a story by Alexander von Humboldt that turned out to be wrong. Finally, Sachs needed frog legs as integral parts for the measuring devices. But again, the frogs of Venezuela were very different from the frogs in Berlin. The example illustrates the obstacles of mobilizing particular animals that seems suitable for certain investigations. As much as the epistemic choice of research organism, the delicate relation between organism and environment determines successful human–animal relations in the life sciences and medicine (Reiß 2012). The challenge for a proper understanding of animals in the history of the life sciences and medicine in Latin America is to bring together the different environments (Latin American and non-LatinAmerican) and the different scientific cultures involved (i.e., natural history and experimental). Several of the studies mentioned earlier, as well as several more comprehensive accounts point to the fact that the late nineteenth century might be a crucial time to look for these histories. In this period, zoology as a merger of natural history and experimental physiology became an important field of research. A consequence was a wide variety of research organisms, as studies of particular places, academic journals, and research fields have shown (Logan 2002; Hopwood 2011). The history of the Mexican axolotl as an animal in the life sciences (and not so much medicine) points to ways how a broader history of animals in Latin American history of the life sciences and medicine might look. The axolotl is thus a representative of a whole class of experimental animals, whose history is not only misunderstood, but hardly understood at all. The following history of the Mexican axolotl is based on a study that was mainly focused on the history of axolotls as laboratory animals (Reiß 2020). It used an approach that traced the whereabouts of the axolotls with the help of publications, both scientific and nonscientific. The starting point was the comprehensive bibliography on the literature on the Mexican axolotl until 1971 published by Hobart M. and Rozella B. Smith (Smith and Smith 1971). The publications were transferred into a bibliographic database and checked and completed with the help of scientific databases. The resulting 1759 publications were then geo-tagged to the location at which the research was likely conducted. Bibliographies compiled by taxonomists are generally very comprehensive as they cover a broad array of sources, in the case of the Smiths’ bibliography on the axolotl also including literary references and hobbyist journals from the nineteenth century. But the result clearly has a certain bias, as it relies almost exclusively on published sources. A more archivally based approach with a specific focus on research on the axolotl in Mexico might have resulted in a different picture.

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

301

The History of the Natural History of the Mexican Axolotl In many ways, the beginning of these events and thus in some way also the history proper of the axolotl begins in Paris in 1864. From there, an axolotl population outside of Mexico would develop and spread all over the world, eventually becoming the foundation of the species global fame (Reiß et al. 2015; Reiß 2020) (Due to the introductory nature of this text, references to primary sources have been mostly spared. For the primary source on the axolotl, please consult Reiß et al. (2015) and Reiß (2020)). In 1864, 34 axolotls were brought from the lakes of the Valley of Mexico to the “Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation,” the new Parisian zoo run by the “Société imperiale zoologqiue d’acclimatation,” the French acclimatization society. The privately funded and well-connected “Société” combined scientific ambition, private entertainment, and economic interest under the idea of acclimatization – the idea of a limited adaptability of species to new living conditions. The members of the “Société” and especially its zoo, the “Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation” became a central hub for the colonial circulation of animals and plants in France from the 1850s onward. The axolotls came to Paris as part of one of the many shipments of the “Commission scientifique du Mexique.” This scientific expedition was part of the French intervention in Mexico between 1861 and 1867. Together with three does and three small dogs, they were presented to “Société impériale zoologique d’acclimatation” with explicit gratitude to two of its members, the French foreign minister Édouard Drouyn de Lhyus (1805–1881) and the commander in chief of the Mexican expedition Élie-Frédéric Forey (1804–1872). Six of these axolotls were given to Auguste Duméril (1812–1870), professor for herpetology and ichthyology at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle and vice president of the Société. The axolotl already had a prehistory at the Muséum. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) had sent two preserved axolotls from his voyage to the Americas to Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), professor for comparative anatomy at the Muséum. The axolotl’s form posed an interesting problem for Cuvier’s comparative anatomy that he tried to solve with the Auguste Duméril’s father and predecessor, Constante Duméril (1774–1860). The specimens had external gills and were reported to live entirely under water and otherwise strongly resembled an amphibian larva as well. But their size was rather large and Humboldt had not observed a matching adult form. Thus, the question was whether these animals were very big, unmetamorphosed larvae of an unknown amphibian or whether they were adult animals of a yet unknown group. With the help of his method of comparative anatomy, Cuvier concluded that the axolotl had to be a larva. Even though Cuvier’s conclusion carried a lot of authority, the adult form was never discovered. Apart from his anatomical investigations and the scarce information provided by Humboldt, Cuvier could only rely on what was already written on the axolotl in natural history. European naturalists knew the animals since the colonial conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century. In the typical style of eighteenth century natural history, Cuvier cites the books of Francisco Ximénez (1666–1721) (1615), Juan Nieremberg (1595–1658) (1635), and Joannes Jonstonus (1603–1675) (1649) and

302

C. Reiß

applies a philological analysis to sort out the complex histories of these works and to gain some insights into what he thought was helpful for his analysis of the axolotl. The authors copied from each other, volumes were lost, and already from Cuvier’s perspective, their descriptions were adventurous assemblages of information on the nature and habits of the animals, their uses in medicine and as food, and also myths and legends about the species (Arredondo 2019; Varey et al. 2000). Similar to Humboldt’s case (Canizares-Esguerra 2006), the knowledge gathered in these books was largely taken from indigenous informants. While in the early modern natural histories the local culture was still visible in these elements, Cuvier and the generations after him completed the separation of what they saw as nature and culture. The isolated information stripped from all human and local connections. After the first two specimens, a growing number of preserved axolotls were brought to Europe and the USA, sorted into natural history collections and investigated. Cuvier’s classification became more and more controversial. Professional traders in natural history objects played a central role in this process. The British surgeon Everard Home (1756–1832) checked Cuvier’s results on specimens he had ordered from the British adventurer and trader William Bullock (1773–1849). While Cuvier had to work with the two animals Humboldt had collected and who turned out to be two females of unknown age, Home asked Bullock to bring him mature animals and to collect information on the habits of the animals and their mode of reproduction from the locals. A summary and a comment by two Mexican authors were published in 1832 and 1833 (Cal 1832; O. J 1833). A similar case are the two animals (male and female) that the German anatomist Martin Heinrich Rathke (1793–1860) dissected in Berlin in 1829. The specimens probably were brought to Berlin by German natural history trader Ferdinand Deppe (1795–1861), who made two collecting trips to Mexico in the 1820s. The collections brought back by Deppe became a cornerstone of the Berlin natural history collection. The attendance of the dissection by the professors Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein (1780–1857), Karl Asmund Rudolphi (1771–1832), and Johannes Müller (1801–1858) demonstrate the importance of Deppe’s specimens in general and the two axolotls in particular. Based on his findings, Rathke also contested Cuvier’s result.

A Mexican in Paris When the first living axolotls came to Europe in 1864, Auguste Duméril saw the possibility to approach the problem with a different method. One of the central criteria to distinguish larvae from adult animals was their ability to reproduce, i.e., adults do whereas larvae do not reproduce. And Duméril was not just a comparative anatomist, but also head of the “collection des reptiles,” the aquarium and terrarium section of the Muséum’s own zoo, the Ménagerie. This space had been founded by Duméril’s father together with Honoré Vallée (1807–unknown), whose traveling zoo provided the starting point for the collection of reptiles, amphibians, fish, and insects and other invertebrates. Duméril took the six axolotls to this quite elaborate facility

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

303

for animal breeding and keeping, and waited, either for metamorphosis or reproduction. Here, the scarcity of information on the axolotl again becomes a problem that makes the colonial and epistemological asymmetries between Paris and Mexico visible. While Cuvier, Home, and Rathke needed information on the habits of the axolotls for their anatomical assessment of their specimens, for Duméril and Vallée, the survival of these animals depended on information on their feeding habits. Due to the lack of information from Mexico, they had to use their experiences in keeping other types of animals and complement it with the information available in the literature specifically on axolotls. The subsequent events were so surprising that they sparked immediate and broad interest in both science and popular culture all over Europe. The axolotls quickly started to reproduce and Duméril accordingly concluded that they were adult animals. A year later, however, some individuals of this first progeny transformed into an unknown amphibian species and went onto land. As a comparative anatomist, Duméril was at first mainly concerned with the anatomical and hence taxonomic relation between the larval and the transformed form – or, as he called it – the “axolotl” and the “amblystoma” condition. Apart from his own investigations, Duméril spread the news of the seemingly miraculous incident in several publications and also the animals themselves. This was possible due to the enormous reproductive success in the Ménagerie. In contrast to the Jardin, which had only opened 4 years earlier, the Ménagerie had existed for 60 years and the “collection des reptiles” since 25 years. The effect of this difference in experience and infrastructural development becomes obvious when looking at the different reproduction rates. One year after the axolotl’s arrival in Paris, the Jardin reported contentedly that, even though no reproduction took place, they lost only one animal and thus had 27 axolotls. In the same time interval, Duméril’s six animals had reproduced several times and the Ménagerie held 800 axolotls from different generations. The numbers become even more impressive if one considers that, as Duméril reported, many animals of the first hatches had died and a considerable number had been sacrificed for scientific investigations. Following the practice of exchanging surplus specimens common in natural history and the acclimatization movement, Duméril had given away about 200 animals to the Jardin and interested persons and institutions all over Europe. Alongside zoological gardens, natural history museums and university institutions, the animals were also sent to amateur enthusiasts. Until the end of the 1860s, axolotls could be found in Toulouse, Nantes, Blyth, Belfast, Naples, Milan, Kazan, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Würzburg, as well as in Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany, and in 1882, as The New York Times reported, the axolotl had been even brought from Paris back to the Americas. Duméril’s distribution of animals turned out to be extremely successful. Already in 1880, the price for axolotl was only a third of the price compared to the olm (Proteus anguineus), a European aquarium species. The quick proliferation of the axolotl across Europe was mostly due to the development of aquarium keeping as a popular pastime and the rise of zoology in Germany (Reiß 2012). The axolotl was the first non-European aquarium animal. The

304

C. Reiß

first non-European aquarium fish, the Paradise fish (Macropodus opercularis), was sent from China to Paris in 1869 by the French consul Eugene Simon (1829–1896). In this story, the acclimatization society played a central role as well as a major hub for animals from the colonies. The Paradise fish was successfully bred by Pierre Carbonnier (1829–1883), a key figure in the Société’s activities, and quickly spread over Europe, arriving in Germany 7 years later.

The Transformation and the Question of Two Axolotls But it was also the animals’ transformation that gained a lot of attention only six years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) “Origin of Species” (Reiß 2014). One of Duméril’s first recipients was the Würzburg anatomist Albert Kölliker (1817–1905; also Albert von Kölliker). Kölliker had visited Paris and brought 20 animals from the second spawn back to his institute. He had been interested in the axolotl for a longer time and the collection of his institute in Würzburg already held several axolotl preparations. Two of his students, Nikolaus Friedreich (1825–1882) and Karl Gegenbaur (1826–1903), had published an anatomical study of the axolotl’s skull using these preparations. In the 1860s, Kölliker was involved in the debates around Charles Darwin’s recently published Origin of Species. He held an alternative theory of progressive evolution. This “theory of heterogeneous generation” stood in the tradition of Karl Ernst von Baer’s (1792–1876) teleomechanism and saw the transformation of species as a law-like progressive development from what was seen as more primitive life forms to more developed ones. For Kölliker, the transformation of the axolotl was a potential proof of his theory. With the axolotls from Paris, he wanted to investigate it in more detail. While Kölliker did not follow up on his investigation of the transformation, he established a productive axolotl colony in his institute in Würzburg and acted as a multiplicator for the animals. One of the recipients of Kölliker’s axolotls was the Freiburg zoologist August Weismann. He shared a similar interest in Darwin’s theory and, in 1872, asked Kölliker for some axolotls and received five animals. The axolotl became part of Weismann’s experimental research program on evolution that he had started at the end of the 1860s (Reiß 2014). Weismann was a proponent of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and was involved in controversies with its critiques like Kölliker or the naturalist Moritz Wagner (1813–1887), who also saw the transformation of the axolotl as proof for his own alternative theory of evolution. Both for Wagner and for Kölliker, the transformation seemed to be connected to the axolotls’ transfer from the heights of the Valley of Mexico to the lowland of the Paris Basin. Weismann’s idea was thus to see whether the axolotl could be brought to transformation by literally forcing it onto land. After Weismann’s own attempts at an experimental transformation failed, it was the practical naturalist Marie von Chauvin from Freiburg, who successfully made four axolotls transform in 1874. Drawing on experiments Duméril had tried a few years before, she reconstructed what were believed to be the environmental conditions that triggered the change. In

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

305

her home, she set up an aquarium with a small shore and slowly lowered the water level. While Weismann used the experimental transformation as an argument in his refutation of the claims of Wagner, Kölliker, and others, Chauvin continued to work with the animals. It took her until 1883 to induce the transformed form to reproduce. Weismann drew the conclusion, that the transformation was not a progression but rather a retrogression, i.e., the Amblystoma had previously evolved from the axolotl in a gradual, Darwinian manner. Through a change in their environment, they had returned to the earlier stage, i.e. the axolotl living in the lakes of Mexico City. Caused by another change of the environmental conditions – the move to Paris – the old Amblystoma form that has always been hidden in the axolotl appeared again. The evolution of a new species was only ostensible. For Weismann, the controversy with Wagner and Kölliker was solved. But again, the living conditions of the axolotls in Mexico became a point of discussion. Information was still scarce and already Albert Kölliker’s presentation of the axolotl case to the Swiss natural history society became a place of wild speculation about the conditions there. The Genevan naturalist Henri de Sausurre (1829–1905) recollected his memories from his visit to Mexico and the attendants tried to collectively imagine the shores of lakes in the Valley of Mexico. Likewise, Weismann speculated on the conditions in the axolotls’ natural habitat. He acquired information from the German traveler Alexander von Frantzius (1821–1877), who had previously visited Mexico. From all this information, he reconstructed a hypothetical habitat that fit his own theory of retrogression. In Mexico, scientists had only started to publish on the axolotl at the end of the 1860s. The naturalist Alfredo Dugès (1826–1910) put together a catalog of the vertebrate animals of the Mexican republic in 1869 (Dugès 1869). A paper on a new species of axolotl (Dugès 1870) he published a year later, highlighted the increasing discrepancies between axolotls in Mexico and the European axolotl populations, as well as between the different sciences of the axolotl. Dugés reported on a new species of axolotl from the lake Pátzcuaro in the region Michoacán. To honor Duméril’s work with the axolotls in Paris, he named the new species Siredon Dumerilii. While for Dugès and in Mexico in general, the term axolotl – or, as he wrote in the Spanish spelling “ajolote” – covered a broad variety of amphibian larvae, in Europe, axolotl was only used for Siredon pisciformis, the species today known as Ambystoma mexicanum. While Dugès was mapping the Mexican fauna and studying animals in their local habitats, the European axolotls were about to adapt to a new habitat, the aquarium and the laboratory. And they were part of controversy about the mechanism of species transformation. These differences should be the source of much of the misconceptions about the axolotl and soon spark another controversy. In 1880, the Mexican painter and naturalist José Maria Velasco (1840–1912) had Weismann’s paper on the axolotl translated into Spanish and published in “La Naturaleza,” the journal of the “Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural”, the Mexican natural history society (Weismann 1880). The translation was made from an English translation published in the journal “Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution.” Alongside the Spanish translation, Velasco published his own findings

306

C. Reiß

on the axolotl and Weismann’s view on the transformation (▶ Chap. 12, “Between History of Art and History of Science,” this volume; Sandoval 2021). In Velasco’s critique of Weismann, the two axolotls in Mexican lakes and in European aquariums as well as the two related epistemologies become apparent. For Velasco, one of the central problems of Weismann’s position is his lack of knowledge of the situation in the animals’ natural habitat. Furthermore, he criticized the artificial conditions of Chauvin’s experiment that made it impossible to draw conclusions from it about natural reproduction. While Velasco contributed to the science of the axolotl, he also aimed at reclaiming the animal for Mexico by reconnecting it to its natural habitat. Weismann remained indifferent to Velasco’s critique. In the English translation of his “Studien zur Descendenz-Theorie,” published in 1882, he took up much of the information Velasco had brought forward in his text. A year later, the German zoologist Johann Wilhelm Spengel (1852–1921) published a German summary on Velasco’s paper in the review journal “Biologisches Centralblatt” (Spengel 1883). Weismann ignored Velasco’s central arguments. This was not least due to the different interests of the two. Weismann was not so much interested in the axolotl, but in the mechanism of evolution. For him, the case was closed when he came up with retrogression as an explanation for the mysterious transformation. In contrast, Velasco was predominantly interested in the axolotl and its life in Mexico. This reflected the broader situation in zoology. In the 1880s, the axolotl was already naturalized in the laboratory. The process of becoming a laboratory animal went hand in hand with the dissociation of the axolotl from its home in Mexico. As Weismann’s example has shown, zoologists in Europe were becoming less and less interested in the species’ life in Mexico. The European axolotl population became separated from the Mexican one, both culturally and biologically. The appropriation of the axolotl by European science and culture was one of the reasons for Velasco’s involvement in the topic, an attempt to reclaim this part of Mexican nature. The axolotl remained a symbol in this respect (Vila Riquelme 2001). Due to the division between field and laboratory biology that would continuously grow through the coming decades, it took until the end of the twentieth century to bring the approaches and perspectives back together (Voss and Shaffer 2000). With the decline of the axolotl population in Xochimilco, this integrated approach continuously gains importance (Voss et al. 2015).

The Axolotl Becomes a Laboratory Creature Soon after making his point, Weismann lost interest in the axolotl. Experimental zoology was only in its early stage and it would take until the turn of the century for zoologists to build (experimental) research programs on specific organisms. Representative for zoology in the second half of the nineteenth century, Weismann’s research style was characterized by a multitude of animals, which would be investigated for a comparably short period (Reiß 2014). Similar to Kölliker, he kept a productive axolotl colony in his Freiburg institute. From there, his student Valentin

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

307

Haecker (1864–1927) took animals first to Stuttgart, where he became professor in 1900 and then, in 1909 to Halle, where he started his own research program on axolotl heredity and psychology. It is possible, to trace a direct transmission of axolotls from Duméril in Paris (1864) via Kölliker in Würzburg (1867) to Weismann in Freiburg (1872) and then to Haecker in Stuttgart (1900) and in Halle (1909). Another, though more indirect, line of transmission goes from Kölliker in Würzburg, where his student Karl Gegenbaur had worked on skull development in axolotl, to Heidelberg, where Gegenbaur became professor in 1873. In Heidelberg, Gegenbaur’s student and assistant Friedrich Maurer (1859–1936) published several papers on amphibian development, for which he used large numbers of axolotls. Maurer became professor for anatomy in Jena in 1901. Together with Julius Schaxel (1887–1943), one of his former students, he was member of the Jena aquarium club Wasserrose e.V. 1913 Jena. In 1918, Schaxel would start an experimental research program on axolotl regeneration. These are just two exemplary ways in which the axolotls spread over Europe not only as aquarium pets but also as research animals. Due to their availability, they became a popular supplement of studies in descriptive embryology and comparative anatomy, where they would complement local amphibian species or even stand in for the entire amphibian class. Instead of a research program narrowly built on the axolotls as a research organism, the animals were used whenever there was the need for an easily available research organism and then abandoned again for another one. When embryology became experimental in the 1880s, axolotls were among the animals that were used in the laboratories. In Würzburg, the zoologist Karl Gottfried Semper (1832–1893), who had received his axolotls from Kölliker, developed a method to regularly procure axolotl eggs for embryological studies. The German embryologist Dietrich Barfurth (1849–1927), working in Dorpat, praised the axolotl as a supplement for marine invertebrates like the sea urchin larva that were heavily used in experimental embryology. It soon became clear, that the axolotl’s irregular transformation was no evolutionary event, but the singular exception from a state termed paedomorphosis or neoteny and thus an ordinary metamorphosis. It took until the beginning of the twentieth century to receive considerable attention again. In 1913, the Prague physiologist Edward Babák (1873–1926) published a paper on the relation between amphibian metamorphosis and internal secretion, based on the experimental results of one of his students, Vilem Laufberger (1890–1986). Laufberger had used several amphibian species to investigate the influence of thyroid gland on their metamorphosis and was finally able, by using axolotls, to demonstrate an accelerating effect and to conclude that it must be a substance in the thyroid gland that produces this effect. The choice of the axolotl was again rather arbitrary, since the animals were already bred in Babák’s institute since the turn of the twentieth century. Ignorant of Laufberger’s and Babák’s work, Julian Huxley (1887–1975) would famously redo the experiments and come to the same results a few years later. While Babák speculated in his paper on the possibilities to use the newly found substance and other hormones to produce new amphibian forms as an experimental approach to phylogenetic research, Huxley used his findings for wide-ranging, even utopian

308

C. Reiß

speculations on the consequences of his findings for mankind. These were taken up by newspapers and caused him considerable trouble in the scientific community. The axolotl developed into one of the central animals in research on what would later become the hormone thyroxine, isolated for the first time in 1914 and characterized and synthesized in 1926. Here, the axolotl’s sensitivity to thyroxine was utilized to, e.g., measure the metabolic distribution and decomposition of thyroxine and to standardize thyroxine dosages. Furthermore, the axolotl was used in research on the products of other hormonal glands, e.g., the pituitary gland. The endocrinological and embryological experimental cultures of the axolotl eventually met again, when Hermann Voss in 1935 found out that it is possible to obtain large quantities of unfertilized axolotl eggs for embryological research by treating female animals with a substance from the pituitary gland.

From Europe to the World and Back to Mexico The European axolotl population grew considerably until the beginning of the twentieth century and then began to spread globally. In Mexico, the growth of Mexico City increased and the decline of the natural habitat of the axolotl began (Wanderer 2018). Until 1933, Mexican investigations of the axolotl were mostly concerned with their life in nature, and were part of broader faunistic or biogeographical studies (e.g., Seurat 1900). Occasionally, the transformation and its causes were investigated (Herrera 1900). One early exception is a study by the physician Carlos Heinemann from Veracruz, who published a comparative anatomy of the retina in amphibians, reptilians, birds, and fish in German in a German journal for microscopical anatomy (Heinemann 1877). Very much like his colleagues in Europe, Heinemann was not at all interested in axolotls in nature. Rather, the axolotls were sent to him from Mexico City to Veracruz. It was only with the globalization of the modern biomedical sciences that the laboratory axolotl returned to Mexico. Like many other laboratory animals, especially the classic model organisms such as mouse of fruit fly (Ankeny and Leonelli 2019), a sophisticated infrastructure of breeding centers, scientific and technical literature, and databases has developed around the axolotl (Voss et al. 2009). Since 2005, the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center (AGSC) is at the University of Kentucky and welcomes the visitors of its website with the explicit warning: “ASGC does not sell pets” (https://ambystoma.uky.edu/genetic-stock-center/ (Accessed 20 Oct 2020)). From here, developmental biologists, regeneration researchers, and other scientists all over the world can order genetically well-characterized animals for their investigations. Since 2006, there are also transgenic axolotls available, which glow green due to the insertion of the DNA for the green fluorescent protein (Sobkow et al. 2006). And since 2018, the entire genome of the axolotl has been sequenced (Nowoshilow et al. 2018). It was the largest genome that has been sequenced so far. The animals and resources are also used by researchers in Mexico, so that a very different axolotl returned to its home. The difference is cultural

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

309

(Wanderer 2018), but there is evidence that also the animals themselves have diverged considerably (Voss et al. 2015).

Conclusion The axolotl exists in countless material and symbolic forms all over the world. This chapter has focused on the ways in which the species has continuously materialized in European natural history and the colonial relations that were the basis of this. It emphasized the materiality of animals, their biological existence, and their agency. This approach draws attention to the networks of collectors, the often ephemeral information on the living conditions of the animals collected and the changes induced by their different materializations. Especially Velasco’s case shows the prerequisites and the complications of the asymmetry. His work has been ignored for a long time, but the difference between the axolotls in Xochimilco and the European population comes back into focus today. The Mexican and the European axolotl are being brought back together for their mutual benefit. Taking into account this history sheds light on the situation in the nineteenth century. The developments since then might point to new ways for the conservation of the species and the ecosystem. The history of the two populations helps to differentiate the knowledge produced with the help of the axolotl in the laboratory and even leads to new research questions. Writing the history of animals in the life sciences and medicine of Latin America not only contributes to a critical perspective on the colonial history of the Americas and their legacy in the history of science and medicine, it also helps to understand the environmental history of the Americas and informs the sciences that are still working with these animals.

References Aguilar-Moreno M (2006) Handbook to life in the Aztec world. Facts on File, New York Ankeny RA, Leonelli S (2019) Chapter 9: Organisms in experimental research. In: Dietrich M et al (eds) Handbook of the historiography of biology, historiographies of science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319901183. Accessed 26 Oct 2018 Arredondo JM (2019) The method of Francisco Hernández. In: Arredondo JM, Bauer R (eds) Translating nature cross-cultural histories of early modern science. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp 45–69. https://www.academia.edu/38206861/The_Method_of_ Francisco_Hern%C3%A1ndez. Accessed 28 Sept 2020 Arredondo JM, Bauer R (eds) (2019) Translating nature. Cross-cultural histories of early modern science. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia Asúa M, French R (2005) A new world of animals: early modern Europeans on the creatures of Iberian America. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot Birke L (2012) Animal bodies in the production of scientific knowledge. Model Med Body Soc 18: 156–178 Bride IG et al (2008) Flying an amphibian flagship: conservation of the axolotl Ambystoma mexicanum through nature tourism at Lake Xochimilco, Mexico. Int Zoo Yearb 42:116–124 Cal A (1832) Bibliografia. Registro trimestre o Coleccion de Memorias de historia, literatura, ciencias y artes 1:359–362

310

C. Reiß

Canizares-Esguerra J (2006) Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Chrulew M (2018) Living, biting monitors, a morose howler and other infamous animals: animal biographies in ethology and zoo biology. In: Krebber A, Roscher M (eds) Animal biography: re-framing animal lives, Palgrave studies in animals and literature. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 19–40. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98288-5_2. Accessed 20 Oct 2020 Cortázar J (1968) Blow-up and other stories. Collier, New York Crosby AW (1972) The Columbian exchange. Greenwood Press, Westport Dierig S (2006) Wissenschaft in der Maschinenstadt. Emil Du Bois-Reymond und seine Laboratorien in Berlin. Wallstein, Göttingen Dugès A (1869) Catálogo de animales vertebrados observados en la república mexicana. La Naturaleza 1:137–145 Dugès A (1870) Una neuva especie de ajolote de la Laguna de Pátzcuaro. La Naturaleza 1:241–244 Endersby J (2007) A Guinea Pig’s history of biology. William Heinemann, London Few M, Tortorici Z (eds) (2013) Centering animals in Latin American history. Duke University Press, Durham Gurdon JB, Hopwood N (2000) The introduction of Xenopus laevis into developmental biology: of empire, pregnancy testing and ribosomal genes. Int J Dev Biol 46:49–63 Heinemann C (1877) Beiträge zur Anatomie der Retina. Arch Mikrosk Anat 14:409–441 Herrera AL (1900) El ajolote sufre la metamorfosis general en la clase de los batracios por aumento de nutricio y no por cambio de medio. La Naturaleza 3:367–376 Hopwood N (2011) Approaches and species in the history of vertebrate embryology. In: Pelegrini FJ (ed) Vertebrate embryogenesis: embryological, cellular and genetic methods. Humana Press, New York, pp 1–20 Kalof L (2017) The Oxford handbook of animal studies. Oxford University Press, Oxford Kalof L, Resl B (eds) (2007) A cultural history of animals. Berg, Oxford et al Kean H, Howell P (eds) (2018) Routledge companion to animal-human history, 1st edn. Routledge, London/New York Kirk RGW (2018) Animals in science: laboratory life from the experimental animal to the model organism. In: Kean H, Howell P (eds) Routledge companion to animal-human history, 1st edn. Routledge, London/New York, pp 121–146 Kohler RE (1994) Lords of the fly. Drosophila genetics and the experimental life. University of Chicago Press, Chicago et al Latour B (2005) Reassembling the social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory Oxford University Press, Oxford et al Logan CA (2002) Before there were standards: the role of test animals in the production of empirical generality in physiology. J Hist Biol 35:329–363 Logan CA (2019) Commercial rodents in America: standard animals, model animals, and biological diversity. Brain Behav Evol 93:70–81 Lopez-Paleta M, Súarez-Diaz E (2014) The feathered one in the flock of models: Gallus gallus as a model organism for developmental biology. Ludus Vitalis 22:71–89 McFarland SE, Hediger R (eds) (2009) Animals and agency: an interdisciplinary exploration. Brill, Leiden/Boston Meunier R (2012) Stages in the development of a model organism as a platform for mechanistic models in developmental biology: zebrafish, 1970–2000. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43: 522–531 Moreno R (1969) El axolotl Estudios de cultura. Nahuatl 8:157–173 Müller-Wille S, Charmantier I (2012) Natural history and information overload: the case of Linnaeus. Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 43:4–15 Nowoshilow S et al (2018) The axolotl genome and the evolution of key tissue formation regulators. Nature 554:50–55

14

Writing the History of Animals in Latin America

311

O. J (1833) Sobre el axolote o Proteus mexicanus. Registro trimestre o Coleccion de Memorias de historia, literatura, ciencias y artes 2:35–38 Rader KA (2004) Making mice. Standardizing animals for American biomedical research, 1900–1955. Princeton University Press, Princeton Reiß C (2012) Gateway, instrument, environment: the aquarium as a hybrid space between animal fancying and experimental zoology. NTM Z Gesch Wiss Tech Med 24:309–336 Reiß C (2014) August Weismanns frühe Evolutionsforschung: Experiment und Theorie im künstlichen Naturraum. Rudolstädter naturhistorische Schriften 20:11–29 Reiß C (2020) Der Axolotl. Ein Labortier im Heimaquarium, 1864–1914. Wallstein, Göttingen Reiß C et al (2015) The history of the oldest self-sustaining laboratory animal: 150 years of axolotl research. J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol 324:393–404 Sandoval O (2021) The scientific images of the Axolotl by José María Velasco and their role in nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking. Nuncius 36(1):143–166. https://doi.org/10.1163/ 18253911-bja10005 Schlünder M et al (2014) Becoming bone sheep. Configurations 22:263–294 Seurat LG (1900) Sobre la fauna de los lagos y lagunas del valle de Mexico. La Naturaleza 3:403–406 Smith HM (1969) The Mexican axolotl: some misconceptions and problems. Bioscience 19:593–615 Smith HM, Smith RB (1971) Synopsis of the Herpetofauna of Mexico, Vol. 1: analysis of literature on the Mexican axolotl. Lundberg, Augusta Sobkow L et al (2006) A germline GFP transgenic axolotl and its use to track cell fate: dual origin of the fin mesenchyme during development and the fate of blood cells during regeneration. Dev Biol 290:386–397 Spengel JW (1883) Beobachtungen über das Leben des Ajolotl in Mexico. Biologisches Centralblatt 2:80–83 Tate CE (2010) The axolotl as food and symbol in the basin of Mexico, from 1200 BC to today. In: Staller JE, Carrasco M (eds) Pre-Columbian foodways. Springer, New York, pp 511–533 Varey S et al (eds) (2000) Searching for the secrets of nature: the life and works of Dr. Stanford University Press, Stanford, Francisco Hernández Vergara G (2018) Animals in Latin American history. In: Oxford research encyclopedia of Latin American history. https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/ 9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-436. Accessed 16 Jun 2021 Vila Riquelme C (2001) Ideologia de la conquista en América Latina: entre el axolotl y el ornitorrinco. Nobel, Oviedo Vinas GV, Bartra R (2011) Axolotiada: Vida y Mito de un anfibio mexicano/life and myth of the Mexican amphibian. Fondo de Cultura Economica USA, México Voss SR, Shaffer HB (2000) Evolutionary genetics of metamorphic failure using wild-caughtvs. laboratory axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum). Mol Ecol 9:1401–1407 Voss SR et al (2009) Ambystoma mexicanum, the axolotl: a versatile amphibian model for regeneration, development, and evolution studies. Cold Spring Harb Protoc 2009 Voss SR et al (2015) A tale of two axolotls. Bioscience 65:1134–1140 Wanderer E (2018) The axolotl in global circuits of knowledge production: producing multispecies potentiality. Cult Anthropol 33:650–679 Weismann A (1880) Transformación del ajolote mexicano en Amblistoma por el Senor Doctor Augusto Weismann. Traducido del Annual Report Smithsonian Inst., 1877, por el Sr. Miguel Perez. La Naturaleza 5: 31–42, 43–57 Zambrano L et al (2010) Ambystoma mexicanum, IUCN red list of threatened species. Version 2013.1. http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/1095/0. Accessed 17 Sept 2013

Part IV Agriculture

Agriculture As Connectivity How to Write the History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean

15

Leida Fernandez-Prieto

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Knowledge Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Capitalism, Technology, and Commodities Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Environmental Histories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion: Placing Latin America and the Caribbean in the History of Agricultural Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

316 317 324 328 333 334

Abstract

This chapter underscores the centrality of agriculture as a connectivity element of inquiry for Latin American and Caribbean societies, whose legacies of colonialism still survive today. To do that, this study brings leading concepts and debates to complicate chronologies, geographies, and scales in new writings on the agricultural sciences that go beyond the analytical frameworks of center and periphery, and of the region as the passive recipient of Western science and technology. This is to identify promising niches and investigative lines for writing future histories of agricultural sciences in the region that are interconnected, multidirectional, and transversal. The ample and ambitious literature has been considered to argue that similar methodological concerns go through the respective “disciplinary bubbles,” especially in studies covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The departure point is the intersection of science and knowledge, capitalism, technology, commodity histories, and the environment. These are all essential axes in the history of agriculture, and insufficiently explored for

L. Fernandez-Prieto (*) Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_13

315

316

L. Fernandez-Prieto

the history of science in the region. The chapter closes with some proposals for new, interlinked writings on the history of agricultural science as an expanding field of study within the Life Sciences of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Introduction In his canonical essay Traveling Theory, Edward Said (2000) considered the historiographical tradition to explore the reception of ideas, perspectives, and concepts in different academic contexts. The argument is valid in observing tensions, meetings, and adjustments between historiographical traditions and recent debates in Latin American and Caribbean histories of agricultural science. One principal historiographical challenge is the inclusion of all Latin America and the Caribbean – an area that is vast, heterogeneous, and complex, and a setting of different empires, colonial experiences, populations, languages, chronologies, and temporalities – in integrative studies or synthesizing compilations on the history of science in the region. In the same way, the Greater Antilles is approached through an incremental sum of national histories and fragmented empires, with a predominance of regional and insular studies, as, for example, with the West Indies. In search of interconnected histories, the Duke University journal Small Axe (2013, 2014, 2016) grouped studies of the Caribbean in important monographs around transversal axes encompassing Latin America. Jorge Giovanetti suggested writing connected histories on the basis of a regional conscience and the practice of multidisciplinary and cross-border research (in geographical and disciplinary terms). Ada Ferrer proposed delving deeper into the national sphere and abandoning area studies, to uncover forms in which societies interacted, shared, and were shaped by one another. Ernesto Bassi (2017) emphasized the sea’s articulating and evermetaphorical role in the Greater Antilles, which was tied to global, Atlantic, and transnational processes. Likewise, Lara Putnam proposed exploring links in the Caribbean between research into microhistories, “in conversation” with a wider Atlantic framework and macro-level questions. Agriculture is paradigmatic as an element of cohesion in writing transversal, cross-border, and multidirectional histories of the sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean. Nevertheless, it has received scant attention within historiography. Dependence theory shaped and contributed the most original ideas conceived by, for, and from the region, with highly influential essays written on the causes of underdevelopment or the North-South power asymmetry, so pertinent today to some academic approaches. Students of this school agree this was the intellectual response to developmental and industrializing models promoted by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Paradoxically it was from that institution that the Argentine economist Raúl Prébisch exposed his powerful theory on centers and peripheries, two terms that recur today and still foment vigorous debate in historiography on the Global South. At the same time regional nation-states faced similar modernization processes, with pervasive ideas on the supposed

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

317

immobilism and backwardness of colonial and postcolonial farming systems, or the region as a passive receiver of Western, scientific, and technological innovation. In recent decades, the history of Latin American and Caribbean colonial science has responded critically to the thesis of the exceptionalism of Western science and of world systems to the diffusionist models of modernization and development (Medina et al. 2014). Studies have relocated and underlined the contribution of Latin America and the Caribbean in the cartography of global science. They have highlighted other forms of knowledge produced in the region, questioning the mythical picture of backward societies that were destinations and passive consumers of Western, scientific, and technological knowledge. However, the histories of agricultural science are unequal and fragmented, within more general studies. Historians usually follow established chronologies on the progressive evolution, professionalization, and institutionalization of agricultural sciences in the late nineteenth century, and emphasize the debt incurred with other scientific disciplines, like botany and chemistry. In their place, this chapter proposes transcending, though not ignoring, the periodic divisions and chronologies that favor dialogue with certain, current history-writing trends. This is to identify promising niches and investigative lines for writing future histories of agricultural sciences in the region that are interconnected, multidirectional, and transversal. The ample literature discussed here illustrates key concepts, debates, and notions for rethinking and writing an interconnected history of the sciences of Latin American and Caribbean agriculture, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The departure point is the intersection of science and knowledge, capitalism, commodity histories, and the environment. These are all essential axes in the history of agriculture, and insufficiently explored for the history of science in the region. Thus, the first section places Latin America and the Caribbean within updated studies on knowledge production and circulation, with a discussion of epistemic concepts and questions within a historiographical current characterized by constant opposition to foreign influences. At the same time, one would emphatically argue that writing the history of agricultural science faces common questions on the production of scientific knowledge as well as its agency, places of production and travel modes. These are not always considered in the so-called applied sciences. The second section considers classical and new approaches, to highlight the connections between science, knowledge, technology, and capitalism, including histories of commodities. A third section evaluates the contribution of environmental historiography to the history of agricultural sciences. The chapter closes with some proposals for new, interlinked writings on the history of agricultural science in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Knowledge Studies The Franco-American scientists André and Jean Mayer (1975) defined agriculture as the first science, the mother of all sciences, whose contribution was key to the progress of human life. André Mayer was the founding father of the UN Food and

318

L. Fernandez-Prieto

Agriculture Organization (FAO). His son, Jean Mayer, was professor of nutrition at Harvard University and president of Tufts University. Both these nutrition physiologists believed the success or failure of science in its entirety would be judged by the success or failure, before the end of the twentieth century, of global food and agricultural development programs. However, the Mayers regretted that studies on agriculture were an “insular empire,” distinct from academic and intellectual life and the prisoner of scientists’ lack of interest in most parts of the world. The somber panorama depicted by the Mayers had particular connotations at the heart of academia in Latin America and the Caribbean, whose societies were strongly interwoven with developments in agriculture. Dependency theorists questioned the Eurocentric position of a linear progression from traditional farming societies to modern, industrial societies propelled by developmental and industrializing models. The critical outlook was maintained around epistemic questions in order to decenter academic knowledge, from post-colonial, then decolonial perspectives. A figure of reference here was Aníbal Quijano, who established the concept of coloniality of knowledge associated with the coloniality of power, consisting in a global hierarchization of knowledge where the West represented real and relevant knowledge, while the Rest was inferiorized and catalogued as prescientific, or superstition (Lander 2000). The principal contribution of the studies was in recognizing other forms of knowledge in the region. Epistemic concerns with writing history uncontaminated by outside categorizations is at the heart of academic debates emanating from the Global South. An emphatic quest for “autochthonous” conceptual thinking, however, risks discrediting, discarding, and overlooking analytical frameworks that would allow the elaboration of histories that are integrative, transversal, comparative, and broader than the center-periphery framework. This is in addition to a habitual ignorance of Hispanic historiography when histories are written, especially though not uniquely among Anglo-American academics. So, how should one overcome the binaries when writing a history of science centered on agriculture, when it is often forgotten in Latin American and Caribbean approaches? A useful line of research consists in the new studies that take an interest in knowledge production and practices on different scales (global, regional, local, imperial, national). Latin America and the Caribbean participated in creating and applying scientific solutions to local problems of agriculture, and these parts of the global archipelago of knowledge their singularities. Yet analyses are limited, insufficient, and fragmented from these methodological approximations. Likewise, historians of science usually distinguish between formal knowledge, produced in the so-called pure sciences, and field sciences, which are understood to be more applied and informal than theoretical sciences, as in the case of agriculture. New perspectives reconsider this division, because writing the history of the science of agriculture faces problems and questions common to the production of scientific knowledge generally. These include asking: how, when, and by whom is knowledge produced, how does it travel between and through national and international frontiers, and which are its validation mechanisms and scientific authorities or the tensions between expert and vernacular knowledge? Similarly, studying the

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

319

processes that constitute knowledge may illustrate agriculture’s contribution to other scientific disciplines. Decentering the history of science is indebted to the concept of situated knowledge, which emphasizes the role of local characteristics dependent on multiple (environmental, cultural, institutional, etc..) factors in knowledge production. The concept changed the manner in which scientific production was understood, through its criticism of the neutrality and objectivity of Western science as essential conditions of the production of a universal, epistemically superior knowledge. Studies to provincialize knowledge produced in traditional knowledge centers as local processes, banished the vision of peripheral societies as passive receptors of Western scientific and technological knowledge, as they did the nationalist outlook within local histories (Saldaña 2006). The so-called local turn was particularly fruitful in the historiography of science in Latin America and the Caribbean. From this perspective, local elements were conceived to be cultural practices fitting into complex power relationships and science histories epistemically located in Latin America and the Caribbean. Other historians formulate new notions to explore the co-production of knowledge between empires and colonies. Stuart McCook (2002, 2019) suggested the concept of “creole science“to discuss metropolitan development strategies and those of local élites throughout the nineteenth century, when pressure on ecosystems increased and agricultural problems led to new scientific disciplines. Following this idea, David Edgerton (2017) coined the term “creole technologies” to insist on technology use, which allowed the periphery to be inserted into studies on knowledge production missing in historiography based on the notion that these were backward, traditional societies bereft of technological innovations. New histories of agricultural science must be written based on such ideas as “creole knowledge“and/or “creole expertise,” to better capture the multiplicity of knowledge and agents intervening in knowledge production in agriculture. At the same time, keeping the meaning of creole as something different, as highlighted by McCook and Edgerton, to examine the problem of hybridity, in suggesting fixity in interactions between Western knowledge systems, and the ways natives and other agents (slaves, peasants, and agronomists, among others) accessed knowledge, restricts the ability to see the dynamic, consensual, and negotiated character of processes of knowledge co-production, in colonial and postcolonial societies. In fact, there is no study yet on the ways in which the beliefs, knowhow, and local practices of American Indians, slaves, farmers, peasants, and planters interacted to create comparative, transversal, and horizontal studies of the history of agricultural science in Latin America and the Caribbean. The inclusion in studies of new, subaltern agents within the global geography of knowledge sheds light on the roles played by natives, enslaved Africans and their descendants, and peasant populations in the region. For example, Pablo Gómez (2017) illustrated the role played by black religious practitioners in creating an experiential and natural knowledge based on the human body, which competed with Western knowledge systems within the seventeenth century Caribbean, through an intersection of science and medicine. Similarly, Londa Shiebinger (2017) pointed out how the complex

320

L. Fernandez-Prieto

experiential medical world of the Atlantic ignored, discredited, or kept secret the previous knowledge of enslaved Africans in the eighteenth century British and French Caribbean. The participation of slaves, as producers of silenced knowledge, has benefited from a geographical and ethnobotanical shift inside Latin American and Caribbean studies. Judith Carney (2002) discussed the place of the African rice variety and the contribution of the knowledge of African slave women in helping planters create large-scale plantations in the southern United States. Essays underline the varied legacy of traditional knowledge of plants by Africans in establishing their cultivation, and their medicinal and religious use in Latin America and the Caribbean. Other studies of science see local subjects as elements that enriched Europe not just with their physical efforts but also their knowledge of plants, animals, persons, and climate in the Greater Antilles and Brazil. Daniel Rood (2016, 2017) offers the notion of knowledge management as a new, analytical category. This consists in management of racial work by owners and other colonial actors, whereby enslaved persons and other subordinates were placed at the center of the colonial project when forced to perform the scientific work of bioprospecting, to find valuable information on medicinal flora, or cartography and agronomy that also depended on the knowledge and work of native or enslaved peoples. Gabriela Soto Laveaga (2009, 2018) recovers the voice and practices of Mexican peasants farming the forest yam from the 1950s to the 1980s as a pillar of discoveries leading to the contraceptive pill, which big pharmaceutical firms have sold on a massive scale. One problem with science histories regarding the role of subaltern agents in producing knowledge is in the priority given to the contribution of native knowledge over other bodies or agents of local knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean. The contribution of other essential actors in agricultural science in the region – farmers, planters, officials, agronomists and scientists – continues to receive little attention when it is not absent, in Latin American and Caribbean historiography. Likewise the new history of science guides one’s attention toward those places where knowledge is produced, and how it travels through chains of experts, texts, images, objects, and scientific networks. Studies argue that scientific knowledge and its practices are local, and determined by a complex process of co-production and negotiation between knowledge systems, actors, and institutional and private sources of finance. This breaks the traditional center-periphery dichotomy. Following a global shift, for example, James Delbourgo (2019) formulates the notion of a “knowing world,“formed by multiple scientific cultures and a long, historical memory, in order to tie narrative and geography into scientific histories that do not begin in Western Europe nor end in the United States. The author highlights the role of transatlantic trade as a moment favoring the circulation of natural knowledge and helping create scientific places in large cities. This has yet to be examined in studies on the Hispanic, black Atlantic sphere. Agricultural sciences and affiliated areas are likewise the objects of analysis in recent compilations on Latin America and the Caribbean. Following the thesis that skills and knowledge were the result of complex processes of negotiation between

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

321

multiple actors, Fernandez-Prieto (2013, 2015) proposes the idea of agricultural knowledge “under construction,” to suggest its constant transformation. In the realm of field sciences, its narratives have given particular attention to material and anthropological shifts and followed objects, plants, animals, texts, and images as “immutable, mobile artefacts” or a body of stable practices aiding the movement of knowledge. Other essays document how sugar farming manuals and technologies forged alliances and exchanges between East and West, and inside the Caribbean. These approaches open new horizons and revisions for global, comparative studies that connect Latin America and the Caribbean with other parts of the world. For example, some studies highlight the biological revolution produced and led by experimental stations in Barbados and Java, through hybrid cane varieties that widely circulated through the tropics and revitalized the sugarcane industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following hybrids is an ideal study for observing how knowledge travels between and through national and imperial frontiers, as it does horizontally or vertically. In the same way future studies would do well to stress the place of experimental stations as production places in the discovery of sugarcane hybrids, the local nature of knowledge, and tensions and negotiations between expert and vernacular knowledge. Robert E. Kohler (2011), highlighted the intrinsically polycentric nature of field sciences, to decenter studies on science and empire. His concepts of labscapes and residential science distinguish field science practices from those of laboratories, while highlighting the scientist’s ethnographical outlook as observer in situ in a process of knowledge construction. The two notions are particularly fertile for exploring the singularities of knowledge production in situated ecologies, as with tropical agriculture in colonial and postcolonial societies. Kohler illustrates certain examples of analysis of new production sites (cafés, museums, and gardens), whose practices blur the dividing lines between the laboratory and the field, and expert and vernacular knowledge. He sees field sciences as marked by mixed practices where roles can be documented for scientific careers that were both expert and vernacular, for being service sciences. In that direction, McCook studied the science produced by “working landscapes” as interconnected objects of analysis between persons, plants, and animals, and differentiated field practice from knowledge obtained from virgin spaces without human presence. These perspectives shed light on central issues of the history of agricultural science to stress the porosity of frontiers between processes of knowledge construction and negotiation among experts and scientists. For example, sugar historians have better dealt with the expert’s role in transmitting knowledge. Humberto García (2010) coined the term Sugar Tramp to identify a new class of professionals (engineers, chemists, and so on) trained at the University of Louisiana, who circulated across the Caribbean. Likewise García follows the formative trajectory of the expert Noel Deerr, considered the foremost historian of sugar in the twentieth century, through the tropics. Deerr’s figure illustrates how on occasions, expert knowledge was sought out by governments and institutions to scientifically validate agricultural solutions, beside the work of scientists and agronomists.

322

L. Fernandez-Prieto

In another area of ideas, Latin American and Caribbean historiography has given scant attention to studies of life sciences as a paradigmatic example of agriculture’s contribution to other scientific developments that transcend its usual interpretation as a receptor of other disciplines. Ángela Creager (2002) explored the way in which the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) became an object of exemplary research for biotechnology. Inspired by this thesis, new findings can track the colonial roots and further examine the ways in which economic and environmental problems became engines of knowledge in the rise and consolidation of other sciences related to agriculture. An example is tropical phytopathology, entomology, and developments in genetic engineering to improve farming yields or ensure resistance to plant diseases and infestations in the region. This would further highlight agents and connections that were hitherto less visible in the history of agricultural science. We may also mention studies that have taken an interest in technical assistance and scientific collaboration in the framework of global development programs led by state and international agencies from Europe and the United States, after the Second World War. Some of them were mentioned by the Mayers to give centrality to agriculture in resolving population growth and food scarcity problems. Traditionally, development programs were a restricted research niche inside international relations studies. But there is an extensive body of writing highlighting their environmental, technological, socioeconomic, and political aspects in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is no secret that scientific programs were also political. The region shows the intimate interrelations between techno-science, power, and politics, as it became a space for direct, experimental, and theoretical intervention to initiate and follow the progress of programs within hegemonic and political contexts. Recent studies illustrate how authors have begun analyzing from new, scientific, or knowledge perspectives, to examine problems of concepts, time factors, and to shed light on other interconnections. Within this panorama, certain students still give greater emphasis to the deep power asymmetries between North and South or the centerperiphery, including in programs in which the FAO participated. Thus some writings question the use of terms like circulation, exchange, or cooperation in describing the participation of scientists and experts involved in the unequal relations between the United States and Western Europe, and peripheral regions like Latin America and the Caribbean. Instead, Mateos and Suarez 2019 promote concepts like itineraries, travel, and/or trajectories to track the movements of diverse agents and equipment between national and transnational frontiers. Nevertheless, one should bear in mind that the term circulation does not necessarily indicate constant, circular flows. In one suggestive study, DeGreif and Nieto (2008) invite us to ponder unresolved questions on the place of science and technology in development programs, like North-South exchanges, participation of local agents, and negotiation processes to decenter narratives in the context of geopolitical debates between centers and peripheries. From their viewpoint, techno-science in the North did not develop independently of negotiations with the South. Within the history of science, studies insist on a multidirectional analysis of scientific exchanges between the United States and Latin America.

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

323

Other writers have accepted the complexity of multisided knowledge, and proposed the elaboration of individual biographies to write global histories. Soto Laveaga introduces the analytical tool termed LARGO dislocare to expand exchange timelines and geographies in science, technology, and knowledge studies. In her research, Soto Laveaga rescues the key participation of an Indian political refugee, scientist, and agronomist in modernizing and initiating global and national hybridation projects in Mexico, quite before the start of the Green Revolution where studies are concentrated in the historiography of Latin America. Not surprisingly, in studies on development programs, the Green Revolution occupies a preeminent place in its own right (Kumar et al. 2017; Harwood 2020). The established narrative describes the innovative and relevant work of Norman Borlaug in Mexico, with the backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, in obtaining genetically modified wheat and corn seeds in the 1940s. The later, global diffusion of the seeds came with a packet of technological supplies (fertilizers, mechanization, and so on) that came to be termed the Green Revolution. This promised a notable increase in global agricultural output, to fight hunger between 1960 and 1980. Recent studies have highlighted a good many green revolutions, and even the so-called red revolutions as enacted by socialist states. Other authors shed light on new, horizontal, or South-South exchanges and links, as for example between Mexico, India, and Costa Rica (Picado 2012; Montero et al. 2021). The compilation made by Lorek and Chasin (2020) is an excellent example of a rereading and application of contributions from new scientific and knowledge trends to understand processes of the globalization of knowledge during the Cold War. This is usually analyzed in the context of political tensions. They are inspired by the notion of knowledge transfer itineraries defended by Neil Safier as appropriate explanatory models for following objects and individuals while blurring binary divisions like center-periphery. The authors included in the volume seek in longterm histories the roots of some of the development programs of the 1920s, within the global archipelago of scientific knowledge. For that, texts follow the journey of plants, animals, and artifacts to highlight negotiation processes between multiple human and nonhuman actors, which transcend the center-periphery concept. Likewise, another point of view has considered integrating regional differences inside the United States for their influence on projects, beyond exporting the ideal of Midwest agriculture toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Essays have stressed the complex interactions between US experts and local farmers in the execution of global agricultural and development programs in the region. Participation by scientists and experts from Western Europe and the United States and locals, require studies that illustrate multiple motivations including cosmopolitan ideals, beyond predictable ones that followed domestic or hegemonic political goals. These approximations make the roles of experts and scientists even more complex in the contexts of geopolitical rivalries and hegemony. People are more familiar with the deeply negative, socioeconomic, political, and environmental effects of development programs. The region was especially considered a terrain to produce tropical crops for exportation to industrialized states. The programs reinforced dependency on a greater amount of agro-technological inputs

324

L. Fernandez-Prieto

and on industrial capitalism, whose legacies perdure. It is no surprise then that many of these problems came to mark the Latin American and Caribbean research agenda.

Capitalism, Technology, and Commodities Histories The histories of Latin American and Caribbean agricultural science were closely connected with developments in capitalism, technologies, and tropical products. The Caribbean considers itself the beginning of modernity and a gateway for subsequent, imperial expansion. Other scholars stress that capitalism and the production of agricultural goods were co-constituted with colonialism, domination, and Latin America’s underdevelopment and dependency. But, how far does the interconnectivity of science, capitalism, technology, and commodities find itself at the heart of research agendas? What can these axes teach us in order to articulate comparative analyses of histories of the agricultural sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean? This chapter seeks to (re)consider certain silent omissions and gaps, but would also emphasize certain analytical categories and promising perspectives in current debates on capitalism, technology, and commodities histories. Capitalism and slavery remain particularly relevant in the economic and agrarian historiography of the Caribbean. Sidney Mintz (1985) made his classic contribution on sugar’s place in the modern world, within complex relations as commodity and consumer good for Europe’s middle and working classes, and from a global perspective. Mintz understood that sugar plantations’ forced labor practices had a precedent in the formative process of the wage-earning worker in Europe. That is, for him, the sugar plantation was the colonial ancestor of the modern factory. Dale Tomich (2018) formulated the influential concept of second slavery to urgently point out new frontiers of slave-labor production in the southern United States, Cuba, and Brazil during the industrialization process and expansion of capitalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. The concept questioned the standard thesis on slave labor’s diminishing productivity and the impossibility of introducing modern technologies as factors to abolish slavery, especially considering the illegal introduction of high numbers of enslaved Africans, which reached unsuspected levels in Cuba and Brazil in a bid to dominate the world sugar and coffee markets. Likewise it is a fruitful model for comparative studies between the Greater Antilles and continental Latin America around tropical agricultural goods and slavery. The problem with the term is in the emphasis on the industrial shape of the new frontiers in traded goods. It gave greater importance to industrial transformations over agricultural spheres affecting tropical crops, which were essential in fitting Latin American economies into the world capitalist system. In a further step, Dale Tomich, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Carlos Venegas have wondered how changes on an unprecedented scale in the industrial production of new agricultural frontiers, which implicated nature and slave labor, were represented visually through critiques of studies on the pristine image within studies of the tropical and semitropical landscape (Tomich et al. 2021). The authors seek to understand how working spaces and constructed

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

325

environments expressed, ordered, and represented the multiple interactions (relations of the world market and division of labor, geography and local landscapes, the property owner’s power and authority, and the enslaved’s ability to resist, etc.), and how these spaces were formed and functioned inside the world capitalist economy. One of the study’s main contributions is understanding how working spaces reflect both the relations in global economic and political processes, and local histories. In the light of new, knowledge and science-centered perspectives on the active contributions of subaltern agents, a question of interest is: did the visual representation of worked spaces contemplate or unconsciously insinuate the agency of the enslaved as informal producers of knowledge, to elaborate possible, intertwined histories in Latin American and Caribbean, (post) slavery societies? The authors offer little or no margin for the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in working spaces, which keeps the agency under the owner’s domination and authority. Thus, the power of resistance of the enslaved is an imagined and symbolic perspective, coerced by the power that used the physical organization of space to control slave labor. One may infer from the study a suggestive path of investigation that can map the omissions and gaps in images of slavery and agriculture and seek the inclusion of subaltern subjects inside transversal histories of science and knowledge. Inspired by studies of landscape, agriculture, and technology, other approaches have proposed the powerful and attractive analytical category of cropscape to challenge conventional periodic and geographical divisions, scales, and values (Bray et al. 2019). Rereading the actor-network theory and mobility studies, the authors illustrate the pertinence of following crops to observe flows and circulations on various scales, including more local scales that can explain ways in which various elements come together or not, in new local contexts. That means that this methodological tool focuses rather on contextual resignifiations in assemblages between the human and nonhuman agency, as crops are rooted in a local setting and the environment, and multiple factors intervene in their successful or failed developments in other ecosystems. This innovative outlook understands the place of origin also as a place of arrival in displacements, a point often overlooked in global science studies, and debates the idea of associating the term circulation with static movement flows. Likewise, the proposition suggests rethinking timing and scales in mobility studies on the basis of elements governing cultivation (sowing seasons, and the expertise and practices of natives, peasants, and Afro-Caribbeans) to escape conventional timings, scales, and center-periphery, South-South or East-West exchanges. In its place, they propose multivoiced, multi-local histories of agricultural science and technologies. The inclusion of Latin America and the Caribbean within the most recent debates on the Industrial Revolution is a pending subject from the intersection between the histories of science, technology, and capitalism. Scholars have paid little attention to the different histories and uses of Industrial Revolution technologies to connect different scales, speeds, and times of numerous industrial revolutions and agricultural processes. For example, historiography has focused separately on the bestknown cases of the sugar revolution in Cuba and the history of Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company in the Río de la Plata. However, the two cases illustrate the

326

L. Fernandez-Prieto

horizontal and vertical connections between Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean through the previous trade in beef jerky for feeding slaves on plantations in Cuba and Brazil from the Rio de la Plata salt marshes. Likewise, Liebig had agents and an advertising campaign for the commercialization of its product in Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States, Western Europe, Africa, and Asia. In an excellent contribution, Bárbara Hahn (2020) follows machines as key actors of the Industrial Revolution, to explore the changes they brought in and how they came to be changed in various local contexts, even in Great Britain, considered their birthplace. Hahn stresses it was a gradual process of industrialization accompanied by other revolutions in various, related areas, like agriculture. The approach is useful in illustrating multiple histories of industrial and agricultural revolutions in the Latin America and Caribbean region, which can decenter the great narratives on inventors and scientists, as well as the thesis of importation and passive reception of industrial technologies. In the case of “Cuba’s sugar revolution” analyses are still based on the adopting of technologies like the steam engine in industry, with particular emphasis on the introduction of the Derosne and Cail system during the second slavery period in the mid-nineteenth century. New studies take an interest in the production sites, inclusion of subaltern agents, networks of experts, or the complex interactions between expertise and vernacular knowledge from the perspectives of science, technology, and capitalism. For example, Rood (2017) considers a café in colonial Havana or the sugar plantations as production spaces and spaces for experimentation in chemical science and Industrial Revolution technologies whose adaptation to the tropical environment had passed through the hiring of a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other specialists. This author highlights the agency of slaves in the diffusion but also in knowledge produced by the Franco-American of African descent, Norbert Rillieux, in his evaporation system conceived to modernize the sugar industry. For his part, Curry-Machado (2011, 2013) correctly valued the contribution of engineers and technicians coming from European and US industrial centers and working on the trans-imperial margins, as the Indispensable Alien that ensured the success of sugar’s industrial revolution in colonial Cuba. Other studies point to networks of experts considered at the intersection of global and local currents in the Greater Antilles. Even so, the transatlantic, trans-imperial, and intra-Caribbean circulation of engineers and specialists is seen in global histories of science and technology more as transmitting abilities than as producing and spreading new knowledge. Another possible risk is reifying the figure of the engineer and other experts involved in the technological changes, to produce great stories of scientific heroes. This might be avoided if studies of science and technology include histories of failures alongside instances of success. A recent compilatory volume warns against associating technology in Latin America with formal science, for making it difficult to elaborate narratives from the Global South perspective (Pretel et al. 2019). The editors suggested a global approximation to reveal the region’s place in histories of technology opposed to narratives centered around the nation-state and colonialism. Along that line one of

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

327

the proposals consisted in elaborating studies of cases in international contexts to observe how local technologies and scientific institutions shared and were shared with global developments. Following the influential studies of David Edgerton, some histories of science-agriculture-technology in Latin America and the Caribbean center on technology users rather than innovation. The author associates this with formal knowledge, which is habitually produced in centers more than in peripheries. The commodities histories circuit is another path of research that is highly valid in writing new histories of agricultural sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean. This perspective has renewed studies on basic products with the reorganization of global and local elements whose detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter on interactions between science, capitalism, and tropical crops. The conventional narrative highlights on the one hand the contribution of the main crops as engines of agricultural modernization, generators of new expertise, and agents introducing and institutionalizing the application of science to agriculture from the mid-nineteenth century. Experimental stations and agricultural schools occupy a preeminent place in its writings. On the other hand, scholars point out the region’s high level of dependence as a producer par excellence of raw materials and tropical agricultural goods in the makeup of world capitalism. This was especially the case during the so-called agricultural exports boom, from about 1840 to 1930. New approaches give more emphasis to multiple interactions at different levels in the life histories of commodities, to transcend the center-periphery and nation-state frontiers. Another novel contribution is the inclusion of traditional plantation cash crops better known as sugar and rubber, with others destined for nutrition or pleasure. Jonathan Curry-Machado suggested the history of civilization could be told through biographies of individual goods, for the high level of dependence on them for food, clothing, and so on. Curry-Machado recalls that global empires arose in association with merchandise, which also provoked episodes of forced migration, economic domination, innovation, transfers, and espionage. Likewise, analyzing interconnected worlds through basic product chains advances our understanding of global interconnections and social and economic relations, from manufacture to consumption. These ties exemplify more fluidly in the intertwining of global and local elements through multiple, transnational trading, migratory and technological transfer networks. The interconnected histories of the agricultural sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean will find elements of analysis in new studies, even if they pay unequal and fragmented attention to science and knowledge in developments in commodities. Likewise, emphasis on the global hides the transversal and intraregional connections that may be usefully considered to transcend established chronologies, geographies, and scales in studies on scientific agriculture in the region. An essay to write connected and transversal histories of science, technology, and capitalism would have us reconsider the place of transnational companies, which are usually understood as instruments of domination and dependence in contexts of US geopolitical dominance of Latin America and the Caribbean after 1898. Some authors invoke the need to transcend geographical limits (hemispheric, Atlantic, or

328

L. Fernandez-Prieto

Caribbean) in analytical constructions, inside new perspectives on multinational sugar and banana firms in the Greater Antilles. For example, Catherine LeGrand (2006) examines US corporations in Latin America as key objects of study in the recent historiography of the transnational circuit. Multinational companies merit deeper analysis from the scientific, technological, and knowledge perspectives. These spaces are excellent study cases for observing production sites, the forging of scientific careers in the field sciences, tensions between expert and vernacular knowledge, and relations between US and European scientists and agronomists with locals, to mention just some of the concerns from this perspective. Studies also need to include histories that go beyond the best known ones about multinational sugar and banana firms. In fact, transnational fertilizer firms are of the utmost interest in seeking possible continuities and/or breaks in agricultural research in Latin American and Caribbean societies of the colonial and postcolonial periods, as well as new, global, regional, and local connections. In many cases these firms hired local agronomists as representatives of international brands. Some of them combined this position with relevant positions in the government agriculture offices. For example, the Cuban agronomist Francisco B. Cruz graduated in agronomic engineering in the first school of agriculture financed by the sugar planters guild under the Spanish empire. In 1904, Cruz acted both as representative of a transnational firm of fertilizers meant for tobacco plants and as head of the agriculture department of the Central Agronomic Stations, recently established by the Cuban government. The government had entrusted its design and management to the US agronomist and scientist Franklin S. Earle. One should not forget that multinational firms were key to the emergence of new scientific expertise, experimentation, and the implementation of global-local development programs for regional agriculture. Historiography has not yet fully analyzed their respective socioeconomic and environmental involvements.

Environmental Histories Environmental history is a highly attractive field that is both expanding and maturing within Latin American and Caribbean studies. This expansion has yielded numerous, historiographical compilations, reviews, and essays. It would seem however that environmental history and the history of science and technology in general and of agriculture in particular, were condemned to oppose one another in regional studies. In other words, a necessary interdisciplinary dialogue remains in a state of infancy for Latin America and the Caribbean. Pritchard and Zimring (2020) argue rightly that knowledge of nature depended on artifacts, technologies, and science and at the same time, new technologies and uses produced new forms of natural knowledge and conceptions of the environment. These approaches are still rare for the region. One of the great challenges remains making progress with histories that create a more complex narrative than the usual focus on the negative uses of nature as an exploitative resource in opposition to the triumphalist vision of science as progress and modernity inside Latin American and

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

329

Caribbean environmental studies. Another problem is in historians of agricultural science and technology putting greater emphasis on the environmental dimension and integrating it at the heart of their investigations, and not just as background. Likewise, there is as yet no history of a shared past, which remains fragmented in regions, (former) colonies, and nation-states. Some essays reveal fruitful examples of the intersection of disciplinary approaches in elaborating other histories of science, technology, and the environment in a paradigmatic region for observing the developments and implications of environmental degradation from industrial agriculture and extractivist economies. Meanwhile newer studies must understand the diverse forms of producing environmental and scientific knowledge in situated ecologies, and the role of agency (human and nonhuman) from perspectives of the history of science, technology, and knowledge. In the last two decades, environmental historians have tackled in greater depth the counterproductive effects of the agro-exporting model of development for Latin America and the Caribbean. These include erosion of soils, infestations and crop diseases, and deforestation. In fact, an important group of academics representing the first wave of historiography emerged around criticisms of the negative effects on ecosystems of measuring progress and modernity with indiscriminate felling of forests and intensive cultivation of tropical products, especially in the so-called second environmental conquest of the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Disciplinary consecration came with the founding of the Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Medioambiental, SOLCHA, 2006) and the publication of its review Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana and Caribeña (HALAC https://www. halacsolcha.org/index.php/halac-) as the platform par excellence for scholars. Other, more specialized reviews contain themes of shared interest for writing interconnected histories concerning agriculture, science, and the environment. These include the Historia Agraria (https://www.historiaagraria.com/en/), Historia, ciências, Saúde - Maghuinhos (https://www.revistahcsm.coc.fiocruz.br/), and the Historia Agraria de la América Latina (https://www.haal.cl/indiex.php/haal). John Soluri, Claudia Leal, and José Augusto Padua have called on some of the prominent founding academics to study the multiple legacies of abundance and extraction in Latin American and Caribbean societies (Soluri et al. 2018). Their essays have explored histories of complex interactions between persons, governments, and nature to present new angles that can be contrasted with established narratives. In doing this, the authors traced the evolution of old and emerging themes associated with the environmental footprint of agroindustrial plantations, urbanization, and tourism, shedding light on current trends and promising investigative paths in environmental and scientific histories of agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean. One of the most fruitful articulating axes is to explore connections between political revolutions and wars, and global and local techno-scientific processes, changes inflicted on agricultural diversity and fertility, and deforestation. As Chris Boyer and Micheline Cariño warn, Mexico is an outstanding case for studying

330

L. Fernandez-Prieto

longstanding, historical and colonial footprints in terms of environmental degradation through several political and agricultural revolutions. There is ample literature on this. Even so, Mikael Wolfe (2017) presents a refreshing look at questions on global and local problems during the Mexican Revolution and the agrarian reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas, from the envirotech perspective. Wolfe seeks to understand the attitude of governments that adopted invasive technologies for development in spite of their environmental inviability. This type of love-hate relationship between environment and developmental technologies is a constant for governments regardless of politics – be they (neo) liberal or socialist – which invites one to revisit the interactions between uses of science and technology and the environment through different historical contexts. For example, he draws our attention toward studies on the adoption of industrial technologies, which are better known in terms of their environmental impact, for extracting and marketing fertilizers like guano. In contrast with the studies analyzed in the preceding section, Wolfe describes the participation of engineers and technicians as mediating agents between the state and society, being more than mere transmitters of skills. They transformed and adjusted them to identify what they believed was technologically possible, but predicted the environmental implications. Equally, the author addresses the place of farmers in water policies. In that way, he incorporates agents and knowledge bodies that are usually neglected in studies on science and knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean. Emily Wakild (2011) offers suggestive reading for observing how Latin American governments and societies have concerned themselves with implementing conservation policies for natural resources, through Mexico’s revolutions. Inspired by Richard Grove’s influential book, other studies reconsider the place of Latin America and the Caribbean where the history of science meets the environment. Reinaldo Funes pointed out that the Lesser Antilles became pioneer territories in adopting conservation measures. The emergence of new environmental sciences guides Megan Raby (2017) to locate the historical origins of biodiversity in experimental agricultural stations and biological research sites established in Cuba and Panama after 1898. In these spaces, the experience of field work in the tropics changed the way in which US scientists, agronomists, and biologists understood nature. From this perspective, the role of local agents (farmers, scientists, biologists, agronomists, and so on) and their interactions with the Americans are still not sufficiently explored in historiography on the region. A different focus is the one adopted by Camilo Quintero (2012), who examines relations between US and local scientists in the course of scientific exchanges around conservation policies and bird collecting. These histories help nuance the image associated with the geopolitics of European and US scientists working in Latin America and the Caribbean, in contexts of imperial expansion and political hegemony. The tropics have reemerged in recent decades, as an important category in critical analysis for studies of science and the environment. In his classic book, David Arnold (1993) elaborated on the concept of alterity to the ecological context of the tropics that complemented the invention and conquest of the Americas. Arturo

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

331

Escobar (2008) highlighted the coloniality of nature, consistent with the idea of a wild nature, uncontrolled by humans who turn it an object of domination. It is seen as a subaltern space to be exploited, razed, and reshaped in line with the needs of the accumulation regimes in force, while traditional knowledge to manage the natural world is silenced. Historians of science have underlined the key contribution of scientists and naturalists to the conception of nature as a natural resource, through inventories and taxonomies. The tropics’ supposedly ideal climate was defended by intellectuals, naturalists, agronomists, and scientists as an economic factor inside the vision of nature’s generosity for the large-scale production of tropical crops. Likewise, landowners, local élites, and colonial and state officials used racial criteria to argue that Africans were best suited to working in difficult conditions in the tropical climate. This was to justify slavery in crop plantations in the Latin America and the Caribbean. Parallel to these, naturalists and scientists promoted the thesis of the backwardness of tropical agricultural practices, which has even influenced the writing of regional histories of agricultural science. Studying tropical agriculture introduces an important rectification of the triumphalist vision that came with the conquest of the tropics and was associated with tropical medicine under US imperialist expansion. This is yet to be studied sufficiently in the historiography of science. As Stuart McCook recalled, governments, farmers, peasants, agronomists, scientists, and transnational agricultural firms had to deal with the simultaneous appearance of agricultural infestations and plagues, due to the commodification of nature. It is an analysis that goes deeper with a study on coffee where the history of global science and the environmental history of tropical products meet. In these studies, the expression “commodity disease,” coined by John Soluri (2005, 2011, 2018), has become a fruitful category in analyzing cross-related biological, social, political, and economic processes at different levels. The concept of the environmental and economic conquest of the tropics reinforced and acquired new meanings for the power of science, with the building of the Panama Canal. Marixa Lasso (2019) studied how the Americans converted a center into a periphery, metaphorically using both terms to describe the dismantling of sites that had initiated modernity by introducing innovations and including indigenous, Afro-Caribbean and peasant knowledge to reproduce the ideal of a wild, tropical landscape and a pristine jungle that must be tamed and civilized. Lasso thus underlined the discursive place of tropicalism and developmentalism in the construction of the American vision of Panamanians as incapable of producing technological innovations, and recovers the voice of nature’s inhabitants displaced in the name of modernizing the tropics. Environmental history has brought new approaches that critique the triumphalist narrative of science and technology over nature in the history of science and the environment. In one suggestive debate, Ashley Carse and Cristine Keiner (2016) gathered a group of scholars precisely to revisit the legacies of the Panama Canal on the centenary of its opening. This was considered the engineering gem par excellence in the vision of techno-science’s triumph over nature, an enclave devoted to maritime transportation and a site of numerous scientific, military, and technological

332

L. Fernandez-Prieto

projects. The essays in the compilation point to interoceanic canals as places for understanding environmental epistemologies, and their mediating role as infrastructures between global networks and situated socio-ecological processes. The examples chosen document the narrative presented by various actors on the conquest of tropical nature through political discourse, economic expectations, and scientific knowledge. For example, Paul Sutter suggested reconsidering the participation of US entomologists in the production of environmental knowledge. The essays forward certain force-ideas that are highly valid for studies on the history of agricultural sciences in the region. Firstly, the authors observe environmental history as an intellectual contact zone between natural historians and scientists whose dialogue is essential to advancing our understanding of the complex relations between man and nature. Secondly, the editors use the concept of “ecological contact sites between species” as a fruitful concept in analyzing the impact of large projects or work spaces on flora and fauna. Likewise, studies understand that US tropical imperialism was co-constituted with racial and gender categories. In a recent article, Stefania Gallini asked how much environmental history contributed to history in general, and suggested in response going through some of the emerging themes in this intersection. She cited Discard Studies for giving a voice to some unusual participants of historical narratives (trash, animals, water). Among other historical approximations, these approaches are inspired by Bruno Latour’s influential thesis viewed from studies of science, technology, and society (CTS). Likewise, Gallini considered the anthropogenic turning where the human factor is analyzed as a key agent in the current geological era. Other studies define the capitalocene as the geological era based on a production system. We would have to add to this the recent development of plantationocene, which brings different types of plantations, colonialism, and capitalism into the conversation. The three turnings are common points in an unusual agreement between scientists and historians of science and the environment. It thus becomes attractive in considering bridges for dialogue and hinge issues that transcend problems and challenges, in search of a history that is more global than local. Gallini mentioned Agroecology, a consolidated current with its own voice inside studies, to rethink the agrarian question, a debate present in the historical roots of Latin America and the Caribbean. The quest to develop sustainable agriculture and recover knowledge deemed traditional – belonging to indigenous, Afro-Caribbean or peasant populations – is at the center of its concerns. Not surprisingly then, agro-ecological studies enjoy high levels of representation and prestige in the region. One of the risks in agroecology is the indiscriminate use of this term, as happens, for example, with its growing conversion into an attractive, commercial label. Using slogans like healthy eating, or food that respects the environment and traditional methods, it helps raise the price of products and boost the profits of agro-businesses. Frequently, agroecology has come to oppose industrial farming models that make indiscriminate use of biotechnology, pesticides, and genetically modified crops. These criticisms have become a particular object of attention in studies on big

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

333

development programs like the aforementioned Green Revolution. But these analyses still emphasize the environmental implications of adopting technological packs without considering whether or not, and how, new environmental and scientific knowledge was produced. There are other, emerging approaches of interest for the history of environmental sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean, like the study of the relationship between animals and agricultural systems and changes in the use of fossil, an industrial energy. Precisely the militant criticism against the ecological transition is present in the decolonial turning to undermine the legacies of energy colonialism in the Global South. This perspective is particularly attractive in studies of the ecologies of knowledges of Latin American environmental expertise, a concept coined by Boaventura (de Sousa Santos 2010) and related in many cases to the recovery of knowledge lost for industrialization. Environmental historians have paid greater attention to environmental struggles and conflicts over mismanagement of forests, water, and malpractice by monopolies. The challenge is to write environmental histories of agricultural sciences that integrate these trends in regions with deep power asymmetries, but bring in meeting and negotiation points with other historiographical approximations. Today, the environmental crisis has reopened old debates on the unsustainability of modern agriculture. Donald Worster (2020) has returned to the emblematic work by Rachel Carson (1962), to refer to the deep roots of the breaking of boundaries between man and the natural habitat of animals in favor of industrial agriculture and a constant quest for food. Natural disasters and epidemics are without a doubt, reminders of the fragility of industrial farming ecosystems.

Conclusion: Placing Latin America and the Caribbean in the History of Agricultural Science Writing the history of agricultural science is no longer the insular empire described by the Mayers. Latin America and the Caribbean is an emerging region inside studies that transcend imperial frontiers and establish new connections with histories of the African diaspora, of Latin America in general, of intra-Caribbean migrations, multiple Atlantic histories, global economic development, racism, rereadings of plantations and enclaves, and of sites and objects related to knowledge production and circulation. However, there is considerable room for evolution in the historiography of the field and life sciences whose perspectives have yet to fully explore the history of agriculture as an analytical element acting as a link in epistemological and comparative issues that are a fertile, attractive, and promising terrain in Latin America and the Caribbean. Likewise, agriculture has received scant attention in the articulation of transversal, multivocal, and multidirectional studies in the region in the context of new debates on science, technology, and knowledge, the environment and capitalism among other historiographical approximations. This chapter brings leading concepts and debates to complicate chronologies, geographies,

334

L. Fernandez-Prieto

and scales in new writings on the agricultural sciences that go beyond the analytical frameworks of center and periphery, and of the region as the passive recipient of Western science and technology. New histories of the agricultural sciences await global and local studies on field science practices in affiliated areas, and analyses of other socioeconomic and political processes that illustrate other actors with knowledge systems, and production and circulation sites and objects hitherto neglected in historiography. For example, global studies on the region’s responses to central problems of agriculture would require incorporating the multiple local solutions found by multiple agents whose practices and expertise have remained fragmented and unequal in various national histories, or different disciplinary readings. At the same time, we should seek new studies that connect Latin America and the Caribbean to different scales (global, regional, national, and local), and to exchanges that are both vertical and horizontal. Another historiographical challenge is to write histories wherein science, environment, capitalism, and technology meet. These are all central questions in the history of the agricultural sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean. The ample and ambitious literature has been considered to argue that similar methodological concerns go through the respective “disciplinary bubbles.” The existence of separate rather than inclusive patches has impeded identifying shared points to establish a productive dialogue, which so far has been a dialogue of the deaf, and advancing in studies with a broader scope. In their place one should stimulate interdisciplinary and transversal histories that will gather different subfields, from those mentioned to others, like anthropology and archaeology. In the same way, the histories of agricultural sciences constitute an ideal, intellectual meeting point between natural scientists and historians, to propose common essays that underline agriculture’s contribution to the development of other sciences, while bringing new concepts, epistemologies, and methodologies for global, transnational, transoceanic, and transdisciplinary narratives of the Global South. Acknowledgments This work is part of the Special Intramural Project, “Tropical Nature, Colonial Science and Agro-botanical Expertise in the Making: Spain and the Hispanic Caribbean in the 19th Century,” financed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). The author is grateful for the suggestions and comments received by the editor and anonymous evaluators who have helped enrich this chapter. Special thanks go to David Pretel for his generosity, and excellent and incisive recommendations.

References Arnold D (1993) Colonizing the body. State medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century india. University of California Press, Berkeley Ca Bassi E (2017) An aqueous territory: sailor geographies and New Granada’s trans imperial greater Caribbean world. Duke University Press, Durham

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

335

Bray F, Hahn B, Lourdusamy JB et al (Spring 2019) Cropscapes and history: reflections on rootedness and mobility. Tansfers (9,1). https://doi.org/10.3167/TRANS.2019.090103 Carney JC (2002) Black rice: the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Carse A, Keiner C, Henson PM et al (2016) Panama Canal forum: from the conquest of nature to the construction of new ecologies. Environ Hist 21:206–287 Carson R (1962) Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, MA Chastain AB, Lorek TW (2020) Itineraries of expertise, science, technology, and the environment in Latin America. Pittsburgh University Press, Pittsburgh Creager ANH (2002) The life of a virus: tobacco mosaic virus as an experimental model, 1930–1965. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Curry-Machado J (2011) Cuban sugar industry: transnational networks and engineering migrants in mid-nineteenth century Cuba. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Curry-Machado J (2013) Global histories, imperial commodities, local interactions. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke De Greif A, Nieto M (2008) Lo que aún no sabemos sobre el intercambio tecnocientífico entre Sur y Norte: Nortecentrismo, Difusión Científica y Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia. In: Gorbach F, López C (eds) Saberes locales. Ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora, pp 41–71 De Sousa Santos B (2010) Descolonizar el saber. Reinventar el poder. Ediciones Trilce, Uruguay Delbourgo J (2019) The knowing world: a new global history of science. Hist Sci 57:373–399 Edgerton D (2017) The shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900. Oxford University Press, Oxford Escobar E (2008) Territories of difference. Place, movements, life, Redes. Duke University Press, Durham Fernandez-Prieto L (2013) Islands of knowledge: science and agriculture in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. Isis 104(4):789–797 Fernandez-Prieto L (2015) Introducción. Ciencia y saberes agrícolas en construcción en la historia de América Latina y el Caribe: agentes, redes y circuitos (siglos XVIII–XX). Asclepio 67 (1):075. https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2015.01 Ferrer A (November 2016) History and the idea of Hispanic Caribbean studies. Small Axe 20 3 (51): 49–64 Gallini S (2020) ¿Qué hay de histórico en la Historiografía Ambiental de América Latina? Historia y Memoria (número especial):179–223 García Muñiz H (2010) Sugar and power in the Caribbean: the South Porto Rico sugar company in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, 1900–1921. Editorial Universidad de Puerto Rico, Ian Randle Publishers, San Juan, Kingston Giovannetti J (2013) Caribbean studies as practice: insights from border-crossing histories and research. Small Axe 17(2–41):74–87 Gómez PF (2017) The experiential Caribbean: creating knowledge in the early modern Atlantic. University of North Caroline Press, Chapel Hill Hahn B (2020) Technology in the industrial revolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/ New York Harwood J (2020) Whatever happened to the Mexican green revolution? Agroecol Sustain Food Syst 44(9):1243–1252. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2020.1752350 Kohler RE (2011) History of field science: trends and prospects. In: Vetter J (ed) Knowing global environments: new historical perspectives on the field sciences. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, pp 212–240 Kumar P, Lorek T, Olsson TC et al (2017) Roundtable: new narratives of the green revolution. Agric Hist 91(3):397–422. https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2017.091.3.397 Lander E (2000) La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas. CLACSO, Buenos Aires

336

L. Fernandez-Prieto

Lasso M (2019) Erased: the untold story of the Panama Canal. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA LeGrand C (octubre 2006) Historias transnacionales: nuevas interpretaciones de los enclaves en América Latina. Nómadas (25): 144–154 Mateos G, Suarez E (2019) Technical assistance in movement: nuclear knowledge crosses Latin American borders. In: Krige J (ed) How knowledge moves: writing the transnational history of science and technology. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp 346–367 McCook S (2002) States of nature: science, agriculture, and environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760–1940. University of Texas Press, Austin McCook S (2019) Coffee it not forever: a global history of the coffee leaf rust. Ohio University Press, Athens Medina E, da Costa MI, Holmes C, Cueto M (2014) Beyond imported magic: essays on science, technology, and Society in Latin America. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, pp 1–24 Mintz S (1985) Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. Viking, New York Montero A, Marc Badia-Miró M, Tello E (2021) Geographic expansion and intensification of coffee-growing in Costa Rica during the green revolution (1950–89): drivers and outcomes. Historia Agraria (April). https://doi.org/10.26882/histagrar.083e04m Picado W (2012) En busca de la genética guerrera. Segunda Guerra Mundial, cooperación agrícola y Revolución Verde en la agricultura de Costa Rica. Historia Agraria 56(April):107–134. http:// repositori.uji.es/xmlui/handle/10234/149674 Pretel D, Inkster I, Wendt H (2019) Special issue technology in Latin American history: perspectives, scales, and comparisons. Hist Technol 34:1–21 Pritchard SB, Zimring CA (2020) Technology and the environment in history. Johs Hopkins University, Baltimore Putnam L (2014) Borderlands and border crossers: migrants and boundaries in the Greatter Caribbean, 1840–1940. Small Axe 18(43):7–21 Quintero C (2012) Birds of empire, birds of nation. A history of science, economy, and conservation in United States-Colombia relations. Ediciones Uniandes, Colombia Raby M (2017) American tropics: the Caribbean roots of biodiversity. University of North Caroline Press, Chapel Hill Rood DB (2016) Toward a global labor history of science. In: Manning P, Rood DB (eds) Global scientific practice in an age of revolutions, 1750–1850. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, pp 255–274 Rood DB (2017) The reinvention of Atlantic slavery: technology, labor, race, and capitalism in the greater Caribbean. Oxford University Press, Oxford Said EW (2000) Traveling theory reconsidered. In reflections on exile and other essays. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 436–452 Saldaña JJ (ed) (2006) Science in Latin America: a history. University of Texas Press, Austin Shiebinger L (2017) Secret cures of slaves: people, plants, and medicine in the eighteen-century Atlantic world. Stanford University Press, California Soluri J (2005) Banana culture: agriculture, consumption, and environmental change in Honduras and the United States. University of Texas Press, Austin Soluri J (2011) Something fishy: Chile’s blue revolution, commodity diseases, and the problem of sustainability. Latin Amer Res Rev 46(suppl):55–81 Soluri J, Leal C, Pádua JA (2018) A living past, environmental histories of modern Latin America. Berghahn Books, New York Soto Laveaga G (2009) Jungle laboratories: Mexican peasants, national projects, and the making of the pill. Duke University Press, Durham/London Soto Laveaga G (2018) Largo dislocare: connecting microhistories to remap and recenter histories of science. Hist Technol 34:21–30 Tomich D (2018) The second slavery and world capitalism: a perspective for historical inquiry. Int Rev Soc Hist 63(1):477–501

15

Agriculture As Connectivity

337

Tomich D, de Bivar MR, Funes R, Venegas C (2021) Reconstructing the landscapes of slavery: a visual history of the plantation in the nineteenth-century Atlanttic world. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Wakild E (2011) Revolutionary parks: conservation, social justice, and Mexico’s National Parks. University of Arizona Press, Tucson Wolfe M (2017) Watering the revolution: environmental and technological history of agrarian reform in Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford Worster D (2020) Another silent spring, environment & society portal, virtual exhibitions. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/9028

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s Mexico

16

The Role and Contribution of Indian Revolutionary Pandurang Khankhoje to Mexico’s History of Agriculture Alexandra Ortiz Wallner Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science, Art, and Revolution in Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

340 343 351 352

Abstract

This chapter offers an introductory reading to the growing field of interdisciplinary Latin American Studies on the intellectual history of the Global South as seen in the case of a concrete South-South knowledge transfer and encounter between India and Mexico in the decade of 1920. The historical figure of Indian revolutionary and agronomist Pandurang Khankhoje (1884–1967), who arrived as a political exile in postrevolutionary Mexico in 1924, and soon became a key figure in the development of the National Schools of Agriculture in the context of Mexico’s project of modernizing agriculture and agricultural techniques, expands, reframes, and rewrites part of the history of the agricultural sciences in Mexico, as well as it amplifies the South-South connections that shaped the

This chapter is part of the results of my research within the project “Ex Oriente – beyond Orientalism: Indian Knowledge and Knowledge about India in the Worldviews and Lebenswelten of a different Latin American Modernity (1880–1940),” supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG), and carried out at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, between 2017 and 2020. A. Ortiz Wallner (*) Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de América Central, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_12

339

340

A. Ortiz Wallner

transnational and global community of Left intellectuals in Mexico during that time. Khankhoje’s commitment to revolutionary ideals and a socially just agricultural reform via scientific knowledge taught and shared from below show the complex political and scientific articulations inherent to a South-South history of knowledge transfer.

Introduction The epistemological turn to global perspectives in the disciplines of the Humanities in the second half of the twentieth century has influenced the surge and consolidation of interdisciplinary fields such as Global History as well as readings and re-readings of the past deriving from a critical historiography of globalization. These perspectives have expanded the analysis and study of “global moments” (such as colonial enterprises, revolutions, world wars, economic crises, famines) by integrating, methodologically and thematically, non-Eurocentric readings of such events, as well as concrete formations of a global consciousness stemming from interconnected non-Eurocentric actors, for example of those situated and often moving in and through the Global South. This change of perspective within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences implies a complex multilayered approach: on the one hand, global history aims at overcoming national boundaries considered inadequate to undertake an accurate analysis of the “entangled histories” or histoires croisées of the globalized world. On the other hand, methodologically, the agency of local historical protagonists needs also to be taken into account. Their histories must be thus comprehended as an unavoidable repository of located knowledge and an entangled archive. As part of the effort to engage in a continuous practice to decolonize disciplines and the writing of History, this perspective enables also the possibility to reframe the scope from which the histories of these actors will be narrated. Further, parting from the intertwined political, social, economic, and cultural relations that have shaped the different colonialisms, the interactions between colonizers and colonized peoples and places, the relevance of understanding knowledge transfers beyond the one-way direction of the center/periphery paradigm are central aspects continuously emphasized in global perspectives of historical and cultural analysis, and simultaneously a precondition for South-South contacts in the context of processes of circulation of knowledge (Conrad 2016; Klengel and Ortiz Wallner 2016, 2018). Globalization and it’s different phases of acceleration, as understood in the twenty-first century, entails a vast and complex assemblage of interconnectedness worldwide as is evidenced by the transnational movement of goods, capital, people, and imageries in diverse directions throughout and across the Global North and South. Thus, to overcome the Eurocentric paradigm in the production of knowledge in a globalized world, a clearer understanding of particular sets of transfer and contact dynamics is necessary. In this sense, the entangled histories of the South and a South-South perspective on these histories imply a new exploration of the

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

341

tensions between universality and particularity, difference and similarity in the context of plural modernities (Klengel and Ortiz Wallner 2016). As Comaroff and Comaroff (2012: 113) have stated, “the Global South” is rarely seen as a source of theory and explanation for world historical events as it stands mostly as a synonym for uncertain development, unorthodox economies, failed states fraught with corruption and poverty. To overcome this Eurocentric conception of globalization and of interconnected geo-cultural spaces, emerging perspectives that engage in pluricentric modernities aim to make the connections between peripheral regions of the global geopolitical system visible (Conrad et al. 2007). In this sense, the organization of a new and alternative archive is required, not exclusively in the sense of an institutional site for the preservation of written materials, but in the sense of a repertoire of materials and a source for the reconstruction of forgotten trajectories and marginalized actors in the prevailing dominant narratives that have long shaped intellectual history and the history of science. A dynamic ensemble of disseminated memories and histories forms this new and alternative archive. An ensemble of an interconnected global history of networks and knowledge transfer that must be reconstructed in order to fully understand global dynamics beyond Eurocentrism and persisting colonial dynamics. By examining the historical and cultural relations and interactions between Asia and Latin America from a global perspective, it is clear that the connections and transfers between these two regions of the Global South embrace a long, complex, and concrete history which has its own historicity and temporality, dating back to the Hispanic colonial past, when the Americas and Asia communicated not only through the Atlantic but also through the Pacific. This series of connected worlds includes the Asian exile and migration flows to Latin America that have their own dynamic and have been rapidly changing throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Gasquet and Majstorovic (2021) have argued, the history of displacements from Asia to Latin America has been marked by cycles of attraction and repulsion toward Asians in general. In the context of a growing interest in Eastern philosophies, religions, and arts, and forms of cultural appropriation via orientalist worldviews practiced by the Latin American intellectual elite from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, as well as through the opposite movement, that is, the rejection and exclusion of Asian communities, exiles and migrants from Asia have shaped the contemporary history, the history of knowledge production, and the cultures of Latin America. Kapil Raj (2013) following James Secord’s (2004) observation about the circulatory property of knowledge posed by historians of science states that until recent years issues pertaining the location and movement of science and scientific knowledge have remained peripheral in scholarly research since the history of science – in it’s more traditional, positivist conception – has not been interested in the question of where science is produced and practiced, and therefore how and from where it circulates around the globe (see also Harding 2011; Phalkey 2013). This asymmetric formation of power relations from within scientific knowledge production is also part of the constant flows of people, ideas, capital, and imaginaries that need to be acknowledged in order to include the situated agency of knowledge producers within

342

A. Ortiz Wallner

the geopolitics of knowledge production. In the foucaultian sense (Foucault 2008), these flows pertaining the political, economic, and social spheres are unavoidably related to the production of knowledge. Form the postcolonial perspective, theories and methodologies related to global, less asymmetrical approaches, derive from what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) suggested with the proposition of provincializing Western knowledge. Following these arguments, the circulation of knowledge in its complexity can only be grasped from its multidirectional dynamic, a dynamic that relativizes the hegemonic center-periphery divide of the world. Focusing on the relevance of the agency of local historical protagonists, the first decades of the twentieth century are characterized by the increasing numbers of colonized intellectuals who began to envision a wider world, a world without boundaries with an equal share of influence to all and a positive attitude toward cultural differences in the context of the spread of radical ideological and political articulations around the world and the emergence of new spaces of exchange and intermediation (Conrad et al. 2007: 21; Fischer-Tiné 2007; Ramnath 2011). By that time, the inclusion of a number of non-European societies in the arena of international politics and the international formalization and implementation of shared ideas about social justice, humanity, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary change relate to a connected history between Mexico and India (Uchmany 1998, 2003; Tenorio-Trillo 2012; Klengel and Ortiz Wallner 2018). When read from a comparative perspective, the history of Mexico and India offer a case of global history dynamics within the Global South. In both places, the first decades of the twentieth century were characterized by deep social upheaval and armed conflicts: the Mexican Revolution (ca. 1910–1920) and the long struggle for India’s independence which successfully ended British colonial rule in 1947 coexisted with a rich political, cultural, and intellectual effervescence that shaped and influenced the historical and cultural processes of the first half of the twentieth century. The special status of cosmopolitan Mexico during the early decades of the new century offered radicals, revolutionaries, exiles, fugitives, artists, scientists, and outcasts from all over the world an ideal place for the continuation and expansion of a wide spectrum of political and social struggles fighting against imperialism, oppression, and hunger (Tenorio-Trillo 2012). Indian revolutionary and agronomist Pandurang Khankhoje (1884–1967) was one of these political exiles who arrived in Mexico in 1924 (Sawhney 2008; Tenorio-Trillo 2012) and worked there as a scientist for nearly 30 years, participating in relevant transformations and developments in the agricultural sciences before returning to India after its independence. A forgotten and long marginalized figure in Mexico’s history of science and intellectual history, Khankhoje gained an unprecedented attention by scholars of these fields only after a series of photographs taken by Italian photographer and revolutionary activist Tina Modotti (1896–1942) was donated by Khankhoje’s daughter Savitri Sawhney to the Fototeca Nacional at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia INAH in Mexico City in 2014, and after the photographs were exhibited as part of the documenta14, the 14 edition of the contemporary art exhibition that took place in 2017 in the cities of Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Modotti’s series of photographs of Pandurang Khankhoje, which registered his agricultural

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

343

experiments with maize and his efforts to develop drought-tolerant varieties through genetically modified crops, as well as his engagement at the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura in Mexico between 1924 and 1928, inaugurate the rediscovery of this long forgotten history of South-South networks and knowledge circulation between India and Mexico interconnecting art, science, and revolutionary trajectories. Recent publications reveal this turn toward global history approaches (Dávalos and Salado 2018; Soto Laveaga 2018, 2020; Kent Carrasco 2020a, 2020b, 2021). As the primary crop and one of the main sources of the Mesoamerican diet since precolonial times, maize holds a central role in political, social, and cultural life in Mexico. A foundational symbol for both indigenous and nonindigenous communities and a source of identity formation and collective identification through the social spectrum of Mexico’s society and throughout Mexico’s turbulent history, maize and it’s grow are intimately related to struggles for food sovereignty, land, political autonomy, and also to state modernization projects, public education efforts during the aftermath of the Mexican revolution, and scientific knowledge production as Pandurang Khankhoje’s figure as a revolutionary exile and agronomist in postrevolutionary Mexico paradigmatically shows. Furthermore, maize is a contested field and symbol for the preservation of cultural heterogeneity (Page 2021), and a key component of identity politics during the first years of the postrevolutionary government. Decades before US institutions such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations started dealing with the political and ecological context of maize farming (later better known as the Green Revolution), as well as with derived projects that aimed to “modernize” agriculture across the Latin American subcontinent, Asia, and Africa via introducing hybrid seeds and the extensive use of agricultural chemicals (Patel 2013; Eddens 2019; Soto Laveaga 2020), Pandurang Khankhoje and the Mexican agronomists participating in the foundation of the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura and in agricultural development initiatives were seeking to transmit scientific knowledge to peasants struggling with drought and diverse disease threats. This was part of the Mexican state interests in modernizing peasantry in the context of president Cárdenas’ land reform (Cotter 2002). The decade of the 1930s turned into a complex political ecology from the agricultural point of view with rising problems in the production, distribution, and consumption of crops due to extreme weather conditions and outbreaks (Eddens 2019). This was the frame that led to what later became known as the Green Revolution. As Eddens (2019) points out by analyzing the case of a “Green Revolution for Africa,” plant breeders who develop disease-resistant hybrid maize for Africa use cutting-edge technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 to mine the genomes of maize collected in Mexico 75 years ago, during the Green Revolution’s earliest incarnation.

Science, Art, and Revolution in Mexico India-Mexico: Similarities and Encounters Throughout History is a comprehensive volume on the long-standing relations between the two countries published in 2003 by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Delhi. This edition includes an

344

A. Ortiz Wallner

extensive study on Pandurang Khankhoje’s political and agronomic presence and work in postrevolutionary Mexico, whose presence in the Latin American country lasted 30 years, from 1924 until 1954. It is noteworthy that this chapter was prepared and included in this volume at the request of Indian scholars and historians. In the original Spanish version, published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1998, Khankhoje is not even mentioned, although an article dedicated to the cultivation of a Mexican variety of wheat in India and the contributions of Indian scientists to Mexican agriculture, written by Ripusudan Lal Paliwal (1928–2013), is included (1998: 242–263). Paliwal worked at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and began his work in Mexico in the 1970s. CIMMYT started its programs in Mexico in the 1960s. This Center became one of the main institutions in the by then already structured Green Revolution, which consisted of a group of programs led by the US government, the Ford and the Rockefeller foundations that aimed to modernize agriculture across the Global South by introducing hybrid seeds, credit programs, and the use of chemicals in cultivating processes and in agriculture. This frame of the Green Revolution has generally been characterized as part of the history of the Cold War, but as Raj Patel (2013) argues, this revolution linked to agricultural knowledge and cultivating techniques is more accurately framed from the longe durée perspective, as a history marked by “state reconfiguration, capitalist accumulation, concentration of power, disenfranchisement, agricultural investment and innovation” (2013, 2) that has stretched after 1970s in the context of combating hunger and climate change, especially in the Global South. The existence of an expanded Indian version of one of the reference works for an introduction to the historical, cultural, socio-political, and scientific relations between Mexico and India points, on the one hand, to the concrete links of scientific cooperation in the field of agriculture as a space for exchanges between the two countries throughout the twentieth century, while at the same time denoting the omissions in the official narrative of Mexican historiography regarding the development of agriculture and the participation of non-Mexican actors. The series of photographs taken by Tina Modotti, begun around 1928 and discovered in the early 2010s in the personal archive of Indian agronomist Pandurang Khankhoje – an archive preserved in the family estate in Delhi by his daughter Savitri Sawhney – documents the network of South-South intellectual solidarity forged in postrevolutionary Mexico between the Italian photographer and the Indian agronomist and revolutionary exile. This particular encounter between two militants of the Global South was part of the documenta14 program in 2017 (Sawhney 2017), one of the most important exhibitions of the global art circuit, which that year focused on the thematic “South.” Thus, a forgotten and unknown part of history was placed in a network of knowledge circulation that spans the global art market from a sensibility devoted to making otherwise invisible histories, visible. This photographic archive – previously unknown and preserved in a private family archive – offers the opportunity to read the convergence of diverse languages – that of photography and agronomic-organic research in postrevolutionary Mexico – that were political-aesthetic instruments aspiring to shape

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

345

radical and militant thought with the aim of transforming technological and working conditions, as well as the universe of the symbolic in a convulsive time of political transition. The discovery of these photographs reveals the omission by the official history and the dominant narrative of postrevolutionary Mexico, as well as the history of Mexican science, with respect to this figure – a left-wing militant trained as an agronomist, who came from India (via the United States, Japan, and Europe) more than 20 years before Indian independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The particular history of this omission can be traced back in several cases of correction/ expansion of existing accounts of the relations between the two geo-cultural spaces (Mexico and India). Scattered in a few Mexican libraries specializing in agronomy, the scientist’s writings, his history, and above all the role Khankhoje played during his extended stay in Mexico did not begin to gain some relevance until the publication of his memoirs, I Shall Never Ask for Pardon (2008), written by his daughter Savitri Sawhney and published under the label of Penguin Books in Delhi. From India, a doubly-revealing dossier was opened both for the history of socialist-oriented Mexican agrarianism, prior to Cárdena’s transformative effort (1934–1940), and for photography in Mexico, concerning Tina Modotti’s committed participation alongside the agronomist: This relationship of friendship and militancy had remained unknown, hidden, both to specialists in Tina Modotti’s work and to scholars of social processes related to agriculture and the history of science in Mexico. On the other hand, this part of the private family archive donated by Savitri Sawhney to Mexico in 2014 is relevant because it contains 18 postcard-sized photographs taken by Tina Modotti, recording Khankhoje’s work in the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura [Free Agricultural Schools] and in the Liga Nacional Campesina [National Peasant League], including one photograph portraying the figure of Diego Rivera. The theme of Granada maize (or the Zea Maiz Digitata), a variety developed by Khankhoje, and Teocintle maize was also represented in Tina Modotti’s photographs. The photographs show both, open spaces, for example in the fields next to the farmers and with samples from various maize plants, and in enclosed laboratory spaces where the agronomist worked with the plant samples and varieties he studied. The Indian agronomist and revolutionary was an anticolonial activist, trade unionist, avant-garde geneticist, as well as an agrarian pedagogue, especially since his arrival in postrevolutionary Mexico. Since his three decades in Mexico to this day, and despite his scientific contributions, Khankhoje occupies a marginal place as a little known and irrelevant character in the intellectual and scientific history of both Mexico and India. Although Khankhoje is mentioned in important studies on the history of the institutionalization of genetics and the history of agronomy in postrevolutionary Mexico (Barahona Echeverría et al. 2003), in-depth and comprehensive studies on his work and legacy are only now being published (Kent Carrasco 2020a, b, 2021). Thus, for example, from a theoretical perspective, his figure and his time in Mexico have been used to promote an exercise of “dislocation” of inherited

346

A. Ortiz Wallner

narratives and symbolic structures in order to decenter the study of the global history of science (Soto Laveaga 2018). Studying Khankhoje’s time in Mexico provides important clues to understanding the ideological, institutional, and scientific transition that brought the trajectories of agrarianism and agroindustry closer during those years, thus prefiguring the beginning of the so-called green revolution in Mexico (Soto Laveaga 2018, 2020). Soto Laveaga has read Khankhoje’s “Mexican” biography in the context of the emergence of the history of the so-called green revolution as an overlooked chapter of the history of science in Mexico and the history of science in general, showing that the practices of the green revolution had already been implemented in a precursory and revolutionary way in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, and not as an American scientific discovery in later decades (the 1960s and 1970s), as recorded by official history. Interestingly, for Soto Laveaga, Modotti’s photographs have no value beyond the mere illustrative record, barely mentioning them in footnotes in her articles published on the topic in 2018. This is where our perspective from interdisciplinary Latin American cultural studies takes on meaning and justification in a critical analysis of how national histories have been constructed. In order to read and reread the configuration of our lettered cities, focusing on the omissions, we need the tools and perspectives that allow us to think about the convergences between, for example, science and art, science and revolution, science and history, along with the particular encounters between actors that transcend national boundaries. Born on November 7, 1886, in a Brahmin family, Pandurang Khankhoje was inspired already in his early years by the political commitment of his grandfather Vyankatesh Khankhoje who had participated during the revolt of 1857 at the start of what later would be the Indian independence movement which stretches until 1947. These kinds of experiences allowed him to establish connections with the revolutionary movements across the Indian subcontinent, in Bengal, Punjab, and Goa, for example (Dhumatkar 2011). Following the recount of Sawhney (2008) Dhumatkar affirms that the Indian famine of 1899–1900, which affected almost 60 million people (The Imperial Gazetteer of India 1907), was a turning point for Khankhoje who decided to study agriculture and managed to organize his study abroad: he combined a military and agricultural education in the USA. and Japan, and was simultaneously involved in revolutionary activities in both countries. His interaction with the societies of the rising industrial countries of East and West at the beginning of the twentieth century as a young student marked his trajectory as an engaged revolutionary seeking new forms of political action through scientific knowledge and military preparation. Dhumatkar (2011) describes how during his stay in Japan (1906–1907), Khankhoje learned manufacturing techniques related to chemistry as well as horticulture and rice cultivation. The Japan years were thus important in his formation as an agronomist and his interest in better understanding the causes of famines, the role of the cultivation of crop, and the farming techniques applied. His political commitment was marked by his interest in scientific knowledge, specifically that of agriculture as a means to avoid hunger. In 1908, Khankhoje traveled together with Japanese and Chinese workers to San Francisco, USA, and in 1911

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

347

was able to complete studies in Agriculture at Oregon State Agriculture College (Sawhney 2008; Dhumatkar 2011). In I Shall Never Ask for Pardon, Khankhoje recounts to his daughter an early encounter with Mexico as he describes his experience as a student during practical agricultural works and the relationship between the farmers and the land they cultivated. At the same time, the enthusiasm generated by the capture of Mexicali by the Magonista forces in 1911 shaped his interest for Mexico. Guided by the idea of joining the armed struggle, he crosses the border from Calexico, but returns to the USA discouraged by the situation he later witnesses in Mexico (Sawhney 2008: 93–94). The reasons leading to his decision to travel back to Mexico in 1924 remain unclear, although the unique connections he was aware of, between revolutionary action and scientific knowledge, might have played a significant role, especially after continuing his studies at Washington State Agriculture College in the USA and specializing in dry farming. On the other hand, his close relation with India’s Communist Party might have also played a role in his decision (Dhumatkar 2011). As Sawhney (2008) and Dhumatkar (2011) explain, Khankhoje was inspired and influenced during his studies in the USA by Luther Burbank (1849–1926), an American botanist, horticulturist, and pioneer in the agricultural sciences, who worked with modern methods of cultivation and agricultural implements, and developed new varieties of cactus and potato through the process of cross breeding. Khankhoje was very active as a researcher and became a member of the American Breeders Association in 1913. That same year, the results of his research on the factors determining water requirements of plants were included in a textbook on agro-chemistry (Khankhoje 1914). All these gathered knowledge before arriving in Mexico was continuously transmitted by Khankhoje to Indian farmers through publications and letters sent to his peers in his homeland. Khankhoje believed that it was necessary to undertake agriculture and animal husbandry on a commercial basis, on the one hand as a source of nutrition to the large masses of population of India, and, on the other hand to achieve economic independence as farmers. He also defended the importance of conducting scientific research on agriculture. His focus on scientific knowledge and the possibilities it opened for a profound and longlasting change were fundamental aspects for the independent societies of the future. As a scientist he identified education as the solution to India’s tragic famines and agricultural and industrial development as the solution to all Indian problems. Thus he was not only a revolutionary intellectual of the global Left and a scientist, he was also a modernizer. Khankhoje saw in the education and the instruction of farmers the possibilities of independence as well as the realization of a modern, postcolonial state. Science and revolution offered him a fundament for social transformation. Postrevolutionary Mexico was, from these perspective, an ideal scenario to experiment in this various directions. Khankhoje was not the first Indian who, via the USA, sought refuge in postrevolutionary Mexico. In 1917, Manabendra Nath Roy arrives in Mexico City, where he participates in the creation of the Mexican Communist Party. Around that time also, Heramba Lal Gupta, another member of the Ghadar Movement (Ramnath 2011; Tenorio-Trillo 2012), works actively as a translator, publishing

348

A. Ortiz Wallner

several texts in José Vasconcelos’ journal El Maestro (1921–1923), as well as a Spanish translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Chitra. Drama en un acto [Chitra. A play in One Act] (1919) (Tenorio-Trillo 2012). In the case of the young agronomist, he benefited from the range of scientific and employment opportunities that opened for scientists in Mexico in the 1920s. During those years, the agronomic profession merged with the agrarian program of the new postrevolutionary regime, which allowed many to access governmental, academic, or technical positions (see Cotter). In this context, Khankhoje was hired as a professor at the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura [National School of Agriculture] in May 1924. Located in what was once a Chapingo estate (hacienda), the Escuela became an important symbol of the agrarian reform and modernization project spearheaded by the postrevolutionary regime. At Chapingo, Khankhoje became the first professor to teach genetics in Mexico, and in the experimental fields of Texcoco he headed what is considered the first institutional effort to carry out genetic improvement experiments on agricultural varieties in Mexico, particularly maize (see Barahona Echeverría et al. 2003). Khankhoje began to be known at that time thanks to his investigations on frost and drought resisting varieties of maize; by 1925 he became a member of the Mexican Scientific Society (Sawhney 2008; Dhumatkar 2011). By 1926 in the context of his appointment as professor of agronomy and maize farming he became the first professor of plant genetics in Latin America (Sawhney 2008; Dhumatkar 2011). That same year he participated in the Mexican National Exhibition with his research on hybrid maize crop being recognized for his results. According to Sawhney (2008) and Dhumatkar (2011), he was also a prolific writer authoring 18 books on agriculture and plant genetics in Spanish, and he produced rust and frost resisting hybrid varieties of wheat cultivable in monsoon and summer and varieties of pigeon-peas, cow-peas, and soya surviving for 3 to 4 years and yielding two crops a year; he informed the Mexican farmers he worked with through Spanish booklets and aimed at motivated them to engage in more modern techniques of farming. With appropriate institutional support, the Indian agronomist applied the knowledge he had acquired during his training in the USA and developed new corn seeds “resistant to the diseases, frost and droughts” of the Mexican highlands (“Nuevas variedades de maíz” 5), a much celebrated development. As Soto Laveaga points out, in the Mexico of the 1920s, Khankhoje’s anti-British sentiment was in tune with the revolutionary anti-imperialist spirit of the promoters of the National School of Agriculture and their advocacy of revolutionary social engineering for the creation of a new peasant, a fact that coincided with the redefinition of the role of science in agricultural fields (Soto Laveaga 2018: 28). Thus, for example, in December 1924, Khankhoje’s work occupied an important place in the debates of the Second Congress of the Liga de Comunidades Agrarias [League of Agrarian Communities] of the State of Veracruz. Led by Úrsulo Galván, this Congress was the result of the mobilization and organization of leaders and peasant guerrilla organizations in Veracruz that revolved around the problem of land and peasant education. At this Congress, a nationwide organization was created, an accord that turned it into a milestone in the history of postrevolutionary agrarianism in Mexico (see Falcón 1977).

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

349

That same Second Congress agreed to the creation of the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura throughout the country. Their goal would be to lead the education of the peasant class, especially adults, and to provide practical and scientific knowledge that could contribute to agricultural production, cooperativism, and the development of a non-capitalist revolutionary pedagogy. Taking into account the work carried out in the experimental fields of Chapingo, Khankhoje was appointed director of this new network of schools. In Khankhoje’s own words, the aim was to establish a form of peasant education by overcoming a “bourgeois pedagogy based on class distinction and the exploitation of man for the accumulation of capital” and the development of a philosophy founded on overcoming “personal egoism” and on the “sowing [of] the seed of class consciousness in the hearts of the students by means of pure affection” (“Escuelas Libres de Agricultura,” 188–189). Once the armed stage of the Mexican Revolution was over, the peasant movement set out to find a solution to the agrarian problem. To accomplish this, it was essential to group together by sectors and undertake forms of struggle and organization of the rural poor, which included, among others, requests for the distribution of large estates and assignment of land to create ejidos and population centers, seizures of haciendas, and crucially, the creation of agrarian committees. Veracruz was an entity exhibiting conditions that made it stand out throughout the Republic: a relatively strong labor movement covering workers in the oil, railroad, textile and port sectors, and teachers; an important liberal, anti-imperialist, and revolutionary tradition; advanced pedagogical experiences in public education, with representation in the government sector representing the most advanced wing of the Mexican Revolution. The Liga Nacional Campesina, founded in 1926, revitalized the peasant struggle at a time when all options seemed to be exhausted. This is where we need to situate Khankhoje, with his ideal of bottom-up agrarian reform, putting first the scientific knowledge needed to cultivate the land in the best possible way. It is precisely Modotti’s photographs that highlight this project. With the reforms to their curricula, the Escuelas Libres became an important source of progressive agronomists who were no strangers to organized struggles. It was Khankhoje who set out to implement in several peasant communities some of the tasks that the curriculum of the Chapingo school proposed to develop on the lands of the students’ cooperatives, such as instituting and advising neighboring villages that had been endowed with lands, and promoting planting techniques that were tested in Chapingo, always within an organizational structure oriented toward socialism. Moreover, Khankhoje’s first months in Chapingo coincided with Diego Rivera, who was beginning his mural work in the Capilla Riveriana (1924–1928). Through Rivera, Khankhoje became acquainted with artists, intellectuals, and communist militants based in Mexico City. Within these cosmopolitan relationships, the friendship and camaraderie he established with Tina Modotti stands out. The Italian photographer worked closely with the Indian agronomist to document his scientific and pedagogical work developed during those years. Her photographs, along with Khankhoje’s presence in a mural painted by Diego Rivera in the Secretaría de Educación Pública [Department of Public Education] building, entitled “El pan

350

A. Ortiz Wallner

nuestro” [Our bread], are an eloquent visual testimony of Khankhoje’s presence in the postrevolutionary, lettered city of Mexico, thus confirming his active involvement in the artistic networks closely associated with communism. By 1928, the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura spread throughout the State of Veracruz, concentrating the radical agrarianism of the time. With the direct support of Úrsulo Galván, Khankhoje coordinated the creation of five new sites where productive activities adapted to the diverse natural regions of the area were created. The Escuela Libre del Café was created in Fortin; the Escuela de Agricultura Tropical, in Córdoba; and the Escuela Libre de Horticultura, in Malibran. In the early 1930s, Khankhoje moved to the city of Xalapa, where he served as a normalist teacher and director of the Escuela Libre de Agricultura “Úrsulo Galván.” The programmatic foundations of the Escuelas Libres set out a revolutionary ideology that coincided with Tina Modotti’s political aspirations (Khankhoje 2016). Photographs of Khankhoje’s work were not a simple documentation of the passage from laboratory research to the implementation of experiments in the field, but represented the possibility of art’s involvement in a revolutionary project, without sacrificing the specificity of an aesthetic language, in some cases particularly abstract. It is worth remembering here that Modotti’s first solo exhibition in Mexico, in 1929 at the National Library, was called “the first revolutionary photographic exhibition” in the country. At the same time, several of Khankhoje’s publications were accompanied by Modotti’s photographs, although authorship was not always attributed, for example: Nuevas variedades de maíz (1930) or Maíz Granada “Zea Mays Digitata”: su origen, evolución y cultivo (1937). What would have amounted to a number of scientific laboratory procedures was staged in a series of black-andwhite compositions, as can be seen in the photographs of Maíz Granada or in the image entitled “Roots” (Sawhney 2017). As the 1930s progressed, the impact and relevance of his scientific (and political) work in Veracruz was recognized and he was appointed representative of the state government to the Consejo Nacional de Agricultura [National Agriculture Council] of Mexico City. His rise in Mexican agrarianism and agricultural sciences reached its apex during the government of Lázaro Cárdenas when, in 1934, Khankhoje was appointed head of the Plant Genetics section of the newly created Instituto Biotécnico [Biotechnical Institute], an institution that was part of the Department of Agriculture and Development (Sawhney 2008; Barahona Echeverría et al. 2003). This brief look at a long and committed trajectory that began in the 1920s and that we reconstruct here until the end of the 1930s shows that by the end of that decade, Khankhoje was already fully integrated into the pedagogical, scientific, and administrative activities of the government at that time. Along this path, he distinguished himself by embodying a double ideal: that of the left-wing revolutionary and that of the modernizing scientist. In the Mexico of the first half of the twentieth century, agronomists went from being active agents of the Revolution to scientific professionals, a move that should be understood as the connection between the national dynamics of the Mexican Revolution and global agrarian transformations that resulted in the green revolution (Cotter; Soto Laveaga 2020).

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

351

Conclusions Khankhoje’s trajectory between East and West shows his continuous efforts in building bridges between his Mexican experience and India’s complex agricultural reality. He was convinced that political and social transformation had to emerge from below, that is from farmers who had to be active in introducing agricultural reforms to end famines and hunger. Drawing from his Mexican experience he was convinced that India also needed collectives and cooperatives of farmers, which would take an active role in scientific knowledge production and scientific knowledge dissemination from below. Only a collective effort would have results on the local, the provincial, and the national levels. At the same time, Khankhoje the modernizer was an early proponent of understanding agriculture as an industry. He advised farmers not to waste food grains, use fumigation to avoid crop diseases and attacks of insects (Sawhney 2008; Soto Laveaga 2020). On the other hand, his anti-colonial perspective remained intact as he pointed out that due to British colonial rule and it’s neglect of the technological development of agriculture in India, the absence of research policies, India was not prepared to overcome the profound national food problem derived from famines and structural conditions to better cultivate the land. Scientific knowledge, scientific training of farmers and students in modern agriculture, in the use of chemical fertilizers, and in marketing and export of agricultural products were some of the changes he aspired to bring to India after his long experience in Mexico. After Indian independence, Khankhoje wanted to return to India to play his part in India’s reconstruction with the help of his Mexican experience. In his lectures, he explained that due to colonial rule Indians had been trapped in the vicious circle of poverty and illiteracy, discouraging them to adopt modern techniques of agriculture. The period of his early career in Mexico offers a new insight into the global and interdisciplinary study of a series of political, ideological, and scientific transformation processes that coincided in the 1920s and 1930s. However, in the absence of archives and more documentary evidence of the results obtained in the pioneer work of genetic experimentation and plant biology carried out by Pandurang Khankhoje, as well as the absence of information about his work as a teacher due to the few testimonies left by him (with the exception of his autobiography written by his daughter), it is difficult to make definitive conclusions about the political, cultural, and scientific processes in which he was involved during those years. In this constellation, the militancy that united him to Tina Modotti – in this particular synchronism of scientific research with photographic mediality – reverts and questions what is usually considered part of the tradition of officially accepted forms of representation and knowledge. On the other hand, his commitment to the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura and the Escuelas Libres de Agricultura was perhaps his most defining aspect during this stage – the eradication of hunger and famines being his strongest objective. After spending three decades in Mexico, in which Khankhoje was active as a revolutionary, as an agronomist, and as a modernizer of agricultural techniques, he declared himself “doubly Indian” as his daughter Savitri Sawhney

352

A. Ortiz Wallner

(2008: 266) writes. He described himself as an emissary of political, scientific, and cultural traditions, which he saw influenced by his adopted country Mexico as well as stemming from his land of birth, India, the land he aspired to transform through his political views and scientific achievements. His ambiguous positions on a revolutionary development from below based on the access to scientific knowledge by the people together with ideas on modernizing the agricultural work for example through its industrialization show a much larger and complex set of issues related to the relations between science, intellectuality, and revolutionary projects between East and West, between socialist and capitalist world views in the first decades of the twentieth century in the entangled histories between India and Mexico.

References Barahona Echeverría A, Pinar S, Ayala FJ (2003) La genética en México: institucionalización de una disciplina. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México Chakrabarty D (2000) Provincializing Europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton Comaroff, Jean/Comaroff, John L. 2012. “Theory from the South: or, how euro-America is evolving towards Africa”. Anthropol Forum 22: 2, pp. 113–131 Conrad S (2016) What is global history? Princeton University Press, Princeton Conrad S, Eckert A, Freitag U (eds) (2007) Globalgeschichte: Theorien, Ansätze, Themen. Campus, Frankfurt am Main/New York Cotter J (2002) Troubled harvest. Agronomy and revolution in Mexico, 1880–2002. Praeger Publishers, Westport Dávalos M, Salado K (2018) Agrónomos, revolución agrícola y escuelas de agricultura (1920–1928). Pacarina del Sur 10(37). www.pacarinadelsur.com/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=1678&catid=10 Fuente: Pacarina del Sur – http://www. pacarinadelsur.com/nuestra-america/amautas-y-horizontes/1678-agronomos-revolucionagricolay-escuelas-de-agricultura-1920-1928 Dhumatkar A (2011) From nationalism to internationalism: Pandurang Sadashiv Khankhoje: apostle of indo-Mexican friendship. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 72 (II):1123–1140 Eddens A (2019) White science and indigenous maize: the racial logics of the green revolution. J Peasant Stud 46(3):653–673 Falcón R (1977) El agrarismo en Veracruz. La etapa radical (1928–1935). El Colegio de México, México Fischer-Tiné H (2007) Indian nationalism and the ‘world forces’: transnational and diasporic dimensions of the Indian freedom movement on the eve of the first world war. J Glob Hist 2: 325–344 Foucault M (2008) In: Senellart M (ed) The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979 (trans: Burchell G). Palgrave Macmillan, London Gasquet A, Majstorovic G (eds) (2021) Cultural and literary dialogues between Asia and Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, London Harding S (ed) (2011) The postcolonial science and technology studies reader. Duke University Press, Durham Kent Carrasco D (2020a) De Chapingo a Sonora: Pandurang Khankhoje en México y el tránsito del agrarismo a la agroindustria. Hist Mex 70, 1(277):375–421 Kent Carrasco D (2020b) Breath of revolution: Ghadar anti-colonial radicalism in North America and the Mexican revolution. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43(6):1077–1092

16

South-South Exchange Networks and the Circulation of Knowledge in 1920s. . .

353

Kent Carrasco D (2021) From British colonial subject to Mexican ‘Naturalizado’ Pandurang Khankhoje’s life beyond the reach of imperial power (1924-1954). In: Bose N (ed) South Asian migrations in global history. Labour, law, wayward lives. Bloomsbury, London, pp 179–199 Khankhoje P (1914) Some factors which influence the water requirements of plants. Journal of the American Society of Agronomy 6(1):1–23 Khankhoje P (1930) Nuevas variedades de maíz. Boletín de Investigación Estación Experimental Agrícola, Escuela Nacional de Agricultura 1:5–14 Khankhoje P (1937) El frijol soya. Glycine Hispida. Max. El Campesino 1(7):14–15 Khankhoje P (2016) Escuelas Libres de Agricultura del Estado de Veracruz. Depto. de Ingeniería Agrícola de la Liga de Comunidades Agrarias del Estado de Veracruz. Revista de Geografía Agrícola 57:187–198 Klengel S, Ortiz Wallner A (eds) (2016) Sur/South: poetics and politics of thinking Latin America / India. Vervuert/Iberoamericana, Frankfurt a.M./Madrid Klengel S, Ortiz Wallner A (eds) (2018) Latinoamérica/Oriente desde el Sur en el temprano siglo XX. Iberoromania 87:1–109 Page J (2021) Decolonizing science in Latin American art. UCL Press, London Patel R (2013) The long green revolution. J Peasant Stud 40(1):1–63 Phalkey J (2013) “Introduction”. Focus: science, history, and modern India. Isis 104(2):330–336 Raj K (2013) “Beyond Postcolonialism. . . and Postpositivism. Circulation and the global history of science”. Focus: science, history, and modern India. Isis 104(2):337–347 Ramnath M (2011) Haj to utopia: how the Ghadar movement charted global radicalism and attempted to overthrow the British empires. University of California Press, Oakland Sawhney S (2008) I shall never ask for pardon. A memoir of Pandurang Khankhoje. Penguin Books, Delhi Sawhney S (2017), Revolutionary work: Pandurang Khankhoje and Tina Modotti. Documenta14 SOUTH Secord JA (2004) Knowledge in transit. Isis 95(4):654–672 Soto Laveaga G (2018) Largo dislocare: connecting microhistories to remap and recenter histories of science. Hist Technol 34(1):21–30 Soto Laveaga G (2020) The socialist origins of the green revolution: Pandurang Khankhoje and domestic ‘technical assistance’. Hist Technol 36(3–4):337–359 Tagore R (1919) Chitra. Drama en un acto. Trad. Heramba Lal Gupta La Helvetia, Mexico Tenorio-Trillo M (2012) I speak of the city. Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago The Imperial Gazetteer of India (1907) Chapter X: Famine. In: The Indian empire. Economic, vol III. Published under the authority of His Majesty’s Secretary of State for India in Council. Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp 475–502 Uchmany EA (ed) (1998) México-India. Similitudes y encuentros a través de la historia. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico Uchmany EA (ed) (2003) India-Mexico: similarities and encounters throughout history. Indian Council for Cultural Relations, New Delhi

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America: Technology, Geopolitics, and Institutions

17

Wilson Picado

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Dominant Narrative of the Green Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Green Revolution As a Unique Process: The Heroic Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Green Revolution As a Result of the Market Forces: The Economic Narrative . . . . . . The New Narratives of the Green Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alternative Narratives from Latin America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging the Chronology: 1968 Versus 1941 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Causal Factor: Seeds Versus Institutions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Institutional Cloning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Connecting International and National Policies: The Green Revolution in Costa Rica . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

356 356 357 359 360 363 364 365 366 369 371 371

Abstract

This chapter confronts the dominant narrative about the Green Revolution in Latin America with its critics and, through a case study, proposes an agenda with an alternative periodization. The first section analyzes the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution through a discussion of its origin writings and theoretical foundations. The following section is an overview of the critical literature on this dominant narrative. Finally, it proposes a multiplicity of green revolutions with other chronologies, depending on national political processes and the degree of agricultural modernization. The conclusions suggest a change in the process’ chronology, shifting its beginnings from 1968 to 1941, and underscoring “green revolutions” linked to agricultural modernization in the post-war era. It is based on the literature on the subject and other documentary sources. W. Picado (*) Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_14

355

356

W. Picado

Introduction Third World agricultures went through a profound change during the second half of the twentieth century, a process generically known as the Green Revolution. It stemmed from the introduction of chemical inputs, the diffusion of genetically improved seeds, and the rise in agricultural mechanization. As a concept, however, Green Revolution has had different meanings, ranging from geographically focused processes to conflicting chronologies. This polysemic character is evident as it encompasses agricultural modernization in Latin America, Africa, and Asia since World War II, or the agricultural growth in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. It is also used in referring to specific processes such as the development of high-yielding varieties (hereafter referred as HYVs) in wheat and rice, as well as the American geopolitical strategy to confront communism in the Third World during the Cold War. Furthermore, sometimes the concept of Green Revolution is applied to scientific advances such as genetic improvement in plants, the use of chemical fertilizers, and mechanization in agriculture. Finally, there is disagreement in its timing: some scholars date the beginning of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, while for others it began in World War II or even before. In order to understand the manifold meanings of this concept, this chapter attempts to clarify them through a historical reconstruction, underlining the Latin American experience. The mainstream narrative on the Green Revolution assigns a marginal role to Latin America. The region’s role is limited to the development of HYVs in the Mexican agricultural program, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s. It downplays other Latin American agricultural research programs, either before or after World War II, unrelated to the Mexican program. The chronology of the Green Revolution begins with the Mexican program and reaches its climax with the arrival of HYVs to India during the 1960s. Therefore, it disregards how the internal policy of every Latin American country shaped the increasing agricultural modernization. The first part of this chapter analyses the characteristics of the Green Revolution main narrative, its foundational texts, and its theoretical sources. Besides, it presents an overview of the different critiques to this narrative made by several authors. The following part evaluates the mainstream narrative from a Latin American perspective on three aspects. To begin with, it challenges the main chronology of the Green Revolution, centered in 1968, because it does not apply to the region. The second aspect posits that agricultural research and rural technical assistance institutions led the modernization in the region, even before the creation of HYVs. Finally, it proposes that the Green Revolution in Latin America owes to the political processes in each host country as much as to the broader global geopolitical context.

The Dominant Narrative of the Green Revolution The typical narrative of the Green Revolution ignores the history of the very concept of a “Green Revolution” and the ideas and values that underpin it. This section analyses two different versions of the history of the Green Revolution. The first one,

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

357

which I call the heroic narrative, has its source in the book Campaigns Against Hunger, which describes the history of the Mexican program (Stakman et al. 1967). The second interpretation, providing a sharp contrast about the same topic, derives from Hayami and Ruttan’s book Agricultural Development: An International Perspective (Hayami and Ruttan 1971). Unlike Campaigns Against Hunger, these economists’ aim was not to give an alternative diachronic version of the process, but to explain the Green Revolution as the consequence of market forces, leaving aside social or geopolitical conflicts.

The Green Revolution As a Unique Process: The Heroic Narrative According to Campaigns Against Hunger, the agricultural program of the Rockefeller Foundation grew out of the need of the Mexican government to improve the country’s agriculture, a challenge willingly supported by the Foundation. Thus, its origin was not linked to the overarching historical moment: World War II. For their book, the war context was ignored, and warfare became a metaphor symbolizing the efforts, and the obstacles as well as commitment that underpinned the work of the American scientists and officials. By isolating the program from the war context, it became an autonomous process, which depended on the scientists’ work or on the Foundation’s initiative. From the American point of view, Mexico’s food problems were due to Cardenas-era Agrarian Reform, which required the willingness and determination of US scientists. Consequently, the programs’ moral standing was to help the Southern neighbor in solving its “agricultural problem.” Under this justification, the program’s success was directly linked to the scientists’ capacity to overcome difficulties and obstacles. This narrative underscored the role of Henry A. Wallace. He served as VicePresident of the United States (1941–1945) and was the broker between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government, helped by Josephus Daniels, US ambassador in Mexico (1933–1944) (Stakman et al. 1967; Kirkendall 1990). The political and diplomatic endeavors of Wallace and Daniels were complemented by the creation of two working groups appointed by the Foundation, which began the program’s activities. The leading one, established in 1941, undertook a diagnostic of Mexico’s agriculture, and was made up of E.C. Stakman, Paul C. Mangelsdorf and Richard Bradfield, also known as “Three Musketeers of Agriculture.” Stakman had had a distinguished career before joining the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico. By then, he was well-known for his studies in controlling wheat diseases, such as the wheat rust fungus. Mangelsdorf, a distinguished botanics professor at the Harvard University, was an expert on the origins and hybridization of maize, while Bradfield, a Cornell University professor, was a soil scientist. The leading group chose J.G. Harrar, L.M. Roberts, D. Parker, E.J. Wellhausen, N. Borlaug, and J.J. McKelvey. They took over the control and management of the agricultural research program from 1943 onward (Cotter 1994; Fitzgerald 1994; Harwood 2009; Gutiérrez 2017). An important element in the book Campaigns Against Hunger was the set of scientists’ biographies, which included information about their family business,

358

W. Picado

education, and working experience. Stakman and his colleagues were careful to point out that the selection of the program personnel was not a random process, but a well thought through procedure. Professional training, field work, as well as shared networks were key elements in their choosing. These biographies included the politicians involved – H. Wallace and J. Daniels. Regarding Wallace, they emphasized his long-standing interest in the Mexican agrarian questions. On Daniels’ enthusiasm about the Foundation’s program, they underline his earlier experience in the American South, where he witnessed when Seaman A. Knapp created the successful campaigns of the agricultural extension services in the United States under the Smith-Lever Act of 1914. With regard to Harrar, the authors enumerated his origins in Ohio, his studies – Iowa-Ames, Puerto Rico, and Minnesota – and his research experience at Washington-Pullman in the Department of Plant Pathology. About Borlaug, they stressed his Iowan origin, and his training in forestry and plant pathology. Wellhausen’s career included his upbringing in Oklahoma, his professional training, and his profile as “a man of the soil as well as a man of science.” Likewise, The Missourian Colwell was considered a man who “knew soil on the farm and in the laboratory” (Stakman et al. 1967). The reconstruction of personal experiences fits into the mythical narrative revealed throughout the book, and consequently it was well-suited to the personified and episodic focus used to explain the program’s mission. Likewise, also from the American point of view, the scientists confronted a heroic task. According to the authors’ logic, their rural upbringing, their studies on agricultural sciences, and their working experiences made them the ideal conveyors for the program’s different aspects, “good scientists with missionary zeal” (Stakman et al. 1967). Biographies became instruments in validating the agricultural program on the basis of the familiar and professional history of its participants. Conversely, its participants validated their professional careers on the success and moral legitimacy of the program. Aside the biographies, Stakman et al. describe how these scientists, due to the internationalization of the Mexican program, were able to project an agronomic culture originated in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century to the Third World. The scientists became agents in spreading mechanization, HYVs, and soil conservation. The success of the Mexican program led to the expansion of this policy to other countries, always under the formers’ pioneer scientists (Méndez 2018). The subsequent programs in Latin American and in Asia kept certain common operational features of their Mexican predecessor, through a dynamic of “institutional cloning” and the promotion of scientists to executive posts (Picado 2012). When a new program started, it was usually headed by one of the pioneering scientists of the Mexican experience. Thus, even though the mission already had transnational outreach, its operations were controlled by the limited network of scientists and colleagues who shared a common experience and an agronomic culture.

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

359

The Green Revolution As a Result of the Market Forces: The Economic Narrative A new generation of scholars, unconditioned by the war experience, proposed a different approach: the theory of induced technical change. Yujiro Hayami and Vernon Ruttan, despite their different birthplaces and backgrounds, the former a Japanese and the latter an American, shared some common traits. They became professionals after World War II, studied Economics and earned their Ph.D. from American universities. During different periods and with diverse degrees of responsibility, they had links with the Rockefeller Foundation and worked for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) (Otsuka 2011). According to their theory, innovation in agriculture is a consequence of the diverse endowment of factors of production in each country or region. In agricultural systems with scarce and therefore expensive land, technological change saves that resource through the application of fertilizers or any other innovation to increase yields per area. By contrast, in contexts where labor force is the scarce and expensive resource, technology tends to save in the use of labor force through mechanization (Hayami and Ruttan 1971). Hayami and Ruttan vindicated the importance of the agricultural sector, which was as important as the industrial sector in securing economic growth at the national level. The Green Revolution gave them the opportunity to test their analysis on agricultural development through statistical analysis. In their view, the revolution mobilized human and institutional agents in order to increase agricultural output through HYV seeds. They identified three different aspects of this “technological optimism.” To begin with, if at the microlevel, a change in the prices of factors of production creates a pressure for innovation, at a macrolevel – that is, at an institutional scale – such pressure leads to institutional innovations in agricultural research. According to the authors, their models showed that institutional change could come about as an economic response to the changes in the endowment of resources and technical change (Hayami and Ruttan 1971). Secondly, they underscored the Green Revolution’s potential to reduce the productivity gap between the agriculture of rich and less developed countries. Finally, for Hayami and Ruttan, the success of HYVs in Asia demonstrated that economic growth was possible in less developed countries through agricultural research institutions. They exemplified this thesis with the development of the international system of agricultural research, including the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known as CIMMYT for its acronyms in Spanish), the IRRI, and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (known as CIAT for its acronyms in Spanish). In their perspective, the purpose of these centers was the transference of agricultural technology from countries in temperate zones to those in the tropics, developing local research capacity (Hayami and Ruttan 1971). Hayami and Ruttan came across a contradiction in the debate about the social repercussion of the Green Revolution technology. On its impact on the distribution

360

W. Picado

of income among farmers, the authors assumed a conservative stance, disregarding any criticism as a “Marxist” perspective: far from deepening socioeconomic inequalities, the innovation was an opportunity to “counteract” the growing income inequality in the agricultural sector. The new technology had not resulted in a greater concentration in the large farms but, instead, it improved the efficiency of smalland medium-sized farmers. They took a very different stance before agrarian productivity between rich and poor countries. While they defended the equalizing effect of the technology of the Green Revolution at the microlevel, they recognized the existence of an obvious “world disequilibrium” in food production. They pointed out that after World War II, developed agriculture evolved toward models of economic growth in which human capital, knowledge, and technological inputs played key roles. They warned that the foundation of “comparative advantage” had shifted from the availability of natural resources to scientific and industrial capacities. Conversely, undeveloped countries field to take advantage of available resources to increase their agricultural productivity. For Ruttan and Hayami, the causes of inequality among agricultural systems were unrelated to the technological package, because technology was neutral. They were due to factors such as market conditions and the influence of politics, including the developed countries protectionism, State intervention in markets for agricultural foodstuffs, and the absence of land reforms (Hayami and Ruttan 1971). Campaigns Against Hunger preceded Agricultural Development: An International Perspective by 4 years. The former was a collective endeavor by scientists with important careers in their respective fields, who were over 60 years old when the book went to print. It was a memoir about the activities financed by the Rockefeller Foundation for food production in the Third World. By contrast, the latter reflected the innovative thinking of two economists belonging to a younger generation, who were building their academic careers. It reveals their ingenuity in designing a theory to understand the process of technological change in world agriculture since 1945. There was a theoretical and methodological divide between Stakman et al., on the one hand, and Ruttan and Hayami, on the other, but both books shared a common trait: the recessive role assigned to history in explaining the emergence of the Green Revolution. Either version was disconnected from the social and political context, each floating in a timeless vacuum. In Stakman et al.’s case, the heroic narrative and the mythical memory took place without any context, while for Ruttan and Hayami the historical framework was an empty canvas to display graphs and statistics. Thus, the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution was written in “ahistorical” terms (Fitzgerald 1994).

The New Narratives of the Green Revolution Among the vast corpus on the subject produced over the last decade, two articles are good synthesis in challenging the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution. The first was published in the journal Agricultural History as “Roundtable: New

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

361

Narratives of the Green Revolution” (Kumar et al. 2017). The authors emphasized the interactions between the American agricultural programs abroad and the local visions of progress in the Third World during the 1960s and 1970s, through the study of confrontation, resistance, and conflict within the host countries. Likewise, they rejected the often cited interpretation of the process of Americanization based on an idealized vision of the development of agriculture in the United States in the twentieth century – especially in the Midwest – supposedly a singular and exceptional process (Kumar et al. 2017). They also underlined the importance of studying the Green Revolution under the perspectives of gender and subaltern studies, as well as cultural and environmental histories. Likewise, with China as an example, they invited scholars to revisit the political dimension of the Green Revolution, usually understood to be a tool against communism but, in the Chinese case, a tool in the process of social revolution. They also insisted on the need to show the Latin American role in the emergence of the Green Revolution, as well as to explain the evolution of inputs markets (Kumar et al. 2017). There are three noteworthy ideas in approaching the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution. To begin with, the suggestion to modify the chronology of the Green Revolution beyond the 1960s and 1970s, or to include processes that preceded it. Secondly, the need to step outside the shadow of Norman Borlaug, namely, to unveil the role of social actors, institutions, programs, and experiences beyond Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation. Finally, leaving aside the idea of “one” Green Revolution occurring in the same historical period, at a global scale, with the participation of the same social actors and institutions, which opens the possibility to new chronologies (Kumar et al. 2017). Raj Patel’s “The Long Green Revolution” (2012) reviews in great detail the history and the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution. Patel calls for the use of critical narratives of the Green Revolution, currently written in the Northern Hemisphere. This requires the inclusion of new actors and processes, such as the role of women during agricultural modernization, and the impact of technology on women and households. Furthermore, these histories should analyze the environmental impact of the revolution, as well as its relationship with authoritarian regimes in the Third World. Patel also encourages scholars to revisit the history of the Mexican program, pointing out its class bias toward the rich wheat producers in northern Mexico. In addition, he insists on the relevance of the historical dynamic of the inputs markets and the role of private capital in the development of the revolution. In Patel’s view, these critical histories are politically relevant because the success of the first Green Revolution is an initial step to assess the blessings of the so-called “Second Green Revolution,” currently associated with genetically modified crops and biotechnology. Three analytical elements found in Patel’s text are particularly important for this chapter. To begin with, Patel underlines the importance of discarding the traditional chronology of the Green Revolution, which generally is placed between the 1940s and the 1970s. According to Patel, it is necessary to go beyond this last decade in order to explain the development of the process after the 1970s, when the World

362

W. Picado

Bank took upon itself the task of financing diverse agricultural development projects; after the 1980s when financial capital began to consolidate its control over agriculture; and since the 1990s when the notion emerges of a “Second Green Revolution” linked to biotechnology. Even though it is obvious that Patel is especially interested in the period after the 1970s, the introduction of new reference points in time enriches the historical narrative of the process (Patel 2012). Secondly, Patel urges his audience to think about the existence of a “regime of truth” regarding the Green Revolution, built and legitimized by the activities of private foundations, international research institutes, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations. This regime, even though it is one of the foundations of the dominant narrative, is set in the middle of a “battlefield of knowledge” or a “political economy of knowledge,” where interact histories, critical voices, political stances of several social and institutional actors (Patel 2012). Finally, due to the interactions between the revolution and the political dynamic in each country, Patel proposes an analysis of the process by which the State made the Green Revolution, just as the Green Revolution reshaped the State. For him, while the creation of technology – and especially its adoption among farmers – was possible due to the actions of State institutions, the effects of that same technology allowed certain groups of farmers to acquire more economic power and, therefore, more political power within the arena of the State (Patel 2012). To summarize, both articles challenge the singular nature of the Green Revolution. This singular nature of the process is, in fact, an obstacle in writing an alternative history from a Latin American perspective, in light of the dominant narrative’s weight, as well as the region’s underrepresentation in the literature (Harwood 2020). This leads to a circular dynamic: there is not sufficient literature because the singular nature defines the Green Revolution as an Asiatic phenomenon – or global, in the best of cases – but not a Latin American process. Breaking out from the dominant narrative is difficult because there is no updated information about the studies on the Green Revolution to estimate its relative importance of Latin American literature. Although there is no updated bibliography on the Green Revolution, there is a source which allows an evaluation of the relative importance of Latin America up to 1986. M. Bazlul Karim’s The Green Revolution. An International Bibliography (1986) is a magnificent compilation of articles and books written in the United States and Europe, but has been undervalued as a source for the historiography of the Green Revolution. It includes more than two thousand publications by agronomists, anthropologists, economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists, encompassing an extraordinary thematic and geographic diversity with the common goal of understanding the Green Revolution. This bibliography has two limitations: it includes only literature written in English, and it apparently follows the hypothesis of an eastward expansion of the Green Revolution, the backbone of the dominant narrative. Titles – either books or articles – about India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Mexico comprise nearly 40% of all the entries. The distribution by continent is equally lopsided: studies about Asia

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

363

encompass roughly half of the entries, while those about Latin America and Africa represented, respectively, 7% and 5%. In the case of entries about Latin America, it shows a similar pattern of geographic concentration: entries about Mexico are nearly half of those for the region, surpassing by far Colombia and Brazil (Karim 1986). Despite its limitations, this bibliography shows three analytical perspectives of the dominant narrative on the Green Revolution. To begin with, the Green Revolution is identified as a “technology package,” which included HYVs of wheat and rice crops, mechanization, and chemical fertilizers. Secondly, it was a process of “technology transfer” through the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centers financed by American funds. Finally, it considered the revolution as essentially an Asiatic process. As mentioned above, the dominant narrative posits it began in Mexico, but fully developed within Asia, and with a marginal impact in Latin America and Africa until the 1980s, as the author himself recognized (Karim 1986). This underrepresentation of Latin America in the dominant narrative of the Green Revolution is surprising, because it oversimplifies the very nature of the process of technological change. According to this perspective, the seeds exported by Borlaug to India become an event of greater explanatory importance and of more symbolic weight than the history of research and agricultural extension in the United States and the Third World since World War II. This focus on seeds and their arrival to India suggests that the Green Revolution was, essentially, a “technology package,” a set of inputs and knowledge created and developed without any link to the work of private and public institutions or associated with research policies or prevailing scientific cultures. In other words, it was considered a short-term and spontaneous process. Under this interpretation, the Green Revolution comes across more as a process of “technology transfer” than as a structural change of agriculture in the Third World (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006; Federico 2005; Curry 2016). This type of premise assumes that the Mexican program was a war-time exception, supposedly in a vacuum in indigenous agricultural innovation, before and after World War II. The dominant narrative dismisses any research taking place in Latin America before the Green Revolution, and ignores the emergence of green revolutions in Latin America.

Alternative Narratives from Latin America The dominant narrative is based on three pillars. The first sets the year 1968 as a decisive moment in the emergence of the Green Revolution as a global process. According to the second pillar, its technology stemmed from the Mexican program and it was subsequently introduced to the Third World. This narrative gives no room to understand the revolution in Latin America because the Asian chronology of the process differs from Latin American chronology. Furthermore, the agricultural program of the Rockefeller Foundation was not the sole research and agricultural extension experience undertaken by the United States in Latin American during the

364

W. Picado

period. Finally, the last pillar considers the Green Revolution as a byproduct of the Cold War, namely, part of geopolitical processes. This section confronts these pillars’ validity for Latin America, offering alternative explanations, and, in order to understand the linkage between international and national policies, Costa Rica is used as a case study.

Challenging the Chronology: 1968 Versus 1941 The term “Green Revolution” was coined by William Gaud, director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in a paper entitled “The Green Revolution: Accomplishments and Apprehensions” presented before the Society for International for Development in Washington, D.C. The history of Gaud’s paper is well known. He used the term in reference to an increase in agricultural output occurring in Southeast Asia thanks to the arrival of HYVs from Mexico. Although that growth was questionable and not very representative of the reality of agriculture in the region (Frankel 1971; Chakravarti 1973; Farmer 1977; Pearse 1980; Glaeser 1987; Shiva 2016), Gaud described it as a “revolution” to underscore the superiority of the new seeds in increasing production; he used the term “green” to contrast pacific processes of social change with the communist movements, then expanding over Southeast Asia, which were potential “red revolutions” (Perkins 1997). It was not a violent revolution, according to Gaud, but a process that could be as beneficial as the very Industrial Revolution. This play on words and colors has misled some to use the contents of Gaud’s paper as evidence of the geopolitical concerns that underpinned the Green Revolution. Nonetheless, Gaud’s enthusiasm in giving the revolution a name occurred at a time of sharp criticism and debate about the effectiveness and pertinence of US programs of international aid (Freeman 1968; Ahlberg 2008). In that sense, it was strategically convenient for Gaud to exaggerate the impact of an emerging process, in order to justify the role of US foreign aid before Congress and the press. Thus, it was a term used to underscore the strategic importance of a global historical circumstance (i.e., the expansion of communism in Asia) while it was a term associated with domestic US politics (Gaud 1969). For Latin America, the key year ought to be 1941. That year Henry A. Wallace, then Secretary of Agriculture of the United States, published ¿Qué hará Norteamérica? [What will the United States do?], a political statement about the strategic importance of agriculture for the United States during World War II. This book stresses the relevance of soil in its agroecological and geopolitical meanings. Wallace’s vision on the agricultural problem was influenced by the ecological crisis triggered by the Dust Bowl in the United States during the 1930s. For Wallace, agriculture symbolized an adequate equilibrium between population and the use of natural resources such as soils. From an agro-ecological standpoint, he claimed for the conservation of “national soils,” which he considered was as important as the strategic defense of “international soils” against Nazi expansionism. According to

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

365

Wallace, it was necessary to defend the soil from those who “by carelessness and ignorance harm it from within, just as those who want to appropriate it from abroad.” (Wallace 1941). ¿Qué hará Norteamérica? reflects the geopolitical concerns of an individual who embodied the complex world of rural America. Born in Iowa, grandson of farmers, and a businessman involved in the production of hybrid seeds, Wallace became an icon of the Green Revolution in light of his support for the Mexican program; he remained an inspiring figure, as Stakman recalls in his book Campaigns Against Hunger. Wallace underscored the strategic importance of Latin America for the United States in the context of the war, especially given the region’s role in the production of raw materials such as quinine, rubber, and abaca [Manila hemp]. He postulated an increase in commercial exchange and ensured the markets of raw materials had to be accompanied by an increase in scientific and economic cooperation by the United States (Wallace 1941). In order to achieve this goal, he proposed the establishment of an institute of tropical agriculture in the region to introduce the use of modern agricultural techniques, which was eventually created in Costa Rica in 1943 under the name of Instituto Interamericano de Ciencias Agrícolas (IICA) [Inter American Institute of Agricultural Sciences]. Wallace’s perspective regarding technical assistance for Latin American was closely linked to the great transformation experienced by US agriculture during the first decades of the twentieth century. In Wallace’s vocabulary, the concept of “agricultural revolution” was synonymous with more productive seeds, chemical fertilizers, and agricultural machinery (Wallace 1941). There are differences between the geopolitical concerns of Wallace and Gaud, in terms of their implications for Latin America. While Wallace’s agricultural geopolitics were legitimized, albeit not lacking in ambiguities derived from an idealization of his own family background and the historical trajectory of US agriculture, Gaud’s geopolitical rhetoric was linked to the expansion of communism in Asia. While Wallace created a long-term narrative based on an analysis of the evolution of agriculture in the United States during the twentieth century, Gaud appropriated short-term statistics that were far from the social and geographic realities of India in order to legitimize his policy through the Green Revolution. If Gaud gave recognition to the Green Revolution during the Cold War, the origins of the Green Revolution as an historical process in Latin America lies in Wallace’s discourse during World War II.

The Causal Factor: Seeds Versus Institutions According to the dominant narrative, HYV seeds were the “jewels of the crown” for the Green Revolution (Brown 1970). However, the impact of Borlaug’s seeds on Indian agriculture during the 1960s was questioned by different experts due to its concentration in irrigated regions, owned by wealthy farmers. In 1967, Nathan M. Koffsky, an adviser for the Ford Foundation, undertook a critical examination of India’s capacity to confront its food production deficit on the basis of its grain

366

W. Picado

harvests in 1965–1966 and 1966–1967. He found a reduction oscillating between 15% and 19%, respectively, if compared with the 1964–1965 harvest. For Koffsky, these results questioned HYVs effectiveness, their success depending on the application of chemical fertilizers and the availability of water (Koffsky 1967). K.S Mann, C. V. Moore, and S. S. Johl expressed a similar skepticism in their article “Estimates of Potential Effects of New Technology on Agriculture of Punjab” and also warned the new varieties were not a panacea for grain production. Their success depended on the availability of chemical fertilizers, as well as the availability of credit for farmers (Mann et al. 1968). In Clifton R. Wharton’s article, “The Green Revolution: Cornucopia or Pandora’s Box?,” the revolution was not a “cornucopia” but, rather, if badly directed, could turn into a “Pandora’s Box,” plagued by unexpected and negative results, increasing social and economic inequalities among farmers. For him, the new varieties depended on access to water, or rather, capital available to build irrigation systems. In addition, he pointed out the inefficacy of local markets for the distribution of agricultural inputs, and acknowledged the presence of traditional production systems organized for self-consumption. Thus, he warned about the environmental vulnerabilities brought by the HYVs and insisted on the need to carry out institutional reforms in land tenure (Wharton 1969). Wolf Ladejinsky, reiterated Wharton’s criticisms about the unequal impact of the Green Revolution in his article “Ironies of India’s Green Revolution,” published in 1970. He described the process as highly selective, dependent on the availability of irrigation systems and the application of chemical inputs, conditions which were far from universal (Ladejinsky 1970). Finally, Walter P. Falcon in his article “The Green Revolution: Generation of Problems,” urged to evaluate the revolution’s achievement and insisted on its limited geographical range. Based on the observed results, Falcon perceived the HYVs – in appearance a neutral technology and unrelated to farm size – in fact favored middleand large-size farmers (Falcon 1970). According to these experts, the analysis of the Green Revolution must go beyond the impact of HYVs (Stone 2019). It must take into account a set of factors of production, environmental impacts, and local social conditions, including land tenancy, irrigation, the farmers’ social structure, and credit availability. The impact of Borlaug’s seeds depended on the new agrarian policy and modernization projects taking place in Southeast Asia since the 1950s. Likewise, the emergence of the Green Revolution in Latin American cannot be explained through seeds improvement, because their propagation took place later than in Asia (Dalrymple 1985). Instead, the emergence of the Green Revolution in Latin America since World War II depended on the development of research institutions and agricultural extension services.

Institutional Cloning During World War II, the United States set up the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), under the direction of Nelson A. Rockefeller, in order to create cooperation programs with Latin America on public health,

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

367

education, and agriculture, under the administration of the Institute for InterAmerican Affairs (IIAA). Food production programs were established in Costa Rica, Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela, in order to supply foodstuffs for US troops assigned to the Panama Canal (as was the case of Costa Rica) and other geo-military strategic regions, such as Peru. Other programs, while not explicitly strategic, sought the stabilization of markets for foodstuffs and agricultural commodities in Latin American countries, as well as the introduction of new crop varieties, cattle breeds, and chemical inputs to increase production. These cooperation programs seek to secure economic, political, and social stability while the United States contained the Axis expansion in the region (Rivas 2002; da Silva 2015; Díaz and Lanero 2015; Cuvi 2020; Picado and Fernández 2018). Most agricultural programs continued after the war and into the 1950s, thanks to the prorogation of cooperation agreements between the United States and the national governments. The importance of agricultural cooperation after the war may be appreciated in the number of US experts associated with these programs in Latin America, which tripled from 205 to 664 between 1947 and 1954. Although a majority of these experts were initially assigned to health programs, after 1952 agricultural programs became more prominent and were assigned at least a third of all experts. In addition, the number of Latin American experts who participated in agricultural training programs increased until they represented, by 1951–1952, nearly half of all experts involved in the different fields of technical assistance (Mosher 1957; Picado and Fernández 2018). Since wartime, technical cooperation was organized around a dynamic of “institutional cloning,” which set up a series of very similar programs throughout Central and South America, in the areas mentioned above. The main element of this cloning dynamic was the creation of technical cooperation “servicios,” based on agreements between the IIAA and the national governments. The “servicio” was a “hybrid” administrative unit insofar as it was formally affiliated with the local ministry (whether of agriculture, health, or any other) but had administrative and financial independence thanks to its links to the IIAA (Iverson 1951). It was the Institute that set down the research guidelines for each “servicio” and appointed their heads in each country, usually a US expert with prior experience in some other cooperation program in Latin America. As a result, the “servicios” had very similar names and acronyms throughout Latin America: the “servicio” in Costa Rica was called STICA (Servicio Inter-americano de Cooperación Agrícola), just as it was in Honduras and Paraguay. In Peru and Haiti it was called SCIPA (Servicio Cooperativo Inter-americano de Producción de Alimentos; Service Cooperatif Inter-Americain de Production Agricole). Besides, the “services” had a common agenda, the transformation of agricultural technology via the diffusion of chemical fertilizers and insecticides, the experimentation with new crop varieties, and the improvement of technical capacities on mechanization and irrigation (Picado and Fernández 2018). The agricultural extension services disseminated the technology proposed by the cooperation programs among the farmers, in which the agricultural extension

368

W. Picado

agent played a key role. The agent established direct contact between the “servicio” and the communities, in coordination with local political and institutional authorities. Besides, they established “demonstration fields” on plots of land owned by well-known local farmers, in order to show the advantages of the new technology to others. These agents also coordinated initiatives, which replicated American models and programs, such as “school vegetable gardens” (huertos escolares as they were called in Costa Rica) or “Victory Gardens” in the case of Peru. Simultaneously, home improvement programs were developed inspired by “Home Economics” programs in the United States. Another iconic program in these countries were the 4-S Clubs (as they were known in Costa Rica and Honduras), local versions of the 4-H Clubs of the United States, which sought to incorporate young people into the process of agricultural modernization. The scope of technical cooperation in Latin America reached a notable level during these years: 49 technical cooperation programs operated in nearly 20 countries in the region during the 1950s. Out of these, 17 were about public health and 15 in agriculture, while the rest centered in education, industry, and others. In general, there were two or three programs in each country; only exceptional cases, such as Peru and Ecuador, had more than four programs (Picado and Fernández 2018). From the perspective of this chapter, the agricultural cooperation programs set the foundations for the development of the Green Revolution in Latin America after the 1960s. The agricultural programs – and particularly the “servicios” – linked the State, the market, and the farmers, consolidating a new agronomical culture through new varieties, chemical fertilizers, and agricultural mechanization. The “servicios” promoted the use of these inputs in regions of commercial farming, creating a market for chemical and mechanical industries during the following decades. Simultaneously, they divulged these inputs’ efficacy among the farmers by organizing demonstrations in the countryside. This set of activities had an impact on productive, political, and social terms: the agricultural extension agents undertook the task of overcoming the farmers’ skepticism toward the new technology, and legitimizing the State presence. Even if the main goal of agricultural extension agents was technical, their work produced a social and cultural mobilization in the countryside: their labor introduced farmers to novel artifacts, materials, and agricultural practices. Their impact reached the rural households and the farmers’ fields, generating cultural and environmental consequences. The agricultural extension agents’ introduction of novel technological equipment were legitimized before the farmers through training sessions, programs for rural youth, with the implicit blessing of the local priest, agricultural fairs, and demonstration plots. They introduced a new agricultural vocabulary in the countryside linked to productivity, efficiency, and science. These concepts created a new productive rationale, considered by the extension agents as superior to traditional forms of agriculture. In several Latin American countries, the “servicios” were the seeds of the national research and agricultural extension institutes, created in the 1950s and 1960s.

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

369

Connecting International and National Policies: The Green Revolution in Costa Rica The narrative of the Green Revolution as an anticommunist strategy pervades agrarian and environmental historiography. Despite the availability of outstanding literature on Green Revolution geopolitics, Gaud’s speech remains an unquestionable historical source. It begs the question, did geopolitics trigger the Green Revolution? This narrative does not apply to Latin America in light of two processes. To begin with, the institutional cloning hypothesis posits the importance of the American strategic interests in Latin America since World War II, over the anticommunist geopolitics in the 1960s and 1970s. Secondly, agricultural cooperation programs developed from a complex relationship between United States foreign policy and local politics in the host countries. For local governments, these programs became a tool in implementing their own economic modernization policies, as well as in expanding their political base in the countryside. The Green Revolution was far from an exotic concept in Costa Rica’s political discourse. In 1972, the Ministry of Agriculture of Costa Rica published a pamphlet entitled “Green Revolution on the Dry Pacific Region” [Revolución Verde en el Pacífico Seco], which describes the agrarian policies in one of the more important agricultural regions under the government of José Figueres Ferrer (1948–1949; 1953–1958; 1970–1974), which supported rice production and cattle raising. The publication included numerous photographs of new buildings, irrigation systems, agricultural machinery, fields planted with HYV crops, and animal health projects, as well as testimonies of farmers and local politicians underscoring the accomplishments of Figueres Ferrer government in the region (MAG 1972). The inclusion of the concept Green Revolution in this pamphlet’s title may reflect the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Norman Borlaug in 1970, when the term went mainstream. Whether it was appropriated from Gaud’s use of the concept or not, the concept had its own meaning for Costa Rica. Figueres Ferrer led the political party in charge of agriculture modernization, which incidentally, used green color iconography. In Figueres Ferrer’s hands, technological improvement became a political strategy. He seized power in 1948, after a civil war, heading a diverse mix of social forces bent on diversifying and modernizing the economy. This transformation challenged the power of the conservative, landowning elite, and the American banana companies, the former traditionally controlling the coffee industry and cattle raising, and the latter monopolizing fruit production. Figueres’ political project was set in the decades-long tradition of State intervention, escalated during World War II. Thus, he nationalized banking institutions, and founded a modern agricultural extension service along the lines of the American technical cooperation program created in 1943. He also secured the State control over the foodstuff market through the Consejo Nacional de Producción, promoted the creation of cooperatives for smalland middle-size coffee producers, as well as the negotiation of new contracts with the banana companies. The economic diversification and modernization project

370

W. Picado

allowed him and his political party to create an electoral base in the rural sector, while opening up new spaces for capital accumulation (Gudmundson 2014). The STICA supported Figueres Ferrer in achieving some of these objectives during the 1950s. The relationship between Figueres Ferrer and the STICA may be described as “political mutualism.” For Figueres, the STICA became a tool to expand his electoral support in the rural areas, especially in those regions with small- and medium-sized coffee and foodstuff producers. He used agricultural extension as political propaganda, so that each STICA office in those regions where small and medium sized farmers predominated increased political support for Figueres Ferrer. He was frequently described as an ambiguous politician and even suspected of leftist tendencies, but his support for STICA avoided being branded as communist but rather a reformist politician, very critical of some US policies, but conscious of US technology’s key role in transforming agriculture. For STICA this relationship was equally beneficial. Its close relationship with the president made coordination easier with the Ministry of Agriculture, respected its administrative independence and disregarded the complaints about the weight of American influence (Bowman 2000; Picado 2012). The Green Revolution in Costa Rica exemplifies the connections between local and global processes in the Third World during the 1960s and 1970s. To begin with, the early Green Revolution in Costa Rica occurred within institutional frameworks unrelated to CGIAR’s centers, or with the Rockefeller Foundation. Instead, these institutional frameworks stemmed from postwar US technical cooperation programs. Secondly, the ideology of postwar agricultural modernization dovetailed with the political objectives of Figueres Ferrer: the new agricultural technology increased productivity, while expanding the president’s electoral base. Finally, the revolution was not based on the HYVs developed by Borlaug, which arrived until the 1970s. Costa Rica already had an experience in research of plant improvement along the twentieth century, when rice and corn varieties arrived from several countries, such as Mexico and the United States. While the Green Revolution in Costa Rica is considered an anti-communist process, which took place after the Cuban Revolution and in the midst of the Alliance for Progress, it was also a process subject to Costa Rican internal political conditions. Figueres was a strong defender of private property but simultaneously supported the creation of agricultural cooperatives, as well as financial subsidies for peasant agriculture. While the communist party in Costa Rica was banned until the mid-1970s, the Costa Rican Green Revolution combined capitalist production of rice, concentrated in large properties, with a reformist agrarian policy to lessen inequalities and addressed the landless peasants’ plight. As was characteristic of Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, the Green Revolution in Costa Rica focused on increasing foodstuffs production to feed the growing urban population. To summarize, it was a Green Revolution within Costa Rican particularities from the political and institutional standpoints, but remained global as far as the basic techniques of green revolutions taking place elsewhere during those decades. In contrast to the dominant narrative, which posits a single and global Green Revolution, the green revolutions lie in the interaction between those national or regional dynamics and the global process.

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

371

Conclusions Campaigns Against Hunger and Agricultural Development: An International Perspective gave alternative explanations to the “agricultural revolution,” which was the result of widespread use of HYVs. The former underlined the scientists’ heroic role in the fight against hunger, while the latter explained it as the outcome of market forces. In the authors’ perspective, it was a unique process of technological change, originated in Mexico during the 1940s, which was diffused among Third World agricultures since the 1960s. Campaigns Against Hunger, published 1967, described a process heretofore unknown, while Agricultural Development: An International Perspective hit the bookstores in 1971, a year after Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Prize. Although unrelated, in the midst of the Cold War they became the foundation of the dominant narrative, a tool to justify American political and economic influence. However, due to the ahistoric character of their approach, both books ignored the local political context where the adoption of technology took place. This dominant narrative of the Green Revolution is far from representative of Latin America. Its conventional chronology, set in 1968, is inadequate for explaining the process for the region, where it must be dated back to 1941, when America became belligerent. Institutional cloning of agricultural research and extension services during World War II and the postwar period were the basis of the Green Revolution, which took off during the 1950s and 1960s. Institutional change was important as plant breeding for Latin America’s agricultural modernization. Therefore, internal politics were key in the adoption of technological packages, as well as the external pressure exerted by the United States’ geopolitical interests. As demonstrated by the case of Costa Rica, new agricultural technology boosted agricultural productivity, and Liberación Nacional’s electoral base, Figueres Ferrer’s political party. Although the Green Revolution gained the status of a global process several decades ago, its history in Latin America is still in its infancy. In the region, agricultural technology was appropriated by wealthy farmers, who owned irrigated and fertile properties. Most of these producers focused on export products such as coffee, cotton, and sugarcane, or rice for the internal market, which was mechanized. However, we have a limited knowledge about technological modernization among peasants of different ethnic groups and gender. Leaving aside the different social consequences of this process, there is a set of questions requiring study from different approaches, such as the relationship between plant breeding and nutrition, or the impact of modern technology on biodiversity, human health, and ecosystems. Our work is just beginning.

References Ahlberg KL (2008) Trasplanting the great society. Lyndon Johnson and food for peace. University of Missouri Press, Columbia-London Bowman KS (2000) ¿Fue el compromiso y consenso de las elites lo que llevó a la consolidación democrática en Costa Rica? Evidencias de la década de 1950. Revista de Historia 41:91–127

372

W. Picado

Brown L (1970) Seeds of change. The Green Revolution and development in the 1970s. Praeger Publishers, Nueva York Chakravarti AK (1973) Green Revolution in India. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 63(3):319–330 CIAA (Coordinator of Inter American Affairs) (1947) History of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter American Affairs. Historical Reports on War Administration. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC Cotter J (1994) The Rockefeller Foundation’s Mexican Agricultural Project. A Cross-Cultural Encounter, 1943–1949. In: Cueto M (ed) Missionaries of Science. The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp 99–125 Curry HA (2016) Evolution made order: plant breeding and technological innovation in twentiethcentury America. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Cuvi N (2020) Expertos, agrobraceros y resistencias durante los inicios de la larga Revolución Verde en Los Andes. Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) Revista De La Solcha 10(3):227–264 Da Silva CM (2015) De agricultor a farmer. Nelson Rockefeller e a modernização da agricultura no Brasil. Editora Unicentro, Curitiba Dalrymple DG (1985) The development and adoption of high-yielding varieties of wheat and rice in developing countries. Am J Agric Econ 67(5):1067–1073 Díaz A, Lanero D (2015) Modelos de modernización para el desarrollismo: el influjo de las propuestas estadounidenses en el Servicio de Extensión Agraria (1955–1975). Revista Complutense de Historia de América 41:71–94 Falcon WP (1970) The Green Revolution: generations of problems. Am J Agric Econ 52(5):698– 710 Farmer BH (1977) Green Revolution? Technology and change in rice-growing areas of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka. Cambridge Commonwealth Series, London Federico G (2005) Feeding the world. An economic history of agriculture, 1800–2000. Princeton University Press, Princeton Fitzgerald D (1994) Exporting American Agriculture. The Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, 1943–1953. In: Cueto M (ed) Missionaries of Science. The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin American. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, pp 72–96 Frankel FR (1971) India’s Green Revolution. Economic gains and political costs. Princeton University Press, Princeton Freeman OL (1968) World without hunger. Praeger, New York Gaud W (1969) The current effect of the American Aid Program. Annals Am Acad 384:73–84 Glaeser B (1987) The Green Revolution revisited. Allen & Unwin, London Gudmundson L (2014) On Green Revolutions and Golden beans: memories and metaphors of Costa Rican Coffee Co-op Founders. Agric Hist 88(4):538–565 Gutiérrez N (2017) Cambio agrario y Revolución Verde: dilemas científicos, políticos y agrarios en la agricultura mexicana del maíz, 1920–1970. Ph.D. dissertation in History, El Colegio de México Harwood J (2009) Peasant friendly plant breeding and the early years of the Green Revolution in Mexico. Agric Hist 83(3):384–410 Harwood J (2020) Whatever happened to the Mexican Green Revolution? Agroecol Sustain Food Syst 44(9):1243–1252 Hayami Y, Ruttan VW (1971) Agricultural development. An international perspective. The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore Hewitt de Alcántara C (1978) La modernización de la agricultura mexicana. 1940–1970. Siglo Veintiuno Editores, México Iverson KR (1951) The “Servicio” in theory and practice. Public Adm Rev 11(4):223–228 Karim MB (1986) The Green Revolution. An international bibliography. Greenwood Press, Connecticut Kirkendall RS (1990) The second secretary Wallace. Agric Hist 64(2):199–206 Koffsky NM (1967) The food potential of developing nations. Am J Agric Econ 49(5):1106–1113

17

Evaluating the Green Revolution Dominant Narrative for Latin America:. . .

373

Kumar P et al (2017) Roundtable: new narratives of the Green Revolution. Agric Hist 91(3):397– 422 Ladejinsky W (1970) Ironies of India’s Green Revolution. Foreign Aff 48(4):758–768 MAG (1972) Revolución Verde en el Pacífico Seco. Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería, San José Mann KS et al (1968) Estimates of potential effects of new technology on agriculture of Punjab. Am J Agric Econ 50(2):278–291 Mazoyer M, Roudart L (2006) A history of world agriculture. From the Neolithic age to the current crisis. Earthscan, London Méndez D (2018) El Programa Cooperativo Centroamericano para el Mejoramiento del Maíz: Una historia transnacional de la Revolución Verde desde Costa Rica y Guatemala, 1954–1963. Master’s thesis in History, Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, México Mosher AT (1957) Technical co-operation in Latin American agriculture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Patel R (2012) The long Green Revolution. J Peasant Stud 40(1):1–63 Pearse A (1980) Seeds of plenty, seeds of want. Social and economic implications of the Green Revolution. Oxford University Press, Oxford Perkins JH (1997) Geopolitics and the Green Revolution. Wheat, genes, and the cold war. Oxford University Press, New York Picado W (2012) Conexiones de la Revolución Verde. Estado y cambio tecnológico en la agricultura de Costa Rica durante el período 1940–1980. Ph.D. dissertation in History, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Spain Picado W, Fernández J (2018) On the institutional cloning hypothesis. US Agricultural Cooperation Programs in Latin America since World War II. 3rd International Congress of SEHA, Spain Rivas D (2002) Missionary capitalist. Nelson Rockefeller in Venezuela. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Shiva V (2016) The violence of the Green Revolution. Third world agriculture, ecology, and politics. University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky Stakman EC et al (1967) Campaigns against hunger. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Stone GD (2019) Commentary: new histories of the Indian Green Revolution. Geogr J 185:243– 250 Wallace HA (1941) ¿Qué hará Norteamérica? Publicaciones Panamericanas, México Wharton CR (1969) The Green Revolution: cornucopia or Pandora’s Box? Foreign Aff 47(3): 464–476

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

18

A Hemispheric History of Highway Building Michael K. Bess

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rise of the Automobile and Motor Roads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Popular Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regimes of Immobility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

376 378 379 384 387 388 389

Abstract

The Pan-American Highway is one of the most famous and important examples of the economic relationship and ties the hemisphere’s nations have had with the United States. This chapter is a historiography and historical synthesis of motor road building in the Americas, outlining scholarly arguments over much of the last 20 years (along with some classic entries) that have shaped the study of these engineering efforts in rural and urban areas. It examines the policies nation-states used for road construction locally and how these efforts intersected across the hemisphere with implications for economic development, agriculture, public health, and safety. It also considers how a hemispheric regime of immobility, to limit immigration flows and drug traffic, evolved during the latter half of the twentieth century. This change contrasted starkly with the rhetoric and practice of earlier generations that embraced the notion of Pan-Americanism and transnational mobility in the guise of building continent-spanning highways. The increase in vehicle traffic brought new concerns over public safety, while this activity also impacted rural areas, leading to environmental degradation and resistance from local activists. M. K. Bess (*) Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Aguascalientes, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_15

375

376

M. K. Bess

Introduction The Pan-American Highway system stretches over 30,000 km from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego with a gap between Panama and Colombia in the Darien region. The road is one of the most famous and important examples of the economic relationship and ties the hemisphere’s nations have had with the United States. Originally conceived as a railroad network at a meeting in Washington, DC, in 1889, developers later proposed it as a highway for motor traffic. The idea of Pan-Americanism as a building project promised to foment cross-border cooperation and transnational economic growth guided by US American principals of capitalist development. Promoters saw it to drive tourism as well as city-rural connections for trade and agriculture. The realities of the highway’s impact belied the progressive and modernizing dreams of the early twentieth century. Building the road meant the destruction of natural environments and reconfiguring communities, while later generations fretted about undocumented immigration and illegal drugs flowing across the continent. This chapter is a historiography and historical synthesis of motor road building in the Americas, outlining scholarly arguments over much of the last 20 years (along with some classic entries) that have shaped the study of these engineering efforts in rural and urban areas. It examines the policies nation-states used for road construction locally and how these efforts intersected across the hemisphere with implications for economic development, agriculture, public health, and safety. It also considers how a hemispheric regime of immobility, to limit immigration flows and drug traffic, evolved during the latter half of the twentieth century. This change contrasted starkly with the rhetoric and practice of earlier generations that embraced the notion of Pan-Americanism and transnational mobility in the guise of building continent-spanning highways. The deployment of new transportation infrastructures in North and South America profoundly affected access to farming and public health services. On the one hand, communities across the region, including in Mexico, Chile, and Peru, among others, with railroad or motor road connections could travel more affordably and safely to nearby cities for medical attention. Likewise, farmers had the opportunity to sell their produce to markets in other parts of the country or beyond. Many people welcomed the arrival of these technologies to their regions. On the other hand, transportation infrastructure generally had severe implications for land use; for instance, in the country cases cited in this chapter, construction crews divided properties to clear a path, damaging agricultural operations for some neighbors. The increase in vehicle traffic brought new concerns over public safety, while this activity also impacted rural areas, leading to environmental degradation and resistance from local activists. The health implications could be profound. On railroad and highway building in the Americas, the academic literature has paid considerable attention to the social and economic implications of these activities. Scholars consider how new infrastructures contributed to regional mobility, while also raising new popular concerns about safety and environmental integrity. The field in Latin America offers a broad understanding of this phenomena across

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

377

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In urban areas, scholars have studied historical processes where municipal governments installed animal-drawn vehicles and electric trams but began to replace them in favor of new infrastructures amenable to automobile and motorbuses during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Although much of the academic work remains focused on nation-state case studies, there are good examples of borderlands and transversal scholarship that study the impact of new roads across two or more countries. By studying rail and motor road development, historians uncovered how national political and commercial priorities have been written into physical space, oftentimes reconfiguring natural and built environments to reflect US-influenced capitalist priorities for economic growth. Themes of development and health have been closely intertwined in the history of the twentieth century (Connelly 2010). National and foreign-backed programs articulated a need for better industrial and transportation infrastructure to drive economic development and improve health outcomes for local populations. For instance, as part of the larger, global trend of the Green Revolution at mid-century, the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico fostered agricultural research and technology transfers with the goal of increasing crop yields. After the Second World War, it supported initiatives that saw Mexican agronomists collaborate with US scientists to implement new agricultural practices locally in Sonora, Morelos, Chiapas, and other Mexican states (Cotter 2003). Certain actors in the agricultural sector benefited from improved technical infrastructures, like new roads. Truck drivers carrying foodstuffs and other goods relied on macadam and asphalt-concrete roads to safely travel to difficult-to-reach populations in faraway areas not well served by railroads. Transportation and food production companies lobbied governments to build new roads and maintain existing ones. The creation of these networks favored large-scale, industrial agricultural production, which profited food companies at the expense of local, small-scale producers. Firms like Maseca, a national corn flour and tortilla manufacturer in Mexico, could much more easily expand market share and homogenize consumption practices, impacting cultural and health trends, regionally, thanks to the access they received from the building of new highways and paved roads (Pilcher 2012). This chapter is structured in four parts. First, the author considers the origins of Pan-American highway building in the nineteenth century with a brief review of the scholarly literature on railroad building to contextualize how future generations continued a new era of construction efforts. Second, the rise and impact of the automobile is considered. Its advent transformed existing policymaking frameworks and affected how leaders and the public defined health and safety concerns. This technology also profoundly changed how people utilized natural and built environments, while further reducing the cost of travel and expanding commercial agriculture. The third section examines the history and scholarly literature around popular resistance to hemispheric road-building projects, which drew on environmental and indigenous land-right concerns. Highways became a political battleground as it became clear that their benefits affected communities in disproportionate ways. The fourth part of the chapter continues this thread of changing views about hemispheric road building as governments, in particular (and ironically) the United

378

M. K. Bess

States, turn against the idea of Pan-Americanism and implemented technologically focused measures to hamper mobility and carry out drug interdiction in the name of public health and safety. Finally, the author draws on the myriad points raised throughout this historiography, identifying the common threads that bind them together in the conclusion.

Background In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, governments and private promoters considered important the construction of grand transportation infrastructures that could improve mobility and drive economic development. In the United States, the idea of a continent spanning highway had its roots in the railroads. Public-private partnerships, relying on immigrant labor, laid rail that connected California with the east coast network; the first of these stretched from Chicago to San Francisco with a critical junction completed at Council Bluffs, Iowa, by 1869 (White 2011). The railroad increased westward migration of US citizens; many settled in California and the territories to work in the extractive industries, while others sought out medical treatments for respiratory diseases in the arid climate of the American southwest (Truett and Young 2004). Other countries in North America reproduced aspects of this model. In Mexico, the national government allowed the building of thousands of kilometers of railroad with foreign investment from the 1870s to 1909 when it nationalized the network and generously paid off creditors (Lewis 2008). Whereas the United States looked west, Mexico’s northward industrial growth had similar goals: increase the region’s population, subjugate indigenous groups, and expand the extractive industries (Coatsworth 1981; Alonso 1995; Tinker Salas 1997). Meanwhile, in Canada, provincial authorities and business built the country’s rail network in piecemeal fashion due to frequent economic recessions that affected construction; by 1885, however, they celebrated the opening of the Pacific railroad, which completed the first phase of a continent spanning rail line (Boyko 2018). Builders in Panama, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, benefiting from the narrower geographic profile of Central America, built railroads that connected Pacific Ocean ports with the Gulf Coast in 1855, 1908, and 1910, respectively. Before construction of the transisthmian canal, the United States government had long supported laying rail to facilitate the movement of people, agricultural goods, and other products between the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean (Donoghue 2014). During this period in South America, national governments and private enterprise focused railroad construction on regional endeavors. In the nineteenth century, Brazilians built rail lines along the coast, connecting cities and ports, but tended to avoid venturing deeper into the interior of the country. Alfonso Pena, president of Brazil (1906–1909) advocated for railroads as part of a larger project linked closely with public health campaigns to improve urban and rural quality of life. Pioneering reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw this infrastructure expansion occurring alongside the growth of export agriculture. Their hope was to

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

379

link interior regions with burgeoning markets on the coasts to benefit the national economy. Although prominent government officials, such as Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, believed they could manage this industrial and agricultural development respectful of indigenous rights and communities this view proved mistaken. The continued expansion of national commercial activity in the Amazon region brought farmers and ranchers in conflict with Native peoples and led to environmental degradation (Diacon 2004). This focus on coastal-inland development occurred elsewhere. In Argentina, the government built rail lines that connected Buenos Aires with the port of Mar de Plata, then expanded inland to the cities of Cordova and Rosario by the latter decades of the nineteenth century (Goodwin 1977). On the other side of the Andean mountain chain, Anglo-Chilean railroad initiatives developed north-south connections that ran along the coastal spine of the country with the aim of increasing export economic activity (Alliende 2006; Soto 2009). While foreign investment and participation in railroads was commonplace across Latin America, recent scholarship indicates a much more complex economic dynamic underway. Earlier academic work emphasized the importance of extractive infrastructure controlled by foreigners and comprador elites in these societies; however, revisionist analysis has noted the popularity of this technology among middle- and working-class people. Railroads played an important role in conceptualizing a sense of the nation, allowing citizens to travel over long distances at an affordable cost with less hardship. Ticket sales for third-class passenger service indicated high demand for rail travel among working-class people. Railroads helped foment regional economic development and improved access not only for foreign tourists and merchants, but also residents who traveled for personal needs or pleasure (Van Hoy 2008). They greatly transformed how people moved and considered longdistance travel, becoming one of the first technologies to supersede the vast physical spaces that defined life across the continental Americas (Truett 2007). For instance, not only did the building of railroads to Arizona and New Mexico collapse travel times, it also brought a new kind of medical tourist to the region who sought to escape “unhealthy” climes and treat respiratory ailments (Benton-Cohen 2011).

Rise of the Automobile and Motor Roads Scholars have largely considered the expansion of automobility as a process that intervened in and transformed existing mobility spaces across built and natural environments. Sociologist John Urry has commented on how “car travel interrupts the taskscapes of others (pedestrians, children going to school, postmen, garbage collectors, farmers, animals, so on) whose daily routines are obstacles to the highspeed traffic cutting mercilessly through slower-moving paths and dwellings” (Urry 2004). These interruptions created new concerns about public health and safety. Guillermo Giucci further clarifies this argument and connects it to modern capitalism and notions of the individual in society: “The automobile produced transformations of capital and therefore became seen and heard in the different means of

380

M. K. Bess

communication”; “The modern subject is the individual in movement. Mobility is glorified” (Giucci 2012). While much of the existing literature has focused on case studies of automobility and highway building from a nation-state perspective, recent work on transatlantic and borderlands themes is changing that focus. Gijs Mom considers the crosspollination of ideas about automobility among nations in the north Atlantic (the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Switzerland), and he calls on scholars to carry out further regional and hemispheric research (Mom 2014a). Rosa E. Ficek has written extensively on the Pan-American Highway as a transformative historical subject that has cut across regional and national bounds (Ficek 2016). Likewise, Borderlands scholarship has regionalized study of transportation infrastructure; from Jessica Kim’s work on highway building from Los Angeles to Mexico City and C. J. Alvarez on how land and water are utilized along the US-Mexico border (Kim 2019; Alvarez 2019). They represent a new generation of scholars deeply interested in writing on the role of roads and automobiles on everyday life in the Americas. As the twentieth century dawned, railroad promoters gradually gave way to highway boosters as the automobile grew in popularity. In 1893, Charles and Frank Duryea built the first US-made, gasoline-powered “motor wagon” in Springfield, Massachusetts. By 1900, the United States counted almost 5000 automobiles in circulation, but that figure ballooned to roughly 500,000 vehicles in 1910. Ford Motor Company’s mass-produced Model T, introduced to the US market in 1908, was a huge success for the firm, selling millions of units for two decades. While the automobile served as an important status symbol, it quickly became a mass market item for the growing urban middle class. Social organizations formed to promote driving clubs and encourage adoption of motor vehicles. They were also touted as a technology to improve public health by reducing the reliance of animal-drawn vehicles for urban transportation (Flink 1990). In cities, municipal governments responded to broad demands for changes to transportation infrastructure. Reformers often articulated public health and safety arguments in favor of modernizing urban mobility. For instance, in the late nineteenth century, health advocates pressed for the implementation of electric trams to reduce the number of pack animals on city streets to improve public sanitation. Bicycle clubs, with memberships predominately male drawn from the middle and upper classes, were another group that advocated for policy changes across the Americas. They fought for the passage of new right-of-way laws, street paving, and the creation of sidewalks (Longhurst 2015). In Mexico City, after the municipal government banned bicycles from the historic center, clubs appealed directly to the strongman president, Porfirio Díaz, for redress; he overruled the ban. In subsequent years, cyclists had a prominent role in shaping the capital’s transportation spaces, including the purchase of the Chapultepec forest to be converted into a grand public park for bicycle riders and pedestrians (Beezley 1987). Automobile clubs inherited this reformist legacy of the early twentieth century. Building on the argument for public health and safety, these groups and their political allies advocated for a dramatic rethinking of road spaces. They wanted

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

381

streets segregated into areas for specific types of mobility: pedestrians had the sidewalk, cars and buses the street, and where pertinent trams were given their own space. Promoters coined the term “jaywalking” to deride pedestrians who did not abide by the new rules on how to cross the street. During the 1910s and 1920s, cities witnessed an intense political fight to define public health and safety as it related to transportation infrastructure and policy. The Boy Scouts of America played a critical role in training a new generation of city dwellers in the etiquette of urban mobility (Norton 2008). Likewise, middle class and elite residents in Latin American drew on this rhetoric. For example, in the wealthy industrial capital, Monterrey, Nuevo León, in northeastern Mexico, during the 1920s, policymakers implemented new rules that changed how people could use the city’s streets. They privileged the automobile, while banning animal-drawn carts from the historic center and even restricting areas for bicyclists. They also instructed police to give out fines for illegal street crossings. The policies, made in the name of public safety, were broadly supported by drivers and bus companies, while others resisted the reforms (Bess 2016). Beyond urban areas, the growth in automobile sales drove demand for new kinds of roads or “auto trails” that were properly graded and could accommodate motor vehicles. Existing routes in the early twentieth century lacked adequate engineering, which resulted in washed out paths or dangerous, blind curves. In response, some of the first activities to organize building of improved road types occurred at the local and county levels in the United States. Municipal governments and private associations, including social clubs, created pro-road committees. Oftentimes, coordinating across localities was disorganized and haphazard. For instance, counties did not always agree on where a road should be built, ending a route with nowhere else to go once construction reached the jurisdiction’s borders. Although some state governments intervened to coordinate efforts, the policy was far from uniform and left a regional patchwork of road infrastructure (Ingram 2014). This type of locally focused organizational structure built the first continentspanning auto trail: completed in 1910, the Lincoln highway extended over 5000 km from New York to San Francisco. Promoters at the time touted it as a modern thoroughfare; however, it was a hodge-podge of hundreds of local efforts with varying degrees of quality in road surface and engineering. Nevertheless, it proved popular and committees proposed a new route from Winnipeg, Canada, to Mexico City, they called the “Meridian Road.” It ultimately reached Monterrey, Nuevo León, by 1922, before funding ran out on the Mexican side of the border (Bess 2017). This hemispheric road project was an important precursor to the Pan-American Highway, which emerged as a plan during the Fifth International Congress of American States, held in Santiago, Chile, in 1923 (Booth 2013). Militaries also participated in road building and expanding the reach of motor vehicles. For example, along the US-Mexico border, Pershing’s Punitive Expedition in pursuit of the revolutionary leader Francisco Villa brought a fleet of trucks, cars, and pavers. They built and graded roads through the Chihuahuan desert; their work was an important experiment for the US military as it transitioned to gasolinepowered motor vehicles to move soldiers and materials (Alvarez 2019). After the

382

M. K. Bess

Mexican Revolution, as the government rebuilt the nation, they relied on the military. Revolutionary generals, including Juan Andreu Almazán, founded construction companies that won government contracts for highways, bridges, and related infrastructure. During the Second World War, the Mexican military built new roads to facilitate the transportation of basic goods and natural resources to coastal ports in support of the Allied effort (Bess 2017). Economic growth and infrastructure building were central pillars that bolstered the idea of Pan-Americanism as a continental project to foment cross-border ties and greater cooperation with a US-led model of capitalism. Across the hemisphere, politicians, the business community, and the public embraced this concept; automobile companies, airlines, and the tourism sector played active roles in advertising the benefits of Pan-Americanism (Freeman 2009). Building an inter-American highway promised to extend the reach of city dwellers, who could motor in the countryside on weekends or during longer vacation; accommodate companies to distribute their products; allow farmers to move produce more easily to regional markets; and create new job opportunities in diverse industries. Other stakeholders, including local politicians, teachers, and business owners envisioned building the highway and connecting rural communities via feeder roads, to bring “progress” to areas that lacked a persistent, physical connection with the state (Kim 2019). Highways reached more people than railroads. In mountainous regions, a motor road could be built at much steeper grades than rail lines. Roads could also be built using diverse surface materials. As a result, governments could deepen the road infrastructure more affordably. Highways operated like trunk lines that connected cities together and reduced travel times; stemming from them were a network of local roads that ran through the countryside (Waters 2004). During the early decades of the twentieth century, in Mexico, foreign business built the highest quality roads to support their industrial operations, especially petroleum production and other extractive industries. They limited regional access to these routes, which angered residents and became an opportunity for political intervention (Santiago 2009). Later, following political reforms, local, state, and national governments took control of road construction and focused on building dirt and macadam (gravel) roads, because they were cheaper. However, by the 1930s and 1940s, citizens and the business community complained about roads washed out due to heavy rains, which blocked automobiles, trucks, and motor buses. They pressured their political leaders to spend more, oftentimes through the issuance of public debt, to build roads with asphalt concrete and carry out extra maintenance (Bess 2017). During this period, in Argentina, the national government launched an aggressive building program for new roads. By 1943, the state commission in charge had constructed almost 30,000 new kilometers of roads. National officials saw this work as necessary to promote economic development, improve urban-rural connections, and boost regional mobility. An important consequence of extensive road building was a dramatic reworking of the national economy from the 1930s to the 1950s, away from rural agriculture and ranching for export to new industrial activities focused on internal markets (Ballent 2008). Regional automobile clubs championed these efforts, joining forces with public officials to promote economic

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

383

development through infrastructure spending to the public. The Automobile Club of Argentina and the Argentine Touring Club organized public events to popularize motor travel and promoted tourism. They also played a critical role in building out the network of gasoline stations across Argentina to accommodate the travel needs of thousands of new motorists, including growing numbers of rural drivers (Piglia 2015). The idea of building a modern highway through the Americas implied a northsouth orientation for construction efforts. Wealthy and middle-class US Americans would flow south to tourist destinations and “exotic” excursions, while Latin American goods would flow north to markets in the United States and Canada. The business community across the hemisphere saw this as a “win-win” arrangement and many politicians enthusiastically supported the project, expecting rises in tax collection from tourism and transportation of goods and people. For instance, in 1920s Chile, officials and motoring clubs looked to the United States as a model for building roads to promote tourism. They built the “Recreo” a highway that ran 130 km from Valparaíso, in the mountains, to coastal Viña del Mar with picturesque vistas of the region. Further north, the Chilean government coordinated with the US Vice Consul Benjamin C. Williams on building a highway between the ports of Arica and Antofagasta, which was intended to complement existing railroad infrastructure to transport goods across the region for export (Booth 2011). Tourism promotion and economic development were important to road builders. For example, US tourists departing from San Diego relied on an extension of the Santa Fe Railroad to enter northwestern Mexico, traveling to Tijuana and Ensenada, Baja California. Later, road-building efforts in the 1920s increased the number of visitors to the region, especially those looking to escape strict public health campaigns that prohibited the sale and consumption of alcohol. For example, at this time, Mexican officials in Tijuana recorded 100,000 people and 13,000 automobiles crossing the border to visit local cantinas to participate in Fourth of July independence celebrations. Moreover, the construction of the US naval base in San Diego brought soldiers on holiday to the region (Nuñez Tapia and Méndez Reyes 2018). The International Pacific Highway, begun in the 1940s, complemented these twin goals, but also exposed the fissures among the project’s different stakeholders. From Los Angeles, California, political and business leaders coordinated with counterparts to build a highway that crossed the border and extended along the Pacific coast, then turned eastward to Mexico City. They heralded the project as a boon to economic growth, creating new jobs in tourism and greater demand for other goods and services as Californian motorists streamed south of the border. US and Mexican developers agreed on the benefits of development but disagreed on implementation. The Angelenos wanted a picturesque route that saw more of the Pacific coastline, whereas local Mexican officials demanded that the highway better served the needs of their region by connecting to more communities inland. Ultimately, both sides compromised on how to build the road (Kim 2019). Mexico was the first country in Latin America to complete construction of the Pan-American Highway. In 1950, President Miguel Alemán inaugurated its opening with ceremonies at the border with Guatemala. The Mexican government promoted

384

M. K. Bess

motor races along the new highway to advertise the country as a modern tourist destination and gain international attention on radio and television. The races proved popular in the news coverage, but for reasons counter to the aspirations of national leaders. Journalists reported on the sensational crashes that occurred along the route, painting Mexico as a dangerous, unhealthy country to their audiences. In response, Alemán ordered future competitions cancelled. By the time he left office in 1952, thanks to decades of work from several presidential administrations, Mexico counted a nationwide network of tens of thousands of kilometers of highways and local roads, which had a profound impact on regional economic activity (Freeman 2011). This model of highway development accelerated in the postwar period with significant implications for regional populations, creating new spaces that privileged automobiles over other forms of mobility (Wells 2012). In the United States, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 directed 333 billion dollars to the construction of freeways that not only connected cities together but also transformed them. In 1950, Houston, Texas, counted the Gulf Freeway as its single major motor thoroughfare; over subsequent decades, federal support helped construct more than 1200 miles of highways. It transformed the city and its region into a car-focused metropolis that also deeply affected poor and working-class communities, many of them predominately African American, which became targets for bulldozing to make way for highways (Shelton 2017). Similar activities occurred in New York, where workingclass boroughs, including the Bronx and Queens, faced Moses’s enthusiastic support for highway construction (Caro 1975). In Chicago, the building of freeways divided the city along economic and racial lines, isolating the predominately African American Southside area (Abu-Lughod 1999). Meanwhile, at mid-century, in Mexico City, district governor Ernesto P. Uruchurtu (in power from 1952 to 1964) was an avid supporter of bulldozing low-income neighborhoods and building new urban thoroughfares in the name of improved public health and economic development. Urban planners in the Mexican capital had drawn on US ideas to prioritize motorized travel (Davis 1994; Escudero 2018).

Popular Resistance The historical challenges to unimpeded road building and the growth of automobility has been carefully periodized by Gijs Mom, noting the changes in public attitudes. He finds that the century and a half of automobilism can be organized into six epochs: Emergence (1880–1917), Persistence (1917–1940), Exuberance (1945–1973), Doom (1973–2000), and Confusion (2001–present) (Mom 2014b). In the period covered in this chapter, societies across the Americas met the rise of the automobile with concern and excitement that led to concerted public policy efforts to promote motor travel by the early decades of the twentieth century. By the postwar period of the late 1940s, Pan-Americanism in the forms of motor tourism and hemispheric infrastructure building appeared to continue in popularity. However,

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

385

as noted by Mom generally, this exuberance gave way to concerns about the social and environmental impacts of the automobile and its associated technologies. Tension between stakeholders affected road-building efforts across the nations of the Western Hemisphere. For instance, in Panama, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, US investors funded planning and construction of the Pan-American Highway through the densely forested and mountainous zone of the Darien near the border with Colombia. Not unlike the Angeleno investors decades before, they heralded the transformative effects the highway would have on economic development in the region. Panamanian supporters also saw the project as a means to “modernize” a part of their country where communities had long resisted colonial and national pressures to change. The foreign and national highway boosters relied on local help and knowledge of the Darien to coordinate the engineering and labor teams. Without this help, it would have been almost impossible to make any progress on the route; however, environmental difficulties and other local resistance slowed construction. Rising costs, local blockades, and concerns about disease exposure and deforestation forced the planners to freeze and ultimately abandon their work. On the Panamanian side, the Pan-American highway ends at the town of Yaviza, leaving a straight-line 100-kilometer separation that extends to Turbo, Colombia, where the road continues (Ficek 2016). Before graded and paved motor roads reached rural communities, residents complained about the difficulty of transporting goods and the long travel times required. In Mexico, villages and towns relied on old, rutted footpaths unsuitable for most vehicles. Once the state built a road, farmers could more easily move produce to regional markets for sale. They could also send family members to hospitals or schools. Moreover, where roads went, electricity, irrigation, and telephone and telegraph lines often followed opening access to broader communication within the nation (Santiago 2009). Of course, not all farmers or landowners welcomed a new motor route. Some complained that it divided their properties or, in the case of workers setting up a makeshift quarry, damaged land values. Residents blocked construction and slowed building efforts to force officials to reengineer infrastructure plans. Once a road was finished, new problems arose, especially for residents nearby asphaltconcrete highways. Speeding motorists struck people and livestock crossing the road or walking alongside it. Governments responded by setting speed limits, fining drivers, and restricting use of roads’ shoulders, but these rules had varying degrees of success and were often ignored. In short, the “modern” invention of high-speed motor roads brought new physical risks (Bess 2016). Roads have been important tools of the state to control natural resources and indigenous peoples, which has led to violent conflicts and increasing deforestation. In Brazil, since the 1970s, the national government supported the construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway. It saw the megaproject as important for economic development and agriculture, beginning on the coast at the port of Joao Pessoa and running 4000 km westward to the city of Labréa in the state of Amazonas. The construction faced resistance from indigenous communities, environmental activists, and other groups that feared such intrusion into the Amazon forest threatened to destroy the region’s ecosystem and pre-Columbian human cultures. A proposed tract

386

M. K. Bess

of the highway to the border with Peru and Colombia has remained unfinished (Smith 1982). Activist concerns about environment and land rights clashed with commercial interests. In the Amazon, loggers and cattle ranchers championed road building to “open” the land to greater development. They pressured political authorities in capitals across South America to support these efforts or at least not to enforce rules limiting their growth. Scholars working in this region concluded “nearly 90% of deforestation has occurred within a 100 km buffer from roads built by the federal government” (Arima et al. 2005). In Peru, the national government also advocated developing the rural Amazonian countryside with the construction of new motor highways to bring tourism and other commercial activity. Some local politicians embraced the plan to provide jobs to once-isolated mountainous areas; however, as occurred in other places across the continent, indigenous groups and environmental activists campaigned against extending motor vehicle infrastructure. They argued that the government had not done enough to consult them on the work and that it threatened to further degrade forests and wildlife (Harvey and Knox 2015). The controversy around road building stemmed from the profound impact the construction of new transportation infrastructures had on natural and built environments. In the countryside, roads reshaped how people interacted with the spaces around them. It separated the land, affecting farmers’ and ranchers’ access to water sources, while bringing in new dangers (high-speed motor vehicles) that further affected everyday life. These factors also divided communities, as some local stakeholders championed building projects, while others resisted them for complex reasons. For instance, in the largely rural state, Chiapas, in southern Mexico, the national government sought to expand road access to highways in the 1970s and 1990s to support tourism and improve economic activity. However, policymakers often failed to consult with local, indigenous groups. Their opposition to road building came to symbolize broader resistance to a faraway central government that had historically preferred to impose its will rather than consider the needs of everyday people (Otto 2018). In urban areas, roads and highways also significantly affected built spaces. Construction crews needed to clear residential and business structures to make way for a route. Political power determined whose community was most affected, and many working-class people faced the brunt of building efforts, while middleclass and wealthy residents successfully resisted certain projects (Norton 2008). Moreover, public health and safety measures could inordinately affect workingclass and peripheral neighborhoods. For example, in Monterrey, Mexico, authorities redirected bus routes and restricted trucking to improve air quality in high-income places frequented by tourists; residents in other areas, especially working-class and poor neighborhoods, complained of more traffic congestion, noise, and air pollution (Bess 2016). Balancing these spatial factors for road building in rural and urban areas proved to be a complex task for governments, especially as their own priorities changed in the latter half of the twentieth century in favor of policies that restricted mobility and created new zones of surveillance.

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

387

Regimes of Immobility For much of the 1900s, government and commercial leaders saw road building as a panacea for traffic congestion and necessary for economic growth. If locals resisted new projects, elites sought to outmaneuver them arguing in favor of national developmentalist priorities. Urban planners and corporations in the United States pioneered the concept of the motor city. However, across the hemisphere, more people began to question the objectives of road building in the second half of the twentieth century. The ideals of Pan-Americanism gave way to concerns about environmental degradation. In 1974, after decades of financial support the US government cancelled further funding of the Pan-American Highway through the Darien region of Panama due to activist pressure. During this time, another important factor that contributed to a reassessment of transnational highway building across the Americas was the nascent War on Drugs launched during the administration of US President Richard M. Nixon (1968–1974). The US government increasingly viewed transportation infrastructure as one of the vulnerabilities it faced in contending with emergent drug cartels that produced and shipped cocaine and marijuana from Latin America to wealthy buyers in the United States (Enciso 2010). As a result, the US government and its allies in Latin America pivoted to a new strategy. Whereas for much of the twentieth century policymakers saw heightened mobility as an important objective to promote Pan-Americanism, in the 1970s and 1980s, a regime of immobility came to define cross-border relationships. The new goal, which received additional funding in the 1990s, aimed to monitor and control the movement of people and goods. US officials described the need to combat drug use as justification for increasingly onerous policing tactics. Likewise, neo-nationalist worries about immigration, combined with a US President, William Jefferson Clinton (1993–2001), willing to triangulate on conservative policy positions, militarized the US-Mexico border. New antidrug programs like Plan Colombia, and later the Merida Initiative, sent US money to militarize policing efforts in Latin American countries (Carpenter 2003). A shift towards drug interdictions and immigration restrictions came with its own series of infrastructure reforms that affected mobility, highway building, and regional health across the Americas. Its physical consequences were most prominent along the US-Mexico border; beginning in the 1990s, the federal government under President Bill Clinton expanded policing measures and the construction of new physical barriers. The goal of this “militarization” of policing was to increase the difficulty of crossing the border illegally by forcing undocumented immigrants to follow routes in more isolated, dangerous desert areas with little access to water. During the Clinton administration, immigrant deaths increased as the deterrence policy failed to stop unlawful border crossings (Alvarez 2019). Nevertheless, the government redoubled efforts in the 2000s as President George H.W. Bush oversaw the creation of new agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol, a part of the new Department of Homeland Security, which further made the issue of cross-border mobility a policing matter. He also signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006 into law, providing funding for

388

M. K. Bess

the construction of additional physical barriers along the US-Mexico border. A new layer of technological complexity was laid over existing transport infrastructures. Officials used concerns over illegal immigration and the drug trade to justify implementation. At ports of entry into the United States, the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade facilities. It created high-tech, surveillance spaces to process the day-to-day border crossers. The government also utilized drone technologies, developed for the so-called War on Terror, to monitor regional mobility to identify illegal immigrants and smugglers (Alvarez 2019). This infrastructure represented the creation of technological regimes of mobility and immobility. As has been the case with airport designs, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, government policies focused on designing flow patterns that attempted to restrict the movement of suspicious individuals or groups, while allowing the vast number of people to move through check-points. It required the deployment of “Big Data” and artificial intelligence to track patterns and sort people into different groups based on an algorithmic threat matrix with increasing complexity in the new century (Kloppenberg 2013). The fraught legacy of Pan-Americanism that had championed enthusiastically the construction of transport infrastructures that prioritized the flows of people and goods had given way to a new era focused on the control and limiting of those same socioeconomic currents.

Conclusion The history and literature of highway building across the Western hemisphere has tracked with US priorities for infrastructure development. During the early-to-mid twentieth century, when Pan-Americanism predominated, the United States saw international roadways as a means to extend its economic and political influence across Latin America through motor tourism and trade. This policy was an important part of the hemispheric strategy Washington carried out, but gradual changes occurred. It reflected the intersection of road politics and agriculture, as private corporations and investors benefited from new transportation infrastructure to grow market share. Popular resentment over unrestrained, unconsidered growth saw environmental and indigenous activists protest the Pan-American Highway, to many a symbol of US imperial capitalism. They successfully blocked construction of the route through the Darien region of eastern Panama. It came at a time when US political leadership was reconsidering previous generations’ endorsement of infrastructure building. Beginning under Nixon, and continued under subsequent presidents, the War on Drugs moved the US government towards a preference for restrictionist measures on continental mobility. Later, the War on Terror further deepened this stance, transforming US policy on transportation infrastructure into something largely unrecognizable to the pro-highway campaigns of the 1910s– 1960s. The creation of new regimes of mobility and immobility influenced the contours of economic development, investing millions of dollars into surveillance measures,

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

389

while also sending money and equipment to Latin American allies to wage violent campaigns against illegal drug operations. As climate change exacerbates extant socioeconomic tensions and failed political schemes, thousands of additional individuals and families will consider the need to migrate from their home communities. They will join existing and past flows of people and goods that have, since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moved along the vast hemispheric network of transportation infrastructure. In doing so, they will contribute to the still unwritten chapters of mobility history in the Americas in the decades to come.

References Abu-Lughod JL (1999) New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America’s global cities. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis Alliende MP (2006) Historia del ferrocarril en Chile, 2nd edn. Goethe-Institut, Pehuen Editores, Santiago Alonso AM (1995) Thread of blood: colonialism, revolution, and gender on Mexico’s northern frontier. University of Arizona Press, Tucson Alvarez CJ (2019) Border land, border water: a history of construction on the U.S.–Mexico divide. University of Texas Press, Austin Arima E et al (2005) Loggers and forest fragmentation: behavioral models of road building in the Amazon Basin. Ann Assoc Am Geogr 95(3):525–541 Ballent A (2008) Ingeniería y Estado: La Red Nacional de Caminos y las Obras Públicas en la Argentina, 1930–1943. Hist, CC, Saúde-Manguinhos 15(3):827–847 Beezley WH (1987) Judas at the Jockey Club and other episodes of Porfirian Mexico. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln Benton-Cohen K (2011) Borderline Americans: racial division and labor war in the Arizona borderlands. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Bess MK (2016) “Neither motorists nor pedestrians obey the rules”: transit law, public safety, and the policing of Northern Mexico’s roads, 1920s–1950s. J Transp Hist 37(2):155–174 Bess MK (2017) Routes of compromise: building roads and shaping the nation in Mexico, 1917–1952. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln Booth R (2011) El automóvil, un objeto técnico superior. Debates y experiencias en torno a la irrupción de la motorización privada en Chile (1902–1914). In: Tauzin I (dir) À pied, à cheval, en voiture: l’Amérique indépendante et les moyens de transport. Maison des Sciences de l’Homme d’Aquitaine, Burdeos, pp 99–110 Booth R (2013) El camino como aventura. El automóvil y la movilidad turística en el Chile de comienzos del siglo XX. Cdad y Arq 151:17–21 Boyko J (2018) Intercolonial railway. In: The Canadian encyclopedia. Historica Canada, Toronto Caro R (1975) The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. Vantage Books, New York Carpenter TG (2003) Bad neighbor policy: Washington’s futile war on drugs in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York Coatsworth JH (1981) Growth against development: the economic impact of railroads in Porfirian Mexico. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb Connelly M (2010) Fatal misconception: the struggle to control world population. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Cotter J (2003) Troubled harvest: agronomy and revolution in Mexico, 1880–2002. Praeger Publishers, Westport Davis D (1994) Urban leviathan: Mexico City in the twentieth century. Temple University Press, Philadelphia

390

M. K. Bess

Diacon TA (2004) Stringing together a nation: Cândido Mariano Da Silva Rondon and the construction of a modern Brazil, 1906–1930. Duke University Press, Durham Donoghue ME (2014) Borderland on the isthmus: race, culture, and the struggle for the canal zone. Duke University Press, Durham Enciso F (2010) Los fracasos del chantaje régimen de prohibición de drogas y narcotráfico. In: Alvarado A, Serrano M (eds) Los grandes problemas de México: Seguridad Nacional Y Seguridad Interior. Colegio de México, Mexico City Escudero A (2018) Una ciudad noble y lógica. Las propuestas de Carlos Contreras Elizondo para la Ciudad de Mexico. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City Ficek RE (2016) Imperial routes, national networks, and regional projects in the Pan-American Highway, 1884–1977. J Transp Hist 37(2):129–154 Flink J (1990) The automobile age. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Freeman JB (2009) Driving Pan-Americanism: the imagination of a Gulf of Mexico Highway. J Lat Am Stud 3(4):56–68 Freeman JB (2011) “La Carrera de la muerte”: death, driving, and rituals of modernization in 1950s Mexico. Stud Lat Am Pop Cult 29:2–23 Giucci G (2012) The cultural life of the automobile: roads to modernity. University of Texas Press, Austin Goodwin PB Jr (1977) The Central Argentine Railway and the economic development of Argentina, 1854–1881. Hisp Am Hist Rev 57(4):613–632 Harvey P, Knox H (2015) Roads: an anthropology of infrastructure and expertise. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Ingram T (2014) Dixie highway: road building and the making of the modern south, 1900–1930. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Kim JM (2019) Imperial metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the borderlands of American empire, 1865–1941. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Kloppenberg S (2013) Mapping the contours of mobilities regimes: air travel and drug smuggling between the Caribbean and the Netherlands. Mobility 8:1 Lewis D (2008) Iron horse imperialism: the Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880–1951. University of Arizona Press, Tucson Longhurst J (2015) Bike battles: a history of sharing the American road. University of Washington Press, Seattle Mom G (2014a) Atlantic automobilism: the emergence and persistence of the car, 1895–1940. Berghahn, New York Mom G (2014b) Evolution of automotive technology: a handbook. SAE International, Warrendale Norton PD (2008) Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Nuñez Tapia FA, Méndez Reyes J (2018) El camino de Tijuana a Ensenada: de la precariedad al potencial turístico. Notas sobre empresas de transporte, movilidad y turismo estadounidense en Baja California, 1896–1940. In: Cruz González N d C, Méndez Medina DL (eds) Enfoques desde el noroeste de México. Poblamiento y actividades económicas en Baja California y Sonora, siglos XVIII al XX. Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Tijuana Otto J (2018) State-building and roads in postrevolutionary Chiapas and at the turn of the 21st century. In: Beezley WH (ed) Oxford encyclopedia of Mexican history and culture. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Piglia M (2015) Motor clubs in the public arena: the Argentine Automobile Club, the Argentine Touring Club, and the construction of a National Road System (1910–43). J Transp Hist 36(2): 170–187 Pilcher J (2012) Planet taco: a global history of mexican food. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK Santiago MI (2009) The ecology of oil: environment, labor, and the Mexican revolution, 1900–1938. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Shelton K (2017) Power moves: transportation, politics and development in Houston. University of Texas Press, Austin Smith NJH (1982) Rainforest corridors: the Transamazon colonization scheme. University of California Press, Berkeley

18

Steering Latin America’s Economic Relationship with the United States

391

Soto R (2009) End of the line: railroads in Chile. In: Instituto de Economía. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago Tinker Salas M (1997) In the shadow of the eagles: Sonora and the transformation of the border during the Porfiriato. University of California Press, Berkeley Truett S (2007) Fugitive landscapes: the forgotten history of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Yale University Press, New Haven Truett S, Young E (eds) (2004) Continental crossroads: remapping U.S.–Mexico borderlands history. Duke University Press, Durham Urry J (2004) The “system” of automobility. Theory Cult Soc 21(4–5):25–39 Van Hoy T (2008) A social history of Mexico’s railroads: peons, prisoners, and priests. Rowman and Littlefield, New York Waters W (2004) Remapping identities: road construction and nation building in postrevolutionary Mexico. In: Vaughan MK, Lewis S (eds) The eagle and the virgin: nation and cultural revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940. Duke University Press, Durham Wells C (2012) Car country: an environmental history. University of Washington Press, Seattle White R (2011) Railroaded: the transcontinental and the making of modern America. W. W. Norton, New York

Part V Race Studies, Medicine, and Genetics

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

19

Olivia Gall

Contents Ethnocentrism in the Colonial New Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The First Nations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The African Populations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Criollos and the Mestizos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Modern and Contemporary Mexican Sui Generis Racism (1810–2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

396 396 400 404 409 416 416

Abstract

This chapter develops a long duration of social, political, and cultural history of Mexican racism, often characterized as a sui generis type of racism. Its first part goes through the history of ethnocentrism in the colonial New Spain: the Indigenous and the African populations, the criollos (Creole), the mestizos, and the castas. Its second part deals with the history of modern and contemporary Mexican racism. It goes through a long period, starting with the conquest of Independencie (1821) and finishing in 2018. On the one hand, it analyzes the way in which independent Mexico developed an apparently antiracist nation-building project, centered on the idea that the best thing for this young country was to dissolve all ethnic identities in the melting pot of a national mestizo race and culture, made of two components: the Indigenous and the Spanish. On the other hand, it explains how this ideology had a racist character, because it asked Indigenous peoples to mix in order to whiten, but did not ask the Spanish or Creole populations to Indianize themselves, and left the Afro-descendant important population of that time unseen, invisibilized, and not considered in the racial O. Gall (*) CEIICH, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_26

395

396

O. Gall

and cultural ideal national mixture. The text continues to develop around how, after the 1910–1920 revolution, this nineteenth-century ideology became one of the main political and cultural projects of the new State; how between 1920 and 1970 this project’s racist nature consisted in developing a series of powerful State policies to try to dissolve the Indigenous ethnicities and “bloods” in mestizaje, seen and the essence of Mexicanity and of Mexican nationalism; how it kept erasing the Afro-Mexicans; and how it also created racism among different fringes of mestizo population.

Ethnocentrism in the Colonial New Spain The First Nations Following the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492, during three centuries, the Spanish Monarchy carried out a set of ethnocentric policies toward the many first nations and the African populations enslaved in its territories. The first of the four viceroyalties of New Spain covered not only a huge area that included the territory occupied today by Mexico as a country, but also that occupied in our times by 19 states of the USA or part of them, and by the southwest of British Columbia belonging today to Canada. In pre-Columbian times, there were abundant Indigenous peoples and languages in these territories, many of which survived after the conquest. The New Spain, the most important Iberian colony, was born in 1521, 2 years after Hernan Cortés’ arrival to American continental lands, and after the dramatic fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the powerful Mexica Empire. Over the ruins of the ancient Tenochtitlan, the conquerors built Mexico City, the new capital of the New Spain. Columbus and the Catholic monarchs were convinced that by traveling from Europe toward the West they had arrived to India. This is why they united under the term “Indians” all the autochthonous peoples of this continent, without taking into account their geographical, historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious differences. These peoples were completely new to the Iberians, as well as to all the other European conquerors of America. When they arrived in these lands, Europeans had had various encounters with different peoples, who were different from them, for example, the Chinese that Marco Polo had encountered in the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century, or the populations of sub-Saharan Africa, part of whose members had swelled the ranks of slaves, who, from the Greek empire on, belonged to very different peoples. As did the other colonial powers in America – the Portuguese, the British, or the French – the Spanish classified the aboriginal populations it conquered on a scale that considered Western Christian culture as a superior cultural and religious model: “You are not like us and therefore you are inferior” (Mignolo 2005, 43). By then, many other peoples of non-European origins had been subject to this kind of degrading evaluation and treatment.

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

397

In the Iberian Peninsula of the late middle Ages, for the Spanish Christian society, “accustomed for centuries to decode religious identity in ethnic terms, tied to the ancestry or the genealogy of each group” (Stallaert 2006, 23), the “others” were mainly the Jews and the Moslems. The former had been gradually arriving to the peninsula since the fall of the Roman Empire in the third century of our era; the latter, from northern Africa, had invaded Al-Andalus in the eighth century and would remain there for at least 800 years. Against both these peoples, the policy of the feudal lords, increasingly unified around the alliance between Castile and Aragon, was made of a set of measures based on the “materialization of an ethno-religious ideal that opened the door to the future colonial power of the Spanish Crown” (Stallaert 2006, 27). One cannot interpret the fact that the Crown and the Vatican offered Jews and Moslems conversion to Catholicism in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries as a gesture of ethno-religious pacification. Furthermore, in 1449, this supposedly assimilationist offer provoked “a popular ethnic reaction in the opposite sense,” because “anti-conversion revolts” burst out in several cities. In order to control them, the political and religious authorities established the “Clean Blood Statutes,” which had nothing to do with the biological characteristics of people, but rather with their ethnic-religious belonging. According to these statutes, anyone wishing to hold a political, military, or ecclesiastical position had to present documents that proved he was an “Old Christian,” in other words, that his family had been Christian for at least two generations. The Holy Inquisition created its Spanish Court in 1475. Apart from condemning women accused of witchcraft, its main mission was to persecute the Judeo-converts, accusing them of continuing to practice in secret their old faith. Finally, in 1492, King Fernando and Queen Isabel expelled the Jews from the peninsula. That same year, Columbus embarked for America, and in 1519, Cortes engaged in the conquest of what would become the New Spain. Starting in the second decade of the sixteenth century, the vice-royal authorities allowed a public reflection about the aboriginal peoples (“los naturales”), and about “what should be the relationship between the Crown and the natives.” This occurred in tune with two perennial concerns of the Catholic Monarchs: guaranteeing the flow of income from their American lands to the Iberian Peninsula, and keeping under paternalistic control the aboriginal peoples, toward whom they harbored moral scruples that expressed an interest in safeguarding them. This is why protective laws of the first nations would mark the colonial interethnic New Spain’s history (1519–1810): • The Laws of Burgos (1512) legally established, on the one hand, a protective system of the Indigenous populations, and, on the other hand, the right of the Crown to wage war on Indigenous peoples who resisted evangelization, and the development of the encomiendas (entrusts), which were the prize given to the conquerors for their services to the Crown. These men were thus entitled to own enormous extensions of land and their indigenous inhabitants, imposing on them a labor system close to slavery. • The New Laws of the Indies (1542) solemnly prohibited the enslavement of the “Indians” and abolished the encomiendas.

398

O. Gall

• The Controversy of Valladolid (1555) – also known as the “Fair Titles Debate” or the “polemic on the natives” – between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Sepúlveda had opposed the New Laws, and wanted to apply to the Indians Aristotle’s theory about some peoples being “naturally” born to obey and others to command. (When Aristotle wrote these words, he was thinking about the difference between barbarians, among whom passion prevailed over reason, and those he considered governed more by reason and thus civilized, not because they were biologically superior but because they were the product of Hellenic discipline and education.) In his opinion, the American natives were barbarians – “sinners and idolaters,” “beings with no soul or conscience,” “nonrational,” almost “nonhuman” – whose inferior condition made them incapable of self-governing. Therefore, he argued, the Spanish had the right to wage war on them in order to protect them from their own barbarian self, no matter the harsh methods this enterprise would require. He advocated in favor of maintaining the New Laws, and in his Thirty very legal propositions demonstrated that the Indians were peoples “of reason” and “with a soul,” because otherwise they would not have been able to build their splendid pre-Columbian civilizations and cities. Las Casas also argued that these civilizations had not been crueler, or less vicious, than the western cultures. Fortunately, Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas’ progressive views triumphed over Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s conservative voice. Had the latter won the Valladolid Controversy, the Spanish-American authorities would have regarded “the Indians” as subhuman, allowing their segregation and their enslavement. Las Casas’ victory in this debate guaranteed that the autochthonous populations of the New Spain would be assimilationist rather than segregationist. This model did not prevent the colonial powers and the colonial society to exploit the autochthonous populations, and force catechization and assimilation of the Spanish language on them. Nevertheless, these practices would have been much harsher if Las Casas had lost this important controversy. On the part of the Crown and the Viceroy, his victory resulted in a “greater self-censorship of their policies and practices towards the indigenous peoples” (León Portilla 2010). Between 1560 and 1600, the viceregal authorities forced them to abandon their old dwellings and “congregate” in new populations, called Repúblicas de Indios. In these new towns, drawn in the Spanish way, the authorities implemented an unusual program of castilianization. From then on, their forms of government, religious beliefs, some of their cultural habits, and their public and ceremonial life adopted Spanish traditions. They also became a workforce subordinated to the needs of the Spanish economy, but without ceasing to reside in their villages. One could think that these “Indian republics” resembled the Indian reservations established by the British or the French colonial powers in their conquered lands in America, but in these towns, the Crown also authorized the deployment of a mechanism that allowed these new communities’ conscience to articulate. This mechanism was “the primordial Titles,” a set of documents that were the product of the interaction of the Mesoamerican and the Spanish cultures. They were destined to preserve and

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

399

transmit the order established in the Repúblicas de Indios, and, at the same time, the different native people’s collective memory. They combined written text and numerous images with the purpose of defending the lands of the town and the identity of its inhabitants (Florescano 2014). Thus, at the same time that the Spanish imposed to the natives a new way of living, they also pushed forward a range of devices that helped these peoples’ resistance to this new settlement of things. “The communities that lacked land grants or had lost their documents, that had recently congregated or that had land disputes with their neighbors prepared their primordial titles and other similar documents in order to defend their ancestral rights to the land and to preserve the territory that their parents and grandparents had bequeathed” (Florescano 2014). The cultural symbiosis between Indigenous and western traditions that occurred in these documents marked the process by which native groups built their new identities. To the surprise of the historian dominated by the western vision, or of the anthropologist addicted to the indigenous dogma, the founding of the colonial indigenous towns is a mixture of both traditions. Its wording brings together the paraphernalia that surrounded the old cultural and religious foundations: protective gods, New Fire, patronage of the elderly, participation of the entire community, celebratory ceremonies. However, this happened within the framework of European institutions and symbols: [. . .] written in Castilian, which legalized the founding act and incorporated the presence of the vice- regal authorities. They constructed the towns’ church and installed crosses in the towns’ four cardinal points, baptizing the principals or chiefs. Such is the hybrid nature of the canon that sanctified the Repúblicas de Indios. (Florescano 2014) (Translated by Olivia Gall, OG. From here on in this text, every time a * appears it will mean translated by OG.)

The above-described Indian towns did not develop all through New Spain’s territory. Thus, the life of many other native peoples was imposed to them by other means that were not as potentially conciliatory as the Repúblicas de Indios. Nevertheless, as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún wrote in his Historia General de las Cosas de la Nueva España, the process of subjugation to the colonial Spanish power turned all the aboriginal peoples of this territory into something that was not even the shadow of what they had once been. A destructive colonial ethnocentrism submitted the original cultures of this region, and it would be an important touchstone in the further development of racism in independent Mexico. The colonization was even cruder against the “Indians” living in lands that were very far away from the vice-regal central powers, where the presence of the New Laws, Las Casas’ victory and the Repúblicas de indios were important. For example, Spanish authorities and landowners were much harsher to the Maya native indigenous populations in their lands, where the abolishment of the encomienda took almost 250 years longer (1786) than in central New Spain (1542). There, the different Maya native peoples became in fact slaves, even if nobody called them such. (Lenkersdorf 1995, 71–85)*

The then Provincia de Chiapa – today a large part of the state of Chiapas – belonged at that time to the Reign of Guatemala, also a Spanish colony. This province would become part of independent Mexico in 1824, but before that, its

400

O. Gall

native Maya peoples lived also under the boot of the encomienda until the late eighteenth century. This is why this province registered the greatest number of Indigenous rebellions throughout the colonial Guatemalan and Mexican colonial history. The first of them took place during the third decade of the sixteenth century, when the newly conquered Chiapa or Chiapaneca Indians rose up in arms and then fled their villages toward the caves of the Sumidero Canyon, in order to escape the fierce Spanish tributary system and the extreme abuses of the encomenderos (see De Vos 1988, 1990). The second of these rebellions, which should rather be called long-term resistance, burst out for the first time in 1542, when, from the heart of the rainforest, the Lacandones rose up against the payment of tributes, and then maintained a more than a century and a half battle against its colonization and pacification (see De Vos 1988, 1990). In 1693, this region’s third Indigenous insurrection broke out, this time starring the Zoques, inhabitants of the then Indigenous town of Tuxtla located in the central low valleys. With great effort, the Zoques tried to appeal to the legal authorities of the Kingdom of Guatemala in their protest against the abuses of two officials – one a Spanish and the other an Indigenous principal – assigned to the Tuxtla administration. The Audiencia of Guatemala dismissed these two men, but the province of Chiapa’s authorities did not comply with their superiors’ decision. Tuxtla could not bear this and organized a mutiny, which the Spanish authorities repressed in such a way that it led to one of the cruelest bloodbaths this province had seen or would ever see (Macleod 1994, 244). Throughout the 40 years following these events, almost all the Indigenous groups in this province maintained a permanent resistance in the form of disputes and conflicts. Among these conflicts, the Cancuc rebellion that broke out in 1712 was undoubtedly one of the longest and most radical Indigenous insurrections in the Mesoamerican colonial history. Among the leaders of this revolt were two Tzeltal women, María de la Candelaria and Magdalena Díaz. They told the majority of the native population of the Zendal region and an important part of the Tsotsil and the Chol ethnic groups in the north of the province that Virgin Mary had appeared to them, and that she had asked them to become her representatives, the legitimate depositaries of the Gospel and its soldiers and protectors. This messianic and political rebellion was of such magnitude that it called into question the viability and continuity of the colonial regime in the region (see Viqueira 1997). Terrified, the Spanish population of the region put down this uprising, and it would take more than a 100 years for another Indigenous revolt in Chiapas.

The African Populations In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese systematically explored the African coasts, in search for products. With the arrival to the New World, the demand for slaves gave rise to a very lucrative trade of sub-Saharan enslaved people, and the creation of slavery companies in these new territories. The Atlantic human trafficking became the largest and most complex maritime and commercial enterprise developed until

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

401

then. Between 1492 and 1870, the Portuguese, the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish traders transported at least 12.5 million slaves to various American regions and took them to the tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, cotton, and rice plantations, to the gold and silver mines, or to the domestic service (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 46–47). In the Spanish colonies, during the sixteenth century, the conquest implied the death of millions of “Indians,” mainly because they had no immunity against smallpox and measles, two diseases to which the Europeans were by then immune and that they unconsciously brought with them to America. Some historians estimate that up to 90% of the Indigenous populations submitted to the Spanish Crown in North, Central, and South America died during the sixteenth century from contagion (see Páramo and Núñez 2019). This strong demographic decline of the Indigenous populations represented a problem for the Spanish colonizing enterprise, because it “required labor for the mining extraction, for the cattle, the sugar and the agricultural haciendas, and for various crafts and domestic services in rural regions and cities in the New Spain” (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 63). This is why they decided to bring Sub-Saharan African slaves to this territory. Slaves trafficked to the New Spain came mainly from Senegambia and Central or Eastern Africa or were Mandingos, Wolof, Brans, or Bantu. Calculations based at the time on the records of the shipping companies and the customs office considered that [. . .] from 1576 to 1650 [. . .] between 200,000 and 250,000 Africans arrived in the New Spain. A figure that does not consider those who were smuggled in, something difficult to estimate, and those who were born as slaves in the New Spain. (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 67; Vinson and Vaughn 2004, 11)

Some scholars claim that before the Africans’ slave trade to America, the concept of “blacks” did not exist to refer to these populations in a globalizing way (Quijano 2000, 202). This opinion is questionable. Let us remember, first, the passage of the Old Testament and the Talmud, in which Noah claimed that God had cursed with black skin one of his sons, Ham, because he was a sinful man whose descendants became degenerate human beings (El Hamel 2002, 39–40). And second, the very important Arab slave trade of sub-Saharan Africans started long before 1492, when they were sold in all the regions of the Muslim world (from Al-Andalus and the Middle East to India and China), and when the term “black” was largely used to designate them and their peoples. Some wealthy slave owners in twelfth-century Canton called them “savages and demons due to their physical appearance” (Petré-Grenouilleau 2003, 48–55). Ibn al-Nafis, a famous thirteenth-century Arab physician, describes the zanj or the “people of black color” in the following terms: “the moral characteristics found in their mentality are close to the instinctual characteristics naturally found in animals” (Reid and Lane 2004, 166). Quijano also claims that it was in the American colonies that the use of the term “black” became the main way to identify the African slaves, introducing a racial criterion that had not existed until then (Quijano 2000, 202).

402

O. Gall

The idea of race, in its modern sense, has no known history before America. Perhaps it originated as a reference to the phenotypic differences between conquerors and conquered. However, what matters is that the latter constructed it very soon as a way of referring to alleged differential biological structures between these groups. (Quijano 2000, 202)*

Nevertheless, the use of the old nickname of “blacks” in the Americas had nothing to do with a newborn colonial racism, but with the Spanish ethnocentrism, which belittled the origins and the particular characteristics of each of these peoples. It was a strategy to make them forget their past, and a way of breaking their ethnic identities. In effect, calling all aboriginal American peoples “Indians” and all sub-Saharan slaves “blacks” was a generalizing formula that did not do justice to the many differences existing within the American continent’s first nations or within the African slaves in this New World. This was due to the profound and cruel ethnocentric ideas, beliefs, and practices of the conquerors. The African slaves brought to the New Spain had a much greater demographic and cultural presence than Mexicans have admitted. The first Africans to arrive were part of the armies of the Spanish conquerors and acted as such. Then, the records of the shipping companies and the customs offices considered that, from 1576 to 1650, in New Spain between 200,000 and 250,000 Africans arrived, a number that considers neither those who were smuggled in, something difficult to estimate, nor those who were born slaves in the New Spain. At the end of the seventeenth century, the slave trade to the New Spain began to decline and, at the same time, the proportion of people of African descent increased. Part of this phenomenon was due to the coexistence of Africans, Indigenous people, and Europeans (Curtin 1969; Lovejoy 1983). Finally, some historians estimate that by the end of the eighteenth century there were a million people of African descent in the “New Spain” (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 65–66; Gerhard 1986, 493). The viceregal authorities rarely observed the laws and norms promulgated under their mandate that tried to limit the coexistence between the many Indigenous peoples, the Spanish and other very small European minorities, and the African groups. There was also a very small population minority coming from the Philippines or China. Moreover, the main religious colonial institution, the Church, did not prohibit mixed marriages. All this resulted in the fact that in daily life these various groups – some extremely discriminated and others not so much or not at all – coexisted, resulting in an intense cultural exchange between them. Of course that the different Indigenous peoples and the African traded people were subjected to often inhumane conditions, especially in the case of the slaves. From the beginning of the life of Africans in these lands, there were multiple demonstrations of resistance to slavery. Slaves often escaped from the haciendas or plantations situated in rural areas or from the houses or convents where they did domestic work. They were called maroons (marranos). Many of them fled to isolated places – along the South-Pacific coast of this territory, for example, known as palenques (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 75). At the same time, as shown in the following examples, the Spanish rules toward the first nations and toward slavery were to some extent much laxer that the ones implanted in the British or the Portuguese colonies.

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

403

Africans and Afro-descendants were a heterogeneous group. Many lived in extreme poverty and submission, but some managed to attain better living conditions, and some others built their families with people from other groups. In fact, in the New Spain, historians have observed an absolutely unique social and cultural formation: a fractal society. [. . .] In these chaotic universes, individual and collective behavior escaped the norm, the “custom”, as it prevailed [both] in the Iberian Peninsula [and in the Aztec world]. [. . .] This dynamic of loss and reconstruction translated into a particular form of cultural exchange between [several] opposed cultures; an “intermittent and fragmented reception prevailed.” (Gruzinsky 1994, 15)*

The mixtures between Spanish and African individuals gave birth to the “mulatto” men and women, and throughout the colonial period, even before the eighteenth century, many slaves obtained their freedom. Towards the end of the 18th century, the number of enslaved people had apparently decreased in the New Spain. Many became free because slavery stopped being profitable for colonial companies, due to the considerable increase in indigenous and mestizo labor [. . .]. Obtaining freedom followed different paths. The slave owners could grant it in life or by testament. Upon their death, many masters freed their female slaves for ‘having raised them’ or in recognition for their care and attention. Slaves could also buy their freedom if they made enough money to pay for it, and many managed to do so because their masters or mistresses allowed them to sell some goods or food and keep that money. [. . .] Another way of achieving freedom was through establishing, legitimately or illegitimately, relationships with people of other groups. African enslaved men frequently paired with indigenous women so that their children did not inherit the enslaved condition, which the mother transmitted by law. Some enslaved women established relationships with Spanish or mestizo men, and then tried to get the fathers of their children to recognize them, something which sometimes granted them freedom.” (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 70)*

Africans’ work strongly contributed to the economic, social, and cultural formation of the New Spain. “Enslaved or free, they worked on mining, livestock and agricultural estates, particularly in sugar mills, as well as in ports and construction. They were apprentices, officers and masters in guilds such as blacksmiths, saddlers, tailors, painters and architects, among many other trades. In the main cities, such as Mexico City, Puebla or Guanajuato, they were in charge of domestic service as servants or coachmen” (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 67). Some of them even became painters or architects. Some became militiamen. The viceregal governments had to guarantee the security of the conquered territories, protecting them from the uprisings of the Indigenous peoples or from the attack of pirates and foreign powers. Nevertheless, the Crown did not build a regular army in New Spain, so they created militias, mainly formed by slaves or by freed slaves, who could benefit from this, from 1765 onward, because their incorporation into the professional military career granted them some sort of social promotion, because they could access some of the privileges reserved for the military (Velázquez and Iturralde 2016, 72–74). “At the beginning of the eighteenth century the new generations of Afro-descendants were freed.”

404

O. Gall

The violent colonial ethnocentrism against autochthonous populations and against the enslaved Africans was a touchstone in the further development of racism in independent Mexico. But in the New Spain, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in the first part of the eighteenth century, neither the appellative “Indians” nor the appellative “blacks” had to do with the idea that the natives populations were the “Indian race,” the African slaves the “black race,” and the Spanish the members of the “white race.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the conditions that would later allow Europe to implant in the world the concept of race and the racist domination system were not yet ready for historians to think that racism was a main part of the domination system in the New Spain.

The Criollos and the Mestizos The Criollos, the Creole Being criollo meant being born in the New Spain to Spanish or European parents. The first criollos were proud of their Hispanic ancestry. They claimed that they came from ancient Spanish old Christians, and that they were hidalgos (hijos d’algo or “sons of something”), which made them socially worthy because of who their ancestors were. Very early in the colonial period, with the abolition of the encomiendas, the Crown attacked the foundation of the economic and social power of the first conquerors’ sons and installed in the viceroyalty a bureaucracy of Spanish officials that excluded the criollos from managerial positions. “At the end of the sixteenth century, the continuous deterioration of the criollos’ social position created in them a bitter animosity against who they started calling “the gachupines,” a somewhat derogative term destined to those who came to Spanish America from the Iberian Peninsula, stayed here for a few years, and returned to Spain enriched.” The criollos’ “consciousness of constituting a specific social group, with common identities and aspirations, was built through a complex process [. . .] of a progressive physical, social and cultural appropriation of the strange land that had been imposed on them as their destiny” (Florescano 1986). When the Spanish arrived in these lands, they began to not only control what they produced, but also to transform the lives of the natives, which implied getting to know to some extent their traditions and their history. The friars, members of different religious orders, lived and acted in many Indigenous regions. A few 1000 Spaniards, dispersed throughout the land, founded mining operations, haciendas, crafts and artisan workshops, ports, towns, and cities that radically transformed those spaces. The language, the religion, and the cities created and entertained by the peninsular Spanish were the main vehicles for the westernization of the pre-Columbian native world. The Spanish tongue renamed the nature, the native cultures, and their members, giving them another meaning. Its use created a strangeness between the nature and the native peoples, because it conceived and named nature in a way that was incomprehensible to them. The conquerors’ tongue was the

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

405

main vehicle for creating the new cultural, economic, and social parameters that were to classify and exploit the natural world. The colonizers also imposed their Catholic religion, regarding it as a way of integrating under its mantle the contrasting diversity of the New Spain, as a kind of solid cohesive cement made of a new spiritual and cultural world vision, seasoned with beliefs, values, behaviors, and moral norms. One could say that in less than a century they largely achieved this integration, instrumented by friars, priests, theologians, and men of letters educated in the dominant occidental culture of their time. As for the criollos, their first generation was born into their Spanish parents’ Iberian cultural tradition, but as the colonization progressed, their next generations became rapidly and strongly influenced by Indigenous and mestizo food, customs, and ways of life. Although for a long time the criollos did not question the political dominance of the Crown over these lands and their subjects, they did demand the recognition of their rights to the land, and also to the new kind of fractal culture that they were building on (Gruzinsky 1994, 19). Very early after the conquest, the young criollo clergy started to claim their need to found their own Church, autonomous from the peninsular clergy. The religious history of this criollo church started in 1532. A Nahua man, Juan Diego, claimed that Virgin Mary appeared to him in the Tepeyac hill, north of Mexico City, told him that she had taken the Mexican people under her protection, and asked him to go to the Arch Bishop, Monseñor de Zumárraga, with some cut roses rapped in a blanket. Once with Zumárraga, when Juan Diego unfolded the blanket and the roses fell to the ground, both men could see, on the blanket, the image of a dark skin beautiful virgin, known since then as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Seeing this, the bishop took the holy image to the Greater Church and built a hermitage in the place where she had appeared to Juan Diego. This particular spot had been for decades the site where this region’s Nahua natives had been heading in procession to worship Tonantzin, “mother of the Gods, our mother,” the main Mexica deity before the Spanish conquest. Placing this hermitage honoring the Virgen morena (brown Virgin) had a strong symbolic power among the Indigenous peoples, because it rode on the Mexica tradition of ixiptla. This tradition had been an incarnation/personification of a divinity in a human being or an animal, which was carried out especially during the sacrificial ceremony, and which kept “alive the principle that any sacred object could not only condense a divine presence but also incarnate that same presence. (Gruzinsky 1994, 19)*

This was how the local Spanish church propagated a religious symbolism, flexible enough to be able to integrate and dominate a set of religious imaginaries coming from different ethnic and social origins, and to tolerate more or less autonomous spaces, whether they were hybrid or syncretic in nature (Gruzinsky 1994, 19). The new common religious imaginary became the core of a new baroque syncretism between the ixiptla and the brown virgin, which started to predominate at that time and had a tremendous success as well among criollos as among native peoples. From then on, the criollo group became extremely

406

O. Gall

important in propagating, in the New Spain society, the baroque as its religious, cultural, and symbolic very powerful essence, as the representation and the crucial factor for the reproduction of the dynamics of the social and the ethnic relations in this colonial territory. Toward the middle of the seventeenth century, this hybrid cult of a Spanish virgin practiced by the Indians, the criollos, and the mestizos became the symbol of the homeland (Florescano 1986). In 1648, Miguel Sánchez, a priest, a theologian, and a famous criollo preacher published the book Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (2010), where he stated that the virgin’s appearance turned these lands into a symbol of pride and optimism for those born in them, because she is a special privilege of God for them. This was the culmination of the criollos’ process of self-affirmation and their progressive separation from Spain. “From then on, the Guadalupana would be the proud emblem of the criollo homeland, the symbol of a group that was until then orphan of its own prestige, and a bridge that united them with the also uprooted world of the Indians and the mestizos” (Florescano 1986). This religious bridge that conquered the hearts and souls of New Spain’s first nations was, nevertheless, ethnocentric. Despite its syncretic nature, symbolized in a dark-skinned virgin who promised to protect the Indians, it aroused from the Spanish Christian culture and not from the Indian’s religious and cultural worldviews. The criollos exalted the riches of nature in America. They also started to rescue what they considered the Indigenous peoples’ glorious ancient history. Their view on the mythical Indigenous pre-Colombian story had nothing to do with the way they treated their Indigenous contemporaries as inferior human beings, despite sharing with them the cult of la Guadalupana. They also created a grandiose and baroque architecture, and they insisted in showing to what extent their soul mastered the Spanish language, as it occurs in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ beautiful poetry. Their vision of the world fused Western values with a syncretic mixed reality, the mestizo reality, no longer Indigenous nor Spanish, but an original product of these lands (Florescano 1986)*.

Mestizos and Castas The highest number of Spaniards that arrived to this territory came in the sixteenth century and amounted in total to around 125,000 (Martínez Shaw 1994, 151–152). If one compares this number with the 25 million natives that, according to the highest demographic estimation, lived in this territory at the beginning of the conquest (Borah and Cook 1963; McCaa 1999, 223–239), (Sanders and Santley (1979), cut this population down to 12,000,000. Cook and Borah (1976), add the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous scattered particularly in North-Western Mexico.) the Spanish represented only 0.5% of the natives. Toward the end of this century, considering that the epidemics and the wars had left only 1.4 million Indians in this territory, these 125,000 Spaniards represented 8.92% of all the Indians, although this percentage might have been a bit higher, because since they arrived and throughout the century, they had children and grandchildren born in the new land. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Indigenous population slightly augmented, amounting to 2 million, and at the end of the century it had risen to around 2.5

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

407

million (López Sarrelangue 1963, 523), while the peninsular and the criollo Spanish population augmented insignificantly. Despite the profound difference between the two worlds that clashed in 1492, one of them exerting physical and cultural brutality over the other, and despite the incompatibility between the dreams that characterized each of these worlds, their cultures entangled very early, and these entanglements had a real existence (Le Clézio 1988, 63). Since 1525, at the time of the destruction-reconstruction of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, a fractal society, as Gruzinsky calls it, was born. It was thus that the miscegenation of various types, but especially that between the Indigenous and the Spanish, dragged the New Spain society. During the colonial era, the sons and daughters of Spanish and Indigenous parents, especially of Spanish men and Indigenous women, were called mestizos. The dominant historiographic thesis about this mestizo group is that this particular miscegenation was a biological and/or a cultural process that started to take place from the moment of the Conquest, and had become quite significant in 1810, when the War of Independence broke out. It also claims that the colonial society could consider the mestizo either more Spanish or more Indigenous. Mestizos and mestizas often received an education as if they were Spanish, since the peninsular population thought that a child of a Spanish should not be educated as an Indian, and the fathers of a mestizo/a often paid the administration for him to appear on their birth certificate as Spanish. A mestizo child could also be abandoned by their father, and be educated as an Indian. In fact, neither the Spanish nor the natives truly accepted mestizos as their own. At the very beginning of the colonization, the best way in which you could describe the condition of the progeny of the first invaders with American women as one of a very vulnerable social group, legally unprotected (López-Beltrán 2008, 306). Even later during the sixteenth century and during a part of the seventeenth century, mestizos had no place in either the Spanish or the Indian world, because both considered them as “vile people.” They had no right to occupy royal or ecclesiastical positions, and in 1549, an express order by Carlos Quinto forbade them to become public officials or encomenderos. They were subject to many other prohibitions: They could not bear arms, be notaries, chieftains, magistrates, tax collectors, mayors, protectors of the Indians, soldiers, and students at the universities, or hold any religious position. Only if they could prove that they were legitimate children, they were in some cases accepted into these “professions,” but normally they were constrained to be carpenters, bricklayers, or laborers, something that reminds the treatment given to Jews and Moslems in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries in the Iberian Peninsula. Despite all this, from the seventeenth century on, the mestizo miscegenation started ruling in the New Spain. The mestizos slowly acquired a not minor demographic and cultural importance, even though unconscious (Florescano 1986; Knight 2004, 12–13; Gruzinsky 1994; Gall 2013). The individuals who were part of this multiform mass of mixed people were a new biological and social product, but “they were so absorbed by trying to survive and find their place in this socially polarized world between the Spanish and the Indians, that they hardly had the strength to assert their own individual or collective identity” (Florescano 2014)*.

408

O. Gall

In the New Spain, the Church was in charge of registering people, and, depending of the time and region, the priests and scribes used different terms and forms to fulfill this task. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they separated people mainly in three categories: “Indians,” “Blacks,” and “Spanish,” to whom were added another category called “castes” (castas), which grouped people who were the product of even more complicated or of multiple mixtures. In the eighteenth century, when the classification ideas of the Enlightenment arrived to this part of the world, the authorities attempted to mark with specific names the different kinds of mixtures they found. They did this especially to describe these mixtures to the foreigners who visited the New Spain. The famous “castes paintings” ordered by the viceregal authorities to some painters throughout the eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century played this role. Here are some of the names given to the different mixtures called “castas”: Mestizo and Spanish, Morisco (which in fact means Moore); Morisco and Spanish, Chino (Chinese); Chino and Indian, Salta atrás, or Salta pa’tras (he who jumps back); and Salta pa’tras and Mulatto, Lobo (Wolf). The more complex these mixtures were, the more they received appellatives meaning something like “one cannot figure out who you are,” for example, “Tente en el aire” (Stay in the air), or “No te endiendo” (I do not understand you). Nevertheless, at that period of the New Spain’s history, in everyday social life you could not find these appellatives referring to these mixtures (Ward 1828). In order to try to reconstruct the numbers and the characteristics of the population of that time, historians and demographers have gone through the birth, marriage, and death certificates collected by the Church. They also revised the notarial files, the regional censuses, and demographic calculations of chroniclers and travelers. The famous twentieth-century anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán analyzed the results of these data. He found out that, during the colonial period, the mestizo population that included all the “mixed” people of the New Spain, and that was the product of a biological and/or of a cultural miscegenation process, went from 0.4% in 1570, to 36.6% in 1742, and to 39.5% in 1810 (see Aguirre Beltrán 1972). According to Dolores Pla’s analysis of the ethnic-demographic data provided by three important Mexican nineteenth-century demographers, García Cubas (1885), Hermosa (1991), and Navarro y Noriega (1869), this number was 22% in 1810 (Pla Brugat 2011, 71). Pla belongs to a group of scholars who do not agree with the thesis that sustains that this part of the colonial society called mestiza was truly a product of a biological and/or cultural miscegenation (see Bonfil Batalla 1994; Navarrete 2016; Pla Brugat 2011). One of the main leaders of this group, Guillermo Bonfil, believed that miscegenation meant an exclusively biological type of phenomenon, which, he argued, “is not useful to explain what happens when different cultural groups come into contact in a context of colonial domination.” He added that he did not believe in an existing “cultural miscegenation” taking place in the New Spain (Bonfil Batalla 1994, 41–42). Federico Navarrete states that in colonial Mexico miscegenation was not a biological process, because “the racial mixture during the colonial period was so little important that, although there were many unions between people

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

409

of different origins, they were neither the rule nor the most common or preferred practices” (Navarrete 2016, 108). Dolores Pla wrote: There was evidently a biological mixture, but even if each one of the foreigners had married outside their group, (Pla is speaking here about the Spanish and other European populations.) their reduced number would have made it impossible for their descendants become mestizos thanks to these mixtures. This without taking into account that during the three centuries of the Spanish domination, the indigenous communities, the so-called Indian republics, organized separately from those of the Spanish, which made miscegenation difficult. Moreover, the various ethnic groups, with the exception of the African population, [. . .] showed little interest in mixing. (Pla Brugat 2011, 69–91)*

According to these colleagues, there was no real biological and cultural mestizaje, in the New Spain, which is why instead of talking about mestizaje, from their point of view we should be talking about “de-Indianization” (Bonfil Batalla 1994, 82). A term they define as “a historical process through which [the indigenous] populations that originally possessed a particular and distinct identity based on their own culture, are forced to renounce this identity, with all the consequent changes in their social and cultural organization” (Bonfil Batalla 1994, 42). De-Indianization is, wrote Bonfil, the result of an ideological process that leads to “ethnocide and that ends up preventing the historical continuity of an indigenous nation as a socially and culturally differentiated unit” (Bonfil Batalla 1994, 42) – a result that they achieve by breaking this nation’s ethnic identity and by leading it to stop considering itself an Indigenous group (Bonfil Batalla 1994, 79–80), a process that succeeds when, ideologically speaking, the population ceases to consider itself Indian, even though its way of life continues to be such. The debate between the two above-mentioned currents of thought on this issue leaves us with an open question around whether, during the colonial period and especially during the nineteenth century, a part of the population resulted from de-Indianization or from a biological and/or cultural mestizaje process. The fact is that at the beginning of the nineteenth century Mexico came to life as a modern country convinced that a significant part of its population had truly become mestiza; and that, during that century and the following, when asked to auto-define in identity terms, an incessantly growing number of people thought of themselves as mestizos. This is what counts.

Modern and Contemporary Mexican Sui Generis Racism (1810–2018) The ideas of the Enlightenment spread and were imposed throughout Europe by the Napoleonic wars. Despite the defeat of Napoleon and the imposition of a conservative order in Europe, the world was already moving toward the construction of modern nation-states made up of a population settled in a delimited territory, and led by a State founded on republican liberal principles and governed by a regime chosen by “the people.” The new world order was to be assured by an organization founded

410

O. Gall

on the existence of different nation-states, each of which had to treat its citizens as equal subjects in regard to their civil and then their political rights. The nineteenth century saw the promulgation of liberal constitutions, and the impulse of a greater economic and social liberalization, not only in several European countries but also in the new American countries that became independent from the metropolises and constituted themselves into modern nation-states. In this context, as well in Spain as in the Spanish colonies, the crisis of the Spanish monarchy brought about new ways of thinking and imagining that different social hierarchical relationships were possible. By then, Europe had also strongly developed racist thought, practices, and institutions and had exported them throughout the world. The concept of “race” – as is known today – was born in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time, some of the naturalist scientists who were dedicated to classifying animal and plant species also began to classify human beings into “races.” This is how they began to speak of the four human races: white or Caucasian, Negroid or African, yellow or Mongolian, and red or Amerindian. In this process, the work of the nascent physical anthropologists who were describing the physiology of each so-called “race” was important. They measured the skulls and other parts of the bone structure of people and associated these measurements with their physical appearance: the color of their skin, the shape of their eyes, their mouth, and their nose. They affirmed that physiology (internal structure) and physiognomy (physical appearance) were associated, resulting in different races. These scientific currents considered that the physical characteristics of the people belonging to each supposed “race” were associated to their intelligence and their culture, seen by them as fixed, immovable, and hereditary. They were convinced that the biological characteristics of each race were radically different, and that they had direct repercussions on the degree of culture and civilization each one of them could attain. These naturalists thought that the highest civilizing human project could only flourish in the world built over the biological constitution of the “white race.” The liberal principles and institutions created by the French Revolution and by the Constitutional Chart of the United States of America strongly influenced the criollo leaders of the Mexican war of Independence (1810–1821). They were antimonarchical, liberal, and secular. On the other hand, they had been born in the second half or in the third quarter of the eighteenth century’s colonial New Spain. This period was, on the international arena, the era of the birth of modern scientific racism. On the local arena, it was the culmination of a three centuries’ complex political and social process, which created a society partly built around the separation of the different ethnic groups, and partly around mestizaje and the baroque Guadalupana culture. The criollo leaders launched the invention of a new national community, over the basis of the spirit of the ideology and the political and economic liberal project, and of the baroque syncretic culture of their own society. The idea behind this invention was to create citizenship, also including in the Indians. As did many liberal nation-building projects based on a theoretical egalitarian perspective (Bonfil Batalla 1994, 44), the Mexican one constitutionally erased the ethnic and racial differences that survived in practice. Nevertheless, in that process it confused “nationality (a notion regarding

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

411

citizenship), mestizaje (a racial and cultural category) and liberalism (an economic and political system)” (Basave 2002, 21). It is in this confusion that lies the very interesting particularity of Mexican nineteenth century’s social, ethnic, and racialized liberalism, which could not have existed if the baroque, syncretic colonial society had not existed on whose tracks it started to walk. Mexican nineteenth century political history was extremely complicated. Neverending conflicts marked it: between conservatives and liberals, between federalists and centralists, between the Church and the State, and between the new country and the United States or France, two imperialist powers that tried to invade Mexico in 1849 and in 1861. Amazingly enough, the Mexican nation-building project was developed despite these complicated times, and despite the fact that, in Europe, the United States, Australia, and other parts of the world, the idea of race mixing became a complicated issue from the nineteenth century onward. In the United States and in Europe, that racial mixture caused anxiety because there was a deep belief that it would lead to the possible dissolution of the ideal of constructing a superior, social, and racial order. This happened especially after the pseudoscientific works of Gobineau and other European thinkers, which put forward a deep concern with contamination, “suggesting that race mixture proves unseemly [. . .] because it violates the laws of biology” (Pérez Torres 2006, 5). However, not only in Mexico but also in other Latin American countries, race mixture, because it was so pervasive, led to a complex discussion about the nature of colonial, and later national, identity (Pérez Torres 2006, 5). Between 1869 and 1870, Gobineau was the French Ambassador to Brazil. During his stay in this country, where miscegenation also represented an important segment of the population, he observed with horror: No Brazilian has pure blood; the combinations of marriages between whites, natives and Blacks have proliferated to such an extent that the nuances in the coloration of the skin are innumerable, and all this has caused, in the lower and in the upper classes, a degeneration of the saddest aspect. (Raeders 1988, in Sánchez Arteaga 2009, 77)*

According to count Gobineau, the disastrous effects of miscegenation in Brazil were so obvious that “the decline produced by interracial crosses was going to “inevitably condemn degenerate mestizos to disappearance (. . .) in a period of 270 years” (Raeders 1988, in Sánchez Arteaga 2009, 77). This opinion weighed heavily on the evolution of physical anthropology and social Darwinism in Brazil, where, at the time, lived Emperor Pedro II. Thanks to Gobineau’s visit, Brazil stopped exalting miscegenation, because its elites started to believe Gobineau’s ideas, which stated that what was at stake was the characterization of Brazil as a civilized country, or, at least, as a country capable of overcoming its backwardness and its contradictions, in order to reach a place alongside the luminous civilizations of the northern hemisphere. Intrinsically tied to the indigenous problems and to the slavery of Blacks, the prospect of reaching such a state depended, ultimately, on the incorporation or elimination (. . .) of those [racial] elements. (Monteiro 2001, 175–176, cited by Sánchez Arteaga 2009, 68)

412

O. Gall

Mexico went through no such process. On the contrary, in this country, unlike the nineteenth-century conservatives, the criollo liberal leaders did not want to form a white, Hispanistic, and Catholic nation. They strongly cultivated the idea that it would become a great country if it based its identity on a mestizo population (Gall 2013). This is why in 1821 the “Declaration of Independence” states that it guarantees the “restitution,” the “refoundation,” and not the “institution” of the “Mexican nation.” What did this symbolically mean? That the new State was refounding “the authentic autochthonous roots of our nationality” that, dominated by three centuries of colonization, would now melt in a biologically and culturally mixed unified nation. All of this sounded like an extremely progressive and advanced ethno-racial nation-building project, especially considering the historical period in which it was developed, in which scientific racism was taking the lead in almost the whole world. However, this national identity model was extremely limited and contradictory. First, the new State’s mestizaje ideology wished to build a mestizo nation resulting of the mixture of exclusively “two bloods and cultures,” the Spanish or white and the Indigenous. No other biological or cultural “root” was to be included in the Mexican mestizaje. Second, the State never defined this mixture in terms of color, but it produced “morenos,” which could mean “brown,” “swart,” “swarthy,” or “dusky.” Third, when talking about the “Mexican mixture,” this project understood by it the miscegenation of the Spanish root with “the authentic and deep Mexico,” meaning the mythical precolonial nations, particularly the Mayan and the Aztecs or Mexica (Pérez Vejo 2010, 147–183). It is not difficult to see to what extent this “glorious mixture project” did not take into account the living “Indians,” the flesh and blood of Indians. Finally and yet importantly, the ruling class was convinced that the lack of progress was a product of the backwardness of the still majoritarian Indigenous population (60%), which made it urgent “to convert that population into individualcitizens, through education, the transformation of their economic basis, and miscegenation with European migration” (Urías Horcasitas 2000, 54). Francisco Pimentel (1832–1893) is a good example of this position. In his Memory on the causes that have originated the current situation of the indigenous race of Mexico and means of remedying it, published in 1864, he explains why the integration of the “Indians” was necessary to build the nation-state. As long as the natives remain in the state they are today, Mexico cannot aspire to acquire, properly speaking, the rank of a country. A state-nation is a gathering of men who profess common beliefs, are dominated by the same idea, and who tend towards a same purpose. (Pimentel 1864, 217, cited by Iturriaga 2018, 75)

This is why almost all the liberal ideologists of that period planned to gradually develop an immigration process mainly of French, British, or German origin, “capable of industrializing the country and whitewashing the by then already called ‘Indigenous race’” (Pérez Vejo 2010, 152–176). After the 1910–1920 deep political revolution that shook Mexico, the love for the mestizo cultural, ethnic, and racial nature of this country became the main State

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

413

cultural policy. From then on, this policy has been alive and well, and built around a series of ideas, feelings, practices, and rules, which, from that moment on, have underpinned the formation, consolidation, and reproduction of this country’s national identity and nationalism. As did the liberal mestizaje ideology in the nineteenth century, the main postrevolutionary political and cultural State policy that promoted mestizaje as the nation’s ethnic and racial essence harbored several types of racism: An anti-Afro-Mexican racism. This racism explains the total and absolute invisibilization of the new nation’s African component, considered to represent, during various moments of the colonial period, the second demographic population after the Indigenous one. “In 1570, for example, 98.7% of the population was indigenous, 0.6% African and 0.2% European. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the African population had risen to becoming 2% of the population, against the 74.6% represented by the Indians, and the 0.8% by the Europeans” (Aguirre Beltrán 1972, 234). Despite this, after abolishing slavery (1829), the Mexican State completely forgot the Afro-Mexicans, as if they had never existed nor been a part of the nation’s colonial history, and despite the fact that they had formally become citizens. From then on, and until very recently, Mexicans have lived as if there were no Afro-Mexicans of black people of Mexican nationality and as if in the national culture or traditions there were no African elements whatsoever. During many years, the immigration police frequently detained Afro-Mexican people under the argument they were foreigners who did not carry with them their true nationality identity documents. It was not until 2015 that the Mexican government counted this population on the national level (INEGI 2015), using an auto-identification question. Thus, Mexico has just very recently realized that it does have an Afro-Mexican population. In fact, according to the 2020 Census, 2% of Mexicans consider themselves “black,” “Afro-descendants” of Afro-Mexicans, and they are scattered all over the country. Almost 200 years after Mexico abolished slavery, this country stopped invibilizing Afro-Mexicans, denying their existence. An anti-Indigenous racism. From the Independence on, anti-Indigenous racism has resided in hiding that the mixture between the Indigenous and the Spanish on which mestizo Mexico is supposedly structured has never operated in an equitable way between the two poles of this binomial. In other words, in order to attain citizenship nobody asked or imposed on the “Spanish pole” to “Indianize,” while the State and the dominant society always asked and imposed on the “Indigenous pole” to whiten and “Westernize.” In the twentieth century, this type of racism took hold in a hidden and unacknowledged way. The mestizante postrevolutionary national project, reinforced by the indigenista project, directed to assimilate the Indigenous peoples to the mestizo nation (see Gall 2013), penetrated so deeply in this country that it convinced most Mexicans that the nature of our particular mestizo identity could not be racist. The argument behind this certainty was that, although there has been classism and ethnic discrimination, a country that has built its identity on the miscegenation of bloods and cultures cannot possibly be racist. For many decades, Mexicans saw this miscegenation project as radically opposed to racism, which, they argued, usually does not accept in any way “racial and cultural mixtures”

414

O. Gall

as the ethno-racial basis of the nation. In the 1960s and 1970s, some prominent left wing Mexican anthropologists, such as Guillermo Bonfil and Rodolfo Stavenhagen, developed a strong criticism of the indigenista policy of the Mexican State, and of an important part of Mexican anthropology. They accused them of having presented mestizaje and indigenismo as beneficial to the Indigenous peoples, and thus of proceeding to an unforgivable “ethnocide” of these peoples, accompanied by class exploitation (see López y Rivas 2015). In those years, part of the peasant movement began to raise its demands not only in class but also in ethnic terms. However, between the 1960s and the 1980s, neither the critics of indigenismo nor these organized peasants recognized the existence of anti-Indigenous racism in Mexico. In 1989, Mexico was the second country in the world to sign the ILO Convention 169 on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal peoples, which anteceded the promulgation of the multicultural laws in many countries. On January 28, 1992, Mexico amended Article 4 of its Constitution, thus recognizing the multicultural character of the nation, based on its diverse Indigenous peoples. Between 1992 and 2019, there has been a recognition in the country in the fact that Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples are an essential part of our rich multicultural character. After many years of mobilizations, today our Constitution grants these peoples and communities the collective right to autonomy and self-determination. These constitutional reforms transformed Indigenous nations and Afro-Mexican communities into a collective subject worthy of rights, and this is fundamental for them to build a new relationship with the Mexican State and the national society. Unfortunately, the racist national system resists to fully translate these rights into reality, because doing so would mean to recognize the Indigenous peoples in their own specificity as defined by them, and not by the State or by the non-Indigenous and non-Afro-Mexican national society. So, even if our country has lived under the certainty that it has finally abolished its unconditional attachment to the monolithic foundations of its mestizo national identity, this has been happening more on paper than in reality. To this day, Mexican ethnically differentiated peoples continue to be the victims of racism, classism, and ethnic discrimination, and they continue to fight for the full recognition, in practice, of the multicultural legal reforms in favor of their collective rights. Racism among “mestizos.” According to the State’s definition, the “mestizo” population includes all those who are neither Indigenous nor Afro-Mexican nor born abroad, which amounts to over 80% of the national population. As has been explained before, “mestizos and mestizas” are, by definition, the essence of this country’s national identity. However, in practice, not every person who considers herself a mestizo or whom others define as such is proud to be one, nor does society see in every mestizo the representative of national pride. This country views, values, and treats this population in contradictory ways. While its members may well be part of Mexico’s economic, political and intellectual elites, they can also be despised and subjected to discriminatory treatments of various kinds. The darker a “mestizo” person, the more she will be considered and treated as being closer to her indigenous part than to the Spanish one. Discriminatory treatment usually marks the life of the fringe of mestizos considered "inferior" due to their skin color and to their facial traits. In

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

415

the case of the lower class mestizos, whose skin color and features do not match the European physiognomic ideal, this unequal treatment becomes even worse because of classism and racism combined. (Iturriaga et al. 2021, 43)

Endo-racism. In some colonial contexts and in others marked by a dehumanizing racist violence, racism can target oneself or our own community. This happens when people who have suffered racism have internalized the negative stereotypes and values built by racist dominant groups around them. This is known as endo-racism or as an inward racism (Restrepo 2015 124). In Mexico, this phenomenon is very frequent. It becomes a mechanism of “self-contempt,” of “self-underestimation,” and frequently operates in many Mexican people always wanting to have a lighter skin and a European physiognomy (Iturriaga et al. 2021, 43). Xenophobia. In Mexico, during the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, the percentage of legal immigrants or refugees has never represented more than 1% of the national population. The logics behind this are complex, and this chapter cannot fully analyze them. Nevertheless, from 1926 on, the “population laws” were full of mentions to “races” who were considered “unassimilable” to Mexico, “incompatible” to dissolve in the Mexican mestizaje. Among these “races,” Mexico especially considered Chinese, blacks, and Jews (see Saade Granados 2010; Gleizer 2010). Against Afro-descendant immigration from all countries, the mestizo postrevolutionary Mexico argued that they were “racially inferior,” “occupationally incompetent,” “unable to become true citizens,” and “dangerous for the national indigenous population” (Saade Granados 2010, 237–238). The core of the argument contained in multiple confidential official documents against “black immigration” to Mexico was that in the nation-building Mexican model “the mestizo is not colored” (“el mestizo no es de color”) (Saade Granados 2010, 245–246). In the case of the Jews, the mestizo postrevolutionary Mexico considered them as undesirable immigrants, because they were thought to be part of those groups “whose blood mixture, cultural habits and traditions are exotic to our psychology,” inadaptable, again, to our Indo-Spanish fusion (Gleizer 2010, 254). This became dramatically evident during the 12 years that the Nazi régime was in power, and even after “the final solution” in 1942. In those years, officially speaking, Mexico accepted only 1850 persecuted Jews who sought refuge in its territory. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexican immigration policies have been such that they have turned this country into one of the most restrictive in the world regarding immigration and refuge, occupying the third world lowest ranking for the number of immigrants it receives (http://www.pewglobal.org/2018/02/28/global-migrant-stocks/?country¼US& date¼2017). In Mexico, people and groups do not auto-identify in terms of race. Indigenous peoples consider themselves as ethnically cohesive, but they do not think of themselves as part of the “Indian race” or of the “red race.” Afro-Mexican people and their organizations may think of themselves as “morenos” (dark skinned), “costeños” (coastal people), Afro-descendants, or “blacks,” terms that for the larger majority of them are not synonyms of “members of the Black race.” As in many other countries of the world, this country has not built “race” as a politically correct social category.

416

O. Gall

This is why, in Mexico, it is very important for antiracist organizations to proceed by undertaking nonracialist paths – in other words, to fight against the Mexican forms of racism without expecting people and communities to define themselves as belonging to a specific race.

Conclusions This chapter is the product of an important part of the historical bibliography centered mainly in the study of inter-ethnic relations and conflicts in the colonial period in the New Spain as well as in the modern history of Mexico. Only a small percentage of these articles, chapters, and books meant to study and analyze the history of the racist ideas, feelings, projects, and practices underlining the interethnic aspects of this society, and how some of these aspects prevailed and how others constantly changed with time. This does not pose a real problem when going through the historical materials produced about the Colonial period, because their very bright and knowledgeable authors have generally given a clear and refined account on the specificities characterizing the deep ethnocentric ways in which Spanish powers conducted the New Spain. Nevertheless, when it comes to the study of modern and contemporary Mexico, this does pose a problem, because as in most modern societies in Mexico, racialization and racism have been an important part of the national life and its deep inequalities. Introducing Mexican racism as a matter of concern and study by our discipline is very recent, dating back to only two decades. Before this, a large part of Anthropologists and of Historians specialized in Mexico were deeply allied to the postrevolutionary State’s nationalist and mestizante ideology, developing what has been called “antropología indigenista” or “historia patria,” and thus denying the existence of racism in Mexico. This leads their work to lack a theorization on how strongly racism has branded the inter-ethnic and the power relations in a country that historically defined itself as mestizo, and therefore as nonracist.

References Aguirre Beltrán G (1972) La población negra en México. FCE, México City Basave A (2002) México mestizo: análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia. México City, FCE Bonfil Batalla G (1994) México profundo. Una civilización negada. Conaculta/Grijalbo, México City Borah W, Cook SF (1963) The aboriginal population of Central Mexico on the eve of Spanish conquest. University of California Press, Berkeley Cook SF, Borah W (1976) The historical demography of aboriginal and colonial America: an attempt at perspective. In: Denevan WM (ed) The native population of the Americas in 1492. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison Curtin P (1969) The Atlantic slave trade a census. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

19

A Short Version of the Long Duration Story of Mexican Sui Generis Racism

417

De Gobineau, A. (1869) Carta a Carolina de Gobineau con fecha del 19 de abril de 1869. p. 62, cited by Raeders G (1988) O inimigo cordial do Brasil: o conde de Gobineau no Brasil, Río de Janeiro, Paz e Terra, p. 90 De Vos J (1988) La paz de Dios y del Rey. La conquista de la Selva Lacandona (1525–1821). FCE-Gobierno del Estado de Chiapas, México City De Vos J (1990) La Batalla del Sumidero. INI y CONACULTA, México City El Hamel C (2002) “Race”, slavery and Islam in Maghribi Mediterranean thought: the question of the Haratin in Morocco. J North Afr Stud 7(3):29–52 Florescano E (1986) Ser criollo en la Nueva España. Nexos, July 1 Florescano E (2014) La reconstrucción de la memoria en las Repúblicas de Indios. Nexos, March Gall O (2013) Mexican long living mestizophilia versus a democracy open to diversity. J Lat Am Caribb Ethn Stud 8(3):280–303 García Cubas A (1885) Cuadro geográfico, estadístico, descriptivo e histórico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Oficina Tipográfica de la Secretaría de Fomento, México City Gerhard P (1986) Geografía histórica de la Nueva España 1519–1821. UNAM, IIH, México City Gleizer D (2010) México y el refugio a judíos a partir de la “solución final”. In: Yankelevich P (ed) Nación y extranjería, La exclusión racial en las políticas migratorias de Argentina, Brasil, Cuba y México. Dirección General de Publicaciones y PUMC-UNAM, México City Gruzinsky S (1994) “Del barroco al neobarroco: fuentes novohispanas de los tiempos posmodernos”. Varios autores. Identidad y Cultura Nacional, UAM-X, México City Hermosa J (1991/1857) Manual de geografía y estadística de la República Mexicana. Instituto Mora, México City INEGI (2015) Encuesta Intercensal, principales resultados. INEGI, México City Iturriaga E (2018) Las élites en la Ciudad Blanca. Discursos racistas sobre la otredad. UNAM, México City Iturriaga E, Gall O, Morales D, Rodríguez J (2021) Mestizaje y racismo en México. Reflexiones didácticas en torno al racismo y la xenofobia en México. Cuadernillo 4. CONAPRED, México City Knight A (2004) Racismo, revolución e indigenismo. México, 1910–1940. BUAP, Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Puebla Le Clézio J-M (1988) Le rêve mexicain ou la pensée interrompue. Gallimard, Paris Lenkersdorf G (1995) La resistencia a la conquista española en Los Altos de Chiapas. In: Viqueira JP, Ruz MH (eds) Chiapas: los rumbos de otra historia. Centro de Investigaciones Filológicas/ UNAM and Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS), México City León Portilla M (2010) Los indios de Nueva España. Conference. Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Monterrey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼vIdPN2BeZu4 López Sarrelangue DE (1963) Población indígena de la Nueva España en el siglo xviii. Hist Mex 12 (4):516–530 López y Rivas G (2015) Antropología para el poder o antropología para el pueblo. En el Volcán Insurgente. Corriente Crítica de Trabajadores de la Cultura, México City López-Beltrán C (2008) Sangre y temperamento pureza y mestizajes en las sociedades de castas americanas. In: Gorbach F, López-Beltrán C (eds) Saberes locales: ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora Lovejoy P (1983) Transformations in slavery. A history of slavery in Africa, African studies series. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Macleod MJ (1994) Motines y cambios en las formas de control económico y político: los sucesos de Tuxtla en 1693. Mesoamérica 1(28):231–251 Martínez Shaw C (1994) La emigración española a América (1492–1824). Archivo de Indianos, Gijón McCaa R (1999, July–September) ¿Fue el siglo XVI una catástrofe demográfica para México? Una respuesta basada en la demografía histórica no cuantitativa. Papeles de Población, no. 21, pp 223–239 Mignolo W (2005) La idea de América Latina. La herida colonial y la opción decolonial. Gedisa, Barcelona

418

O. Gall

Monteiro JM (2001) Tupis, Tapuias, e historiadores. Estúdios de história indígena e de indigenismo, Campinas, IFCH-Unicamp, pp. 175–176 Navarrete F (2016) México racista, una denuncia. Grijalbo, México City Navarro y Noriega F (1869) Memorias sobre la población del Reino de Nueva España. In: Boletín de la Sociedad de Geografía y Estadística de la República Mexicana. Imprenta del Gobierno, México City Páramo O, Núñez M (2019) La conquista provocó la muerte de casi el 90% de los indígenas. UNAM Global, México City Pérez Torres R (2006) Mestizaje: critical uses of race in Chicano culture. University of Minessota Press, Minneapolis Pérez Vejo T (2010) La extranjería en la construcción nacional mexicana. In: Yankelevich P (ed) Nación y extranjería, La exclusión racial en las políticas migratorias de Argentina, Brasil, Cuba y México. Dirección General de Publicaciones y PUMC-UNAM, México City Petré-Grenouilleau O (2003) La traite oubliée des négriers musulmans. L’Histoire, Número Especial 280(S):48–55 Pimentel F (1864) Memoria de las causas que han originado la situación actual de la raza indígena de México y medios de remediarla. Mexico: Imprenta de Escalante y Andrade Pla Brugat D (2011) Más desindianización que mestizaje. Una relectura de los censos generales de población. Dimens Antropol 53:69–91 Quijano A (2000) Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In: Lander E (comp) La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. CLACSO, Buenos Aires Reid AM, Lane PJ (eds) (2004) African historical archaeologies. Springer, New York Restrepo E (2015) Historizando raza. Intervenciones en teoría cultural. Editorial UC, Bogotá Saade Granados M (2010) Una raza prohibida: afroestadounidenses en México. In: Yankelevich P (ed) Nación y extranjería, La exclusión racial en las políticas migratorias de Argentina, Brasil, Cuba y México. Dirección General de Publicaciones y PUMC-UNAM, México City Sánchez M (2010) Imagen de la Virgen María Madre de Dios de Guadalupe, Alicante. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes/Imprenta de la Viuda de Bernardo Calderos, Madrid, p 1648 Sánchez Arteaga JM (2009) Las ciencias y las razas en Brasil hacia 2009. Asclepio. LXI(2):67–100 Sanders WT, Santley RS (1979) The basin of Mexico. Ecological processes in the evolution of a civilization, Studies in Archaeology. Academic Press, New York Stallaert C (2006) Ni una gota de sangre impura. La España inquisitorial y la Alemania nazi cara a cara. Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona Urías Horcasitas B (2000) Indígena y criminal. Interpretaciones del derecho y la antropología en México, 1871–1921. UIA, México Velázquez ME, Iturralde G (2016) Afrodescendientes en México: una historia de silencio. CONAPRED/INAH, México City Vinson B, Vaughn B (2004) Afroméxico, el pulso de la población negra en México: una historia recordada, olvidada y vuelta a recordar. FCE, México City Viqueira JP (1997) Indios rebeldes e idolatras (Dos ensayos históricos sobre la rebelión india de Cancuc, Chiapas, acaecida en el año de 1712). SEP-CIESAS, México City Ward HG (1828) México in 1827. Henry Colburn, London

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and Anglo-American Historiographies) on “Race”

20

Erica Torrens-Rojas and Juan Manuel Rodríguez-Caso

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . General Overview of the Concept of “Race.” Is Race a Valid Category to Address Human Diversity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Genesis of Scientific Conceptions of Race: The Flourishing of Racism During the Eighteenth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Before Mestizaje: Racial Ideas in Medieval Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Colonial Mexico Caste System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Race and Racialization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexico: Mexico and the USA Look into Mexico’s Human Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mexican Historiographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anglo-American Historiographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

420 420 421 423 425 428 429 433 436 440

Abstract

The main objective of this chapter is to provide the reader with an overview of the main trends in recent Latin American historiography. Since talking about the historiography of science can imply two different meanings, namely the writing

E. Torrens-Rojas (*) Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] J. M. Rodríguez-Caso Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico División de Historia, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_23

419

420

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

of the history of science and the analysis of the ways in which the past of science has been written, the authors will focus on the latter. We will bring to the fore the different ways in which the concept of race and its relationship to the establishment of the Mexican state have been written about by both Mexican and US scholars in recent years, with the aim of establishing differences and important points of contact that may be relevant for future discussions on the topic.

Introduction General Overview of the Concept of “Race.” Is Race a Valid Category to Address Human Diversity? The topic of this chapter arose from the authors’ concern to establish, if possible, the conceptual and discursive differences between Mexican and US scholars interested in the concept of race as applied to the understanding of the diversity of Mexico’s human populations. This chapter approaches the question from the vantage point of historiography. It considers what the concept of race and the main racial categories have meant to professional historians who have interpreted it in the twentieth century. However, some background is needed. Broadly, there are some race theorists who believe that the concept of race is a premodern one, coming from fifteenthcentury Spain. Others claim that the concept was born with the establishment of physical anthropology in the late eighteenth century (Hochman 2019). Here we encounter a first clash among scholars interested in the history of race, which perhaps vanishes if we would consider when the scientific concept of race appears. So in the following sections, we will review, on the one hand, the arguments of those who propose that the birth of the concept of race occurred sometime in the eighteenth century and, on the other, the case of those who argue that it is a late medieval concept. The case of Spain is of particular importance if one wishes to understand the colonial effort to establish a caste system in the Americas and its implications for the subsequent racialization of bodies and associated racism in the region. An appropriate starting point is the interest in undertaking local studies in previously invisible countries “to displace the unidirectionality of the older models of centre-periphery focused on Western Europe and the United States, thus elevating the status of non-Western contributors (including Latin America) to global scientific knowledge and also of knowledge systems from non-Western cultures themselves” (Nyhart 2016, 14). Studies of science focused on the local context have led to an increase in microhistories and histories of a nationalistic nature that have emphasized the role of local promoters in understanding, in part, the relationships between science (or some of its fields) and the formation of nation-states. In recent decades, in Mexican historiography, questions about the circulation of knowledge and the concern for writing more situated histories have gained importance within the research agendas of Mexican historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. At the end of the twentieth century, in various spaces and meetings, researchers in this field began to propose and discuss new historiographic approaches aimed at outlining more precisely the approach to scientific practices

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

421

and knowledge, both local and global, in a transnational context, which have made it possible to show the artificiality of diffusionist and merely nationalist models. Citing the important Mexican historian Rafael Guevara Fefer, most of the texts that were produced as a result of considering new regions of interest to the historian of science, such as Latin America, and its characters, institutions, and disciplines as “useful material for telling interesting stories [. . .] when they inhabited a different ecology [than central Europe],” brought with them a recognition that the most traditional historiography had always portrayed “Latin America as a mere passive and subordinate receptacle of the knowledge produced in the countries that hold the hegemony of scientific discourse” (Guevara Fefer 2015, 38–40). In accordance with the above, the authors will first present an overview of the origin of the scientific, or perhaps more “biologized,” concept of race, first in non-Iberian Europe in the eighteenth century and then in Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This last part will serve to understand the establishment of the colonial caste system that gave rise to systems of difference and discrimination that, in various ways, shaped some of the discussions central to the establishment of Mexico as a nation-state and to the constitution of its social order. With this, we will be able to move to the historiographic analysis of Mexican and US scholars interested in the science and politics of the concept of race in Mexico, to show how this contrast reveals interesting aspects of the construction of knowledge and the development of science. Specifically, on the one hand, we stress the need to write interconnected histories to understand complex local realities, and on the other, more particular to the subject of this chapter, we show the implications of the use of postcolonial conceptions in current research that may have constrained, determined, and channeled theoretical and practical research.

The Genesis of Scientific Conceptions of Race: The Flourishing of Racism During the Eighteenth Century Approaching the birth of the concept of race is a difficult task, not only because identifying a person with its invention is impossible, but also because even establishing the approximate moment when it was invented and rationalized is difficult (Bancel et al. 2014; Hochman 2019). Nevertheless, several authors agree that the word race was used in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as part of the genealogical concerns of the nobility. The shift in the use of the concept to the more naturalistic approach occurred, according to Bancel et al. (2014) at some point between 1730 and 1790, when it was explicitly associated with the investigation of human variability. As a clarification, this change toward naturalism has to do with a move away from eminently religious explanations. During the late seventeenth century, a decline of Christianity occurred (which for many led to the development of Western racism since a monogenist Christianity served as a shield against it) and the development of the Atlantic Slave System which contributed to the efforts of obtaining and formalizing racial taxonomies resulting from naturalistic models. Some naturalist’s names are strongly identified with the formulation of ideas related to “races,” such as Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon (1707–1788),

422

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778), or Francois Bernier (1625–1688). Of course, no historian wishes to project the term “race” onto any discussion on human diversity. However, because of the way they explicitly refer to the use of the term “race,” or the nature of their conception of a hierarchical classification system based on physical characteristics such as skin color, or because of their explanation for the basis of human differences (climate or geographical distribution), we can think that the authors undoubtedly alluded to the somewhat “modern” conception of race. Moreover, they were not alone; Immanuel Kant, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, John Locke, David Hume, and Thomas Hobbes are among some social scientists and philosophers who also played with the idea of race. Chronologically, the philosopher Bernier was the first to put to the fore the idea that the world could be divided into four “species or races of men” (Bernier 1684, 133–140) even though his division had nothing to do with the racist human typologies of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (Bernier’s classification was based on Hippocrates theory of the four humors). In 1684, he published The New Division of the Earth where he proposed a division of human beings according to physical types. The first species or race included Europeans, North Africans, Middle Easterners, Asian Indians, and American Indians; the second contemplated Africans; the third East and Northeast Asians; and the last one Lapps. It is clear from his discussion that race and gender were two ideological aspects strongly linked in this time, and those value judgments were built into the race concept from the very beginning (Jackson and Weidman 2004). (For reasons of space, the issue of gender will not be addressed, but it is interesting to recognize the connection between these realities.) According to Poliakov (1994, 208) Buffon also occupies an important place in the historiography of race, although he cannot be attributed an important role in the construction of the modern concept (Hoquet 2014). He was a monogenist and conceptualized difference with respect to an ideal or typical species (Doron 2012 in Hoquet 2014). In the case of the human being, Buffon speaks of a unique original species, from which the other varieties emerged because of degeneration due to differences in climate. This “original” species was found between 40 and 50 latitude where “the most beautiful, best-made men can be found, it is in this climate that one can get a sense of the true, natural color of man, it is here that we must find our model or the unity through which to link all the other nuances in color and beauty. . .” (Buffon 1749–1767, vol. 3, 528 in Hoquet 2014, 23). Here the question arises on whether one can dissociate the concept of race from racist attitudes. However, it was through the work of Linnaeus that the first steps to develop a classification system for humans began in 1735, when in the first edition of his Systema Naturae he included man and monkeys within the animal kingdom, in the category Anthropomorpha (Hoquet 2014). By the tenth edition, Linnaeus had not only created the genus Homo but had also subdivided it into two subgenres, Homo nocturnes into which he placed the great apes and Homo diurnus (or “day man”), which was reserved for creatures that looked more human. Linnaeus, in turn, subdivided this second species into four races differentiated by anatomical features, moral qualities, and mental aptitudes: Homo europeus; Homo americanus; Homo asiaticus; and Homo afer.

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

423

Eighteenth-century biologists warmly celebrated Linnaeus’ classifications, but many also criticized the details of his arrangement regarding humans. For example, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach considered that Linnaeus categories were rooted in cultural prejudices as well as physical distinctions (Malik 1996). “Blumenbach refined Linnaeus’ classification of humans by rejecting all idea of human monsters. Furthermore, to remove Linnaeus’ cultural baggage, he insisted that skull shape and size should be used as the primary means of differentiating between human groups. He eventually reordered Linnaeus’ four human categories to form five varieties, naming them Caucasians, the peoples of Europe, west Asia and North Africa; Mongolians, the peoples of East Asia; Ethiopians of sub-Saharan Africa; Americans, the native peoples of New World; and Malays, the peoples of Oceania” (Malik 1996). This very language of naming races began to create the supposition that those races were real. Anthropologists saw in these classifications a fertile ground for their investigations and soon began to appear a great variety of racial taxonomies in which the number of categories varied from three to several dozen. However, the classification of Blumenbach of five races continued to show its great usefulness, and the expression “Caucasian” was firmly established as a racial category both in the scientific and in the popular field until today (Malik 1996). An interesting aspect of this period is that “the technological innovations of this period made it possible to refine the representation of racialised bodies, including anthropometric techniques that made possible the systematic and scientific classification of races” (Bancel et al. 2014, 2). In addition, in the early nineteenth century, ethnic performances and imperial exhibitions became very popular and served to spread a new visual culture about race to Europeans (Torrens and Barahona 2019).

Before Mestizaje: Racial Ideas in Medieval Spain After World War II, few reputable scholars would claim that race is a concept capable of providing an acceptable explanation for the existence of cultural, economic, and social differences, or for the persistence of such differences over time. Even Michel Foucault mentioned in one of his lectures, not without objection, that racism is a phenomenon exclusive to modernity and that it did not exist before the seventeenth century (Nirenberg 2007, 71). How can we talk then about races during the Middle Ages? Would racism be a misleading anachronism before the modern age? When speaking about Spain, it is hard not to recur to the term “race” when trying to portray the ways people of the premodern and early modern period understood their social identity. It is hard because the ideology of “purity of blood” or limpieza de sangre (which will be discussed below) of the mid-fifteenth century was ostensibly based on religious terms, racial discourses, and political practices. However, talking about race in early modern Spain is problematic for two main reasons. On the one hand, possibly due to the “Black Legend” – that is, a historiographic proposal based on anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda – there is a great deal of scholarship on the history of race and racism which maintains that Iberia was one of the first places to develop racial concepts and policies by means of the doctrine of

424

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

“purity of blood,” its harsh Inquisition and its participation in the early stages of the transatlantic African slave trade, and in the colonization of America (Martínez 2008, 9). The authors do not wish, of course, to contribute to this legend but are aware that to go to the opposite side and assume that limpieza de sangre and the term race are analytically different, or that in fact one cannot speak of racism in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ Spain and its colonies, is complicated and even undesirable. On the other hand, historians can be criticized for being anachronistic, for the modern use of the word “race” was not in operation in the early modern period. However, Spanish reality (Muslims inhabited the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492, and the Jewish population was unwelcome, so there were massacres, exterminations, segregations, conversions, Inquisition, and expulsions) pushes us to think that racial discourses took particular forms since the eighteenth century, but that the meaning and uses of the term “race” have varied through time, space, and individual usage since long before (often being intertwined with culture and/or class). Thus, according to Martínez (2008, 11), “there is no single, transhistorical racism but rather different types of racisms each produced by specific social and historical conditions.” As it is almost impossible to talk about Spanish ideology of “blood purity” without linking it to race, we will do so with caution and full awareness in the following paragraphs. Spain’s venture into the “New World” began in 1492 when the Muslims and Jews were expelled from the peninsula and the Crowns of Aragon and of Castile (the territories that constitute what is now Spain) began their voyages of exploration and conquest. The year 1492 evokes a powerful symbolism and a historical reconfiguration of global magnitude, which was experienced in very different ways by Iberians, Native Americans, and Africans, “for some, it represents the beginning of exploitation and ethnocide and for others the beginning of the European rise to the centre of the economic, political and cultural world” (Stern 1992, 1). Of all the variants of this human drama, in this chapter, we will focus on how this encounter of civilizations revolutionized the ethnography of the human being since the construction of colonial power was based on racial domination and violence. The Spanish expansion, toward the west, was driven in the first instance by the search for gold, so that the economic project of the colonies was based mainly on the exploitation of minerals and extraction systems that required intensive labor. Thus, a particularity of Spanish colonialism that strongly shaped its gendered and racialized imaginings of the nation was the state control of some systems of labor, the transformation of large Indigenous communities into tributaries, and their collective incorporation into Christianity. According to Nirenberg (2007) “Iberian history has long served as a focal point for arguments about premodern race because, as is well known, large populations of Muslims and Jews made the peninsular kingdoms the most religiously diverse in medieval Western Europe. The late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed massive attempts to eliminate that diversity. . . and in one sense these efforts toward homogeneity were successful. Over the course of the 1000 years from 1391 to 1492, for example, all the Jews of Spain were either converted or expelled” (75). However, the conversion of some Jews did not eradicate discrimination but took it to another level in what is known as the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (“blood purity”) which began in 1449 when the first statute of purity of blood appeared in

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

425

Toledo, Spain (Chami 2000, in Nirenberg 2009). The categories of demarcation between Christians and Jews that had once belonged more to the legal and religious realm were replaced with the genealogical notion that Christians descended from Jewish converts (Cristianos nuevos, confessos, conversos, and marranos) were essentially different from the “Christians of nature” (Cristianos de natura, cristianos viejos, lindos, and limpios). According to the limpieza de sangre doctrine, “Jewish and Muslim blood were inferior to Christian; the possession of any amount of such blood made one liable to heresy and moral corruption; and therefore any descendent of Jews and Muslims, no matter how distant, should be barred from church and secular office, from any number of guilds and professions, and especially from marrying Old Christians” (Nirenberg 2009, 242). Thus, since the sixteenth century, the Spanish transferred this social scheme to their colonies, though by no means in a simple and straightforward way. The subordination of the state to the church and the ideology of limpieza de sangre, where the absence of Jewish or Muslim blood defined an honorable “old Christian,” were factors in the hierarchically organized society of Spain (Katzew 2004, 39). Martínez (2008) charted the rise of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre in Spain and its journey from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas, where “it took on a life of its own.” This doctrine was based on the supposed heritability of certain characteristics, so that the proportion of blood of the carrier determined its place in a strict hierarchical system of classification, in which, of course, the “Old Christian Spaniard” was at the top. As will be explained later, in Spanish America, the great diversity of native people, the presence of African and Asian slaves, and the lack of Spanish women in the early colonies provoked a rapid rise of the population of mixed ancestry that produced a much more elaborate and complex system of classification than the one from Castile (p. 2). It is also important to mention that Islam was the dominant religion in the Iberian Peninsula from 711 to 1492. The Iberian Muslims also developed an important system of discrimination of their slaves. By the ninth century, they distinguished between their white and black slaves, whites were often called mamluks and represented leverage with the Christian enemies since they could bring a significant ransom. This differential value is also reflected in the fact that white slaves were often used as house servants, whereas blacks were often given the most strenuous and difficult tasks (working in salt or copper mines, or on plantations) (Jackson and Weidman 2004). The distinction between white and black slaves also rested on the supposed moral and intellectual capacities of their bearers. Africans were thought to be weak-minded, live without moral standards, and be basically savages. These negative stereotypes, that physical appearance indicated a person’s moral worth and that society should be hierarchical, were soon adopted by the Christians in Spain and carried over to their future colonies.

Colonial Mexico Caste System In Mexico, the process of racialization began early in the eighteenth century as a means of conferring legitimacy on the hierarchizing of society. It is not clear yet if the study of the “physical, intellectual and moral” bearing of the Indigenous peoples

426

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

of New Spain had the same spirit as the one carried out in the United States whose aim was to establish a scientific basis for the study of non-European peoples, for example, the study by Samuel Morton of a huge cranial collection. However, by the mid-eighteenth century, there was a perfectly differentiated caste system in New Spain, and its visual apparatus was already institutionalized. This caste system based on the ideology of blood purity, which in New Spain gradually came to be equated with “Spanishness,” was confirmed by the different possible crosses that occurred in America between the three great racial categories: Indigenous, European, and African origin (Fig. 1) (Katzew 2005; Torrens and Barahona 2019). In Iberoamerica, Spanish notions of genealogy and purity of blood gave way to particular understandings of racial difference. It is notable that, according to some scholars, the colonial Novohispana society was the first modern society to formulate notions of “scientific racism” based on what today would be considered as a biological determinism that assigned essentialist categories to human populations. It is true that Spanish statutes of limpieza de sangre were key to describe the hybrid descendants produced by Christians and Muslims and that blood purity was first described as the absence of Jewish and heretical antecedents and later also to the descendants of Muslims (moriscos), and that it was used to deprive the converts of access to certain institutions and public and ecclesiastical offices. However, the full essentializing potential of the concept of race is still missing prior to late eighteenth century because attitudes toward the appearance (phenotype) were combined with ideas of cultural and religious difference (Martinez 2008, 11). Also, some kind of aversion to Jews was endemic in late medieval Europe, and every colonial power could be considered a culprit in the construction of discriminatory policies and practices toward certain human groups. That is, the studies on the origins of race and racism should and could not single out the Iberian Peninsula. Here it is important to mention that some scholars consider colonial racism and anti-Semitism to be different discriminatory regimes. However, “few historical phenomena demonstrate this close relationship between anti-Semitic and colonial discourses of difference better than the ideology of purity of blood, which spread while Spain was forging its overseas empire” (Martinez 2008, 13). Even so, “by the middle of sixteenth century, the ideology of purity of blood had produced a Spanish society obsessed with genealogy” (Martinez 2008, 1). In this sense, something riveting happened in colonial Mexico related to the purity regimes and ancestral lineages. The native communities had not been touched by Judaism or Islam and showed interest in converting to Christianity, so the Spanish promoted the creation of a República de indios (“Indian Republic”), which although it served to segregate the Indians powerfully, also allowed them to survive in a dual social model, with their own political and social hierarchies, institutions, as well as the official recognition of Indian purity (Martinez 2008, 5). However, this did not last long. By the eighteenth century, when invocations of nature began to be strongly attached to discourses on purity and difference, the attitudes toward mestizaje – that is, the biological and cultural encounter between different ethnic groups – began to shift when the idea of the merger of the two republics in reproductive and biological terms began to be associated with the idea of an independent nationstate. Thus, the ways in which this diversity of “Mexicans” was displayed in this

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

427

Fig. 1 Cuadro de castas. Museo del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, México. Eighteenth Century (anonymous painter). Oil on canvas. (Courtesy of Art Resource)

time had functions in different contexts such as in the eventual process of nation building, in myth-making projects, in the structuring and fixation of social categorization, in colonial identity formation, etc.

428

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

Against this backdrop on the introduction, appropriation, and establishment of race and racism in colonial Mexico, we will focus now on how different scholars have studied and analyzed the science and politics of race in the building of the Mexican nation.

Race and Racialization in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mexico: Mexico and the USA Look into Mexico’s Human Diversity “History has no existence before it is written” (Howell and Prevenier 2001, 1). Having in mind that the same topic can be narrated in different ways, which depend not only on what the historian wants to highlight but also (and very importantly) on her culture, place of birth, academic training, and so forth, it is fair to say that there are certain differences in the way Mexican and US scholars approach the topic of race and racism in Mexico that we would like to describe. To do so, we will first review some works on race and its influences in the construction of the Mexican Nation, first by Mexicans and later by US scholars, in order to compare them and provide a critical analysis in the last part of this manuscript. We will also try to establish from these histories whether, at present, there is a use of “old-fashioned” conceptions (racial categories, racializers, ethnic groups, human typology, and human variability) that possibly constrain, determine, and channel research on human bodies. First of all, it is easy to see that many Mexican social scholars have a general aversion to treating race as a legitimate research topic for understanding the history of their region (Martínez 2008, 10). Even anthropologists avoid the term. It is usually assumed that the common usage of the concept of race is particular to former slave societies (such as the United States) and therefore has no relevance to postcolonial nations that were born out of societies with slaves such as Spain (which is very different). In the Mexican scenario, there was the goal of eradicating race after 1821 and building a “mestizo” national identity, which allowed for the recognition of subtle ethnic differences (not unlike castes) but without the idea of racial degeneration, which was so prevalent in North American and European thought (Appelbaum et al. 2003). In discussing concepts such as mestizo or Indian, it is necessary to recognize their subjective nature, insofar as “it depends on a range of perceived characteristics, rather than on any immutable and innate attributes, status is obviously subjective” (Knight 1990, 74). Thus, in Latin American social studies in general, and in Mexico in particular, the study of racism and raciality is interesting because it represents a fluid and changing phenomenon, which was found to underlie various postcolonial and later state policies. However, as will be shown later, for some Mexican scholars, the approach to a social history of race in Mexico is better achieved when considering ethnicity as a more important concept to understand the region’s past. Interestingly, this is not the case for biological studies of human Mexican populations. Just a quick reminder: Since the 2015 national census, blacks have the possibility to self-identify as black.

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

429

To be fair in our analysis and for reasons of space, the authors decided to show four intellectual histories about the concept of race and racism by American and Mexican scholars. We tried to choose highly relevant studies but had to leave out many great contributions to the topic, and we apologize for that.

Mexican Historiographies Along the lines of what was discussed in the previous section, an important point is to now examine what the Mexican academics themselves have raised around discussions related to race, and derivations such as racism. Although it is clear that when we speak of “race” we cannot refer only to what is said exclusively within a particular area of knowledge, in the Mexican case, discussions of race have been raised mainly by philosophers, historians, and anthropologists. Recently, authors such as the philosopher Manuel Vargas have shown how this situation can be appreciated from the fact that authors like José Vasconcelos during the first half of the twentieth century based their discourse on a strong consideration of biological theses. Also, with the passage of time, cultural and social issues were taken as reference. According to this: “As confidence in the biological basis of race diminished, [. . .] they found other categories that would be useful in the explanations they developed in their theories” (Vargas 2009, 174). However, the discussions that took place in Mexico around racial issues must be appreciated from a perspective that sought to rediscover the cultural roots of the original cultures, as a response to the profound impact that European culture brought to Mexico. A clear example of this can be seen in works such as México profundo. Una civilización negada (Deep Mexico. A Denied Civilisation, 1990) by anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla. In general terms, Bonfil Batalla raises the need for a deep reflection on the conflict unleashed by the meeting of two cultures, the European and the Indian, with a long history of more than 500 years, and that above all questions the essence of Mexico as a country produced by colonization and mestizaje. In the selection of authors we have made for this chapter, themes such as mestizaje and national identity are a fundamental part of the narratives around race. How has the concept of race been used within academic discussions among anthropologists in Mexico? This can be understood in at least two periods, before and after World War II, with notable exceptions. In general terms, we want to focus first on the case of Mexican anthropology, to the extent that its field of study includes topics related to the body and culture. A fundamental work for understanding the way in which physical anthropology, in particular, has approached the subject of the race since the nineteenth century is that edited by Maria Villanueva, Carlos Serrano, and José Luis Vera (1999). From an analysis of the published bibliography mainly on physical anthropology – which includes books, articles, and theses – covering the period between 1889 and 1990, conclusions such as the following can be drawn: In structural terms, Mexican anthropology was inserted into a system that justified specific policies such as the conservation and care of “national heritage,” which led to localist attitudes. Few authors focused explicitly on the issue of race. Possibly the

430

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

most notable example of post-1950s Mexico is the Spanish anthropologist who settled in Mexico Juan Comas, who stood out not only for his work in the country but was also widely recognized abroad. It is noteworthy that, despite the recognition he received in his time, in recent writings published in English on the history of discussions on anthropological issues in Mexico his work goes unnoticed. This investigation can be further advanced through the Mexican bibliography, where it is common to recover the figure of Comas, as well as other authors, such as Manuel Gamio and Santiago Genovés, in their defense of antiracist positions, based on the defense of Indigenism and the implications of the evolutionary discourse for the understanding of more inclusive societies. All of this should be evaluated from a perspective of dialogue at an international level, particularly with respect to the proposals of foreign anthropologists, geneticists, psychologists, and sociologists about not only the overall Mexican social situation, but also with repercussions at the Latin American level. The role of figures such as Comas should be assessed on the basis of their role in international forums, such as UNESCO and the various works that emerged in the 1960s on race and racism (Comas 1946, 1961, 1966, 1969, 1972). Following the same argument that Villanueva, Serrano, and Vera established, it is clear that if we refer to the post-Second World War period, we find that: “Race was abandoned as a concept in Mexican anthropological discourse and it was and is also marginal as a specific topic of research in social anthropology” (Peña-Saint-Martin and Vera-Cortés 2018, 244). Despite the breadth of this type of work, that is, reconstructing a disciplinary history from a selection of its bibliography, the authors themselves recognize important limitations, such as the simple fact that this count lacks an update (which is in the making) to locate the publications that have been made after 1990. A work that is indispensable when talking about race in Mexico is that of the historian Agustín Basave, especially with his analysis of one of the most discussed concepts in the national sphere: mestizaje. It is important to emphasize that Basave departs from considering discussions of race – a concept he uses synonymously with ethnicity in his México mestizo – in the context of nineteenthcentury Mexican nationalism. He does all this by coining “mestizofilia,” or in his own words, “the idea that the phenomenon of crossbreeding – that is, the mixing of races and/or cultures – is a desirable fact” (Basave Benítez 2002, 13). On what Basave said, several details can be appreciated: The specific use of the concept of race as a synonym of ethnicity seems to go hand in hand with the recognition that both the physical and cultural diversity of human groups are relevant, that is, there does not seem to be an expressed commitment to the defense of understanding human beings only in biological terms. This can be understood from Basave’s clarification of the close relationship between mestizaje and “mexicanidad” (mexicanity, or, the essence of the Mexican being) as an essential part of the search for national identity (Basave Benítez 2002, 14). This link, between “race” (or ethnicity) and national identity, will become the common denominator in the discussions that Mexican intellectuals have had, and continue to have, on this subject. For example, the work of historian Federico Navarrete, México racista (2016), represented a provocative critique of contemporary Mexican society,

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

431

showing that the history of mestizaje itself has had profound consequences on the discrimination that is exercised on a daily basis. Another important point that Basave reminds us of is that in Mexico the discussion on race took place against the backdrop of Indigenism, a current of thought promoted by authors such as José Vasconcelos and Manuel Gamio, a way in which intellectuals sought to compensate for the situation of abandonment of the country’s Indigenous groups. One of the most relevant points of Basave’s proposal is to provide a far-reaching vision, by locating the origins of mestizaje in the colonial era, when the logic of differentiating different human groups according to racial characteristics was common, as presented earlier in this chapter. Basave recalls that: “Unlike other empires, [. . .] and perhaps uninhibited by its own multiracial lineage, Spain did not reject consanguinity” (Basave Benítez 2002, 17), an issue that greatly impelled mestizaje, not only in Mexico but also in Latin America. Very striking is the detail that Basave also points out about the union of the peninsular Spaniards with local women, as one of the main factors of mestizaje, beyond the indications that the Spanish Crown or the Church could provide. The account presented by Basave as a whole shows the centrality of the idea of race, embodied in mestizaje, or more specifically in the case of Mexico, mestizophilia, which over the years and at different times in the country’s history shows the profound influence on the development of national identity. Given the relevance of racism in national discussions, the work of Beatriz Urias Horcasitas is important in this section. Her work shows three fundamental themes about the way in which the issue of race was discussed and applied in Mexico: the theoretical project that was created from the interaction between naturalistic and scientific discussions – which at the time led to the consolidation of physical anthropology – and political power. This last point refers again to the role played by characters such as Manuel Gamio in the dissemination of projects such as Indigenism, in which the existence of “Mexican races” was defended, who had to be educated in order to “progress.” The next topic is the application of the idea of race that occurred on different fronts in Mexican society. The role that eugenics – particularly influenced by French thought, stressing, through Lamarckism, the influence of the environment – played in the shaping of public policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is of importance in understanding the development of disciplines such as psychiatry and everything related to “mental hygiene.” At the same time, birth control and the legalization of abortion confronted Mexican society, especially the Church and the State, against a backdrop of widespread discussions of race. It is worth recalling here the promotion of the Mexican eugenics’ movement in birth control especially in Indigenous communities, an example explained in more detail in Suárez y López Guazo (2005). The other point of interest raised by Urias Horcasitas is the role played by networks of different professionals in the dissemination of the “reality” of the races, to justify criminalistic studies. These professionals included sociologists, lawyers, anthropologists, and as mentioned above, politicians. All the above serves to endorse part of what has already been mentioned in the case of physical anthropology and mestizophilia, which is that

432

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

In Mexico, thinking about race in the nineteenth century has important parallels with that developed in Europe during the same period, but not in the twentieth century, although the rise of eugenics and mental hygiene in the 1930s and 1940s would have been directly related to the support that an authoritarian state gave to these currents. (Urías Horcasitas 2007, 57)

As a clarification, the concept of race among Mexican academics was not unified, but, as Miguel García Murcia points out, there were at least two currents: those who defended a sociocultural vision of human beings, which established close links with aspects such as “language, customs, the region in which they lived, a common past and genealogy, among others” (García Murcia 2017, 218–219); and another group that defended the breed as a category in terms strictly of physical characteristics resulting from natural phenomena. Now, when talking about the specific case of “Mexican races,” a notable example is that posed by the physician, historian, and anthropologist Nicolas Leon (1859–1929), who proposed the following classification: nahuas, seri, “maratines,” “atapascana,” yuma, maya-quiché, totonaca, chiapaneca, tarasca, “othomixteco-tzapoteca,” and “tzoque-mixe” (quoted in García Murcia 2017, 116). From the above, we can rescue several ideas: Although as we have seen in Mexico there was a tradition that sought to explain the diversity of human groups, for example, through the caste system, it is clear that throughout the nineteenth century the influence of discussions from Europe marked the discourse of Mexican intellectuals. On the other hand, the impulse that politics gave to that intellectual agenda clearly permeated the general vision of the human populations of the country. One possible response to the sometimes ambiguous usage of the concept of race in biological/physical terms during the twentieth century is that, in some cases, the Mexican situation was considered on the basis of the caste-based defense of discrimination. Furthermore, in this sense, “racism,” as a practice derived from the concrete use of the concept of race, is of recent incorporation. This is where it is worth remembering the way in which today foreign academics have insisted on the use of common categories in their own contexts. This leads us in part to consider the role, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, that “scientific colonialism” plays in scientific discussions in general. One of the problems that seems to be implicit is the very idea of “race.” The authors mentioned in this section refer to whites, blacks, or Indians, thus appealing to racial categories that belong to the tradition spread by “Western” scholars. More specifically, it is intellectual traditions in countries such as England, Germany, or the United States that support these categories. Although the only author who makes explicit in his work the connection with colonial history is Basave, the other works appeal to a certain extent to the uniqueness of the situation in Mexico, as a result of Spanish rule, although emphasizing mostly the role that other European powers played in the country in the nineteenth century. From this selection of examples, it seems to us clear that scientific work implies a dialogue between peers, regardless of their nationality, but it must be recognized that in countries like Mexico (a situation that extends to the rest of Latin America) there is also an imposition of narratives by foreigners. In the next section, we will look at a selection of US authors, who put forward their perspective on the issues outlined above.

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

433

Anglo-American Historiographies Most scholars are used to reading about the so-called “Global South” from studies conducted by people from the “Global North,” once again exposing the transmission of technical and specialist knowledge of the hegemonic thought-forms of European and American scientific colonialism. There are no doubt some brilliant contributions to knowledge of this kind, but there are also interesting critiques, mainly, but not only, from historiographic perspectives such as global and transnational history, postcolonial studies, connected histories, etc., that have given rise to more critical narratives, with richer and deeper contexts and less parochial and apologetic visions. In this section, the authors will analyze two significant works related to the concept of race in Mexico carried out by US scholars that make use of different aspects of the above-mentioned approaches, to give rise to narratives that show the concept of race as one of the important axes in the formation of the Mexican nation. As noted by the historian Alan Knight, in the early twentieth-century “[. . .] while the official ideology of revolutionary Mexico has certainly been strenuously resistant to the classic Eurocentric racism, it would be wrong to infer from this that Mexican society is correspondingly free of racist beliefs and practices [. . .]” (Knight 1990, 71), an idea that refers us back to the fact that race as an idea has been present in Mexico through different traditions. The goal is to contrast these works with those described above of Mexican academics in order to highlight differences that could be relevant to our discussion. In his book Before mestizaje, Vinson III, for example, states that Latin Americans have a more “fluid, multilayered conception of race” (2018, xiii) compared to the somewhat more static views in the English-speaking world. We will begin with the work of Alexandra Minna Stern From Mestizophilia to Biotypology: Racialization and Science in Mexico, 1920–1960 (2003), since the term mestizofilia employed by Stern was coined by Basave. Mestizophilia to Biotypology tries to unravel the history of racialization and Mexican mestizaje in twentieth-century Mexico, a time marked by four periods of intense political and social upheaval: the Porfiriato (1876–1910), the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), the postrevolutionary movement (1920–1940), and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional era (1940s–1960s). As many other authors that have dealt with the reconstruction of the historical and cultural trajectories of the Mexican mestizaje (Katzew 2004; López-Beltrán 2007, 2008; Martínez 2008; Vinson III 2009; Restall 2009; among others), Stern has the intention to shed light on how and why the concept of race is imbued in the national identity of Latin American countries, particularly Mexico, and has played very important roles in the processes of nation building after independence. In this sense, the colonial category of mestizo is taken as an articulating resource, crucial to forming the national identity in the Mexican postrevolutionary period, since, as López-Beltrán and García-Deister (2013) suggest, “The Indian-mestizo axis served to organise ethnic interactions and state policies.” In her chapter, Stern “trace continuities and cleavages in the process of racialization in Mexico from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century by focusing on the discourses and projects of medical and scientific professionals affiliated with governmental institutions and involved in state formation,” since the

434

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

mestizo became an object of biomedical interest during this time, becoming appropriated by national and international scientific communities, in an attempt to establish how racially homogeneous or heterogeneous the Mexican population was, under the previous hypothesis of a mestizo uniformity. From the above, an interesting historiographic outlook mainly found in European and US narratives emerges, that is, the search to determine and contextualize when and how an object or phenomenon becomes a scientific object, a line of research strongly promoted by Lorraine Daston and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. In her chapter, Stern poses the question of when and how the classification of human beings by body type or other morphological, physiological, or psychological characteristics became of interest to Mexican scientists. This is not to say that there are no Mexican narratives of the type, since López-Beltran and García-Deister have written about the mestizo as an object of anthropological and biomedical interest (2013), but Stern provides a deeper account of the biotypological studies carried out on different Mexican communities (Indigenous and otherwise) during the first half of the twentieth century, achieving an innovative historical work that indicates the moment in which biotypology eclipsed “mestizophilia” in Mexican scientific circles. Stern also resorts to exploring and emphasizing the importance of the circulation of knowledge and social actors, as well as the appropriation of ideas in the implementation of biotypology in Mexico for the purpose of quantifying and classifying human populations. In this way, she addresses the implementation of biotypology itself, the adaptation of IQ tests, and the circulation of experimental artifacts and techniques such as anthropometric instruments and those for measuring various body functions of interest to biotypologists. Regarding the circulation of social actors, she mentions the demographic studies in Rome of Gilberto Loyo, who was responsible during the 1930s for the first attempts to map the national population using Corrado Gini’s demographic theories, among other things, to determine its ethnic composition. She also mentions the importance for Manuel Gamio, a prominent Mexican anthropologist and archaeologist, director of the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology and of the Inter-American Indian Institute, to attend the Eighth American Scientific Congress held in Washington D.C. to endorse biotypology in 1942. One point that shows the connection between Mexico and the United States is that Gamio was a student of the renowned German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas, and during his stay at Columbia University he adopted the culturalist approach characteristic of early twentieth-century American anthropology. Another point of contrast between Mexican and US histories comes from the different uses of the concept of race and the term “mestizo.” In general, for many Mexican scholars and politicians of different times, the term allowed for the recognition of subtle ethnic differences without the idea of racial degeneration. For many Europeans and Americans, there was persistently a negative and pessimistic (racist) assessment of the mixture of human groups belonging to different castes. These denigrating feelings of the American mestizaje were widely resisted and fought against by the Creole and mestizo intellectuals of America (López-Beltrán and Deister 2013; Gerbi and Alatorre 1978; Cañizares-Esguerra 2001). However,

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

435

many US scholars have shown (Stern 2003; Rosemblatt 2018) that in Mexico, although the concept of race was not the main category within the public policy discussions of the twentieth century, and many times its existence was denied and the term “race” was avoided, other terms used, such as culture, ethnicity, or social class, also served to make distinctions between groups based on biological and/or hereditary criteria. Nonetheless, for Mexican contemporary authors, such as Basave, the concept of “mestizo” encompasses the process of mixing different races with a result that is not only a fusion of human groups of different origins but also of sociocultural habits. Employing the concept of ethnicity rather than race itself to acknowledge and give greater importance to cultural heritage than to a purely biological one is an expressed commitment to the defense of understanding human beings only in biological terms. For many contemporary Mexican anthropologists, this means a generalization of a discussion that has many levels of complexity, and largely reflects the influence of US scholars on the analysis of the Mexican situation, with rather local perspectives. Now we will move to Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt’s book The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 (2018), which from a transnational lens examines the racial policies in Mexico and the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century. For some years, the field of the history of science has focused on the need to write transnational connected narratives, based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts that describe the dynamics of scientific practices. As Subrahmanyam (1997) has pointed out, connected stories, unlike comparative ones, must be written to illuminate both global trends and local resistance. This transnational approach seeks to abandon the concept of nation as the main unit of analysis for understanding the development of the history of science. It also seeks to distance itself from the narratives focused on Europe and the United States to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of scientific knowledge, people, artifacts, and practices (Turchetti et al. 2012). The transnational approach, which began to emerge at the end of the Cold War, has been influenced by the effects of globalization, multiculturalism, and the formation of circuits of practices, organizations, objects, goods, knowledge, and people in which scientific advances exceed the frontiers of nation-states. That is the reason why the main units of historical analysis are the transnational networks of collaboration. This approach, therefore, focuses, on the one hand, on the circulation networks which explore interregional exchanges and, on the other, on transnational circuits which facilitate the cross-border transmission of scientific practices and a faster flow of people, ideas, and objects. Rosemblatt’s contribution starts from this notion and focuses on showing how the history of racism, policies toward Indigenous populations, and other forms of eugenics in Mexico and the United States cannot be understood in purely national terms, but as products of transnational collaborations, networks of discussions, and/or influences. “The book focuses on anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, physicians, economists, geologists, and agronomists who were involved in transnational exchanges and who worked with state officials to understand how to manage racial differences within and across nations” she states in the introduction (p. 3).

436

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

Among the leading figures in the broad group of scientists and policymakers Rosemblatt examines are anthropologists Franz Boas and Robert Redfield, who did important ethnographic fieldwork in and about Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s; Gamio, who, as mentioned above, was a student of Boas and the first doctoral anthropologist in Mexico; and John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the United States, and his close collaborator, anthropologist Laura Thompson. For this diverse transnational group, comparative studies served as a central methodology in their efforts to examine the role and dynamics of race in US and Mexican societies. This group of intellectuals discussed at length the concepts of mestizaje, Indigenism, and race in an effort to broaden and include the concepts of racial identity, and racial and cultural dynamics, in order to discuss how the governments of Mexico and the United States could define policies to promote the social and economic development of Indigenous populations while (ideally) avoiding hierarchization, racism, and discrimination. The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950 is divided into two sections. The first, “Science and Nation in an Age of Evolution and Eugenics, 1910–1934,” addresses the time between the Mexican Revolution and the First World War, a time of great structural change, social transformation, and debate in different Mexican scenarios. This episode of Mexican history has been addressed time and again, but Rosemblatt does so from the point of view of the questions debated by Mexican thinkers and policymakers about how to integrate the diverse Mexican population into a unified society that could be governed fairly while recognizing and preserving cultural distinctions among peoples, all the while comparing the development of US policies associated with the Americanization of the “natives.” The second part of the book, “Science and Nation in an Age of Modernization and Antiracist Populism, 1930–1950,” touches on the period covered by the governments of Franklin Roosevelt in the United States (1933–1945) and in Mexico by Lázaro Cárdenas (1933–1940). In Mexico, during the 1930s, there was an unprecedented but short-lived change, which was the implementation of a socialist state policy with a strong quest to establish a powerful form of sovereignty by transforming institutions and through various political maneuvers. One of these was the effort of social theorists and government workers to produce policies of social equality. In the American case, a main drive, led by thinkers such as John Collier, was to transcend the liberal assimilationist views that dominated social policy during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and to emphasize cultural pluralism brought about through policies that encouraged acculturation rather than assimilation.

Conclusions In order to proceed with the analysis of the intellectual histories of the authors discussed, it is necessary to make explicit that any topic can be approached from a variety of angles and perspectives that depend on various factors such as the

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

437

education, specialization, and even upbringing and nationality of each author. This background determines the interaction that the author has with his or her subject of study and the approach when dealing with it. Therefore, making a comparison or even a contrast between them is complicated, to say the least. In this chapter, our interest was to show a selection of different historiographies on the issue of race and its interactions with diverse social scenarios, which we believe contributes to pointing out the increasing importance of intersectional studies. All the authors addressed are social scientists (in a future study, we will focus on those in the life sciences to find out if there are differences in their use of the concept of race in genomic and biomedical research, for example). In the case of the Mexican authors, there is a tendency toward local and national histories, although it is inevitable to establish the importance of the European origin (whether from fifteenth-century Spain or eighteenth-century Western Europe) of the concept of race and how it was deployed and applied in Mexico. Basave goes back to colonial Mexico as the primary background for understanding the discussions around mestizaje, which agrees with other authors such as Martínez (2008) in the attempt to establish a particular case of the concept of race, racism, and raciality in Latin America, as a result of the legacy of the Spanish ideology of limpieza de sangre. This makes clear the author’s commitment to the idea that “there is no single, transhistorical racism but rather different types of racisms each produced by specific social and historical conditions” Martínez (2008, 11). For her part, Urías Horcasitas refers to nineteenth-century Mexico, emphasizing the discussions that took place in this country on three levels: authors, spaces such as laboratories, and the networks that were created around racial studies. Historias secretas del racismo en México (1920–1950) (Secret Stories of Racism in Mexico (1920–1950)) constitutes an important contribution to the history of ideas and idiosyncrasies in Mexico on the subject of race, mainly on the biopolitics of social and racial distinction in Mexico, from the Porfirian to the postrevolutionary period. It is in this aspect that it converges in some ways with Rosemblatt’s research. What makes this work pioneering in the studies of Mexico, however, is that rather than merely revealing secret histories of racism (as one would expect from the title of her work), Beatriz Urías addresses the opinions, regulations, and laws relating to the constitution and construction of the other. Urías investigates the elaboration of discourses and techniques directed toward racial homogenization and social optimization within the framework of the construction of a modern nation, from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1940s. With respect to the US authors, there is an interest in considering the more global aspects of the concept of race. Explicitly, Rosemblatt points out her intention to approach the relationship between race and politics from a transnational and networked perspective, while Stern, although not recording it, resorts to exploring and emphasizing the importance of the circulation of knowledge, material culture, and social actors in the development of human classification techniques. What is clear to readers is that there is no single analytic framework entirely adequate to explain such globalization of scientific and political ideas. Some scholars have come to think that the concept of race as a global phenomenon has taken shape by means of

438

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

transnational circulation of knowledge and material culture as well as through collaborative networks and actors, both social and institutional. Others have approached the problem by studying exchange networks since these have the capacity to cross any type of border, whether those from empires, nations, or regions (Turchetti et al. 2012). Furthermore, some others have pointed out that the emphasis of research has to be placed on things on the move, in the going and coming of things while transforming themselves (Secord 2004). What we can appreciate in the different cases presented throughout the chapter is the continuous movement of a concept such as race, which at the same time serves to justify nationalist agendas as transnational journeys. Another point that we want to highlight is how, in the case of Mexico, at least two traditions that emphasize the idea of “race” come together, the one that comes from the Spanish colonial era, inherited from the ideology of blood purity and the Inquisition, and the one that emerged in non-Iberian Western Europe in the eighteenth century and that was consolidated in the nineteenth. Of these traditions, those who emphasize the influence of both are usually Latin American authors, while the US scholars assume the more hegemonic vision of central European racism. According to VinsonIII (2017: 1, critical apparatus), authors of Latin American origin, such as Cañizares-Esguerra and María Elena Martínez, support the idea that the Novohispana colonial society was the first modern society to formulate notions of “scientific racism” based on a “biological determinism” that assigned essentialist categories to human populations. According to Martinez, this proclivity to human categorization could have its roots in the time of Muslim Spain, when it was important to describe the hybrid descendants produced by Christians and Muslims. Remarkably, none of the authors described provide a definition of the concept of race. In fact, it is common for “race” and “ethnicity” to be used as synonyms, as far as they “are not terms that have fixed referents” (Wade 2010). It is true that racial discourses took particular forms since the eighteenth century, but that the meaning and uses of the term “race” have varied through time, space, and individual usage since long before (often been intertwined with culture and/or class). This leads us to another point of contrast between Mexican and US histories: the different uses of the concept of race and the term “mestizo.” In general, for many Mexican scholars and politicians of different times, the term allowed for the recognition of subtle ethnic differences without the idea of racial degeneration. For many Europeans and Americans, there was persistently a negative and pessimistic (racist) assessment of the mixture of human groups belonging to different castes. These denigrating feelings of the American mestizaje were widely resisted and fought against by the Creole and mestizo intellectuals of America (López-Beltrán and Deister 2013; Gerbi and Alatorre 1978; Cañizares-Esguerra 2001). However, many US scholars have shown (Stern 2003; Rosemblatt 2018) that in Mexico, although the concept of race was not the main category within the public policy discussions of the twentieth century, and many times its existence was denied and the term “race” was avoided, the other terms used such as culture, ethnicity, or social class only reflect incongruities or contradictions since they also served to make distinctions between groups

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

439

based on biological and/or hereditary criteria. Nonetheless, for Mexican contemporary authors, such as Basave, the concept of “mestizo” encompasses the process of mixing different races with a result that is not only a fusion of human groups of different origins but also of sociocultural habits. Employing the concept of ethnicity rather than race itself to acknowledge and give greater importance to cultural heritage than to a purely biological one is an expressed commitment to the defense of understanding human beings only in biological terms. One of the immediate problems we face when engaging in racializing discussions is the very categorization, “race,” as we can read recently: “There is no more complex and thorny topic for philosophical investigation than the topic of race. Nor is there one with more real-world relevance” (Taylor et al. 2018, xvii) – and not only in a philosophical but also in a historical sense. The concept of race is a rather strange place to navigate in as there are ugly pains and horrible dynamics associated to it, as we have witnessed not only historically but recently. The concept has a colonialist, imperialist, and patriarchal history of domination and inequality that has long been normalized into different social, political, and economic dynamics. In this chapter, although we focused on the role of the concept of “race” in historiographical discussions, it is important to recognize that human variability can be described by a number of other concepts, such as ethnic groups (with a particular emphasis on cultural aspects), or alternative ways of describing human typology, such as speaking of racializing categories or simply emphasizing human variability (in both a biological and cultural sense). Anderson (1998) pointed out that the postcolonial context marks patterns in the production of knowledge in different areas of the world. The understanding of variability through racial categories reflects this context in the case of the study of human inheritance. In Mexico, this context corresponded to some denominations of the colonial caste system, such as Indigenous or mestizo, and in the asymmetric relations between the global production of knowledge and the local ones. These asymmetries were expressed in a unilateral flow of specialization: professionals from the local contexts who traveled abroad for training, and later on how they reconfigured the local knowledge upon their return. Given the complexity of the concept of race, there are many questions still to be answered: Which are the social tensions that produce the preferences for the term race or the term class? In what terms do people express them? What are the ways in which these terms are reproduced or rearticulated over time and across geocultural contexts? And what are the connections between the concept of limpieza de sangre (a religiously imbedded doctrine), the casta system, and the modern uses of the concept of race in Mexican scholarship produced not only by Mexicans but also by US scholars? It is clear that, regardless of the tradition to which we are referring, to speak of race implies referring to a colonial logic, to the exercise of power by the colonizer over the colonized. The social implications are much more profound than is usually accepted, especially from the recognition of the intersectionality of ideas such as race, class, and gender.

440

E. Torrens-Rojas and J. M. Rodríguez-Caso

References Anderson W (1998) Where is the postcolonial history of medicine? Bull Hist Med 72(3):522–530 Appelbaum NP, Macpherson AS, Rosemblatt KA (Eds) (2003) Race and nation in modern Latin America. The University of North Carolina Press Bancel N, David T, Thomas D (Eds) (2014) The Invention of Race: scientific and popular representations. Routledge Basave Benítez A (2002) México mestizo. Análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia de Andrés Molina Enríquez, 2nd edn. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City Bernier F (1684) Nouvelle Division de la Terre, par les differentes Especes ou Races d‟ hommes qui l‟ habitent, envoyé par un fameux Voyageur a M. l‟ Abbé de la Chambre, a peu pres en ces termes. J Savans 1863:148–155 Bonfil Batalla G (1990) México profundo. Una civilización negada. Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico City Cañizares-Esguerra J (2001) How to write the history of the New World: histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Stanford University Press, Stanford Comas J (1946) Las Razas humanas por Juan Comas. Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City Comas J (1961) Relaciones inter-raciales en América Latina: 1940–1960. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City Comas J (1966) Razas, mestizaje y clases sociales en la obra de A. Molina Enriquez: 1909. Cuadernos Americanos, Año XXV, no. 2 Comas J (1972) Razas y racismo. Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City Doron C-O (2012) Race and genealogy. Buffon and the formation of the concept of “race”. Humana Mente 5(2):75–109 García Murcia M (2017) La Emergencia de la Antropología Física en México. La Construcción de su Objeto de Estudio (1864–1909). Secretaria de Cultura, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México City Gerbi A, Alatorre A (1978) La naturaleza de las Indias nuevas: de Cristóbal Colón a Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. No. 04; E123, G4. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México City Guevara Fefer R (2015) El uso de la historia en el quehacer científico. Una mirada a las obras históricas del biólogo Beltrán y del fisiólogo Izquierdo. UNAM, México City Hochman A (2019) Is race modern?: disambiguating the question. Du Bois Rev. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S1742058X19000286 Hoquet T (2014) Biologization of race and racialization of the human Bernier, Buff on, Linnaeus. In: Bancel N, David T, Thomas D (eds) The invention of race: scientific and popular representations. Routledge, New York/London, pp 17–32 Howell MC, Prevenier W (2001) From reliable sources: An introduction to historical methods. Cornell University Press Jackson JP, Weidman NM (2004) Race, racism, and science: social impact and interaction. ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara Katzew I (2004) La pintura de castas. Presentaciones raciales en el México del siglo XVIII. CONACULTA, México Katzew I (2005) Casta painting: images of race in eighteenth-century Mexico. Yale University Pres, New Haven Knight A (1990) Racism, revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940. In: Graham R (ed) The idea of race in Latin America, 1870–1940. University of Texas Press, Austin, pp 71–113 López Beltrán C (2007) Hippocratic bodies. Temperament and Castas in Spanish America (1570–1820). J Spanish Cult Stud 8(2):253–289 López-Beltrán C (2008) Sangre y temperamento: pureza y mestizajes en las sociedades de castas americanas. In: Saberes locales: ensayos sobre historia de la ciencia en América Latina. El Colegio de Michoacán, pp 289–342 López-Beltrán C, Deister VG (2013) Aproximaciones científicas al mestizo mexicano. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos 20(2):391–410. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-597020130002000002

20

A Critical Comparison of Different Intellectual Histories (Mexican and. . .

441

Malik K (1996) The meaning of race: race, history and culture in Western society. Macmillan, London Martínez ME (2008) Genealogical fictions: limpieza de sangre, religion, and gender in colonial Mexico. Stanford University Press Navarrete F (2016) México racista. Una denuncia. Grijalbo, Mexico City Nirenberg D (2007) Race and the Middle Ages: the case of Spain and its Jews. In: Greer MR, Mignolo WD, Quilligan M (eds) Rereading the Black Legend: the discourses of religious and racial difference in the Renaissance empires. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 71–87 Nirenberg D (2009) Was there race before modernity. The example of ‘Jewish’blood in late medieval Spain.” Eliav-Feldon, Isaac, and Ziegler Nyhart LK (2016) Historiography of the history of science. In: A companion to the history of science. Wiley, Hoboken Peña-Saint-Martin F, Vera-Cortés JL (2018) Races, racism, and physical anthropology in Mexico. J Anthropol Sci 96:239–245. https://doi.org/10.4436/JASS.96018 Poliakov L (1994 [1971]) Le Mythe aryen: essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes. Editions Pocket, Paris Restall M (2009) The Black middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in colonial Yucatan. Stanford University Press, Stanford Rosemblatt KA (2018) The science and politics of race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950. UNC Press Books Stern SJ (1992) Paradigms of conquest: history, historiography, and politics. J Lat Am Stud 24(S1):1–34 Stern AM (2003) From mestizophilia to biotypology: racialisation and science in Mexico, 1920–1960. In: Appelbaum NP, Macpherson AS, Rosemblatt KA (eds) Race and nation in modern Latin America. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill/London, pp 187–210 Suárez y López Guazo L (2005) Eugenesia y racismo en México. UNAM, México City Subrahmanyam S (1997) Connected histories: notes towards a reconfiguration of early modern Eurasia. Mod Asian Stud 31:735–762 Taylor PC, Alcoff LM, Anderson L (2018) Introduction. In: Taylor PC, Alcoff LM, Anderson L (eds) The Routledge companion to philosophy of race. Routledge, New York/London, pp xvii– xxviii Torrens E, Barahona A (2019) Castes and trees: tracing the link between European and Mexican representations of human taxonomy. Philos Theory Pract Biol 11(19). https://doi.org/10.3998/ ptpbio.16039257.0011.019 Turchetti S, Herrán N, Boudia S (2012) Introduction: have we ever been “transnational”? Towards a history of science across and beyond borders. Br J Hist Sci 45(3):319–336, 320 Urías Horcasitas B (2007) Historias secretas del racismo en México (1920–1950). Tusquets, Mexico City Vargas M (2009) La biología y la filosofía de la “raza” en México: Francisco Bulnes y José Vasconcelos. In: Granados García A, Marichal C (eds) Construcción de las identidades latinoamericanas. Ensayos de historia intelectual, siglos XIX y XX. El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico City, pp 159–178. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv3f8ntm.8. Accessed 8 May 2020 Villanueva M, Serrano C, Vera JL (1999) Cien años de antropología física en México: inventario bibliográfico. UNAM, Mexico City Vinson III B (2009) West Side Story: Free-Black Labor in the Mexican Pacific during the Late Colonial Period as seen through the Revillagigedo Census. J Colon Colon Hist 10(3) Vinson B III (2017) Before mestizaje: the frontiers of race and caste in colonial Mexico. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Wade P (2010) Race and ethnicity in Latin America. Pluto Press, London [Kindle edition]

Malleable Bodies

21

Race and Mexican Diets in Twentieth-Century Nutrition Science Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Lucía Granados Riveros, and Salina Suri

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Human Diet and International Organizations in the 1930s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Diet of Mexico’s Indigenous People: Between Anthropology and Nutrition . . . . . . . . . . . . . The International in the Regional: Balam Pereira and Coplamar Reports on Yucatan . . . . . . . . The Balam Pereira Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

444 445 451 458 458 462 463

Abstract

This chapter examines historical nutritional policy on both an international and national scale to understand how ideas about proper diets circulated and reached the farthest corners of, in this case, Mexico. The chapter traces scholarly and political viewpoints on nutrition through the twentieth century to demonstrate ways in which nutrition was designed and specialists were recruited to help propel a transformation of rural and racialized populations, “whitening” them in the process. This push to transform social groups via food intake – using descriptions such as “deficient” – was part of a global and changing discourse that braided social, physiological, racial, and cultural beliefs. This chapter first examines such intertwined ideas of race and nutrition on a global scale, briefly alluding to how nutrition became a eugenic tool and a function of capitalist and neoliberal landscapes. How these ideas were both embraced and rejected – and ultimately molded – by Mexican anthropologists and nutritionists forms the second section. G. Soto Laveaga · S. Suri (*) Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] L. Granados Riveros (*) Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_16

443

444

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

The third and final section examines a series of rural-Mexico based nutrition surveys to illustrate how changing perceptions of rural inhabitants shaped studies carried out by social scientists, public health providers, and physicians seeking to understand the eating habits of twentieth-century rural Mexicans.

Introduction In 1982 the Mexican government set out to redefine nutrition, food, diet, and hunger acknowledging that previously used, long-cherished surveys about the nation’s food security were inadequate. These surveys were faulty because they did not cover the entirety of the country at the same time, nor did they focus on a broad spectrum of foods (Rives 1985). The government’s study unsurprisingly concluded that the diet of the majority was “deeply deficient” (Coplamar 1982). This description of inadequate diets of the masses was not new. It had long been used by international organizations to describe the food of much of the world’s population. In 1937, for example, a conference on Rural Hygiene sponsored by the League of Nations concluded that the diets of the population of “the East” were “thoroughly deficient” compared to the standards set by the League’s health organization (Packard 2016). While this assessment was not novel, what was new in the 1982 survey was the push to understand caloric deficiencies as linked to economic systems which racialized and oppressed certain groups. Indeed, it had taken nearly 100 years for the Mexican government to examine as part of their state policy the socioeconomic origins of marginalization and hunger. The very use of the term marginalization and the marginalized in the 1980s reflect a specific approach to nutrition grounded in a social and economic approach rather than a primarily physiological or scientific one. Yet how did this conceptualization of hunger and nutrition leap from the realm of quantifiable science (i.e., the calorie) to a broader social explanation? In Mexico there were faint echoes of a broader social approach to nutrition anchored in the country’s experience with revolution, yet it would take decades for these larger concerns to solidify and become part of a nutrition expert’s toolkit. An example of how societal, cultural, and economic aspects impacted nutrition can already be found in, say, Alberto Pani’s seminal 1917 Hygiene in Mexico: A Study of Sanitary and Educational Problems. Partly researched and written during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and published in the last year of armed conflict, the book is a critical analysis of Mexico City as a stand-in for the rest of the nation. At the core is a push for a scientific approach to alleviate persistent problems (i.e., sewage, illness, contaminated water, etc.) but it is deeply influenced by the on-going revolution and nascent social aspirations. While the section on nutrition relies heavily on formulas and measures in vogue at the time (i.e., “the normal daily proportion of albumina for an adult, while Voit and Pettenkofer fix it at 1.69 grms. for each kilogram. . .” or “social categories which have the weakest ration of nitrogen are usually the most wretched. . .” (Pani 1917)), it also suggests that Mexico’s recent brush with extended conflict and social dislocation make the above formulas problematic. Noting that the core food of “the masses”

21

Malleable Bodies

445

are maize, beans, and meat, Pani nonetheless concluded, as his compatriots would surmise decades later, that for the laboring poor the “ration of nutrition is most deficient” (Pani 1917). Though appalled by the poor’s precariousness when it came to procuring food, Pani, however, stopped short from suggesting that poverty needed to be a unit of analysis. The closest he came was to note that any unexpected life event would bring chaos to a poor family’s food budget and lead to immediate hunger. As this chapter illustrates when it came to nutrition, its definition reflected not only international measures but also national aspirations. Some scholars have argued that hunger as a measure “generated its own history” becoming a category we use to “reflect upon the world we inhabit” (Vernon 2007). In a similar fashion and not surprisingly, nutritional conditions viewed through the lens of race reflected more than physiological concerns. At different times nutritionists were asked to cooperate with agriculturalists, anthropologists, healthcare professionals, and others to propel a transformation of rural inhabitants. This push to transform social groups via food intake – using descriptions such as “deficient” – was part of a global and changing discourse that braided social, physiological, racial, and cultural beliefs. To illustrate how global ideas circulated first in international congresses before becoming standard measures at the national level this chapter examines intertwined ideas of race and nutrition in twentieth-century Mexico. How these ideas were both embraced and rejected – and ultimately molded – by Mexican anthropologists and nutritionists forms the second section. The third and final section examines a series of ruralMexico based nutrition surveys to illustrate how changing perceptions of rural inhabitants shaped studies carried out by social scientists, public health providers, and physicians seeking to understand the eating habits of twentieth-century rural Mexicans.

Human Diet and International Organizations in the 1930s In the first decades of the twentieth century international organizations sought to combat disease and institute norms of public health through nutrition standards. These international bodies were particularly interested in the link between economy and nutrition, and wanted to stimulate the former with the latter. As a result, in 1935, a “mixed committee,” named as such for the inclusion of agricultural, economic, and nutritional professionals, was put together by the League of Nations. The mixed committee presented to the League an interim report in 1936 on the relationship between nutrition and health. The report, titled The Problem of Nutrition, Volume 1, details the necessary breakdown of foods that should be included in human diets. The suggestions of this committee are especially valuable because they emerged from a then powerful transnational diplomatic body. The 1930s was a period of economic struggle. Post-World War I, countries around the world faced debt, recovery from the turmoil of war, and the disparity of the Great Depression. This made food a particularly important focus for governments as the economic downturn resulted in a corresponding reduction in the purchasing power of their populations, further lessening their ability to eat in accordance with the

446

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

“optimal diet” suggested by the mixed committee. That said, the authors of The Problem of Nutrition made sure to write that “defective nutrition” was not “limited to countries or areas specially affected by the economic crisis,” establishing “defective” nutrition as a problem outside the bounds of a particularly bad economy (League of Nations 1936). This text itself is particularly interesting because it tends to be self-contradictory. It establishes the need for “optimal diets” that include “protective” foods, those “rich in the elements necessary to prevent the incidence of” various illnesses, and include meat, dairy products, eggs, vegetables, fruit, and potatoes. The committee defined these as fundamental to human health and the bulk of “optimal” diets. After consuming requisite amounts of each of these products, humans should consume “energy-bearing” foods to make up the rest of their caloric needs. Such foods include vegetables, cereals (wheat, rice, etc.), fats, and sugar (League of Nations 1936). Milk, they write, is the most important food of all, both for the way it is produced as ready-to-consume, and because it contains “most or all of the materials necessary for growth and for the maintenance of life” (League of Nations 1936). It is important to note that these ideas – and the language used – once put forward by the mixed committee, began almost immediately to have impact on policies and programs implemented at the national level in various locales; in Mexico, for example, agricultural programs were referring to the need to produce a larger amount of “protective” foods by the late 1930s (Vargas Domínguez 2019). Further, Maria del Pilar Zazueta argues that by the mid-twentieth century, the Mexican government had created milk distribution strategies “to improve the nutritional conditions of the low income populations,” which eventually transformed the dairy sector (Zazueta 2011). The expediency with which these global terms had a material impact on specific populations demonstrates the role that multinational, diverse organizations like the League of Nations played in global politics. While the mixed committee stipulated that their objective was “not to attempt to prescribe a single type of diet” for all peoples, and that they take into account the importance of food in traditional dietary habits (here they write briefly about the diets of the “Esquimaux” and people in “Arabia”), they continued to develop a narrative around “optimal” nutrition that suggests that a wide diversity of diet due to culture or otherwise was not optimal (League of Nations 1936). Immediately after acknowledging the lack of meat or animal by-products in traditional Bedouin diets, which seemingly had little nutritional consequence, for instance, the authors included a section that deals with childhood nutrition, in which they stressed the importance of milk once again, calling it an “essential item” that should abundantly supplement the diets of children. The mixed committee released several recommendations in pursuit of approaches to nutrition on the national level. One of these recommendations was for states to establish organizations working to investigate population nutrition; these organizations would also be responsible for working with the state authorities to produce national nutrition policies that would dictate agricultural practices and the importation of necessary consumables (League of Nations 1936). The creation of these regulating bodies was one aspect of the mixed committee’s approach to solving the “problem of nutrition.”

21

Malleable Bodies

447

As an affiliated organization of the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization (ILO) was also deeply committed to tackling this issue. More specifically, as Eric Carter has shown, the ILO was concerned with integrating labor and health, by addressing workplace safety, worker health, and worker security (Carter 2018). The Director of the ILO, quoted in W. R. Aykroyd’s (1936) article “Nutrition, International and National,” wrote in his report on this Nineteenth Session of the International Labour Conference (ILC) that “the cares of the American, Argentine, Australian, Canadian or Eastern European farmer would be conjured away if the urban population of Europe and America could eat even a little more bread, butter and meat per head” (Aykroyd 1936). The “cares” of these farmers referenced in the Director’s statement referred to the inability of global farmers to afford the cost of “optimal” nutrition due to the push toward an integrated global economy and capitalism in the twentieth century that, along with World War I, resulted in economic depression. This was compounded with the technological progress that had resulted in the mechanization of farm equipment and consequent agrarian overproduction. Combined with increasing customs rates, overproduction reduced the value of agricultural commodities and the wages of rural farmers by extension (ILO 1935). The argument of the Director, then, was that if wealthier (urban) members of global populaces consumed more “protective food” products sold by the farmers, it would become possible for these farmers to make a living wage and similarly consume the foods that would result in their healthier existence. Farmers were consistently experiencing financial precarity beyond the borders of the countries mentioned by the Director; mechanization was creating surplus in national markets around the world, stimulating competition with which small rural farms struggled to keep pace. For example, Jeffrey Pilcher notes that in Mexico, between 1920 and 1943 the introduction of hybrid seeds, pesticides, and other farming technologies “doubled the production of Mexican corn and quadrupled that of wheat,” but only for the affluent commercial farms that could afford them. The produce of these commercial establishments was then favored by bureaucrats over that of the rural farmers (Pilcher 2005). The official report from the Nineteenth Session of the International Labour Conference (ILC) shows that, consistent with both the argument of the Director and national patterns documented by states themselves, farmers and agricultural laborers were suffering in the 1930s, even as they were generating a surplus of produce. Sociologist Neil Fligstein has argued that the capitalist mechanization of agriculture during the Great Depression, which was made possible (in the United States of America, at least) through government subsidies designed to help farmers, resulted in the displacement of agricultural laborers, as their work was no longer the most efficient method of production (Fligstein 1983). Governments outside of the United States similarly attempted to bolster the production of small rural farms in an effort to reinforce urban industrialization. For example, Pilcher writes about the Mexican government’s grants to urban farmers, in the form of communal land, which were intended to grow their farms into commercial agricultural operations (Pilcher 2005). Meanwhile, the Government Delegate from Australia told the ILC gathering that “many of our unemployed community are denied an adequate supply

448

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

of the very foodstuffs the superabundance of which is creating the farmers’ problem” (ILO 1935). Janet Poppendieck has highlighted that “this contrast of overproduction and underconsumption” was referred to by various organizations in the 1930s as “the paradox of want amid plenty” and had especially troubling implications in agricultural contexts (Poppendieck 2014). Simultaneously, the farmers themselves had, according to the Workers’ Delegate from Japan, “become the victims of modern capitalism” (ILO 1935). Hunger had not been conquered, but America was quickly becoming a “modern” urban society regardless, as men working on rural farms were replaced by machines (Fligstein 1983). This reifies the assertion made by Stefan Pohl-Valero that the mechanization of agrarian work (in this case in Colombia) “helped to denaturalize the population’s power to do work and at the same time to naturalize the ideal of an industrialized society governed by an ethic of energycentric productivism” (Pohl-Valero 2014). From the perspectives on nutrition put forward by these two organizations, the paradox between the creation of an “optimal” human diet and the huge population experiencing malnourishment due to the global process of industrialization is evident. Given the nature of these international organizations, “optimal” nutrition is an especially interesting concept to consider, particularly because these organizations were transnational both in their audience and their member composition. For example, in The Problem of Nutrition, the mixed committee of the League of Nations indicated that organizations whose purpose it was to develop national nutrition policies existed in several countries, in line with the recommendations of the committee. At the time, members of the League included India (whose government was at the time considering establishing a Nutritional Advisory Board), Uruguay (National Committee for Rational Nutrition), and Mexico, the latter of which apparently had a national nutrition committee known as the Nutrition Research Institute at the time of publication (League of Nations 1936). It is unclear in this report if these organizations were founded in response to the recommendations of the mixed committee, but it is clear that international expectations of these bodies included the state regulation of foods consumed by their populaces in compliance with international “standards” (League of Nations 1936). Through its creation by a committee appointed by the League of Nations and its active pursuit of national policy, this report had the potential to globally impact lives and nutritional practices. It also provides valuable insight into the ways in which nutrition was understood less than a century ago. The members of the mixed committee believed that the nutrients to be gained from meat and animal by-products exceeded those of plants, despite the preference shown to plants in diets like the Bedouins’. The mixed committee made use of “modern” scientific knowledge when discussing nutrition, referring to various components of food such as proteins and sugars. For example, they specifically identified the “proteins of milk, eggs and glandular animal tissues (liver, kidney)” (League of Nations 1936) as being particularly valuable. They advised that every human should have a diet in which 50% of the protein they consume was produced from animals. Despite this “modern” approach, the remnants of eugenic ideals prevail in such narratives of optimal nutrition. Some scholars (including Rebecca Earle and Pohl-

21

Malleable Bodies

449

Valero) have shown that the history of nutrition and the development of diets is entangled with racism and colonization. Colonizers at the point of contact in America were deeply concerned about the possibility of becoming like the Indigenous peoples if they were to eat the Indigenous foods of the Americas. This fear prompted them to bring their own food from Europe back to their colonies, prioritizing the cultivation of wheat and animal products in particular (Earle 2010). “Indigenous” foods (racialized foods, condemned for making bodies “weak”), including corn, were meanwhile stigmatized and were used around the world primarily as rations for the working poor and “peasant” class (Warman 2003). This association made food not just a race issue but also a class issue (with the two often one and the same); food that was considered to be lacking in nutrition thus overcame the divide posed by the Atlantic. In the wealthy European imaginary of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, peasants around the world (who were often also people of color) consumed corn in great quantities, falling prey to its “inferior” nutritional capacity and becoming inferior in the process. In light of this context, the pursuit of organizations like the League of Nations and ILO, in cooperation with governments, to feed the hungry and often racialized working classes the food that they deemed to be optimal betrays an underlying history of assimilation. Iris Borowy has further argued that political structures like the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) reinforced global colonial rule through their cooperation with colonizing authorities (Borowy 2009). If food has the ability to sculpt and re-constitute bodies, suggesting that bodies themselves are malleable, requiring these populaces to consume foods that are alien to their traditions undermines their ability to self-determine. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte has written about the entanglement of food and culture for Indigenous peoples, in addition to explaining how authority over food systems is fundamental to the ability for these communities to self-determine (Whyte 2018). Christopher Crenner, meanwhile, has written about the implications for food having race-shaping consequences, namely, rendering the body, and particularly race, malleable (Crenner 2014). Similarly, the aforementioned commitment to the emancipation of peasants from their lands, and incorporation into the urban “modern” workforce by industrializing food production and conquering hunger, demonstrates another insidious approach to eugenics. Namely, one that uses capitalist logics to underpin oppressive colonial states, which prevents the self-determination of rural communities and racialized populaces alike. Identifying the diets of the working poor as lacking proper nutrition allowed international bodies and colonial governments to create policies centered around the “betterment” (or “improvement”) of the bodies of the working poor. This is, integrally, a project of eugenics; after all, as feminist technoscience scholar Michelle Murphy has written, eugenicists in the early twentieth century sought to “govern life and death toward breeding better racial futures – more fit, more pure, more evolved, more uplifted races” (Murphy 2017). Evidently, “better” nutrition was designed to make the working (and often racialized) poor become “better” as a function of this same eugenic itinerary – to work longer hours, more days a week, to be “stronger” and more like the European colonizers. Alexandra Minna Stern elaborates further on

450

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

the concept of “betterment” and how this term has been applied by eugenicists to racialized populations in her book Eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern America (Stern 2005). Further, the concept of betterment in this case is one that is inherently capitalist, because to become “better” in the conditions stipulated by these organizations and governments is to strive toward what PohlValero has called the “maximum performance of the human machine,” such that the economy can profit off of the labor of better-energized (poor) bodies (Pohl-Valero 2014). Energy, that which is gained from metabolizing food, is therefore of the utmost importance to questions surrounding nutrition, because it is central to the project of “generating more productive working subjects within the framework of a capitalist economy” (Pohl-Valero 2014). However, the growth of knowledge related to metabolism and energy has been fraught with racist perspectives that have resulted in skewed, inherently problematic data. Historian Joel Vargas Dominguez has written of what he calls “racial metabolism,” which is the product of the work of scholars affiliated with the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) during the 1920s and 1930s. In the study of metabolism, the “normal” metabolism was the white one, a standard against which all other metabolisms were compared. The CIW scholars found that the “mulatto” (mixed-race, usually Caucasian and Black) group in Jamaica had a lower metabolic rate, which was used as an argument against “race-mixing,” one that was clearly eugenic in nature (Vargas Domínguez 2015; Kühl 2013). Stefan Kühl explains in his book that the CIW scientists found that some “half-breeds” had good results in this study, but they realized that “it would be more sensible to take the precautionary measure of making difficult any form of race mixing” (Kühl 2013). In contrast, these American scientists found that the Maya people of the Yucatán had a higher metabolic rate than Caucasians. Despite this result, the American researchers encouraged the Maya to change their diets, with CIW scholars noting that they had begun to eat “better” as a result of the contact between the two groups. Vargas further points out that the CIW studies were done with little regard to outlying factors, such as variation in environment and age (Vargas Domínguez 2015). These results were used to reinforce biological arguments for race; while following their publication there was criticism from the field of psychology as to the methods of the study, Vargas writes that the physiological data gathered by the CIW workers did not receive criticism and continues to be a “valid” part of the international knowledge on basal metabolism (Vargas Domínguez 2015). The cases put forward in Vargas Dominguez’s article show that the field of nutrition, which is also representative of studies on energy and metabolism, is not one that prioritizes general “betterment,” but rather, “betterment” refers to the process of becoming more white. In Jamaica, this meant avoiding race-mixing; in the Yucatán, it meant adjusting the Maya diet to be more consistent with that of white Americans. Conquering hunger was thus an inherently racial process, because according to the data produced by the CIW, hunger, as an extension of energy, is produced differently in different races. Historian Nick Cullather has pointed out that the translation of food to numbers (the calorie) is to render food, once deeply significant to culture, a “material instrument of statecraft” (Cullather 2007). The

21

Malleable Bodies

451

calorie, through its evolution, became an important data point used by “modern” states to understand their populations and the resources at their disposal, becoming integral to everything from military operations to social standards of body image (Cullather 2007). Vargas Dominguez writes that with the translation of food to numbers, comes the translation of the body itself into numbers (Vargas Domínguez 2015). This process rendered racialized bodies quantitatively “abnormal,” requiring adjustment through nutrition to attain numerical whiteness. With the context provided by the scholarly background of concepts such as energy and metabolism, it becomes clear that the international standards of nutrition previously explored in this section were inherently saturated with race. These standards dictate what diets are most suitable for the production of energy, such that racialized populations will become less racial, reconstituted through their European diets until they become more like the “normal” white human. Alongside scientists, the racialization of food was aided by anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who operated on both a national and an international level. The CIW project in the Yucatán, for example, was aided by one local anthropologist in particular, Manuel Gamio, who shared an interest in archaeology and eugenics with the CIW scientists. Gamio’s support for the study helped to facilitate the research conducted by the American scientists on the Maya metabolism (Castañeda 2003). His work with nutrition continued when he became the director of the InterAmerican Indian Institute (Instituto Indigenista Interamericano/III) in 1942, at which point he inherited a project on diet that had already been approved. The purpose of this project was to canvas the “typical” Indigenous diets of Mexico and several other South American countries, so as to be able to “foster changes” in these diets (Giraudo 2012). While this particular project failed due to funding complications, attempts to alter the diets of Indigenous peoples would later find the necessary funds to be undertaken during Gamio’s tenure (Giraudo 2012). The process of “modernization” and its link to capitalist industrialization thus held complex implications for nutrition both on a global and a continental scale. To better illustrate this point let us now turn to Mexico.

The Diet of Mexico’s Indigenous People: Between Anthropology and Nutrition Well before the League of Nations established their nutritional standards, Mexican intellectuals were eagerly discussing possible ways in which the national population could be “bettered.” In the late-nineteenth century Mexican president Porfirio Diaz (1876–1910) and his cabinet leaned on scientific explanation to further social change. Influenced by French scholarship they embraced the belief that changes made in the lives of individuals could improve the quality of their descendants (Turda and Gillette 2014). Since the “inheritance of acquired characteristics” a key principle of Lamarckism meant that changes in living conditions and individual habits were sufficient to improve the quality of the population in the long term,

452

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

surveying food consumption became an attractive activity in which changes could lead to “betterment.” Pilcher’s seminal text (1998) “¡Que Vivan Los Tamales!” addresses the link between nutrition, identity and race thinking in México. His work creates a narrative arc, ranging from pre-Hispanic times to the present day, making particular emphasis on how the economic growth at the end of the nineteenth century led to a proliferation of publications and scientific guilds in diverse areas. As Sandra Aguilar Rodríguez (2019) noted, the intellectuals of the Porfiriato, particularly Francisco Bulnes, outlined the values and aspirations pursued by the nutritional policies of the twentieth century. A liberal journalist, Bulnes developed, for example, a theory of race based on diet. In it he claimed that racial hierarchies were directly related to the grain that groups had produced and consumed. He created three different categories: as a result of the nutritional benefits of wheat, Europeans were deemed superior to cornsocieties who in turn were thought to be of a better nature than those whose diets were largely based on rice (Bulnes 1899). On the basis of the supposedly mixed racial composition of the Mexican population, Bulnes’ theory suggested prescribing wheat to the Indigenous population in order to secure their rise in the racial order. Another example can be found in the thesis of Andrés Molina Enriquez, a lawyer who in 1908 also proposed that the evolutionary stages of different peoples were the result of the conditions of agricultural production. According to Molina Enriquez, societies perceived as advanced within Mexico had settled in a “Fundamental Breadbasket Area,” characterized by an excess of high-quality agricultural products, and which also happened to be the country’s central belt (Molina Enríquez 1984). This plentiful region produced so much that Molina Enriquez claimed that it was enough to make up for shortages in production in both the northern and southern parts of the country. Unlike Bulnes, Molina Enriquez did not subscribe to a racial hierarchy directly related to the production and consumption of different types of grain but instead to different forms of land ownership. In brief, his evolutionary pyramid had at its base nomadic populations who did not develop land law, followed by societies with communal land-ownership, and on the uppermost level, societies with laws protecting individual ownership of land. According to Molina Enriquez, the most advanced Indigenous societies, located in the Fundamental Breadbasket Area, were one step below the top of the pyramid. After the Spanish conquest in the first half of the sixteenth century, mestizaje, the mixture of European and Indigenous, became especially prevalent in this region. Molina Enriquez was convinced that of all the racial groups mestizos were particularly suited to inhabit all of Mexico. This theory, based on Herbert Spencer’s ideas of social Darwinism as well as Ernest Haeckel’s theories of the internal formative tendency, emphasized the central role of the environment in the conformation of human races. Taking these references but removing them from their associations with white supremacy, Molina Enriquez defended the mestizo race’s superiority (Basave Benítez 1992). Taking the aforementioned as a workable thesis, Molina Enríquez ventured an explanation on the agrarian problem in his book Los grandes problemas nacionales, published right

21

Malleable Bodies

453

before the Mexican Revolution. Thus, the legal and economic issue that collective land ownership of Indigenous people represented was turned into a social problem, whose solution lay in transforming the Indigenous into mestizos. A transformation that included better nutrition (Kourí 2002). As part of his research into race during and after the Mexican Revolution, Alan Knight (1992) argues that indigenism was adopted and advanced by revolutionary elites as a politically convenient way to further the national project. Consequently, “Indigenous” lumped together a vast sector of the population which, in the name of the Revolution, could be bettered. Paradoxically, post-revolutionary governments who proclaimed themselves to be a radical alternative to Porfirio Díaz’s administration, continued to define Indigenous people as a “problem” that hindered national progress. Modern “indigenismo” emerged from this discussion as a political ideology founded on the principle of asymmetric relationships in which one sector of the population develops and implements those measures aimed at improving society, while another, is subject to such measures. Indigenismo continues to exist as an intellectual and political current that focuses on the study of native populations while seeking the “improvement” and incorporation of Indigenous people into national life. In this way, the Indigenous population was also subject to the scrutiny of the mestizo. This would become a key concern of anthropologists. For instance, anthropologist Manuel Gamio, an archeologist at Mexico’s National Museum who completed his postgraduate studies with Franz Boas at Columbia University, was intimately familiar with Mexico’s majestic ruins and thus queried why the descendants of great civilizations now found themselves in deplorable conditions. The key issue was not to perceive them as an inferior race, he said, but rather acknowledge the impact of colonialism on their daily lives. As he emphasized, “The Indian has equal aptitudes for progress as the white; he is neither superior nor inferior to him” (Gamio 1916). Gamio thus became a champion of Mexican indigenismo. He insisted that a study of the Indigenous population was vital to their successful integration into the national project. In other words, anthropology could provide the needed knowledge to govern a heterogeneous country (Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Mexico) 1978). Collaborations between anthropology and the state quickly took shape. Gamio himself became director of the Interamerican Institute of the Indigenous and of the Department of Anthropology at the Secretary of Agriculture and Development. While in this role he tried to introduce soy beans as an alternative with which to enrich the diet of Indigenous groups. Gamio insisted on soybean consumption because he was convinced that the diet of Indigenous peoples did not satisfy their biological needs (Comas 1953). According to him, deficiency in the nutrition of Indigenous peoples was due to: first, a lack of variety in their foodstuffs, a diet based on corn, chiles, and beans; secondly, an imbalance of foods consumed (he claimed that corn in particular was eaten in excess), and, lastly, a lack of essential items such as meat, milk, bread, and eggs (Bertran-Vilà 2010). In Gamio’s view, modifying the eating habits of Indigenous people was a convenient way to better them. In fact, he stressed that Mexico’s native population had historically started much earlier. He proposed that although “there are neither

454

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

superior nor inferior races,” the setback and dire conditions experienced by the Indigenous population stemmed from more than 400 years of colonial rule. Thus, in order to improve and integrate Mexico’s Indigenous peoples into the larger population, its cultural imbalance but not the racial one should be corrected. It is difficult to grasp the thought about the races of Gamio, since at the time that he pronounced himself anti-racist, he was a member of the Mexican Society of Eugenics. The apparent contradiction could be explained in a position on the nature of races. The general consensus dictated that human variability was grouped into races. From that assumption, scholars could be divided into racists, those who considered a natural hierarchy between the races and antiracists, those who, like Gamio denounced the falsehood of that hierarchy. The integration Gamio envisioned would be achieved via Mexican institutions. There are two in particular that stood out, the National Indigenist Institute (INI) dependent on the presidential office and on the National Institute of Nutrition (INN), part of the Ministry of health. Among other issues, both institutions sought to improve and standardize Indigenous diets. Gamio’s approach was institutionalized with the 1948 founding of the National Indigenist Institute (INI). While previous indigenista organizations had focused on integrating the Indigenous population into civic and modern life, through land distribution and basic education, the INI instead organized its own programs to systematically study Indigenous populations (Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Mexico) 1978). On the other hand, the National Institute of Nutriology (INN), based in the National Food Commission sought “to obtain a nutritious, balanced, and healthy rations” for Mexicans (Vargas Domínguez 2019). The INN was launched in 1943 in Mexico City’s General Hospital. One year later its director, Doctor Francisco Miranda de Paula consolidated an alliance with the Rockefeller Foundation, which granted funding to investigate Mexican diets (Aguilar Rodríguez 2019). Regarding Indigenous food, the general consensus between the two institutions was that traditional food should be studied because it should be improved. Mexico’s INI was not detached from an international context, as seen through its ties with the Inter-American Indigenous Institute (in effect until 1960) and Mexican indigenistas anthropologists’ participation in UNESCO’s commissions on the racial issue (UNESCO 1969). However, INI’s approach to Indigenous groups led to mostly ethnographic descriptions of nutrition problems. The physician and anthropologist, Gonzálo Aguirre Beltrán, furthered Gamio’s explanation and blamed the mechanisms of oppression directed at Indigenous people to their closest relatives, the mestizos (which he called “ladinos”) for their setback. Therefore, fixing the so-called Indigenous problem implied changing local ways of interacting, be they political, economic but mainly ethnic, in large intercultural regions (Aguirre Beltrán 1967). This change was intended to assimilate the Indigenous populace into the national culture, a process for which Aguirre Beltrán provided the theoretical basis. Each Indigenista Coordination Centre had to be placed in the most remote regions, where the mechanism of oppression was strongest. This approach created a rural bureaucracy, and notably, made the urban Indigenous population invisible (Saldívar Tanaka 2008). Although both the INI and the National Institute of Nutriology expressed interest in studying and improving the Indigenous population’s dietary habits, they seldomly

21

Malleable Bodies

455

collaborated. They kept different institutional objectives: INI’s primary purpose was not nutrition research, and the INN’s primary objective was not the Indigenous population. These diverging approaches contributed to separate agendas that followed different tracks. Despite this tension, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán took some INN studies and used them to propose the assimilation of the Indigenous population into a national mestizo culture. In his book Intercultural Health Programs, initially published in 1955, Aguirre Beltrán referred to INN’s surveys on the Indigenous population and announced that dietary habits were being studied for the first time in Mexican history with scientific rigor. For Aguirre Beltrán, the results of this study were scientific evidence that reaffirmed Indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge about their diets. He argued that modern technology was now proving campesino’s logic to be true. This implied that “the substitution of traditional corn harvests for exotic harvests as wheat did not result in any real advantage” (Aguirre Beltrán 1994). Furthermore, he wrote that “the laboratory has shown that the assumed inferiority of the tortilla as compared to white bread is false” (Aguirre Beltrán 1994). He based this statement on bromatological, blood, and calorie analysis of the Indigenous population’s foods. This interpretation was in line with INI’s integral approach to communities. Traditional modes of production and nutrition were intrinsically linked to each other. Aguirre Beltrán based his views on his field experience in several regions but especially in the Tzeltal-Tzotzil area. There, he directed the first INI office in a rural area, which allowed him to delve into health issues in such regions. His diagnosis of the Indigenous problem highlighted the importance of health and demographic statistics in the Indigenous areas. He proposed a model for eating habits involving: ecological features such as natural resources and food production, biological factors focusing on the nutritional values of food, and a cultural area focusing on the symbolic value of food (Aguirre Beltrán 1994). Aguirre Beltrán’s model was in line with the goal of social medicine that advocated an integrative causal framework. At the international level this approach flourished during the interwar period, a delicate moment for the liberal political order. In those terms, social medicine attempted to promote “social peace” by studying social and economic-political structures (Carter 2018). In the study of the Mexican Indigenous population, ethnographic methods promoted by the INI drew strength from the observation of particularities. On the other hand, nutrition research was framed within a biomedical perspective characterized by an emphasis on laboratories. Various native foods were evaluated according to their nutritional composition, especially with respect to protein and minerals. Corn was one of the first foods to be scrutinized by the INN. Laboratory tests invited a reconsideration of its value, especially when combined with other products such as beans or chiles. Juan Pío Martínez (2013) pointed out that experts like Francisco de Paula Miranda, of the INN, and William Robinson, of the Rockefeller Foundation, agreed that tortillas had been wrongly devalued. However, they continued to recommend accompanying them with food of animal origins such as eggs, meat, and dairy products. Conversely, Aguirre Beltrán in the same text Intercultural Health Programs wrote “I am of the firm belief that the exceptional

456

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

quantities of proteins, minerals, and vitamins found in native foodstuffs offer the possibility of nourishing Mexicans without necessarily resorting to egg, meat, or dairy products” (Aguirre Beltrán 1994). A key example of the value of native nutrition was nixtamalizing corn. In this process, corn is boiled with lime, taken from the ash of the firewood. This treatment constitutes a source of calcium comparable to milk. Curiously, it was precisely this process which Alberto Pani targeted as the source of nutrition loss. In 1917 Pani explained that “the great loss of food value which corn suffers upon being transformed into dough or mass, for the making of tortillas or corn fritters, as many of the food constituents of this cereal are invariably lost and dissolved in the heating of water” (Pani 1917). Aguirre Beltrán (1994) signaled, however, that the problem of malnutrition was at its worst in cities’ marginal areas and was due not to traditional forms of cooking and eating but rather precisely to the abandonment of traditional eating habits. This loss was especially acute when linked to the economic precariousness of recently arrived rural migrants to urban spaces. The foods recommended by nutritionists, such as milk or meat, were too expensive to be adopted by the newly arrived while at the same time their traditional foods were deemed deficient and detrimental to their health. These new urban dwellers could have been an area of shared interest and cooperation between institutions but each research unit remained rigidly within their own focus: most of the INN’s resources were destined to Mexico City’s popular neighborhoods, precisely where rural Mexicans were arriving, while INI’s resources were mostly dedicated to rural areas. However, the rural-urban focus was only one of their differences. While in México, being mestizo was portrayed discursively “as the best of both worlds,” and European nutrition traditions were prioritized. Milk, for example, coming from societies with a cattle tradition, was established from international recommendations such as those authored by the ILO and League of Nations mentioned in the previous section. To increase milk consumption, the Lechería Nacional S.A. (National Dairy Co.) consortium was founded in 1946. Some inconveniences of its establishment were referred to by the medical paradigm, as Sandra Aguilar Rodríguez (2019) pointed out, that population genetics studies revealed many Mexicans to be lactose-intolerant. Despite these differing conclusions, the INN’s studies proved useful to Aguirre Beltrán as he used them to fiercely condemn a trend within nutritional studies as utterly obsolete: “The vulgar stereotype of a chronically malnourished aboriginal and their supposed states of physical and mental degeneration, including the resulting evolutionary backwardness of Indigenous communities has not stood up to scientific research” (Aguirre Beltrán 1994). In reality, the INN studies were far from demonstrating the impartiality of scientific research. For instance, in referring to the diets of the Indigenous Otomís of the Mezquital valleys, the group led by Anderson et al. (1946) described how: “. . . almost every conceivable plant, including many of the cacti, are used as foods. Many grow without cultivation during the rainy season, and most people would consider them as weeds. Similarly, a variety of worms and insects are also eaten with relish.” These descriptions echoed old European notions of uncivilized societies who would eat everything in their

21

Malleable Bodies

457

surroundings, apparently due to their inability to grasp the civilizational method par excellence, namely, agriculture. Indeed, research observations regularly emphasized surprise at the food intake of Indigenous people without pausing to reflect on the nutritional value of, say, insects or, in other instances, that a population might make dietary choices not through preference but rather out of extreme necessity (Aguilar Rodríguez 2019). While the indigenist and nutritionist agendas overlapped regarding the belief that Indigenous diet should be modified, they disagreed on how to achieve it. On the indigenist side, it was part of a political commitment, openly stated and aligned with the state structure. While on the side of the nutritionists, it was justified by rationalist criteria since food deficiencies were seen as an educational problem. Progress toward this goal was measured through standard calorie consumption levels combined with studies in the nutritional values of foodstuffs. Dietary habits became aligned with those who believed that the path to modernity required national populace homogeneity. Aguirre Beltrán’s contributions are considered fundamental to Medical Anthropology in Mexico and his proposal to assess the symbolic value of food is particularly esteemed. However, they cannot be separated from the racist scheme that guided indigenism. In order to understand the link between his perspective and a social engineering project, we need to consider the rupture between the government and several INI’s authorities in the 1960s. In her critical studies of the history of the INI, Emiko Saldivar-Tanaka explains that, in addition to the depletion of resources in the rural branches of the INI, many studies in the late 1960s argued that the emphasis on racial differences showed that “indigenismo” was a bourgeois strategy designed to separate the native populations from their true class interests. The Indigenistas, who had been celebrated as showing a relationship between academy and the state, were accused of doing what they themselves had attributed to the ladinos: promoting internal colonialism (Saldívar Tanaka 2008). Earlier criticisms led to an internal restructuring of the Institute. By presidential decree, INI was left in charge of the General Coordination of the National Plan for Depressed Areas and Marginalized Groups (COPLAMAR). The new organization grouped together, in addition to INI, ten other governmental entities dedicated to marginalized populations (Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Mexico) 1978). INI’s focus on the indigenous population gradually lost importance since economic criteria were prioritized over ethnicity. The central state-run organization dedicated to caring for nutrition also experienced its own transformation. In 1956 the National Institute of Nutrition was closed, and its research agenda to work on the Mexican diet was transferred to the Hospital of Nutritional Diseases. This institution expanded its objectives beyond food-related pathologies and changed its name to the National Institute of Nutrition. Joel Vargas Domínguez (2019) attributes this change to the restructuring of the Rockefeller Foundation’s international divisions. During this process, the usefulness of nutritional surveys was questioned, and resources were reallocated to seeds’ biochemical analysis. Later, the Nutritional Division of the National Institute of Nutrition, under Alfredo Chávez, reintroduced nutritional surveys with a strong emphasis on rural populations. These trends marked critical institutional orientations, many of which still prevail.

458

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

The International in the Regional: Balam Pereira and Coplamar Reports on Yucatan The above international and national views on nutrition and diet coalesced in a series of long-running surveys in Mexico. Yet as scholars remind us, food consumption was “contingent, cultural, and malleable, not physiological and rational” (Neswald 2017). In Mexico, as perceptions about the nation’s Indigenous populations shifted, so did international methods that measured food consumption and the aims and valuation of data. Furthermore, new understandings of, say, impaired protein absorption due to, for example, an intestinal worm infestation illustrated the complexity of tackling malnutrition in less developed nations (Ruxin 1996). By the 1970s nutrition was no longer a singular priority but rather “one of many instruments available for promoting development and health” (Ruxin 1996). Simultaneously, in the late 1960s and early 1970s declining international support for nutrition intervention programs was supplanted by concerns about high fertility rates and public health (Ruxin 1996). In fact, perceived as being ineffectual in promoting change, nutritionists gave way to health professionals as on-the-ground experts. Finally, the “nutrition problem” came to be understood as one of quantity (the ability to procure food) over one of quality. Given these shifts, not surprisingly it was observations of community health workers that led to a fuller understanding of the interplay between nutrition and health. This final section, a brief analysis of, first, the findings of Dr. Gilberto Balam Pereira, then director of social medicine of the small Indigenista center of Valladolid, Yucatán (1972–1975), and secondly the national Coplamar Food and Nutrition research, illustrate how echoes of long-established transnational measures and national aspirations for standardized food consumption found their way into both quantitative and qualitative analyses of rural Mexico.

The Balam Pereira Report Dr. Gilberto Balam Pereira, a young doctor trained in Mexico City returned to his native Yucatán in the 1970s to continue practicing medicine. As a rural doctor working out of an Indigenista center, he witnessed how the impact of Mexican class disparity was more visible on the bodies of the nation’s rural poor, especially the Indigenous population. It is unclear when he began publishing his regional health findings but nutrition is a persistent theme in his work. In the first few pages of a 1986 report on the health and eating habits of rural Mexicans from Yucatán, for example, he stresses the importance of diverse foods but adds ethnographic details which illustrate the challenging task of procuring adequate and nutritious food for some in rural Mexico. Unfamiliar with the region or local people, he commits several blunders as a newly arrived doctor. He writes, for example, that he chose a large, abandoned colonial home for his doctor’s office only later realizing “what colonization meant for the unfortunate indígenas.” Moreover, he was determined to rely on “wise and scientific practices of medicine and psychology” to combat local healing practices

21

Malleable Bodies

459

initially described by him as witchcraft. With time, however, he grows to respect local medical practices, becomes fluent in the regional dialect, and notes how the exploitive labor practice of the erstwhile hacienda system continued to thrive in the area’s deep-seated racism. While not an anthropologist his intimate connection with his patients and a clinical eye allow him to make broader observations that he relates back to health. This was not uncommon as young medical students fanned across rural Mexico (Soto Laveaga 2013). Describing the village where his doctor’s office once sat, Balam Pereira noted the multigenerational changes taking place in the village. Older men still wore colorful clothing though paired with baseball hats instead of the traditional sombrero, and while older women wore huipiles, younger girls sported modern fashions (Balam Pereira 1986). The biggest transformation, however, was in labor. Every Friday afternoon and evening young men returned by the busload. Working as “braceros,” in Cancún or Isla Mujeres where they were employed in “tourism or construction,” their numbers as high as 48% of the total village population, these men “tended to abandon the labor in the fields” (Balam Pereira 1986). As other scholars noted, there was a direct link between the loss of work in the fields and nutrition. Balam explained this shift in blunt terms: the continued “exploitation of the indígena.” With clear echoes of the Alma Ata Declaration, for Balam it became obvious that a researcher had to address national socioeconomic trends and their impact in remote villages to fully understand shifts in local food consumption. For instance, an indication of the decreased reliance on local farming was an increased dependence on maize sold in the INI distribution centers from “300 tons in 1972 to 5000 tons 2 years later” (Balam Pereira 1986). The young doctor emphasized that while land grabs were not common in the region, it was a different, systemic exploitation of agricultural peons. As he somberly outlined, the “countryside in Tekom [the village where he was stationed], as in other interethnic zones of low productivity, are far removed from capitalist plans” but they were nonetheless part of the economic system. The push to integrate Indigenous Mexicans into “la vida nacional” by pushing them to be a part of the larger economy of, in this case, local tourism did not result in the community’s or individual well-being. The rest of the report detailed a pathology of poverty “typical of the exploited classes.” Contrary to what was seen in Mexico a mere three decades earlier when nutrition among the Indigenous population was described by Gamio and Beltrán as needed for assimilation, by 1986 there was a clear causal link between entrenched exploitation, health, disease and its corollary malnutrition. While linking these was not new, national programming – and funding – certainly was. For a brief time before neo-liberal reforms altered this measure, some local doctors, such as Balam Pereira, urgently called out the continued abuse of native people. Put differently, rural diets, in particular staples which were no longer available and their nutritionally poor substitutes, were a direct way to illustrate how economic disparity manifested itself in the body of the population. In other words, it was no longer the poor, working class who was to blame but rather, doctors were calling out, it was the labor and social system. Balam Pereira’s three case studies of the 1986 report – traditional medicine, nutrition in Indigenous hostels (albergues), and rural migration – reflect a

460

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

countryside in economic transition. Of the mentioned case studies, the “Nutritional Study in Educational Hostels” might be the most damning. The study consisted of 248 Indigenous students from the surrounding areas of Valladolid, Yucatán which would compare and measure the “nutritional state” – diets, height and weight – compared to students in the capital Mérida. Studies on the nutritional state of campesino children in Yucatan were not novel. Foreign and domestic researchers had been measuring Maya bodies since the nineteenth century. In addition to medical surveys a 1943 lecture mentions a “series of anthropometric measurements, basal metabolism tests, nutritional studies, etc. [that] have been made on the Maya of northern Yucatán” (Morley 1943). But one study in particular, a 1959 one carried out by the National Institute of Nutrition revealed “grave protein deficiencies and avitaminosis” among the general population (Balam Pereira 1986). Twenty years later, in 1979, IMSS- Coplamar revealed the dramatic and ongoing malnutrition in the region, a line of which made it into Balam Pereiras’ report: “of 100 pregnant women in the Indigenous area, 80 suffered from anemia. . .” (Balam Pereira 1986). The 1986 study conducted by Balam and a colleague appeared relatively simple but provided a wealth of qualitative information. The researchers interviewed kitchen staff, analyzed menus of food provided to Indigenous children during the week, when they were in the boarding school, as well as documenting the food the children consumed during the weekend when they were home. This comparative research project also included students from a neighboring urban area. The second group of students were the sons and daughters of “principally businessmen, white collar professionals, and merchants, whose diet, they reported, regularly included all food groups needed for adequate development” and, consequently, a good “nutritional state.” The two urban schools selected, Colegio Peninsular, A.C. and Escuela Modelo, were both located in residential areas (Balam Pereira 1986). Not surprisingly, there were stark differences in the foods consumed by children living in neighboring communities yet separated by a corrosive economic system that disenfranchised a portion of them. Indigenous children at the boarding school ate one egg and a portion of meat once a week accompanied by mostly pasta, rice, beans, atole, and sweetened coffee, while at home they mainly consumed only tortillas and beans. This stark diet was intimately tied to the budget, which allowed $160 daily pesos/child. It is difficult to calculate the value of the peso for a specific month in 1986 since that was a dramatic year of crisis when the Mexican peso “plunged” to $800 pesos/dollar (Williams 1986). The effects of this starch-heavy, few fruits and vegetable diet was visible in height and weight, revealing a 20% height differential in most cases (Balam Pereira 1986). Most alarming for Balam Pereira, these findings were virtually identical to a study conducted in 1959 near the henequen zone in the municipality of Sudzal. In other words, more than 20 years of nutrition studies in Indigenous areas in Yucatán revealed little transformation in the population’s health and well-being. In his report, Balam Pereira explains that the numbers and tables for the 1959 student were based on the research of StuartStevenson (Balam Pereira 1986). As in 1986, researchers in 1959 found a 25% calorie-intake deficiency and 24% protein deficiency. Finally, a sobering statistic

21

Malleable Bodies

461

about the consequences of having little to no access to nutritious food in the area were the death rate numbers that came from Tekom. Malnutrition among children under 4 years of age was the third leading cause of death. In his concluding summary an exasperated Balam noted that nutritional data was not revealing something new, “we know what we have to do, what are the actual needs” (Balam Pereira 1986). But in spite of this knowledge, grounded in decades of research, comparative studies, and national and foreign expertise, “financial resources and often the will and the desire to act” were often lacking. This absence of coordination played out at a larger level as well. As Joshua Ruxin explained, the “core certainty about nutrition was that without improved co-ordination among the UN agencies, nutritional progress would remain beyond the grasp of the UN programmes” (Ruxin 1996). The 1980s nutritional surveys illuminated another kind of national health crisis: Mexico’s economic system. The rigid structures or, as Paul Farmer would later use to describe the situation in Haiti, the structural violence of poverty, maintained Indigenous campesinos tethered to a space with few opportunities for change. As Balam Pereira stressed, experts knew what needed to be done to ensure that rural Mexicans were adequately fed but little – beyond nutritional data collection surveys – had been done. Yet, for a brief moment in the late twentieth century, it seemed that expertise merged with will. In the late 1970s there was a shift in state policy, as the approach to Indigenous populations took on a different meaning. The driving policy was no longer “eradication of cultural difference” or assimilation as it had been in the 1930s but instead the focus turned to poverty (World Bank 2015). This shift to poverty alleviation was not unique to Mexico but in Mexico it took on a distinctive feature. Indeed the “discovery” of poverty – both rural and urban – seemed to be a global phenomenon. In the United States the initiative that came to be known as the War on Poverty encouraged policy makers and thinkers alike to rethink the “symptoms” of poverty and its corollaries. In addition to housing and health, nutrition would play a large role. This time, however, nutrition as it was measured by economists as well as anthropologists. In Mexico, this pushed for a rethinking of the countryside, this time as “marginal zones.” This new approach to rural areas, now recognized as “marginal,” warrants a brief mention for it influenced how lack of access to food and malnutrition were explained at a national level – at least for a short time. Fueled by the petroleum boom, late 1970s government-backed studies creatively examined societal problems from a Mexican perspective, often eschewing international parameters which, even reshaped, did not fit regional studies. The Commission for the Study of Marginal Zones or Coplamar devoted several years of research to four pressing social issues – housing, health, education, and food/nutrition. The goal was to think through societal problems from a more critical lens of a failed national economic project and not international blueprints or erstwhile domestic projects that racialized differences among rural Mexicans. Projects fostered rural development by turning away from centralized decision-making that often did not take into consideration peasant communities (Ewell 1986). As noted by others, at this time Indigenous communities were still seen as places in need of attention and

462

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

not as they would later be described with citizenship rights to health, shelter, food, education, dignity, and land. In addition to producing volumes of measurable data – consumption of fruits and vegetables, calorie intake, amount of protein per individual, etc. – the Coplamar project emphasized the rural-urban divide by zeroing in on data at the municipal level. This focus away from a national frame to a more local, indeed a regionalized approach, meant that what was considered an essential need (necesidades esenciales) when it came to food was defined at the district level. Focusing on the regional meant that projects would directly impact “agriculture, fisheries, and the food service industry,” of that area (Coplamar 1982). This had the potential to be transformative. There was not one single type of food that could provide needed nutrients but, ideally, those needs would be met by what the region provided. This was significant for it questioned the focus on numbers (i.e., calories 2750 cal and protein 80 g) and shifted it to the problem of distribution and the difficult access to food in general during economic downturns. To exemplify this, we can take one graph “Daily Consumption of Food Per Capita, Rural Level, Ranked by Monthly Family Income, 1975” whose breakdown (Coplamar 1982) revealed which foods were prioritized at different income levels and how these varied depending on rural settings. While typical measurements were still present (i.e., percentages of energy and proteins) real effort was made to parse the meaning of these numbers for a changing population – and emphasize the fluctuation that income changes would have on the “basic” pantry. This approximation to a family unit’s real consumption could serve as a useful and “valid tool for planning and programming” (Coplamar 1982). Coplamar’s initiatives while grounded in a Mexican experience were concurrent with a “flowering of health systems work as a field of international health” (Gorsky and Sirrs 2019). Often linked to Alma Ata’s 1978 call to support local, in-country health programming other scholars have shown that this strengthening of health services (later termed “systems”) manifested earlier (Gorsky and Sirrs 2019; Packard 2016). It was essential, as the dozens of tables appear to echo, to measure the response – what foods families chose to buy – in times of financial uncertainty. Coplamar’s many graphs appeared to highlight a constant truth: though families were aware of the caloric and energy value of certain foods they made strategic decisions that had little to do with their ethnicity or rural/urban domicile. After nearly 100 years of trying to mold better citizens though the food they ingested, the data produced by this government agency confirmed that it was the structural inequality and continued exploitation of marginalized bodies that stood in the way of better food choices.

Conclusion In the 1930s a League of Nations’ report recommended rigid percentages of foods, such as protein, as a solution to “better” global populations. Perceived as enlightened science these recommendations were not value neutral. Beyond workers in Europe and the northern hemisphere these measures were used to racialize populations

21

Malleable Bodies

463

through food consumption. Indeed, these proposals, and whom they targeted, reflected eugenic ideals of the time period and held echoes of imperial ideas about colonized bodies. From an international body many of these ideas found roots at the national scale. In Mexico, as this chapter showed, ideas about human diets, percentages of food consumption, and types of food needed to improve Mexicans were not new. Yet in the 1930s they took on a new urgency and were one of the many social measures to seek to improve Indigenous populations. Crucial to this endeavor was the role of social scientists, most notably anthropologists, who collaborated with the state to, among other changes, modify the eating habits of Mexico’s Indigenous populations. These ideas would be institutionalized with the creation of the INI and the INN and would become state policy. Lacking in this approach, however, was a nuanced understanding of regional food values whose measure was not centered in national or international institutions. Though the question of economics, labor, and food procurement had been part of these earlier discussions, it is not until mid-century that a serious discussion of structural poverty and its effects on nutrition come to the fore in a new re-imagining of rural Mexico as a marginal zone. This district-level approach to nutrition had the potential to transform the Yucatán, making space for pluralism in the way state-sanctioned agencies approached nutrition and preventative healthcare. Yet, the state began to experience an economic depression in the 1980s due to burgeoning global neoliberal policies that destabilized national and regional industries, leading to the ultimate defunding of the IMSS-Coplamar initiative.

References Aguilar Rodríguez S (2019) Raza y Alimentación En El México Del Siglo XX. Interdisciplina 7 (19):119. https://doi.org/10.22201/ceiich.24485705e.2019.19.70290 Aguirre Beltrán G (1967) Regiones de Refugio: El Desarrollo de La Comunidad y El Proceso Dominical En Mestizo América, 1st edn, FCE. Ediciones Especiales (Inter-American Institute) 46. Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, Mexico City Aguirre Beltrán G (1994) Obra antropológica. T. 5: Programas de salud en la situación intercultural, 1st edn. Univ. Veracruzana [u.a.], Xalapa Anderson W (2012) Racial hybridity, physical anthropology, and human biology in the colonial laboratories of the United States. Curr Anthropol 53(S5):S95–S107. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 662330 Anderson RK, Calvo J, Serrano G, Payne GC (1946) A study of the nutritional status and food habits of Otomi Indians in the Mezquital Valley of Mexico. Am J Public Health Nations Health 36(8):883–903 Aykroyd WR (1936) Nutrition, international and national. Curr Sci 4(9):639–642 Balam Pereira G (1986) Magia y realidad de los mayas de hoy: tres estudios y crónicas Mérida Yucatán. http://www.bibliotecavirtualdeyucatan.com.mx Basave Benítez AF (1992) México mestizo: análisis del nacionalismo mexicano en torno a la mestizofilia. Fondo de Cultura Económica, México City. http://libroselectronicos.cervantes.es/? id¼00031134 Bertran-Vilà M (2010) Acercamiento Antropológico de La Alimentación y Salud En México. Physis: Rev Saúde Coletiva 20(2):387–411. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0103-7331201 0000200004

464

G. Soto Laveaga et al.

Borowy I (2009) Coming to terms with world health: the League of Nations Health Organisation 1921–1946. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main/New York Bulnes F (1899) El porvenir de las naciones hispano americanas ante las conquistas recientes de Europa y los Estados Unidos. Imprenta de Mariano Nava, México City Carter ED (2018) Social medicine and international expert networks in Latin America, 1930–1945. Glob Public Health 14(6–7):791–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2017.1418902 Castañeda QE (2003) Stocking’s historiography of influence: the “story” of Boas, Gamio and Redfield at the cross-“road to light”. Crit Anthropol 23(3):235–263 Comas J (1953) El Régimen Alimenticio y El Mejoramiento Indígena. In: Sobre E (ed) Indigenismo. Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, México City, pp 10–18 Coplamar (ed) (1982) Necesidades esenciales en México. 1: Alimentación. Economía y demografía, 1st edn. Siglo XXI, México City Crenner C (2014) Race and laboratory norms: the critical insights of Julian Herman Lewis (1891–1989). Isis 105(3):477–507. https://doi.org/10.1086/678168 Cullather N (2007) The foreign policy of the calorie. Am Hist Rev 112(2):337–364 Earle R (2010) “If you eat their food. . .”: diets and bodies in early colonial Spanish America. Am Hist Rev 115(3):688–713 Eric D, Carter (2019) Social medicine and international expert networks in Latin America 1930–1945. Glob Public Health 14(6–7):791–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2017.1418902 Ewell PT (1986) Intensification of peasant agriculture in Yucatan. Department of Agricultural Economics, New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. http://publications. dyson.cornell.edu/research/researchpdf/rb/1984/Cornell-Dyson-rb8404.pdf Fligstein N (1983) The transformation of Southern agriculture and the migration of Blacks and Whites, 1930–1940. Int Migr Rev 17(2):268–290 Gamio M (1916) Forjando patria (pro nacionalismo) por Manuel Gamio. Porrúa Hermanos, México City. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015027975575 Giraudo L (2012) Neither “scientific” nor “colonialist”: the ambiguous course of Inter-American Indigenismo in the 1940s. Lat Am Perspect 39(5):12–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0094582X12447275 Gorsky M, Sirrs C (2019) From “planning” to “systems analysis”: health services strengthening at the World Health Organisation, 1952–1975. Dynamis 39(1):205–233. https://doi.org/10.30827/ dynamis.v39i1.8672 Instituto Nacional Indigenista (Mexico), México Indígena (eds) (1978) INI, 30 Años Después: Revisión Crítica. Instituto Nacional Indigenista, México City International Labour Organization (1935) International Labour Conference – nineteenth session. Record of Proceedings. Geneva. https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/P/09616/09616(193519).pdf Knight A (1992) Racism, revolution and indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940. In: Graham R (ed) The idea of race in Latin America 1979–1940. University of Texas Press, Austin, pp 71–114 Kourí EH (2002) Interpreting the expropriation of Indian Pueblo lands in Porfirian Mexico: the unexamined legacies of Andrés Molina Enríquez. Hisp Am Hist Rev 82(1):69–117. https://doi. org/10.1215/00182168-82-1-69 Kühl S (2013) For the betterment of the race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10. 1057/9781137286123 League of Nations (1936) The problem of nutrition. League of Nations Publications, Geneva Lomnitz C (2000) Bordering on anthropology the dialectics of a national tradition in Mexico. Rev Synth 121(3–4):345–379. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02970494 Molina Enríquez A (1984) Los Grandes Problemas Nacionales. Centro de Estudios Históricos del Agrarismo en México, Mexico City Morley SG (1943) Archaeological investigations of the Carnegie institution of Washington in the Maya area of middle America, during the past twenty-eight years. Proc Am Philos Soc 86(2): 205–219 Murphy M (2017) The economization of life. Duke University Press, Durham/London Neswald E (2017) Nutritional knowledge between the lab and the field: the search for dietary norms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In: Neswald E, Smith DF, Thoms U (eds)

21

Malleable Bodies

465

Setting nutritional standards: theory, policies, practices, Rochester studies in medical history, vol 38. University of Rochester Press, Rochester Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO) (1969) Cuatro Declaraciones Sobre La Cuestión Racial. UNESCO, Paris Packard RM (2016) A history of global health: interventions into the lives of other peoples. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore Pani A (1917) Hygiene in Mexico: a study of sanitary and educational problems (Open collections program at Harvard University. Contagion) (trans: de Gogorza EL). G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York Pilcher JM (1998) ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the making of Mexican identity, 6th edn. University of New Mexico Press, Alburquerque Pilcher JM (2005) Industrial tortillas and folkloric Pepsi: the nutritional consequences of hybrid cuisines in Mexico. In: Watson JL, Caldwell ML (eds) The cultural politics of food and eating; a Reader. Blackwell, Malden, pp 235–250 Pío Martínez J (2013) La ciencia de la nutrición y el control social en México en la primera mitad del siglo XX. Relac Est Hist Soc 34(133):225–255 Pohl-Valero S (2014) “La Raza Entra Por La Boca”: energy, diet, and eugenics in Colombia, 1890–1940. Hisp Am Hist Rev 94(3):455–486 Poppendieck J (2014) Breadlines knee-deep in wheat: food assistance in the great depression. Updated and expanded edition. University of California Press, Berkeley World Bank Group (2015) Proyecto de Conservación de Cuencas Costeras en Ambientes Cambiantes, vol. 3. CONANP CONAFOR INE Fondo Mexicano para la Conservación de la Naturaleza A.C. World Bank Group, Washington, D.C. Accessed from https://documents1. worldbank.org/curated/en/893041468270640953/pdf/IPP6360V30SPAN00Box385460B00 PUBLIC0.pdf Rives R (1985) Reviewed work: Necesidades esenciales en México. Situación actual y perspectivas al año 2000. Alimentación by Coordinación General del Plan Nacional de Zonas Deprimidas y Grupos Marginados (COPLAMAR). Est Socio “Los Alimentos en la Sociedad: Aportes al Estudio Interdisciplinario de la Alimentación” 3(8):400–402 Ruxin JN (1996) Hunger, science and politics: FAO, WHO and UNICEF nutrition policies, 1945–1978. University of London, London Saldívar Tanaka E (2008) Prácticas Cotidianas Del Estado: Una Etnografía Del Indigenismo, 1st edn. Universidad Iberoamericana: Plaza y Valdés, México City Soto Laveaga G (2013) Seeing the countryside through medical eyes: social service reports in the making of a sickly nation. Endeavour 37(1):29–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2012.11.004 Stern AM (2005) Eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern America, American crossroads 17. University of California Press, Berkeley Turda M, Gillette A (2014) Latin eugenics in comparative perspective. Bloomsbury Academic, London Vargas Domínguez J (2015) El Metabolismo Racial: Estudios Eugenésicos En Jamaica y Yucatán Entre 1920 y 1940. Ciencias de La Salud 13(especial):85–103. https://doi.org/10.12804/ revsalud13.especial.2015.06 Vargas Domínguez J (2019) El Auge y Declive Del Instituto Nacional de Nutriología de México y su Proyecto de Nutrición Social de 1943 a 1956. Hist Mex 69(2):511. https://doi.org/10.24201/ hm.v69i2.3973 Vernon J (2007) Hunger: a modern history. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, London Warman A (2003) Corn & capitalism: how a botanical bastard grew to global dominance. Latin America in translation: En Traducción/Em Tradução. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Whyte KP (2018) Food sovereignty, justice and indigenous peoples: an essay on settler colonialism and collective continuance. In: Barnhill A, Doggett T, Egan A (eds) Oxford handbook of food ethics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp 345–366 Williams D (1986) Mexican peso plunges past 800 per dollar in near-panic selling. Los Angeles Times, 9 June 1986. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-06-09-fi-10340-story.html Zazueta MdP (2011) Milk against poverty: nutrition and the politics of consumption in twentiethcentury Mexico. PhD, Columbia University, New York

Bodies, Environments, and Race

22

Roots and Branches of Eugenic Nationalism in the Long Twentieth Century Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Race, Biopolitics, and the Biocultural Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beginnings: Stepan on Eugenics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconsidering Latin Eugenics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mestizaje of Hard and Soft Eugenics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Changing Constitutions: Tonics, Medicines, Diets, Exercise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenges Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

468 470 471 473 475 479 482 483 483

Abstract

For at least 20 years, scholars of Latin America have argued that ideas about culture and environment have been critical components of racial ideologies and racism. In so doing, they have complicated histories of science that, based on US experiences, portrayed race as grounded primarily (or only) in ideas regarding inheritance, persistence, biology, genes, and/or the body. Yet in foregrounding the cultural components of racism, historians have evaded deeper consideration of how biological thinking and ideas about the body did shape race in Latin America. That has started to change, as Latin Americanist work in the history of science, environment, and medicine has proliferated. Scholars are now looking not just at how biology has shaped racial formulations but also at how ideas about nature and nurture – biology and culture – have combined. This new work is showing that scientists often characterized racialized bodies and biological processes as malleable and capable of being transformed either by intrinsic biological mechanisms (hormonal, genetic, anatomic, or nervous) or by external social or K. A. Rosemblatt (*) Department of History, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_31

467

468

K. A. Rosemblatt

natural environments (housing, running water, climates, animals, plants, or soils). It is also demonstrating that environmental determinisms and ideas about persistence coexisted with views of racialized bodies as both changing and shaped by contingent processes. Together, these insights are making historians of science more cognizant of how biology and culture have been entangled with each other, and with the nonhuman material world.

Introduction For at least 20 years, scholars of Latin America have argued that ideas about culture and environment have been critical components of racial ideologies and racism. In so doing, they have complicated histories of science that, based on US experiences, have characterized race as grounded primarily (or only) in ideas regarding inheritance, persistence, biology, genes, or the body. Yet in foregrounding the cultural components of racism, historians have evaded a deeper consideration of how biological thinking and ideas about the body did shape race in Latin America. That is starting to change as Latin Americanist work in the history of science, environment, and medicine has proliferated. We are seeing more exploration of the panoply of ideas regarding biology and the body. Scholars of Latin America are looking not just at how biology has shaped racial formulations but also at how ideas about nature and nurture – biology and culture – have combined. This new Latin Americanist scholarship is showing that biology has not always been viewed as inherited, immutable, or starkly defined. Scientists and physicians often saw racialized bodies and biological processes as malleable, capable of being transformed by either intrinsic biological mechanisms (hormonal, genetic, anatomic, or nervous) or by external social or natural environments (housing, running water, climates, animals, plants, or soils). At the same time, scientists at times figured culture and environment as shaped by inheritance and hard to change. Forms of cultural and environmental determinism often coexisted with views of racialized bodies as shaped by contingent and even haphazard processes. Together, these insights have made scholars more cognizant of how human biology and culture have been entangled with each other, and with the nonhuman material world. Historians have long argued that racial concepts have varied across time and from place to place. We are now deepening our understanding of their ubiquity and promiscuity by showing that racism has drawn in a variety of ways and in a variety of combinations on ideas about religion; soils and climates; urban and rural landscapes; genotypes; phenotypes; natural and social environments; gender; upbringing; inheritance; diets; exercise; and culture. Scientists and others have also drawn on ideas about economic and cultural evolution, progress, civilization, or development – the terminology has changed but the notion of an upward trajectory has not – to catalogue people of Amerindian, Asian, and African descent as backward and racially inferior. The imbrication of racial concepts in a wide range of sociopolitical and economic arrangements is one reason that combatting racism has been so difficult.

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

469

This chapter tracks concern with race, bodies, and biopolitics during the long twentieth century. It focuses on eugenics, the applied science of inheritance, during its heyday from the late nineteenth century through the end of World War II. During this period, scientific racism flourished alongside imperial expansion, industrial capitalism, and the efforts of states to create healthier, more robust, and efficient citizenries. A set of biopolitical experts emerged to manage these processes. They deployed a panoply of methods drawn from anthropology, sociology, psychology, social work, education, criminology, demography, economics, agronomy, engineering, and the law, as well as medicine, physiology, anatomy, biology, and chemistry. Because formal training in most of these fields was still in its early stages during the first half of twentieth century, these men and women of science drew easily on insights from a variety of fields. Eugenicists deployed a biopolitical vocabulary that linked poverty, which they often characterized as a biological and economic inheritance, disability, debility, and race. Eugenicists who sought to fortify their national racial stock saw health, civilization, economic productivity, and whiteness as advancing in lockstep. They viewed people of African or Indigenous descent as slow, weak, or thick-headed because of their habits; because of the degradations and degenerations of poverty; or because of their embodied constitutions. Racial uplift therefore implied rooting out of what we would today label disabilities caused by ill-health, and eliminating forms of ill-health caused by social conditions of poverty. Nineteenth- and twentiethcentury thinkers often mixed race and class (Alvarez Peláez 1988, 40–41), and eugenicists worried as much about uplifting urban working-class communities as they did about addressing the alleged backwardness of the Indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples that historians today more commonly define as “races.” “Raza chilena,” could be a synonym for the working pueblo (Rosemblatt 2000, 41). In Mexico, sociologist José Iturriaga suggested that the harmonious mixing of Spanish and Indigenous peoples would lead to the creation of a homogeneous mestizo Mexican middle class (cited in Rosemblatt 2009, 616). Because even discredited ideas reemerged, transformed, in new contexts, this chapter looks not only at the heyday of eugenics proper but also at its roots and branches. For instance, the Hippocratic view that bodies were molded by climates and landscapes, though largely discarded by the twentieth century, continued to influence notions regarding the characters of national or local populations. And while eugenics declined in popularity in the aftermath of Nazi racism, it cast a long shadow over the post-World War II era, shaping, for instance, birth control campaigns (Necochea López 2014, Pieper Mooney 2014) as well as post-war policies around healthcare, population, biological reproduction, and economic development. Even more recently, the remnants of eugenic nationalism can be seen in the coerced sterilization of Indigenous people in Peru and Mexico (Ewig 2006; Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida 2015). While centering the long history of eugenics, this chapter does not consider works dealing with intelligence and the psyche. These topics deserve separate and extended consideration, as does the vast literature on the history of medicine in Latin America. Nor does this essay dwell on the circulation of knowledge, though it shares with that

470

K. A. Rosemblatt

literature the impulse to replace origin stories focused on the inventions of great men with stories regarding the local appropriations, applications, and adaptations of ideas (Carter 2019; Cueto 1994; McCook 2013; Pernet 2013; Soto Laveaga 2018).

Race, Biopolitics, and the Biocultural Body To track the perceived effects of natural and sociocultural environments on the body, this essay builds from the work of Abril Saldaña-Tejeda and Peter Wade (2018), who use the term biocultural body (see also Wade 2017; López Beltrán and García Deister 2013; Pohl-Valero 2014). Understanding bodies as biocultural entails first disentangling the diverse formulations of biology and of culture that have grounded racial thinking and then looking at how various, changing ideas about biology and culture have combined in practice. Wade (2002) has noted that although the terms body, inheritance, biology, genes, nature, and blood are often used interchangeably to reference the embodied nature of race, each term has had its own specificity. Human biology has referred to genes, bones, hormones and other endocrine functions, along with other embodied characteristics and biological proclivities. Ideas about genes and/or blood as carriers of inheritance emerged at specific historical moments. Furthermore, human biology has been only one part of nature. Similarly, the term culture can refer to the arts, folklore, kinship, foodways, exercise, work habits, childrearing, education, sexual and reproductive choices, religion, or economic conditions, among many other facets of social life. Just as important, experts have not necessarily viewed biological processes as existing outside of, or separate from, culture. Biological inheritance depends on reproductive choices. According to Darwinian evolutionary theory, natural environments select for bodily traits, yet it is equally true that humans can shape those environments. Genes may or may not affect bodies in ways that are visible. The soma can be modified in many ways, from hair dye and plastic surgery to food choices, and what we perceive or don’t perceive is shaped by culturally determined ways of sensing. Epigenetics suggests that contingent environmental factors can shape genes. We can inherit cultures, languages, habits, customs, objects, or wealth. As Saldaña-Tejeda and Wade note: “Race is a biocultural construct in which biology and culture form intertwined strands, sometimes separable, sometimes fused, but always co-present, even when ‘cultural racism’ apparently reigns” (2734–35). Of course, not all racial concepts weigh biological or cultural factors in the same way. Certain formulations tilt more in one direction or the other. The task for historians and social scientists, then, is to track which notions, separately or together, are being invoked in which contexts and why. How do they undermine or reaffirm racism? The extent to which any of these concepts are invoked in deterministic fashion – implying characteristics and social arrangements that are hard to change – is important as well, though it would be wrong to assume that determinisms always imply subordination. In certain situations, seeing same-sex desire or a propensity to gain weight as biologically determined, natural, God-given, or structural may be preferable, politically, to characterizing it as the result of an individual choice.

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

471

Saldaña-Tejeda and Wade illustrate their biocultural approaches to race through an analysis of current-day scientific and medical thinking about diabetes in Mexico, thinking that, they note, shapes the forms of prevention and treatment. According to Saldaña-Tejeda and Wade, many scientists and physicians exploring the high prevalence of obesity and diabetes in Mexico draw from a genetically determinist repertoire. In so doing, researchers and practitioners combine a focus on genes with prior forms of race thinking, including the well-established view that Indigenous people (and their mestizo descendants) are well-defined groups possessing distinct racial characteristics derived from a common origin. Efforts to find specific genes related to obesity rely on first defining the indo-mestizo population to be studied, an effort that exceeds strictly genetic or biological criteria. Furthermore, medical analyses of diabetes build from ideas about culture that are themselves inflected by race, notably the view that Mexicans have inherited dietary habits that contribute to disease. Drawing from a view of indigeneity as pre- or non-modern, scientists have argued that the biological makeup of Indigenous people and their descendants is incompatible with a modern world in which there is abundant access to food. The new language of epigenetics has also created room for cultural and environmental explanations within a genetic model with often vague but biologized lines of determination. Scientists have thereby avoided forms of hard genetic determinism but not forms of racialization that pathologize certain populations. New questions emerge if, like Saldaña-Tejeda and Wade, we focus on how diverse ideas regarding the effects of biology and culture on bodies have buttressed or undermined racism: How has human biology, and especially the intrinsic factors shaping the form and functioning of bodies, figured into scientific accounts of individual health, racial constitutions, and national well-being and how are these elements related? To what extent have scientists and policymakers seen the body as plastic? How have external factors shaping bodies, such as natural and social environments, figured into their accounts? How have scientists formulated the relation of bodies to environments? How have they evaluated these differing factors in addressing race and racism? What role do changes in the natural or built environment – climate and soils, housing and running water among others – play? What about education or changes in habits and customs? Exercise or rest? As historians have cast aside the view that discussions of the body are necessarily determinist, they have begun to delve more deeply into where, when, and how scientists have figured the human body as more or less plastic, or as responding to external influences in various ways. We are now recognizing that scientific experts combined – often eclectically – a variety of views regarding the ability of nature, biology, and culture to change bodies; to correct, if not erase, deviations from national ideals; and to produce better citizens.

Beginnings: Stepan on Eugenics To address these questions, Nancy Stepan’s “The Hour of Eugenics” (1996) is an obligatory starting point (see Rodriguez and Zulawski 2011 on Stepan’s impact). Stepan’s book made at least three major interventions. First, it underscored how

472

K. A. Rosemblatt

science and medicine shaped nationalist assertions of Latin American countries as mestizo racial democracies. By showing the relation of science to ideas about mestizaje that were of longstanding interest to historians of Latin America, Stepan established the relevance of the history of science for existing debates regarding local forms of racism in the region. Specifically, Stepan’s work dovetailed with a revisionist rejection of the view that racism was less present or less intense in Latin America than it was in the United States – the myth of racial democracy (for a summary of the debate see Appelbaum et al. 2003). Stepan established that Latin American racism was different, but it was racism nonetheless. Second, and relatedly, it brought Latin America into broader discussions regarding race and science. At the time of the book’s publication, the existing, US- and Euro-centric historical narratives regarding race emphasized the shift toward a deterministic view of inheritance in the first two decades of the twentieth century. August Weismann’s theories regarding the existence of a germ plasm through which traits were passed from one generation to the next, along with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws, helped discredit those evolutionary theories that characterized inheritance as responding to external social and natural environments, including neo-Lamarckian theories. Yet according to Stepan, Latin American scientists and policymakers never embraced Mendelian theories of inheritance to the exclusion of other evolutionary viewpoints, and they continued to deploy neo-Lamarckian theories that saw environments as directly shaping bodies and producing heritable traits. As a result, Latin American eugenicists focused on the effects on bodies of social as well as natural environments. They promoted puericulture, sanitation, hygiene, and other interventions into physical environments. There was a seeming affinity between the fluidity that mestizaje implied and the malleable bodies implied by neo-Lamarckianism, with its openness to environmental and cultural determination. Stepan both constructed and challenged a division between northern and southern eugenics. In her view, Latin America’s softer, preventive eugenics was distinct from the hard eugenics of Charles Davenport in the United States or of the Nazis in Germany, but it was still eugenics. This insight was sustained by scholarship on those European countries where softer forms of eugenics prevailed (Turda and Gillette 2014). Stepan paradoxically argued that Latin America was similar to the United States in harboring racism, despite being mixed, but she reaffirmed Latin America’s divergence from the more stringent forms of racism grounded in Mendelianism. She suggested furthermore that Latin American eugenicists could combine seemingly incompatible Mendelian and neo-Lamarckian explanations. Stepan also maintained that “Latin” eugenics was compatible with the type of pessimistic and racist thinking more prevalent among “Anglo-Saxon” scientists. At times experts embraced the impact of environment while viewing their own local environments as promoting degeneration; at times they stressed the futility of interventions that could not correct more fundamental genetic defects. This recognition of eclecticism was a third major contribution of Stepan’s book, though this insight was somewhat submerged by Stepan’s insistence, in her last chapter, on antiUS, anti-Mendelian positions taken by Latin Americans in Pan-American conferences.

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

473

Reconsidering Latin Eugenics In sum, Stepan’s book encouraged historians of science to look at racial science in a more global, less Eurocentric way and to recognize its diversity, but the book also reaffirmed differences between the reform-minded positive Latin eugenics and the Anglo-Saxon Mendelian eugenics. Subsequent scholarship has built from Stepan’s insight regarding the eclecticism of Latin America’s racial science and from Stepan’s broadened view of what race is and how it works. During a first moment, historical scholarship extended and refined critiques of nationalist “myths” of racial democracy. Some work focused on how mapping distinct racial traditions – Latin/Anglo, Southern/Northern, more fluid/more rigid – onto geographies hardened the boundaries around nations or regions and ossified systems of racial classification. Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt (2003) argued that ideas regarding distinct types of racial and eugenic thinking, along with ideas regarding racial democracy, recreated the border between North and South America rather than just describing it. Sarah Walsh’s (2018) work on Latin eugenics supplemented this viewpoint. Taking up debates regarding sterilization, which had been a key aspect of Stepan’s prior analysis, Walsh noted that many scholars and policymakers emphasized the lack of support for sterilization in Latin America precisely because that emphasis helped delimit a Catholic, Latin eugenics separate from the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon version. We are learning that Latin Americans were not as averse as we have thought to compulsory sterilization or to the Mendelian thinking that undergirded proposals for eugenic sterilization. And if we look beyond the flashpoint of eugenic sterilization to less dramatic practices, eugenicists North and South may appear to have shared more than has been acknowledged. The transnational turn in history, with its insights into the constructed nature of geographic divisions, helped spawn greater awareness of the relation between spatial divisions and race. This development in turn made it easier for scholars to see reformulated remnants of Lamarckian thinking in the United States and to glimpse Mendelianism among Latin American intellectuals, thereby nuancing their views of both Latin and Anglo-Saxon eugenics. For instance, de Souza (2016, 13) noted aspects of neo-Lamarckian thinking in the United States, observing that Franz Boas stressed the effects of environments on the bodies of immigrants and the plasticity of bodily forms. Other historians documented Latin Americans’ acceptance of hardline eugenics measures, including the eugenic sterilization law passed in Veracruz, Mexico, or the proposal for such a law debated in Chile in 1939 (Stern 2011; Sánchez Delgado 2017; Farías 2007). Even when not enacted, sterilization policies were widely discussed by experts nationally and taken up by international congresses (Alvarez Peláez 1988, 49–53; Suárez y López Guazo 2005, 99–100; Reggiani 2010, 304–7; Stepan 1996, 178–88). And regardless of official policy, some physicians sterilized patients they considered “unfit.” They did not always secure consent (Eraso 2007). Indeed, at least some Argentines, Chileans, and Cubans aligned themselves with German fascist racism or the hardline US eugenics propounded by Davenport and Harry Laughlin. Immigrant physicians and scientists provided an easy conduit for

474

K. A. Rosemblatt

the racist science developed in Europe, as did Latin American scientists’ visits abroad. The Italian Nicola Pende visited Argentina in 1930 and 1931 and his countryman Corrado Gini traveled to Mexico around the same time. Both supported Benito Mussolini’s government. Although neither had a fully determinist notion of racial inheritance, they did seek to root out allegedly inferior racial attributes. Their Latin American allies did not question this objective. Other Latin American men of science supported even more hardline, determinist US and European thinkers. Some Argentine and Chilean physicians and scientists of German heritage boasted an affinity with Hitler’s Germany. Cubans, Mexicans, Chileans, and Argentines read and corresponded with Paul Popenoe and Charles Davenport of the United States who relied on similarly racist, hereditarian arguments rooted in biology (Leyton and Sánchez Delgado 2014; Reggiani 2010; Sánchez Delgado 2016; on Popenoe, Sánchez Delgado 2018, 124; Vallejo 2007). Domingo Ramos of Cuba worked with Davenport to advance hardline eugenic measures in Pan-American fora (Alvarez Peláez 1988, 59n42; Turda and Gillette 2014, 131–32). Historians are also confirming Stepan’s insight that the combination of Mendelianism and Weismannianism that grounded hardline eugenics and calls for eugenic sterilization were present in Latin America. The class notes of the Italianborn Juan (née Giovanni) Noé, who was trained at the University of Rome and served as professor at the University of Chile School of Medicine, show that as early as 1913, Noé’s students learned the theories of Mendel, Weismann, and Hugo de Vries. By 1930, students in his course on genetics were hearing about the latest advances of Davenport and his Eugenics Record Office (Sánchez Delgado 2016). Likewise, the Brazilian physical anthropologist Edgard Roquette-Pinto was a committed Mendelian, who embraced Davenport’s work, even while rejecting the US scientist’s conclusion that mixed races were unbalanced (de Souza 2016). Using the theories of Weismann and de Vries, Noé advocated for policies based on biologically determinist theories of racial inheritance. Other Latin American scientists argued similarly (Stern 2011, Sánchez Delgado 2016, 61). Noé proposed requiring Chileans to use identification cards that recorded family heritage (Sánchez Delgado 2016, 67), and throughout Latin America prenuptial certificates were popular (González Soriano and López Beltrán 2009, 92; Reggiani 2010, 304; Sánchez Delgado 2018, 123). In Argentina, Alfredo Verano, who founded Argentina’s Liga de Profilaxis Social in 1921, warned in 1929 that medicine itself contributed to degeneration by allowing defective individuals to reproduce. Verano was a racial pessimist. He maintained that because medicine sought “to protect and conserve degenerates who cause grave dangers and are a terrible burden to those who are healthy,” Argentina faced a grim future (cited in Biernat 2005; on the Liga see also Vallejo and Miranda 2004). Proponents of hardline eugenic measures recognized that humanitarian sentiments made broad sterilization laws unacceptable to most legislators and the population at large. They responded by putting forward what they saw as a more palatable suggestion: the compulsory sterilization of perverts and criminals who they said posed the most direct threat to society. “We can harmonize our human feelings of respect for the individual,” wrote Noé, “with our social interests in cases of perverse

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

475

lineages or of criminals possessing well-known characteristics” (Sánchez Delgado 2016, 67). Mexican physicians who attended the Primer Congreso Nacional del Niño (First National Child Congress) in 1921 made similar proposals regarding the sterilization of those they viewed as abnormal – although other conference participants challenged their views (Rosemblatt 2018).

The Mestizaje of Hard and Soft Eugenics These more hardline positions coexisted harmoniously with the softer neo-Lamarckianism of social reformers who sought to ameliorate poverty and degeneration by intervening in social and natural environments. In other words, support for environmental interventions did not preclude support for eugenic sterilization and other hardline measures. The socialist Adalberto Tejeda of Veracruz, Mexico, was a case in point as was the Argentine Victor Delfino. Delfino, who attended the 1912 eugenics congress in London and founded the Asociación Argentina de Eugenesia in 1918, favored preventive hygiene and sought to remedy poverty. He argued for social leveling but believed that measures aimed at reducing economic inequality could retard the success of the fittest individuals and allow mediocre people to prosper. Marriage decisions, he argued, should not be determined by social conventions or economic considerations but instead seek to strengthen the Argentine national race. To improve the national racial stock, Delfino favored negative as well as positive measures. He advocated studies of the effects on future generations of “inheritance and selection applied to the human species,” along with “the influence of economic resources, economic status, legislation, and a variety of environments” (Vallejo 2007; Ortiz Rangel 2016; citations from Biernat 2005, n.p.). In short, scientists and politicians inclined toward environmentalism held determinist views as well, and they often stressed the lasting effects of habits and environments on bodies. Many characterized European environments as healthy and gave pessimistic assessments of Latin American milieus, especially urban milieus, which they saw as causing illness and demographic decline and weakening the nation economically (Vallejo 2007). Even while characterizing bodies as plastic, they often posited deterministic relationships between climates or topographies and diseases or bodily features. And though they envisioned the possibility of improving unhealthy environments or avoiding them, they suggested that the adverse effects of environmental conditions, even external and contingent conditions, could accumulate and be passed down, acquiring a certain “hardness” over time. The Peruvian biologist Carlos Monge speculated that residents of the high altitudes of the Andes might constitute a distinct, “climatic variety of the human race . . . a physiologic variety... Andean Man being different from sea-level man, his biological personality must be measured with a scale distinct from that applied to the men of the lower valleys and plains” (Tracy 2012, 653). These types of explanations were in part holdovers from Hippocratic notions (Earle 2012; Bashford and Tracy 2012). As García and Pohl-Valero (2016) point out, neo-Hippocratic thinking combined easily with newer bacteriological and germ theories. Scientists associated particular germs

476

K. A. Rosemblatt

and diseases with places that either harbored the germs or made bodies receptive to those germs. As a result, germ theories that potentially posited a contingent relation between places, bodies, and diseases could end up reinforcing geographic determinism. Newer research characterizes all scientists’ views as ambivalent and fluctuating. Some hardline eugenicists proposed mechanisms that targeted biological inheritance but were less coercive or less invasive than sterilization. Sexual education, for instance, could ensure that men and women made reproductive choices that advanced the collective national well-being. Where experts did not succeed in legislating prenuptial certificates – and even where they were in place – it made sense to teach those who were healthy to avoid sexual encounters that might produce inferior offspring. Public health physicians promoted sexual education in the schools. They printed pamphlets to educate the public. At times, these efforts dovetailed with those of feminists who sought to rein in extramarital affairs that drew men away from their wives and daughters and imperiled the economic wellbeing of dependent family members. The intersections of gender politics, feminism, and eugenics in Latin America merits more attention than it has attracted up until now. We know that feminists supported the eugenic programs of governors Adalberto Tejeda in Veracruz, Salvador Alvarado and Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Yucatán, and Tomás Garrido Canabal in Tabasco (Ortiz Rangel 2016; see also Necochea López 2014; Roth 2020). In Sonora, feminists supported anti-Chinese immigration and anti-miscegenation laws (Augustine-Adams 2017). Christina Ewig (2006), writing on massive sterilization campaigns undertaken during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990–2000), has documented Fujimori’s cooptation of both feminist activists and feminist rhetoric regarding reproductive control, thereby helping squelch a potential public campaign against coerced sterilizations. Future scholarship should pay greater attention to the intersection of race, body politics, and gender. Alongside these educational measures targeting biological inheritance, more hardline eugenicists proposed reforms targeting natural and social environments. Puericulture, the science of childrearing, could be hereditarian, as medical experts sought to protect the germ cells of progenitors from the racial poisons of alcohol, tuberculosis, and syphilis, thought to be passed on through reproduction. Proponents of puericulture might also tout the provision of running water and hygiene measures, or encourage proper nutrition, seeing factors external to the body as affecting its shape and functioning. Education could seek to instill in citizens their responsibility to know their family heritage and procreate responsibly, or it could be aimed at more diffuse disease-avoidance strategies like keeping a clean, well-ventilated home. Morality campaigns addressing racial poisons, such as campaigns to curtail drinking or non-marital sex, could cite their hereditary effects. But they could also reference the racial effects of their negative social consequences. Drunk or ill men might shirk economic responsibilities to their families and raise sickly, unproductive, or even criminal, children. Experts have failed to pinpoint the mechanisms of influence. Widespread discussions of racial poisons were a propitious ground on which to combine theories of bodily change based on heredity and those based on

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

477

environment. Racial poisons were, like the climate and topography, elements of the environment and hence not initially intrinsic to a person’s bodily constitution. But these poisons were said to have decisive, lasting impacts that affected entire family lines. Though not initially part of a person’s inherited essence, they became part of it (Stepan 1996). Noé’s discussion of racial poisons was, Sánchez Delgado notes, “a disjointed mishmash of degeneration theory, racism, Weismann’s theory of germ plasm, Mendelianism, and eugenics. In referring to hereditary stains, Noé pointed out that ‘the individual who carries a hereditary blemish should be considered a racial type that appeared suddenly as a result of the physiochemical modification of the germinal elements in the parents’ bodies, affected by the action of a toxin’” (Sánchez Delgado 2016, 60). Scientists adapted their rhetoric to fit changing sociopolitical contexts as well as new knowledge. Sánchez Delgado maintains that although Noé’s class notes evince hereditarian and biologically determinist positions, the professor took a much less strident position at the height of World War II. For instance, during the 1941 Second Latin American Congress on Criminology in Santiago, Noé argued for the plasticity of cells and for creating “a eugenic atmosphere in the broadest sense of the word,” taking into consideration education, family upbringing, economics, and social conditions (Sánchez Delgado 2016, 69). Given widespread eclecticism, discerning individuals’ positions can be difficult. A number of historians have claimed that Dr. Waldemar Coutts, who headed Chile’s División de Higiene Social of the Dirección General de Sanidad, rejected compulsory sterilization policies and theories of intransigent heredity in a presentation to the 1934 Segunda Conferencia Panamericana de Eugenesia y Homicultura in Buenos Aires. Walsh (2018) quotes Coutts’ contention that “environment should not be reduced to the strictly material, but rather it can be found imbued into the cultural and spiritual values that allow man to adapt from childhood to the conditions imposed by civilization.” “We cannot accept,” he continued, “that the individual depends exclusively on heredity, if that were true, we would have to accept the existence of superior men, castes or races” (16). Yet Sánchez Delgado (2018, 121–22), who agrees that Coutts rejected compulsory sterilization on balance, also notes that Coutts seems to defend the German sterilization laws on the grounds that states had the right and responsibility to defend the well-being of the nation at large. Reggiani (2010, 305) categorizes Coutts as being the closest to Ramos of Cuba in defending sterilization. A similar interpretative controversy surrounds the question of whether Salvador Allende, a member of Chile’s Socialist Party, supported a proposal for eugenic sterilization under consideration during the time he served as minister of health in the Popular Front Government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1939–1942). In a controversial work, historian Víctor Farías (2007) claimed that Allende supported the proposal, and subsequent investigation has established that Allende convened a commission to study legislation regarding a compulsory sterilization law. However, the medical community overall did not support the proposal, and it never came before Congress. Allende’s position is far from clear. His thinking was clearly in conversation with eugenics broadly defined (Rosemblatt 2000), yet there is evidence

478

K. A. Rosemblatt

that he tried to quash the proposal. Still, it bears noting that physician Juan Garafulic, a member of Chile’s Socialist Party who served for a brief period in 1946 as minister of health, was part of the commission that Allende appointed, and Garafulic apparently supported the measure (Sánchez Delgado 2017). What this historiography reveals, then, is that hardline eugenics was hardly absent in Latin America. We need to better understand when it was used and how. The evidence that the same person could seem to shift from one position to another suggests that we should resist easy categorizations. We must analyze the individual and societal factors that shaped scientists’ evolving views, along with the changing national and international scientific contexts. A strength of Latin American history overall has been its attention to the intersection of politics, culture, and socioeconomic conditions. Now that we have gained an understanding of some of the main lines of scientific argument, we need to fully contextualize the scientific debates. This line of investigation will be particularly fruitful given contemporaries’ lack of knowledge of the concrete mechanisms of inheritance (Reggiani 2010, 305–7). In the absence of knowledge regarding how traits were inherited, scientists and physicians made pragmatic decisions about what was possible politically and what they knew to be medically efficacious – including measures like controlling prices for foodstuffs, providing running water, or installing sewage lines (Walsh 2018). Moving forward, we will need to continue to ask when and how science collided with, adjusted to, or opposed diverse political forces, and to what extent we can characterize science itself as a unified field. We already have some excellent scholarship that pays simultaneous attention to how scientific and sociopolitical contexts combined. González Soriano and López Beltrán’s (2009) essay on marriage regulation in Mexico, for instance, charts scientists’ growing influence as the postrevolutionary state accepted forms of restriction that scientists and physicians had been advocating for decades. The authors also document shifts in scientific viewpoints, as scientists worried less about consanguineous marriages and more about unfavorable marriages overall, a shift that corresponded in part to the growing ability of the state to actually regulate marriage. Biernat (2005), writing on Argentina, also points to a significant change in racial discourse motivated by politico-economic changes, namely, a change from an emphasis on the quality of the national population to an emphasis on its quantity. This shift, Biernat suggests, resulted from immigration restrictions. As the flow of immigrants to the country slowed, experts worried more about sustaining population growth and less about inspecting and sorting people, what Delfino termed the country’s aduana biológica (biological customs, as in customs house). In these and similar cases, it would be interesting to examine whether and how discussions taking place in international and Pan-American fora shaped shifts in policy. Migration – internal and international – is emerging as an important topic. We have long known that many Latin Americans promoted migration as a way to whiten or Europeanize their populations. We have also known that certain groups, the Chinese foremost among them, but also southern Europeans, were believed to degenerate national races. In many countries, certain categories of immigrants were subjected to harsh measures including, in the case of Chinese immigrants,

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

479

vigilante justice and expulsion. Legislation excluding certain groups was prevalent throughout the region (Augustine-Adams 2017), though not always enforced, and Latin American experts who participated in eugenic conferences debated immigration restriction. Yet we know less about whether and how scientific expertise played into national policy debates. For instance, Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio drew from biogeography and Darwinian theories to argue that immigrants were ill-suited to Mexico’s natural environments and unlikely to meld into the population. The descendants of Native peoples by contrast had not just adapted to those environments but also developed knowledge about how to subsist in them (Rosemblatt 2018, 58). We need further study that elucidates if and how racial concepts shaped immigration debates and that contextualizes those debates nationally and internationally. For Argentina, Vallejo and Miranda (2004) provide a good starting point. Historians of science can also build on work in environmental history to think through how ideas regarding the adaptation of peoples to environments, and of environments to human needs, has played into discussions of economic development that were often cast in racial terms. If certain forms of development associated with civilization and whiteness disrupted landscapes – limiting access to water or forests; polluting; changing the characteristics of soils; introducing new plants and animals and driving out others – we might ask whether or how this has played into ideas about racial distinctions based in geographies. How did experts shape ideas about the suitability of populations for forms of modern life and economic efficiency? Conversely, how did experts evaluate the combined economic, bodily, and environmental effects of Indigenous customs and lifeways?

Changing Constitutions: Tonics, Medicines, Diets, Exercise Among those aspects of social and natural environments we need to know more about are those relating to diets and medicines, foods, and other forms of fortifying bodies such as exercise and fresh air. As Rebecca Earle (2012) has pointed out in her book on colonial Latin America, Galenic or neo-Hippocratic medical traditions saw “non-naturals” such as food, climate, emotions, and behavior as interacting with innate or essential bodily substances to provoke balance and health or imbalance and illness. Together, they determined a person’s constitution and provoked differences among human groups. Europeans associated certain foods, like wine and meat, with healthy and civilized lifeways, and characterized Native diets as reflecting and indeed promoting degraded bodies. Because these humoralist medical traditions viewed bodies as malleable and fluctuating, their practitioners felt that foods and medicines could transform the person. Over time and across generations, bodily changes might become more permanent. Europeans asked about the effects of foods from Europe on Native peoples, and of American soils and foods on Europeans. Debates around foods, medicines, and lands therefore reflected ambivalences regarding the movements and commingling of European and Native peoples.

480

K. A. Rosemblatt

Elements of this thinking were reinforced by a creole nationalism that manifested a greater appreciation of the natural environments and lifeways of the Americas. The casta paintings of the late eighteenth century highlighted skin color and other bodily features and also dress, occupation, and flora and fauna, including foods. Presumably, these elements functioned together: the strength and beauty of bodies developed in relation to social and natural environments, activities, and diets. According to Bak-Geller (2018), some late colonial creole elites rejected the artifices of civilization and touted the benefits of a frugal Native diet that was closer to nature. Others believed Native foodways were unhealthy. Like later formulations of mestizaje, colonial formulations could lean toward whiter or less Europeanized ideals. Sandra Aguilar-Rodríguez (2020) has uncovered the same ambivalence for the twentieth century. She notes that some postrevolutionary elites saw Mexican cuisine as mixing the best of both Native and European diets. Others saw only foods associated with European diets, especially milk and meat, as helping populations fortifying the mestizo national race, while poor Native diets contributed to degeneration. In all these contexts, a correct diet was seen as making Mexicans healthier and therefore more productive. Both Bak-Geller and Aguilar-Rodríguez explain that experts linked the increased consumption of certain products to what they saw as the beneficial growth of commerce. In addition, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experts exhibited a physiocratic concern with wresting maximum productivity from the land and sought a peasantry that would plant its fields with only the most nutritious crops – crops that could efficiently fuel populations of workers. These experts thereby linked the productivity of the land to the productivity of laborers in a circular fashion. Unlike their Hippocratic predecessors, these experts did not claim that the land had a direct effect on bodies and racial characteristics. Still, a person’s relation to the land remained central to their economic and cultural embodied participation in the nation. Questions of morality fed concerns regarding diet and health. Especially when discussions turned to considerations of wine, pulque, and alcohol more generally, observations regarding how food and drink affected the capacity for work blended with a more diffuse moralism that valued work over leisure. In the Hippocratic tradition, morality was seen as operating in concert with temperament and bodily constitution. Properly fed, balanced bodies were likely to remain morally upstanding, steadfast contributors to economies. By the nineteenth century, this morality was articulated in relation to citizens’ contributions to the progress of the nation. Abstinence would improve bodies and their ability to work (Aguilar-Rodríguez 2020; Drinot 2005). Overall, these discussions portrayed bodily constitution as malleable and produced by habits and culture as well as landscapes. Yet experts invoked race insofar as they associated European morality, lifeways, and foodways with civilization, marked by prosperity and health. Racial degeneration and ill-health were not linked to intrinsic or stable bodily characteristics, but instead to contingent factors. Yet those factors were directly and indirectly related to hierarchical racial categories. Even where scientists stressed the moral, cultural, and economic value of foods, diet

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

481

was linked to the body and its functioning. Nutrition sat at the nexus of racial identification, the body, and health. Food could also serve as a medicine, preventing or curing disease, or helping restore balance within the body. In that sense, food was not unlike tonics and other medicines. Sánchez Delgado (2009) has analyzed advertisements and articles regarding these products in the El Almanque 18, a free publication distributed by one of Chile’s leading pharmacies beginning around 1921. The almanac, with a title that referenced Chile’s independence day, packaged scientific ideas for popular audiences. It promoted healthy eating and its advertisements drew heavily on Social Darwinist notions to sell tonics that might fortify Chileans against diseases, including the nervous diseases caused by urban living environments. Its language drew on notions of competition and blood: “Don’t be among the losers. Join the ranks of the winner, Sanatogen”; “Don’t become a failure in life due to impoverished blood.” An advertisement for Viribus, a meat extract, claimed the tonic would give strength to the weak and energy to the downtrodden (12), while purifying the blood (8–9). Drawings portrayed naked men meant to evoke Greco-Roman statues. Some scientists used newer languages of metabolism, physiology, and thermodynamics to voice issues of work, health, diet, and exertion. Racialized human bodies were for them like “human motors” that could work more or less efficiently. This novel concept built on the discovery of the calorie, which quantified the energy in foods, and on Wilbur Atwater’s invention of a machine that could determine a subject’s basal metabolism (Pohl-Valero 2014; Vargas-Domínguez 2015, 2017). Beginning in the 1920s, the League of Nations began a series of studies – focused primarily on Europe – on the diet of the growing urban working classes. Latin Americans took note, and scientists in the region began to study their populations. They measured how many calories workers needed to function efficiently and sought to determine whether such a diet was affordable (Pernet 2013; Yáñez Andrade 2019). Bodies need to be able to balance food intake and exertion. Energy in, energy out. Racial deficiencies in certain populations, they believed, could be overcome with proper diet. In some more neo-Lamarckian formulations, changes, for better or worse, could also be passed from parents to their offspring. Pohl-Valero has shown that these ideas were firmly linked to national elites’ desire for economic prosperity. They also combined with discussions of environmental factors as experts argued, for instance, that proper nutrition would counteract the demands placed on the human body by high altitudes (Pohl-Valero 2014, 462). One topic about which we are only now starting to see scholarly studies is the science of exercise and movement as it relates to race and racialized conceptions of bodily health (Scharagrodsky 2016). The new tools for measuring humans’ production and consumption of energy reaffirmed ideas of racial difference, whether Latin American difference from the United States and Europe or difference among racially defined groups within Latin America. The ability to measure led to the definition of national and international norms and allowed the calculation of an ideal calorie intake. Measurement allowed for standardization and comparison. But although scientists contemplated a human universal, the results of research hardly spoke unequivocally and investigations often confirmed differences. Vargas-Domínguez (2015) shows how US

482

K. A. Rosemblatt

scientists measuring mulatto and indigenous populations in Jamaica and Yucatán overlooked discrepant data and unfavorable research conditions to reaffirm their views regarding racial differences and the dangers of racial mixture. That reaffirmation was in some ways inevitable since before the scientists began collecting data, they grouped the individuals to be studied according to categories defined a priori. The same is true of genetic research today (Saldaña-Tejeda and Wade 2018). The use of measurement to establish normality and abnormality grew in importance during the 1930s and 1940s. It was central to the field of biotypology, popular throughout Latin America. Latin America’s versions of biotypology were closely related to constitutional medicine, a field that privileged clinical observation over laboratory studies and considered the totality of the body: endocrinological and hormonal systems, as well as morphology, nervous systems, and mental processes. Biotypologists regarded some characteristics as inherited and others as contingent. The inclusion of endocrinology in particular allowed them to view that body as continually in flux. And biotypology was ostensibly an antiracial science. Although it sought to correlate measurements of different bodily systems to create distinct categories, those categories were imagined as spanning racial groups. In practice, however, biotypology often reaffirmed racial differences and hierarchies. In Brazil, Edgar Roquette-Pinto created his own biotypological categories that included leucodermians (white), phaiodermians (white  black – mulattoes); xantodermians (white  Native Brazilians – caboclos), and melanodermians (black) (Gomes 2017, 148).

Challenges Ahead As with history in general, and especially histories of science, accessing popular viewpoints remains a challenge, but historians are rising to the challenge. Nancy Appelbaum (2016), writing on the nineteenth century, has chronicled how efforts to map the peoples, climates, and terrains of New Granada drew extensively on the knowledge of local guides and on the labor of porters and cooks. Vargas-Domínguez (2017), writing on physiological experiments on the Otomí, has explored how the actions and attitudes of Otomí subjects of experiments on metabolism shaped scientific outcomes. Paula López Caballero (2020) has used anthropological field notes to capture local definitions of Indigenous and mestizo and what she calls the “domestication of social taxonomies.” We need more work focusing on how nonscientists have shaped science. Historians will also need to identify sources that allow them to access distinct types of knowledge production and reflect on the boundary work done by the term “science.” That will allow us to better understand how alternative, local, or Native knowledge practices coexist or combine with what we generally identify as science. Pablo Gómez’s (2017) book on the colonial period provides an excellent example, demonstrating the importance of Afro-descendant and Native healers and healing traditions in the Caribbean and establishing their reach into lay European

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

483

communities. Based on conversations with Andean healers, anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2015) has drawn on ontological approaches to explore the relation of landscapes to being in the world. What alternative forms of knowledge production have existed and how have they related to the forms of science and medicine affiliated with the West?

Conclusion Nancy Stepan’s “Hour of Eugenics” brought Latin America into discussions of eugenics and racial thinking that had previously focused on the United States and Europe. Equally important, it demonstrated that racism could be grounded in a view of racial divisions as shaped by natural and social environments. Stepan thereby created a framework for reconciling, on the one hand, the revisionist view that Latin America was as racist as the United States, and, on the other hand, the widespread view that Latin America harbored less deterministic racial ideologies (Appelbaum et al. 2003). Historians responded by foregrounding racial policies and practices that stressed the cultural dimensions of racism. With time, researchers began to show that racial thinking did not need to foreground either intrinsic bodily natures or nurture. Scientists and others often viewed racialized bodies as biocultural constructs. They stressed the often-contingent effects of culture and social environments on bodies that they thought of as malleable. But this environmentalism was fully compatible with racial hierarchies, and it could be highly deterministic. Together, these insights extended Stepan’s observations regarding the ability of Latin eugenics experts to combine Mendelianism and neo-Lamarckianism, allowing historians of science to see the promiscuity of racial ideologies and to discern the symbiotic relationship among notions of economic development, poverty, health, debility and disability, and race. More recently, it has prompted further studies of the relation of racialized bodies to the nonhuman material world. Scholars are starting to explore the intersection of environmental history and race. The literatures on lands, health, and diets have provided a crucial nexus. Pursuing these lines of inquiry will require historians to explore not just the various facets of the life sciences and how they have combined, but also the relation of the life sciences to the social sciences and the physical sciences. It will require them to probe the intersection of science, policymaking, politics, and localized – or otherwise differentiated – cultures, lifeways, and worlds.

References Aguilar-Rodríguez S (2020) ‘Las penas con pan son menos’: Race, modernity and wheat in modern Mexico. Bull Span Stud 97(4):539–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/14753820.2020.1701330 Alvarez Peláez R (1988) Eugenics and social control. Asclepio 40(2):29–80 Appelbaum NP (2016) Mapping the country of regions: The chorographic commission of nineteenth-century Colombia. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

484

K. A. Rosemblatt

Appelbaum NP, Macpherson AS, Rosemblatt KA (2003) Race and nation in modern Latin America. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Augustine-Adams K (2017) Women’s suffrage, the anti-Chinese campaigns, and gendered ideals in Sonora, Mexico, 1917–1925. Hisp Am Hist Rev 97(2):223–258. https://doi.org/10.1215/ 00182168-3824053 Bak-Geller S (2018) Comida, civilización y república. El pensamiento de Rousseau en la conformación de una dieta patriótica en México. In: Entin G (ed) Rousseau en Iberoamérica: Lecturas e interpretaciones entre monarquía y revolución. Sb Editorial, Buenos Aires Bashford A, Tracy SW, eds. (2012) Modern airs, waters, and places. Special issue, Bull Hist Med 86(4) Biernat C (2005) La eugenesia argentina y el debate sobre el crecimiento de la población en los años de entreguerras. Cuadernos del Sur, Historia (34):251–273 Carter ED (2019) Social medicine and international expert networks in Latin America, 1930–1945. Glob Public Health 14(6–7):791–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2017.1418902 Cueto M (1994) Missionaries of science: The Rockefeller Foundation and Latin America. Indiana University Press, Bloomington de la Cadena M (2015) Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Duke University Press, Durham and London de Souza VS (2016) Ciência e miscigenação racial no início do século XX: Debates e controvérsias de Edgard Roquette-Pinto com a antropologia física norte-americana. História, Ciências, SaúdeManguinhos 23(3):597–614. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702016005000014 Drinot P (2005) Food, race and working-class identity: restaurantes populares and populism in 1930s Peru. Americas 62(2):245–270. https://doi.org/10.1353/tam.2005.0160 Earle R (2012) The body of the conquistador: Food, race and the colonial experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Eraso Y (2007) Biotypology, endocrinology, and sterilization: The practice of eugenics in the treatment of Argentinian women during the 1930s. Bull Hist Med 81(4):793–822. https://doi. org/10.1353/bhm.2007.0130 Ewig C (2006) Hijacking global feminism: Feminists, the Catholic Church, and the family planning debacle in Peru. Fem Stud 32(3):633–659 Farías V (2007) Salvador Allende: El fin de un mito, 3rd edn. Editorial Maye, Santiago García M, Pohl-Valero S (2016) Styles of knowledge production in Colombia, 1850–1920. Sci Context 29(3):347–377. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889716000107 Gomes ACV (2017) Science, constitutional medicine and national bodily identity in Brazilian biotypology during the 1930s. Soc Hist Med 30(1):137–157. https://doi.org/10.1093/shgom/ hkw009 Gómez PF (2017) The experiential Caribbean: Creating knowledge and healing in the early modern Atlantic. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill González Soriano F, López Beltrán C (2009) Consanguinidad, sífilis, herencia y matrimonio: El lento advenimiento de la intervención médica en las leyes mexicanas del matrimonio. Memoria y Sociedad 13(27):87–100 Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida (2015) Niñas y mujeres sin justicia: Derechos reproductivos en México. https://gire.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/INFORMEGIRE-2015.pdf Leyton C, Sánchez Delgado M (2014) El huevo de la serpiente al sur del mundo: Desarrollo y supervivencia de la ciencia nazi en Chile. Aclepsio 66(2):1–13. https://doi.org/10.3989/ asclepio.2014.18 López Caballero P (2020) Domesticating social taxonomies: Local and national identifications as seen through Susan Drucker’s anthropological fieldwork in Jamiltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1957–1963. Hisp Am Hist Rev 100(2):285–321. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-8178222 López-Beltrán C, García Deister V (2013) Scientific approaches to the Mexican Mestizo. Historia, Ciencias, Saude–Manguinhos 20(2):391–410 McCook S (2013) Introduction. Isis 104(4):773–776. https://doi.org/10.1086/674943

22

Bodies, Environments, and Race

485

Necochea López R (2014) A history of family planning in twentieth-century Peru. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Ortiz Rangel, A (2016) Feminismo y eugenesia en México: Articulaciones posrevolucionarias en Yucatán, Veracruz y Tabasco, 1915–1935. MA Thesis, Mexico City: Colegio de México Pernet CA (2013) Developing nutritional standards and food policy: Latin American reformers between the ILO, the League of Nations Health Organization, and the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau. In: Kott S, Droux J (eds) Globalizing social rights: the international labour organization and beyond. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, pp 249–261. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291967_15 Pieper Mooney J (2014) ‘Overpopulation’ and the politics of family planning in Chile and Peru: Negotiating national interests and global paradigms in a Cold War world. In: Unger C, Hartmann H (eds) A World of Populations: Transnational Perspectives on Demography in the Twentieth Century. Berghahn Books, New York, pp 83–107 Pohl-Valero S (2014) ‘La raza entra por la boca’: Energy, diet, and eugenics in Colombia, 1890–1940. Hisp Am Hist Rev 94(3):455–486. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-2694318 Reggiani AH (2010) Depopulation, fascism, and eugenics in 1930s Argentina. Hisp Am Hist Rev 90(2):283–318. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-2009-135 Rodriguez J, Zulawski A (2011) Introduction: Science and medicine in Latin America. Hisp Am Hist Rev 91(3):387–389. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-1300119 Rosemblatt KA (2000) Gendered compromises: Political cultures and the state in Chile, 1920–1950. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Rosemblatt KA (2009) Other Americas: Transnationalism, scholarship, and the culture of poverty in Mexico and the United States. Hisp Am Hist Rev 89(4):603–641 Rosemblatt KA (2018) The science and politics of race in Mexico and the United States, 1920–1950. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Roth C (2020) A miscarriage of justice: Women’s reproductive lives and the law in early twentiethcentury Brazil. Stanford University Press, Stanford Saldaña-Tejeda A, Wade P (2018) Obesity, race and the indigenous origins of health risks among Mexican mestizos. Ethn Racial Stud 41(15):2731–2749. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870. 2017.1407810 Sánchez Delgado M (2009) Tónicos y darwinismo social: Imaginario de la salud en El Almanaque 18, Chile, 1920–1930. Eä (Buenos Aires) 1(2):1–21 Sánchez Delgado M (2016) El profesor Juan Noé: Eugenesia y mendelismo en tres décadas de docencia médica en Chile (1913–1947). In: Araya C, Leyton C et al (eds) República de la Salud. Fundación y ruinas de un país sanitario. Ocho Libros Editores, Santiago, pp 49–73 Sánchez Delgado M (2017) Salvador Allende, esterilización de alienados y debate eugénico chileno. Revista Izquierdas 35(September):260–286. https://doi.org/10.4067/ S0718-50492017000400260 Sánchez Delgado M (2018) Sexo, eugenesia y política: Waldemar Coutts (Chile, 1895–1959). Revista Historia 25(1):109–130 Scharagrodsky P (2016) Mujeres en movimiento: Deporte, cultura físicia y feminidades: Argentina, 1870–1980. Prometeo, Buenos Aires Soto Laveaga G (2018) Largo dislocare: Connecting microhistories to remap and recenter histories of science. Hist Technol 34(1):21–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2018.1516850 Stepan N (1996) “The hour of eugenics”: Race, gender, and nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca Stern AM (2003) From mestizophilia to biotypology: Racialization and science in Mexico, 1920–1960. In: Appelbaum NP, Macpherson AS, Rosemblatt KA (eds) Race and Nation in Modern Latin America. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill Stern AM (2011) ‘The hour of eugenics’ in Veracruz, Mexico: Radical politics, public health, and Latin America’s only sterilization law. Hisp Am Hist Rev 91(3):431–443. https://doi.org/10. 1215/00182168-1300191 Suárez y López Guazo LL (2005) Eugenesia y racismo en México. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Coyoacán

486

K. A. Rosemblatt

Tracy SW (2012) The physiology of extremes: Ancel Keys and the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935. Bull Hist Med 86(4):627–660. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2012.0079 Turda M, Gillette A (2014) Latin Eugenics in comparative perspective. Bloomsbury Academic, London Vallejo G (2007) Males y remedios de la ciudad moderna: Perspectivas ambientales de la eugenesia argentina de entreguerras. Asclepio 59(1):203–238. https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2007.v59. i1.222 Vallejo G, Miranda M (2004) Los saberes del poder: Eugenesia y biotipología en la Argentina del siglo XX. Revista de Indias 64(231):425–444. https://doi.org/10.3989/revindias.2004.i231.547 Vargas-Domínguez J (2015) El metabolismo racial: Estudios eugenésicos en Jamaica y Yucatán entre 1920 y 1940. Ciencias de La Salud 13(Especial):85–103 Vargas-Domínguez J (2017) The ‘problematic’ Otomi: Metabolism, nutrition, and the classification of Indigenous populations in Mexico in the 1930’s. Perspect Sci 25(5):564–584. https://doi.org/ 10.1162/POSC_a_00254 Wade P (2002) Race, nature and culture: An anthropological perspective. Pluto Press, London. Wade P (2017) Degrees of mixture, degrees of freedom: Genomics, multiculturalism, and race in Latin America. Duke University Press, Durham. Walsh S (2018) The executioner’s shadow: Coerced sterilization and the creation of ‘Latin’ eugenics in Chile. Hist Sci. https://doi.org/10.1177/2F0073275318755533 Yáñez Andrade JC (2019) Los pobres están invitados a la mesa. Debates y proyectos transnacionales de alimentación popular en América del Sur, 1930–1950. Historia Crítica 71 (January):69–91. https://doi.org/10.7440/histcrit71.2019.04

The Frog and the Vine Indigenous Knowledge, Biomedical Innovation, and Biopiracy in Latin America Ernesto Schwartz-Marin

23

and Amelia Fiske

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intersections of Indigenous and Western Knowledge Practices in Relation to Biological Material and Toxic Organisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Doctrine of Discovery in Patent Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toxicological Models and Pharmaceuticals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Central Tensions in Biomedical Research Practice Illuminated by Indigenous Knowledge of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ayahuasca . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poison Dart Frog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Decolonizing Methodologies and Symmetric Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

488 489 491 492 494 495 497 499 500 501

Abstract

The nexus of “western” and “indigenous” knowledge, toxicity, and biodiversity has transformed biomedical fields ranging from drug development to microbial resistance, yet it has not been marked by just research practices. This chapter delineates the intersections of indigenous and Western knowledge practices in relation to toxic organisms, in order to advance insights that shed light into the ways in which biomedicine has been (or failed to be) committed to justice and solidarity. Due to their porous nature and ability to travel across boundaries, E. Schwartz-Marin (*) Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, EGENIS-Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, Exeter University, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Fiske Institute of History and Ethics in Medicine, TUM School of Medicine, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany e-mail: a.fi[email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_22

487

488

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

toxins – in the forms of potent and potentially poisonous plants and animals – are an ideal place from which to inquire into questions of justice and knowledge. The use of indigenous knowledge of nature for research illuminates central tensions in biomedical research practices today. Despite policies such as Genomic Sovereignty doctrine, due to histories of manipulation, lack of benefit sharing, and limited indigenous research representation, the relationship between indigenous and Western knowledges is fraught with suspicion and conflict. One particularly salient concern is that patents filed in the global north have claimed ownership over indigenous knowledge and organisms, thus exploiting inequalities and enabling proprietary colonial uses of biodiversity in Latin America. Drawing on ethnographic and historical methodologies, this chapter interrogates landmark cases linked with biopiracy and medical innovation: (1) ayahuasca and (2) the Poison Dart Frog. These two organisms have been identified as important cases, because both have been subject to patents, are at the center of significant biomedical investment, and are deeply embedded in the ancestral knowledge of Latin American indigenous peoples, as well as biomedical innovations and forms of capitalist profit making via pharmaceutical research.

Introduction The nexus of “western” and “indigenous” knowledge, toxicity, and biodiversity has transformed biomedical fields ranging from drug development to microbial resistance, yet it has not been marked by just research practices. Due to their porous nature and ability to travel across boundaries, toxins – in the forms of potent and potentially poisonous plants and animals – are an ideal place from which to inquire into questions of justice and knowledge in research, use, and practice. In particular, the use of indigenous knowledge of nature for research points to central tensions in biomedical research practices today. For decades, the role of hallucinogens in health has been shadowed by the war on drugs, and the criminalization of hallucinogenic substances around the globe. Despite restrictions and stigmatization around hallucinogens, there has been a revival of ayahuasca (yajé) in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. In addition, a growing international interest in psychedelic and ritual practices has brought with it thousands of medical and spiritual tourists. The confluence of new syncretic ritual practices, indigenous-led guidelines to practice indigenous healing, and promissory biomedical investment in these substances for clinical application points to the centrality of exploring what a decolonial research practice and historiography would look like in relation to toxic organisms. Despite policies such as the Genomic Sovereignty doctrine, due to histories of manipulation, lack of benefit sharing, and limited indigenous research representation, the relationship between indigenous and Western knowledges is fraught with suspicion and conflict. One particularly salient concern is that patents filed in the global north have claimed ownership over indigenous knowledge and organisms, thus exploiting inequalities and enabling proprietary colonial uses of biodiversity in Latin America and the global south at large (Hayden 2003; Schwartz-Marin and

23

The Frog and the Vine

489

Restrepo 2013). Drawing on ethnographic, ethnobotanical, and historical records, this chapter interrogates two landmark cases linked with biopiracy and medical innovation: (1) ayahuasca and (2) the Poison Dart Frog. These two organisms and the toxins they are linked with are deeply embedded in the ancestral knowledge of Latin American indigenous peoples, have been at the center of significant biomedical investment as well as biomedical innovations and forms of capitalist profit making. Both have been identified as important case-studies and examples of biopiracy by indigenous peoples, governmental and non-governmental agencies in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, since both of these organisms have been subject to patents (Tidwell 2002; Males et al. 2015). Research has largely focused on the “clash” of ways of knowing and legal frameworks while failing to account for practices of exchange and knowledge production that inform biomedicine. Most discussion of biopiracy focuses on historiographies that have been recognized by courtrooms and intellectual property systems, in part because these are often documents, written in colonial languages, by officially recognized experts on the matter. Seminal figures in the field of ethnobotany, such as Evan Schultes, created detailed records of indigenous peoples and their relationships with toxic (hallucinogenic) plants in the Amazon, citing a desire to “preserve” culture: This heritage, amassed by aboriginal peoples through many hundreds of years and passed verbally from one generation to the next, is unfortunately disappearing as the result of acculturation and westernization, or sadly, actual annihilation of the indigenous culture, or even physical extinction of the tribe itself. (Schultes and Raffauf 1996)

This chapter takes a different tact by avoiding the retelling of the history of salvage ethnographies as presented by well-known ethnobotanists such as Schultes, or ethnographers such as Wasson (1976) who believed they were recording vanishing peoples, cultures, and environments. Instead, the chapter briefly reviews some of the intersections of indigenous and Western knowledge practices in relation to toxic organisms, and then turns to the ways that toxins intersect with scholarship in global health, pharmaceutical studies, and decolonial approaches to knowledge production in anthropology. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the histories of two organisms as they relate to issues of bioprospection, pharmaceutical promise, and ancestral or native knowledge. It is important to note that the selection of what historiography to follow is a key methodological, and ethical, choice. The chapter closes by proposing that future research could productively turn to a historiography of quotidian practices of knowledge production and biomaterial exchange in order to promote a symmetric approach to indigenous knowledge and the pursuits of contemporary bioscience.

Intersections of Indigenous and Western Knowledge Practices in Relation to Biological Material and Toxic Organisms Throughout this chapter, the terms “western” and “indigenous” are used with the explicit understanding that these terms are summary placeholders for a broader set of understandings around different cultural conceptions of health and illness, and that

490

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

these terms bring with them problematic implications of ethnocentrism. However, for the sake of clarity, they are invoked as signposts – not as given categories of practice that are meaningful in and of themselves – but as some of the very “objects” that need to be explained. Scholarship in medical anthropology has demonstrated that biomedicine, although often assumed to be firmly on the side of “science” rather than “belief” or “custom,” is also a culturally constructed healing system that has been informed by colonial histories and has changed throughout time and place. Importantly, biomedicine works to construct ‘biological facts’ that are shaped by understandings of disease, well-being, the body, and social relationships that are neither singular nor universal. Thus, we begin from the proposition that biomedicine is every bit as plural, and worthy of anthropological scrutiny, as the so-called “traditional” or “alternative” forms of medicine. The collection of genetic material has been one area where biomedicine and bioscience have become particularly entangled with indigenous communities. With the growing promise and integration of genomic technologies into medical care, whether for predicting susceptibility to disease or for personalizing treatment, the past 30 years have seen an increased interest in the creation of large genetic databases. The most famous of these have been the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) and the National Geographic Project, with the ostensible goal of sourcing human genetic diversity. Both projects have subsequently become markers of biocolonialism for their tokenized approach to indigenous genes (TallBear 2013). The resistance to these projects by groups such as the Indigenous Peoples’ Council on Biocolonialism has opened important conversations around trust, biomedical research, and indigenous peoples. More recent initiatives have made considerable investments in advancing personalized medical care, such as through the US-based “All of US” program, which seeks to collect genetic, medical, and lifestyle information on one million people. However, many such programs – in particular those concerned with genomics – remain plagued by the same problems of underrepresentation of indigenous, people of color, and minority groups (Popejoy and Fullerton 2016). The design of research programs for engaging indigenous communities has similarly struggled to overcome egregious experiences of violence, manipulation, and deceit (Mello and Wolf 2010; TallBear 2013), with notable lawsuits brought by the Havasupai Tribe for unapproved use of genetic material, or the ongoing litigation of the Waorani and Ecuadorian Government vs. The Coriell Institute (Ambrosi de la Cadena 2017). As a result, important initiatives for establishing ethical standards for conducting research with indigenous communities have emerged, insisting on the need for researchers to understand existing regulations, foster collaboration, build cultural competency, improve research transparency, support capacity building, and disseminate research findings (Claw et al. 2018). Indigenous organizations have led much of this work, funneling experiences of harm, misuse of genetic and cultural material, and failure to communicate research findings into the creation of ethical guidelines. Despite indigenous resistance to biocolonialism and piracy, most of the history written around the appropriation of biological materials – including potentially lucrative toxins found in plants and animals – was written by explorers in the

23

The Frog and the Vine

491

nineteenth century, and by ethnobotanist and anthropologists in the twentieth century. Explorers and scholars researching the matter of new and fantastic organisms, substances, and indigenous rituals were eager to leave a written record of knowledge that was mostly passed by oral tradition. This was seen as a knowledge that was foreclosed to Western societies in which the traces of original – and in the researchers' eyes even primal – forms of spirituality, healing, botanical, and zoological knowledge was at risk of erasure from industrialization and Westernized forms of sociality (Wasson 1976). Instead of trying to elucidate and clearly separate knowledge contributions of “scientists” and “indigenous communities,” this chapter pays particular attention to the practices, labor, and forms of material and epistemological exchange that make biomedical research on the poison dart frog and ayahuasca possible. By paying attention to the historiographies of patenting disputes and “western discoveries” of valuable toxins, we intend to show how bioprospection shapes indigenous relations to Western capitalist modes of knowledge production. In order to fit with capitalist models of intellectual property, scientists and their patrons reproduce colonial relationships with nature and indigenous nations. Throughout the chapter we illustrate these colonial relationships, by showing a brief snippet of critical historiographies of toxic organisms and their pharmaceutical promise. While we are convinced that these critical historiographies should shape bioscientific innovation in relation to biodiversity in ways that are more inclusive and just, we are also painfully aware that the historical accounts – that we briefly recount here – are made possible thanks to the patent disputes, and the bureaucratic machinery that seeks to legitimize the appropriation of native knowledges on plants and animals in the global south. An absent presence through the chapter is the voices of the indigenous nations, their ritual experts, and their views on key issues about community, healing, and spirituality. We hope to center these voices through further research collaborations based in local and indigenous histories across Latin America, however this is currently beyond the scope of this chapter.

The Doctrine of Discovery in Patent Law Nature does not speak for itself. Complex transitions must be made to turn toxins found on the back of a poison dart frog into the isolate epibatidine, or for the practices of drinking ayahuasca to move from ritual use to clinical trials. Several propositions derived from Science and Technology Studies (STS) inform our methodological and conceptual treatment of these toxic organisms: the first is that the active ingredients used in the development of therapeutic applications are not “collected,” but rather actively produced through experimentation, modeling, and the creation of pipelines of extraction and production, of which the resulting uses are all contingent upon. Second, toxins – whether as the slick on the back of a frog, the bark of a vine, or as patented pharmaceuticals – never exist in isolation, but rather must be enrolled in larger assemblages in order to result in specific effects, whether in hunting, ritual shamanic practices, clinical trials, easing pain, or improving the life

492

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

of terminally ill patients. Building on scholarship that brings proposals from STS into dialogue with decolonial studies, this chapter seeks to challenge the doctrine of discovery surrounding toxic organisms in research in order to help advance decolonial approaches in historiography and the social sciences more broadly. The exploitation of indigenous knowledge and the patenting of sacred life forms such as ayahuasca are understood by some as a novel form of colonialism. One of the most globally significant forms of legislation concerning intellectual property rights has been the use of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which was made effective in 1995. The conditions of TRIPS and the United States Trademark and Patent Office’s (USTPO) reinforce Western notions of ownership, discovery, and knowledge and are premised on the doctrine of discovery. In order to be considered novel under US law, a given discovery ought not to have been “known or used by others in this country or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent” (USPTO, Public Law 593, 1952). When establishing whether a “discovery” meets the conditions for patenting, the USPTO refers to a variety of sources including publications, patent applications, and previously patented discoveries. Patent legislation hinges largely on the notion of terra nullius, which considers land to be “empty” until it is discovered by a colonizing nation. The “Doctrine of Discovery” was first introduced by Spain, England, and Portugal to justify the invasion and plundering of lands not owned by the church (Miller 2011). The doctrine is not merely a historic phenomenon attributable to imperialism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but rather is significant to current debates on knowledge dissemination and tensions surrounding questions of ownership. Terra nullius is of deep significance to patent legislation, and in obvious opposition to many indigenous as well as nonindigenous conceptions of nature as living, relational, and even sentient. The doctrine of discovery in patent law intersects with a growing interest in Latin American rainforests as potential sources of the next pharmaceutical novelty, particularly in the area of biomedical research on toxic organisms.

Toxicological Models and Pharmaceuticals In recent years, “global” health has emerged as a privileged site for imagination and intervention seeking to remake the world. In this configuration, drugs have embodied hopes in various biomedical futures in the midst of claims of rights to life, health care, and dramatic global inequalities of illness and poverty (Greene and Sismondo 2015). Recent advancements have seen a reworking of the field of biomedical possibility through biotechnology, presenting unimagined transformations of both capital and person – one which has increasingly expanded frontiers toward sites in the Global South seen as being rich in pharmaceutical potential (Hayden 2003; Tidwell 2002; Sunder Rajan 2017). Drugs, in other words, have altered not only the biochemistry of bodies, but also our expectations and hopes for specific kinds of futures, as well as our social networks (Ecks 2008; Lakoff 2006). Anthropological

23

The Frog and the Vine

493

investigations of pharmaceuticals signal a range of futures, pushing human boundaries in biomedical research, clinical practice, consumption, and sovereign property rights. Decades of interest in capitalizing on organisms known to indigenous peoples for their hallucinogenic and toxic properties exemplifies the continuing biomedical hopes pinned on “traditional” toxicologies. The field of pharmaceutical anthropology and history has been influenced by work that adopted a biographical approach to the study of drugs, looking at how objects move across different cultural contexts and political economies. Scholars have since explored how drugs “work,” showing that efficacy is more than just a pharmacological effect, but is also processual, relational, and situated (Hardon and Sanabria 2017). In laboratory settings, scientists extract, isolate, and purify pharmaceutical materials, which then are taken up in new and unanticipated ways. Yet in general, early work that sought to understand ritual meanings of compounds in the Global South did so through an implicit comparison to the presumed universality of biomedical knowledge (Lock 2017). By the 1970s, the focus shifted, turning ethnographic gaze to the pharmaceutical industry, with scholars examining questions such as the placebo effect (Comaroff 1976). More recent work has examined the pharmaceuticalization of health (Biehl 2007), the search for human test subjects in the “developing world” (Petryna 2009) and the political economy of pharmaceutical investments in trials (Dumit 2012). As the etymological promise of the pharmakon suggests, every drug is at once cure and poison, encapsulating a central ambivalence that is irreducible to chemical properties alone. Molecules are not “discovered,” but are continually made and remade in relation to the changing bodies and worlds they inhabit. Drugs are “informed” by and in relation to their context (Hardon and Sanabria 2017). Active chemical compounds are shaped and transformed by both human and nonhuman practices and relationships, and drugs leak beyond the bodies, research pipelines, and infrastructures meant to contain them. From consuming pharmaceuticals (Sanabria 2016), to transformations in bodies or the role of pharmaceuticals as boundary transgressors (Landecker 2016), scholarship has attended to questions of bodies and metabolism and illustrated the importance of looking beyond the drug itself when studying the chemical infrastructure of health and medical research. Thus, tracing the histories of drugs is not limited to researching registered prescription drugs or black-market illicit drugs, but also concerns the chemical agents that contaminate environments and affect our health (Nading 2017), and the naturalcultural worlds in which toxic organisms travel from south to north, and vice versa. Interesting methodological questions have arisen about how to “follow” the toxin, and how to assess the broader infrastructure in which it operates. One of the most productive insights of this work has been to follow drugs in their “becoming,” rather than presuming stable chemical toxicities, or particular biomedical facts such as efficacy, prior to their emergence in specific life worlds. Toxicological and pharmacological facts emerge through situated practices of expertise; prior scholarship has made great gains in illustrating the importance of engaging with scientific evidence as situated within a particular historical context, and as contested, strategic, and partial (Sismondo 2015; Leonelli 2016).

494

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

Central Tensions in Biomedical Research Practice Illuminated by Indigenous Knowledge of Nature In 1992, a group of NGOs and indigenous group pushed the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (UNCB) to combat biopiracy and the patenting of indigenous traditional knowledge. The UNCB changed the legal and political landscape, making it more difficult to search for new drugs, therapies, and chemical compounds in the rainforests of Latin America. With the advent of the Human Genome Project at the turn of the twentieth century, countries in the global south recast their postcolonial concerns in the form of the Genomic Sovereignty doctrine. The doctrine was born in the Mexican national congress with the goals of preventing foreign plundering of national bioresources and protecting the unique genetic heritage of indigenous peoples (Schwartz-Marin and Restrepo 2013). The emphasis of the Genomic Sovereignty doctrine so far has been on the legal protection of bioresources; however these legal mechanisms are seldomly applied in practice, are costly and inaccessible to indigenous peoples, and tend to reproduce inequalities and colonial practices within Latin American nations (Schwartz-Marin and Restrepo 2013). Biopiracy, or the colonial use of biogenetic riches and ancestral knowledge (Mooney in Delgado 2002; Tidwell 2002), has cast a long shadow over practices seeking to isolate useful components for medical use. Understood as a form of intellectual property systems that take biological resources and knowledge from indigenous and rural communities without recognition, compensation, or protection (Delgado 2002, 299), biopiracy has significantly hindered the development of local scientific capacities in Latin America, as well as biomedical innovation in places like the USA. The response of Latin American states such as Mexico and Colombia has been the creation of new laws and regulations, making it more difficult to access the biogenetic resources required for biomedical research into toxins. Resulting internal inequalities have reinvigorated nationalistic political agendas (Schwartz-Marin and Restrepo 2013). The logics by which current regulation tries to disentangle indigenous contributions to Western toxicology are extremely difficult to establish and prove, and tend to privilege the language and values of scientists, rather than indigenous understandings of the world and ways of knowledge (Angerer 2011). As Bowker (2000) has argued, collecting data is a way of ordering the world. The regulation of biodata has played a central role in crafting what is relevant for biodiversity, what climate and medical researchers investigate, and what policy makers pay attention to. So far databases have been governed by European and US codes of conduct and practice, depending on the country, discipline, and researcher(s) responsible for the project (Leonelli 2016; Bezuidenhout et al. 2017). Methodological and sociopolitical limitations aside, toxins are well suited for tracing the networks of indigenous bioscience. Hallucinogens, pharmaceuticals, and toxic organisms routinely cross and even help to define the boundaries between sickness and wellness, or between indigenous or popular knowledge and medical science, and can serve as productive tools for tracing global flows of knowledge, capital, and people (Greene and Sismondo 2015). Informed by the worlds they

23

The Frog and the Vine

495

inhabit, toxins can link otherwise diverse or seemingly unrelated practices, and make new phenomena visible, such as the ways that indigenous knowledge informs contemporary medical practice. The two specific cases we explore below, the poison dart frog and ayahuasca, are a great starting point to trace, problematize, and discuss the hybridities across indigenous and Western toxicologies and research, and also how historiographies as told by patent offices, applicants, and indigenous peoples and NGOS disputing them clash.

Ayahuasca Also known as yajé, ayahuasca is a drink derived from a hallucinogenic vine that is central to indigenous ritual practices across the Amazon and many South American nations, including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and some parts of Brazil. Ethnobotanists and chemists such as Schulte and Raffauf (1996) called it the soul vine. Although the notion of soul does not entirely map onto the cosmologies of the indigenous nations of the Amazon, the etymological origins of aya can be roughly compared to the Western notions of spirit, or dead body, and waska translates to vine. Most often cooked over a wood fire, ayahuasca is usually made from shredded sections of the Banisteriopsis cappi vine, which, depending on the preparer and region, is slowly boiled over hours or days along with leaves, bark, or root (MacRae 1999). The plants used to make ayahuasca greatly affect an individual brew’s psychedelic properties, including potency and effect on takers. In many places, restrictions are followed for those wishing to engage in ayahuasca ceremonies, such as fasting, food restrictions, prohibitions on contact with menstruating women, sexual activity, and more. Archaeologists have found evidence of ayahuasca use dating back to more than 1000 years ago, in the form of a small bundle of psychotropic plants found in the Bolivian Andes containing harmine and dimethyltryptamine, the two principal chemical ingredients found in ayahuasca (Miller et al. 2019). In accordance with some Amazonian ontologies, plants used in ayahuasca are conscious beings within their own right, and are understood to be intentional agents capable of allowing for the specific forms of ecological connectedness: “Shamanic approaches use certain ways of relating with other-than-human beings, including communicating with plant beings and spirits,” (Dev 2018, 19). Knowledge is generated through the human– plant relationship. Early colonial accounts from the sixteenth century also record ayahuasca use among indigenous peoples (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975). In the middle of the twentieth century, Western scientists began to try and isolate the chemical compounds present in the plants used to make ayahuasca. Ayahuasca was gaining increasing notoriety in some circles in the US, inspiring beat poet William Burroughs’ journey to the Amazon, the correspondence from which was later compiled in The Yage Letters with Allen Ginsberg (Burroughs and Ginsberg 2001). Multiple other expeditions and journeys from North to South America occurred in search of ayahuasca (Naranjo

496

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

1974), with hopes of studying the properties of the drink and identifying the processes by which the alkaloids affected human experience. Debates over intellectual property and the use of “traditional” knowledge in biomedical research are rooted in disputes beginning in 1986 when Loren Miller first patented ayahuasca. The ayahuasca patent was granted on the basis that Banisteriopsis caapi was a novel variety of vine that could be distinguished from other known varieties by its leaf shape and flower coloring. In 1994, the Coordinating Body of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) became aware of the ayahuasca patent, and called for a re-examination of the patent on the basis that ayahuasca failed to meet the novelty criterion given its longstanding use in many indigenous traditions, and because ayahuasca has sacred status and thus it would be immoral to patent it. In 1999, the ayahuasca patent was reexamined and the patent office called for its rejection on the basis that a similar specimen was known within academic discourse over a year prior to Miller’s patent application being filed. In a highly significant legal case in which Amazonian indigenous tribes challenged Miller’s right to the ownership of ayahuasca, it was decided that a patent should never have been granted. The court’s decision was significant as it illustrates how patent laws systematically exclude indigenous knowledge practices. By typifying the organic life forms cultivated by indigenous populations as undomesticated varieties, Western research systems have delegitimized and discredited indigenous forms of knowledge and knowledge-generation. The biomedical complex “has been largely unable to recognize or value the role of indigenous and local farming communities because the innovators themselves have been invisible, the forms of transmission of knowledge incomprehensible, and the purpose of the work has differed from that of much formal science” (Roht-Arriaza 1996, 931). In recent years there has been a revival of ayahuasca use in Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil, as well as in the USA and Europe. This public resurgence has brought new attention to ritual practices and indigenous-led guidelines on how to practice indigenous healing (Zuluaga-Ramirez 2005) as well as significant public debate over cultural appropriation, and religious or spiritual usages such as with Santo Daime practitioners (Labate et al. 2009). In addition to such touristic, cultural, or religious uses, the hallucinogenic chemicals and the shamanic practices associated with ayahuasca have traveled with great success to the Western biomedical world. There has been increasing interest in the use of the “death vine” or “soul vine” in the treatment of terminal and mental illnesses. Ayahuasca has become the center of a number of clinical trials and alternative therapies which aim to alleviate the symptoms of depression, anxiety, and addiction, among others. Clinical trials conducted using ayahuasca have resulted in potential therapies for the treatment of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and alcohol addiction. Ongoing experiments invoke and challenge discourses on drug use and experimentation, as well as the ways that “traditional” plants enter the worlds of research trials and doctors’ offices. In some cases, the research includes using a trip guide to help patients have good trips. Proponents have argued that the use of ayahuasca could foster a new approach to death and dying in the “West” that is

23

The Frog and the Vine

497

inspired by indigenous ritual practice: “[I]ndividuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states. . .and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance” (Pollan 2015). However, biomedical research in this vein generally involves a selective approach to ayahuasca, in which the psychotropic properties of the biochemical are retained, while simultaneously doing away with (or sanitizing) the ritualized spiritual practices at the heart of indigenous practice with ayahuasca.

Poison Dart Frog Home to 15% of global biodiversity in just 0.071% of the world’s area, countries like Colombia have heralded tremendous pharmaceutical and therapeutic advancement. In the midst of political tensions and international scandals (Tidwell 2002), several chemical compounds have been identified in the Amazonian rainforest that hold the potential to change medical practice around the globe. The poison dart frog (Phyllobates Terribilis, the most toxic vertebrate on earth) is a case in point, with one individual carrying approximately 1 milligram of poison – or enough to kill between 10 and 20 adults. The Poison Dart Frog provides fascinating insight into indigenous knowledge exchange. Unlike the successful clinical trials conducted using ayahuasca, the Poison Dart Frog is representative of a what can be seen as a biomedical failure. Known to the Emberas of the Colombian Choco, as well as the Waorani of Ecuador for centuries due to its toxic potency, P. terribilis was identified and described by John Daly of the US National Institute of Health (Myers et al. 1978). In 1974, Daly and Myers set out to conduct fieldwork in Ecuador with the aim of “analyzing biological activity of alkaloids in frog skin” (Angerer 2011, 4), during which they “discovered” the Poison Dart Frog or Phyllobates terriblis (ibid 4). So-coined for the “extraordinary toxicity of the frog’s skin secretions, and [. . .] the fear once evoked by the poisoned blowgun darts of a more war-like people” (Myers et al. 1978), the Poison Dart Frog is thought to be some two-hundred times more potent than Morphine (Angerer 2011). The alkaloid derived from the skin secretions of the Phllobates Terriblis fueled hopes for a potential new, and nonaddictive opioid. Daly and Myers returned to Ecuador in 1976, traveled to collect further samples of the Poison Dart Frog and its secretions (Myers et al. 1978). However, they found that the site from which they had procured their original samples was void of Poison Dart Frogs. At a different location, Daly and Myers extracted samples of the alkaloid from some 750 Poison Dart Frogs; however they could not pinpoint the source of the analgesic effects observed in the original 1974 sample. They returned to Ecuador to gather more frogs, and again found that the samples collected contained negligible levels of the desired alkaloid (Angerer 2011). Initially collected without any scientific regulation on the part of regulatory agencies, in 1984 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) restricted the trade of frogs from the dendrobatic family (Daly et al. 2000).

498

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

In 2000, Daly obtained a patent on epibatidine, the toxic alkaloid secreted by the frog that interacts with pain receptors to cause numbness and paralysis. The hope has been to develop the properties of the alkaloid into a potent analgesic that could substitute opioid-based painkillers like morphine, but without the side effects (Decker et al. 2001; Tarvin et al. 2017). It was not until some 15 years later that the toxin responsible for the observed analgesic effects was identified. This delay in identification occurred both because of a failure to collect an adequate sample size and as a result of inadequate technologies with which to isolate and identify the toxin. Although the creation of a less addictive substitute for morphine has not yet materialized given that the necessary dose is too close to the mortal dosage, research on epibatidine has opened new fields of genetic, clinical, and chemical research, and reorganized the classification of amphibians (Angerer 2011). The history of the Poison Dart Frog’s “discovery” by Daly raises interesting questions around the degree to which knowledge and discovery are dependent upon a particular apparatus. However, the more significant questions for this chapter are those which concern the collection and utilization of the Poison Dart Frog. Issues surrounding the availability of organisms, such as the Poison Dart Frog, are both sociopolitical and legal in nature (Angerer 2011). They concern not only the ability to access such “raw materials,” but also the right to do so. The history of biopiracy in the case of the Poison Dart Frog occurred as a result of the availability of a new technology, which allowed Myers and Daly to preserve samples of the toxin first collected in 1968 (Daly et al. 2000). However, epibatidine, the toxin isolated from the Phyllobates Terriblis was not “discovered” until 1976, due to the issues with sample collection. Questions have been raised regarding whether Daly and Myers sought and received assistance from indigenous populations in finding the Poison Dart Frog toxins, and how the knowledge they acquired with the Emberas in Colombia then informed their subsequent discovery of toxins in other frog species. Daly, Myers, and Malkin claim that “there was no tradition in Ecuadorian folklore that the skin of the Epidendrobates tricolor had analgesic or other medicinal properties, and, in fact, the frog was considered locally as an unimportant part of the fauna” (Daly et al. 2000, 132). However, others note that indigenous tribes in the Amazon were aware of the existence of the Poison Dart Frog, and had made use of the Terriblis toxin in both healing and warfare. For generations, tribes in the Amazon rain forest have used secretions from the skin of a frog to make poison blow darts. Now Abbott Laboratories is developing a painkiller modelled in the active chemical in the frog secretion that seems as effective as morphine but without damaging side effects (Pollack 1999)

The tensions generated by the Poison Dart Frog case culminated in the filing of an official claim that Abbott Laboratories ought to share information, credit, and findings relating to and arising from the Poison Dart Frog samples with the Ecuadorian government (Angerer 2011). The claim was levied on the basis that indigenous Ecuadorian nationalities had played a significant role in the discovery of epibatidine, and that without engagement with the Emberas and the other indigenous

23

The Frog and the Vine

499

nationalities in Ecuador and Colombia, Daly would not have been able to collect the samples necessary to “discover” epibatidine. Even though this claim was not upheld, it sheds light on the tensions generated through the bioprospecting of organic toxins.

Decolonizing Methodologies and Symmetric Science Rooted in colonialism and conceptions of Western modernity, the history of toxic organisms continues to grapple with legacies of largely white, male scholars located in the West who traveled to distant locations to explain “traditional,” ways of life. As decolonial theorists have argued, one result of this history has been the persistence of a binary between the researcher and the researched. Following Quijano, the Eurocentric project of rationality, modernity, and colonial domination has rendered the European researcher as the “subject” capable of knowing, and all others as the “object” of knowledge (Quijano 2009). Importantly, critiques of ethnographic and historical methodologies have also been levied against biomedicine (cf. Keller 2006), as a research practice centered on the dualities of subject and object, self and other, knower and known. The 1990s saw a groundswell of scholarship calling for the decolonization of anthropology and humanities. Subsequent interventions examined colonial legacies of research, pointing to the problem of misrepresentation and appropriation of indigenous knowledge and practice (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). Further work by black, latinx, and indigenous scholars has deconstructed research binaries (TallBear 2014; Tuck and Wayne Yang 2012; Zavala 2013), illustrating that the divisions of nature/ culture, subject/object were never universal, but rather part of a specific project of modernity that sought to erase other relational forms of knowing and being in the world (Todd 2016). This work has pushed anthropologists to inquire into “the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands, and bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it?)” (TallBear 2014, 1). Approaches that seek “symmetric science” take seriously the colonial erasure of other types of knowledge and practice, challenging the ideals of modern science (Feyerabend 1978). Symmetry entails approaching Western and non-Western societies in the same way, refusing any assertion of a “grand divide” between “modern” and “premodern” societies (Latour 1993). Decolonization, then, is not just a theoretical perspective; it is a methodological intervention into the way that research is done, using transformative methodologies that do not rely on colonial logics of “collection” or insist on equivalence between “alternative” ways of knowing the world and the categories of “modern” science, law, or culture (de la Cadena 2010). Decolonizing methodologies involve questioning how knowledge is produced, as an epistemological, political, and methodological matter infused with power. This is, following Escobar’s interventions into the pluralities of the worlds we inhabit, an effort to examine “other anthropologies and anthropology otherwise,” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005). Decolonial anthropology addresses matters that are important to the communities involved, taking indigenous epistemologies seriously and using them to address

500

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

pertinent problems. In other words, “decolonization is not a metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012); it is always spatially situated and temporally specific, and not abstract nor a general proposition. We take inspiration from work which argues that decolonization is about more than reciprocity or aid, rather it is a practice of “standing with”; a process of co-determining how different intellectual, ethical, scientific, and communitybuilding projects might benefit from shared conversation and practice (TallBear 2014). Some indigenous researchers have argued that community collaboration and control over research is a prerequisite to decolonizing work, identifying “participatory action research methods” through which communities determine what data is collected, and how it is to be used (Zavala 2013). A central tenet of community ownership in research is the right of refusal (Zahara 2016). Reading the histories of ayahuasca and the Poison Dart Frog through calls to decolonize research practices, refusals to share knowledge, property, and practices are notably absent from the official histories of these toxic organisms – such as the Waorani indigenous group’s lawsuit to remove their cell lines from the Coriell Institute biorepository. The cases of ayahuasca and the Poison Dart Frog are rich for thinking, not only about the doctrine of discovery infuses historical accounts of toxic organisms, but also how horizontal relationships might be intentionally forged across various forms of knowledge and practice in ongoing research endeavors – from laboratories to rainforests.

Conclusion Critical theory emerging out of Latin America has shown that questions ranging from science to data are linked to broader questions of global inequality, neocolonialism, and extractivist politics. Thus far, research in biopiracy, bioprospection, and biodiversity has been largely stuck in techno-legal solutionism, and Latin American contexts have invested heavily in creating punitive, albeit inoperative, governance frameworks. Despite the repeated criticisms of scientists and NGOs that genomic sovereignty laws have had little effect on regulating the circulation of biomaterials from the global south to the north (Schwartz-Marin and Restrepo 2013), little policy or regulatory change has taken place. We take these criticisms seriously, and rather than trying to make existing punitive mechanisms operative, we call for further codesigned, decolonial collaborations in scientific innovation that take on board both indigenous and scientific cosmologies and goals, and open dialogues between scientists, NGOs, and indigenous representatives. It is important to note that these criticisms clearly intersect with ongoing conversations about self-governance and sovereignty in Latin America. We imagine that this work would be rooted in practices of “standing with” (Tallbear 2014). Historiographies that bring indigenous knowledge, voices, and critical perspectives, much of which is found in oral traditions, is key. In other words, what “counts” as knowledge or data needs to be refigured – both in thinking about the problems of biopiracy and in how such problems are researched and recounted in historiography, anthropology, STS, and the social sciences more broadly. To produce a thorough examination of the historiographies of patent claims, pharmacological promise, and the purification of toxins – as they move from the

23

The Frog and the Vine

501

Amazonian rainforest into laboratories in Europe and the US – would be a first step toward challenging and nuancing salvage histories. Decolonizing historiography would require that historical accounts made by botanical pioneers that are full of tropes that conceptualize indigenous peoples as stagnated in the past, in need of protection, or as vanishing remnants of world that is disappearing with globalization not only need to be critically revised, but also can motivate researchers to change their tact. For instance, historical record keeping could be transformed by seeking out creative, collaborative avenues between history and anthropology to produce contemporary oral accounts of millenary practices in which indigenous voices – and not the researchers – define themselves, and their practices. This could provide critical perspectives on the capitalist expansion that has sought to patent parts of indigenous heritage and life worlds as a “novel” discovery. In proposing this, we also take inspiration from scholarship which argues that decolonization must move beyond existing approaches employed in some bioscientific work providing “benefit” to local communities, in which the needs and desires of local participants are predetermined by (Western) researchers. As such, it is essential that such collaborations are led by the needs and desires of the indigenous partners, with spaces for refusal and reflection that are often not part of social science or biomedical research methodologies, timeframes, or priorities. Tackling biopiracy means moving beyond strictly punitive governance mechanisms in matters of sovereignty, which tend to be ineffective and time consuming, and mostly beyond the reach of those affected. Historiographical and anthropological research needs to be embedded in a process of co-determining how different intellectual, ethical, scientific, and community-building projects might benefit from shared conversation and practice (TallBear 2014). This means that engagement and collaboration cannot be predetermined prior to initiating the research process, but rather researchers bring an openness to change and revision in light of existing histories of harm, or the emergence of particular facts or practices that might pose new risks or benefits to the research community. In short, we are convinced that a more inclusive, even decolonial, historiography is one that cannot only rely on the archives of the powerful. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Ellie Shaw for her assistance, and the reviewers who took the time to improve this chapter. Parts of the research conducted for this chapter were possible thanks to seed funding from The University of Exeter via its European Network Research Fund entitled “Decolonizing the Philosophy and Anthropology of psychedelics.”

References Ambrosi de la Cadena M (2017) Knowledge commons: an alternative to proprietary knowledge. Maskana 8(1):43–59 Angerer K (2011) Frog tales – on poison dart frogs, epibatidine, and the sharing of biodiversity. Innov Eur J Soc Sci Res 24(3):353–369 Bezuidenhout LM, Leonelli S, Kelly AH, Rappert B (2017) Beyond the digital divide: towards a situated approach to open data. Sci Public Policy 44(4):464–475

502

E. Schwartz-Marin and A. Fiske

Biehl J (2007) Pharmaceuticalization: AIDS treatment and global health politics. Anthropol Q 80 (4):1083–1126 Bowker GC (2000) Biodiversity data diversity. Soc Stud Sci 30(5):643–683 Burroughs WS, Ginsberg A (2001) The yage letters, 1st edn. City Lights Publishers, San Francisco Claw KG, Anderson MZ, Begay RL, Tsosie KS, Fox K, Garrison NA (2018) A framework for enhancing ethical genomic research with Indigenous communities. Nat Commun 9(1):2957 Comaroff J (1976) A bitter pill to swallow: placebo therapy in general practice. Sociol Rev 24(1): 79–96 Daly JW, Martin Garraffo H, Spande TF, Decker MW, Sullivan JP, Williams M (2000) Alkaloids from frog skin: the discovery of epibatidine and the potential for developing novel non-opioid analgesics. Nat Prod Rep 17(2):131–135 de la Cadena M (2010) Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: conceptual reflections beyond ‘Politics’. Cult Anthropol 25(2):334–370 Decker MW, Meyer MD, Sullivan JP (2001) The therapeutic potential of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonists for pain control. Expert Opin Investig Drugs 10(10):1819–1830. page 15 of 20 Delgado G (2002) Biopiracy and intellectual property as the basis for biotechnological development. Int J Polit Cult Soc 16(2) Dev L (2018) Plant knowledges: indigenous approaches and interspecies listening towards decolonizing Ayahuasca research. In: Labate BC, Cavnar C (eds) Plant medicines, healing and psychedelic science: cultural perspectives. Springer, New York, pp 185–204 Dumit J (2012) Drugs for life: how pharmaceutical companies define our health. Duke University Press, Durham Ecks S (2008) Global pharmaceutical markets and corporate citizenship: the case of Novartis? Anticancer drug Glivec. BioSocieties 3(2):165–181 Feyerabend P (1978) Against method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. Verso, London Greene J, Sismondo S (2015) The pharmaceutical studies reader. Wiley, Chichester/Malden Hardon A, Sanabria E (2017) Fluid drugs: revisiting the anthropology of pharmaceuticals. Annu Rev Anthropol 46(1):117–132 Hayden C (2003) When nature goes public: the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton University Press Keller R (2006) Geographies or power, legacies of mistrust: colonial medicine in the global present. Hist Geogr 34:26–48 Labate BC, de Rose IS, dos Santos RG (2009) Ayahuasca religions: a comprehensive bibliography & critical essays. Translated by Matthew Meyer. Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Santa Cruz Lakoff A (2006) Pharmaceutical reason: knowledge and value in global psychiatry. Cambridge University Press Landecker H (2016) Antibiotic resistance and the biology of history. Body Soc 22(4):19–52 Latour B (1993) We have never been modern. Harvard University Press Leonelli S (2016) Data-centric biology: a philosophical study. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Lock M (2017) Recovering the body. Annu Rev Anthropol 46(1):1–14 MacRae E (1999) The ritual and religious use of Ayahuasca in contemporary Brazil. Grupo Interdisciplinar de Estudos sobre Sustancias Psicoativas, Geneva, pp 47–50. http://www.giesp. ffch.ufba.br/Textos%20Edward%20Digitalizados/23.pdf Mello MM, Wolf LE (2010) The Havasupai Indian Tribe Case – lessons for research involving stored biologic samples. N Engl J Med 363(3):204–207 Miller JR (2011) The international law of colonialism: a comparative analysis. Lewis Clark Law Rev 15:847 Miller MJ, Albarracin-Jordan J, Moore C, Capriles JM (2019) Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. Proc Natl Acad Sci 116(23):11207–11212. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1902174116 Morales Males P, Abril A, Vásquez F (2015) Soberanía Genocultural Del Ecuador. Programa Panamericano de Defensa y Desarrollo de La Diversidad Biológica, Cultural, y Social, November

23

The Frog and the Vine

503

Myers CW, Daly JW, Malkin B (1978) A dangerously toxic new frog (Phyllobates) used by Emberá Indians of Western Colombia, with discussion of Blowgun fabrication and dart poisoning. Bull Am Mus Nat Hist 161(2):307–366 Nading AM (2017) Local biologies, leaky things, and the chemical infrastructure of global health. Med Anthropol 36(2):141–156 Naranjo C (1974) The healing journey: new approaches to consciousness, 1st edn. Pantheon Books, New York Petryna A (2009) When experiments travel: clinical trials and the global search for human subjects. Princeton University Press Pollack A (1999) Biological products raise genetic ownership issues: governments are demanding share of profits, New York Times, November 26. http://hdl.handle.net/10822/519096 Pollan M (2015) The trip treatment: research into psychedelics, shut down for decades, is now yielding exciting results. The New Yorker, February 9, 2015, sec. Annals of Medicine Popejoy A, Fullerton S (2016) Genomics is failing on diversity. Nat Comment 538(7624) Quijano A (2009) Coloniality and modernity/rationality. In: Mignolo WD, Escobar A (eds) Globalization and the decolonial option. Routledge, London, pp 22–32 Reichel-Dolmatoff G (1975) The Shaman and the Jaguar: a study of narcotic drugs among the Indians of Colombia. Temple University Press, Philadelphia Restrepo E, Escobar A (2005) ‘Other anthropologies and anthropology otherwise’: steps to a world anthropologies framework. Crit Anthropol 25(2):99–129 Roht-Arriaza N (1996) Of seeds and shamans: the appropriation of the scientific and technical knowledge of indigenous and local communities. Mich J Int Law 17(4):919–966 Sanabria E (2016) Plastic bodies: sex hormones and menstrual suppression in Brazil. Duke University Press, Durham Schultes ER, Raffauf R (1996) Vine of the soul: medicine men, their plants and rituals in the Colombian Amazonia. Synergetic Press, Sante Fe Schwartz-Marin E, Restrepo E (2013) Biocoloniality, governance, and the protection of ‘genetic identities’ in México and Colombia. Sociology 47(5):993–1010 Sismondo S (2015) Pushing knowledge in the drug industry: ghost-managed science. In: Sismondo S, Greene JA (eds) The pharmaceutical studies reader. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 150–164 Sunder Rajan K (2017) Pharmocracy: value, politics, and knowledge in global biomedicine. Duke University Press, Durham TallBear K (2013) Native American DNA: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis TallBear K (2014) Standing with and speaking as faith: a feminist-indigenous approach to inquiry. J Res Pract 10(2):17 Tarvin RD, Borghese CM, Sachs W, Santos JC, Ying L, O’Connell LA, Cannatella DC, Adron Harris R, Zakon HH (2017) Interacting amino acid replacements allow poison frogs to evolve epibatidine resistance. Science Washington 357(6357):1261–1266 Tidwell J (2002) Raiders of the forest cures. ZOOGOER Magazine, 2002 Todd Z (2016) An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. J Hist Sociol 29(1):4–22 Tuck E, Wayne Yang K (2012) Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolon Indigen Educ Soc 1(1) Tuhiwai Smith L (1999) Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books and University of Otago Press, London Wasson RG (1976) Maria Sabina and her Mazatec mushroom velada. Harcourt, New York Zahara A (2016) Refusal as research method in discard studies. Discard Stud 21:2016 Zavala M (2013) What do we mean by decolonizing research strategies? Lessons from decolonizing, indigenous research projects in New Zealand and Latin America. Decolon Indigen Educ Soc 2:55–71 Zuluaga-Ramirez G (2005) Conservación de La Diversidad Biológica y Cultural en el Piedemonte Amazónico Colombiano: La Herencia del Dr. Schultes. Ethnobot Res Appl 3:167–177

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

24

Its Growth and Diversification in the 1940–1960 Decades Aldo Mellender de Arau´jo

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Genetics in Brazil: The Early Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Foundation of the Sociedade Brasileira de Genética (Brazilian Society of Genetics) . . . . The Diversification of Genetics in Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

506 507 508 517 518 523 524

Abstract

Genetics in Brazil was introduced as a teaching activity in 1918, at Piracicaba, state of São Paulo. A decade later, researches were already being developed in the same town, at Escola Agrícola and at the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas, at Campinas, São Paulo, with applied genetics to corn and coffee, respectively. However, evolutionary genetics started in 1943 with the arrival of Theodosius Dobzhansky for the first time to Brazil, at Universidade de São Paulo, at the capital of the state. From this year on, evolutionary genetics developed rapidly, first in São Paulo and then spreading to different universities around the country. If in the 1940 decade the main organism studied were species of Drosophila, the following decades witnessed studies in a variety of organisms, from insects other than diptera, nonhuman primates, humans, microorganisms, and plants. An analysis of some of the studies being done since 1943 is discussed here, with emphasis on those until 1960.

A. M. d. Araújo (*) Departamento de Genética, Instituto de Biociências, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7_32

505

506

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Introduction The notion that science was an important aspect of the culture and development of a country started to grow in Brazil by the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Auguste Comte’s positivism. A scientific state was the objective ahead, according to the French philosopher, since this represented the more advanced state of his “law of three states” (theological, metaphysical, and positive, respectively). It was with this perspective that the Brazilian political authorities programmed a regional version of the Great Exhibition to happen in November 15, 1900 (to celebrate the date of the instauration of the republican regime in 1889), at the southernmost capital of a state, the city of Porto Alegre, state of Rio Grande do Sul. At the time, this was one of the most advanced states in Brazil, where native people together with immigrants from Germany and Italy brought a Europeanizing atmosphere of industrialization and progress. The twentieth century, in turn, has been named by the American philosopher Evelyn Fox Keller as the “century of the gene” (2000), to emphasize the great advancement of genetics, the scientific area first called Mendelism, in honor of Johann Gregor Mendel (both names, Mendelism and genetics, were proposed by William Bateson in the beginning of the century). To celebrate the great achievements of genetics in the year 1950, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of Mendel’s work, a group of invited speakers discussed the contribution of genetics to the twentieth-century science. The meeting occurred from 11 to 14 of September, at the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Twenty-six papers were published in a volume edited by L. C. Dunn (1951); two of these papers are worth to be briefly mentioned here. Richard Goldschmidt summarized the contribution of genetics to science in general as follows (Goldschmidt 1951): The first general result of primary importance is the unequivocal separation of hereditary and non-hereditary changes of the organism as first established by Johannsen. [. . .] This insight at once excluded any possibility that acquired characters might be inherited and apportioned clearly the relative roles of heredity and environment in the determination of organization. (p. 3)

To him, the second and third basic results of genetics were, the establishment of mutation as the source of hereditary change and the experimental demonstration that the material basis of heredity was localized in the chromosomes. Two more basic results of what he called “static genetics” were the proof that the chromosomes have a constant polar organization, and the demonstration of crossing-over between homologous chromosomes. As for “dynamic genetics,” he points out the genetic control of a series of events which constitute development. At the penultimate chapter of a book with more than 600 pages, Theodosius Dobzhansky, at the time the President of the American Society of Naturalists, addressed the subject of “Mendelian populations and their evolution.” Following an introduction on how science works, he declares that:

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

507

Because it ties together the greater number of most diverse facts into a simple and meaningful system, the theory of evolution is by far the most significant generalization which has yet emerged from the biological sciences. (pp. 573–574)

For him, Darwin has done the first step to the understanding of evolutionary changes in populations, particularly the adaptive changes. Although Darwin was aware of the necessity to explain how the offspring is similar to its parents, as well as the origin of variation, he could not advance an adequate explanation, other than his “provisional hypothesis of pangenesis.” It was Mendel who provided the key to understand heredity, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, Hardy and Weinberg independently used that knowledge as a “key to open the first lock” (p. 575), followed by Morgan’s group and the studies with Drosophila. The link to evolution, in Dobzhansky’s view, was done by Sergei Chetverikov and his school, unknown for western scientists until his paper was translated in 1961, together with Fisher’s book on the genetical theory of natural selection and Sewall Wright’s paper on the evolution of Mendelian populations. (Dobzhanksy’s omission of the name of J. B. S. Haldane is surprising, not only by his book The Causes of Evolution (1932) but also by his many papers on the mathematical theory of natural selection (the first one in 1924).) To distinguish from systematic categories, which are used for practical purposes, Dobzhansky introduced a theoretical concept, namely, the concept of Mendelian population. This is “a reproductive community of sexual and cross-fertilizing individuals which share a common gene pool.” Usually, this is called a “deme” in population genetics. For the evolutionary synthesis, the species “is the largest and most inclusive Mendelian population.” His final words in the chapter are dedicated to the “creative” aspects of evolution: Evolution, then, is a creative process, but not in the sense of being directed by some supernatural force, as has often been explicitly or implicitly supposed by vitalists and their modern successors, the finalists. [. . .] Evolution is creative because it involves the formation of previously non-existent coherent entities, Mendelian populations culminating in species; because these entities enable life to spread into and to exploit new environments more and more efficiently; and because evolution, like all creative processes, involves risk of failure and miscreation. . . (pp. 587–588)

For the surprise of the reader, he concludes by saying that this kind of evolutionary creativity confers “dignity” to organic evolution.

Genetics in Brazil: The Early Years Genetics was first taught in Brazil at the Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz (ESALQ – at the time, it was called Escola Agrícola), Piracicaba, São Paulo, in 1918, by Carlos Teixeira Mendes, Otávio Domingues, and Salvador de Toledo Piza Jr. In the following year at Rio de Janeiro, a course on histology and embryology was organized by André Dreyfus, for medical students. ESALQ created a

508

A. M. d. Arau´jo

“Sector of Genetics,” a group for teaching and doing researches in applied genetics in 1927 (later, in 1958, became the Instituto de Genética). This school has attained, later, good international reputation for doing research and teaching in quantitative genetics and plant breeding. A journal, Revista de Agricultura, now Brazilian Journal of Agriculture, was published by ESALQ since 1926. Initially, many papers were translations of articles published abroad, although original ones were also published. In 1933, Carlos Krug published there five papers on the genetics and improvement of corn. He was, indeed, the only Brazilian geneticist who attended the Sixth International Congress of Genetics, at Cornell University, Ithaca, in 1932. The 1930s witnessed political changes in Brazil: Since October 1930, there was a revolutionary government, which adopted the name “provisional.” This government had the following objectives: (1) to promote the industrialization of the country; (2) to provide social welfare especially for the working class, and at the same time to stop the oligarchic power; and (3) to establish a plan for education at all levels; in 1931, for example, the government published a decree to regulate the public universities. The University of Distrito Federal, at Rio de Janeiro (then the capital of Brazil), was created in 1935 (later it was transformed in the University of Brazil). This state of affairs was again disturbed, by an authoritarian coup d’état in 1937, surprisingly, by the same politician that established the “provisional” government in 1930, Getulio Dornelles Vargas. This new regime was denominated O Estado Novo (The New State), had a short duration, and ended in 1945, when general elections were organized and a period of democratic government followed until 1964. In the decade of 1930, there were two Brazilian centers of research in applied genetics: one in the city of Campinas, at the Instituto Agronômico de Campinas (state of São Paulo), with special reference to coffee genetics, and the other in the city of Piracicaba, at Escola Superior de Agricultura Luís de Queiroz, with corn genetics, although a German immigrant, Friedrich Gustav Brieger, started there his researches in evolution of Orchidaceae. With the foundation of the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1934, there was a great impulse for sciences in general, genetics included, particularly because for each field of science a foreign researcher was invited, mainly from Europe or the United States, to work full time and to organize groups in the different areas of research. (At the time it was current in the Brazilian Universities only teaching, not associated with research.)

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil Historically, three elements contributed for the development of evolutionary genetics in Brazil: the foundation of the Universidade de São Paulo in 1934, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Theodosius Dobzhansky. It is true that the Rockefeller Foundation already financed medical researches since the decade of 1910, but from 1934 on it redirected its support to basic sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology. One scientist is unanimous among the first and second generation of geneticists in Brazil, as having a fundamental role in the development of the genetics of natural

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

509

populations in this country: Theodosius Dobzhansky. This Ukrainian, naturalized North-American arrived for the first time in Brazil in March 1943, to give conferences on the new evolutionary synthesis (based mainly in the second edition of his book Genetics and the Origin of Species, 1941). Dobzhansky came to Brazil in those turbulent years of the World War II. The United States of America has entered in the conflict in December 1941, after the Japanese attack to Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, the Brazilian government, under Getulio Vargas dictatorship, officially declared, in September 2, 1939, the neutrality of the country. However, in 1942 and 1943, 36 commercial ships were sunk by German U-boats in the Brazilian coast (Oliveira 2011). Due to this, war was declared to Germany and its allies, and Brazilian people were summoned by the war effort. In 1944, the first contingent of soldiers left Brazil toward Europe. Of course, all these had effects in the already poor financial support of the time for scientific researches. There were no official institutions for financing academic activities unitl 1951, with the creation of the National Research Council (Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas – CNPq). In spite of these unfavorable circumstances, Dobzhansky arrived in Brazil with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which, incidentally, helped the development of genetics in this country until de 1960s. As Pavan and Brito da Cunha, two of Dobzhansky’s disciples since the beginning explain in a paper from 2003, celebrating the 60th anniversary of his arrival: In the original agreement it was stated that he would, beside collecting flies, give a few lectures for students and faculty members. This was changed into a special course on the Principles of Evolution, assiduously attended by over 100 people, comprising faculty members of other schools, researchers of several institutions, students and liberal professionals, newspapermen, as well as biologists from nearby cities. (pp. 387–388)

So profitable was his stay in São Paulo that, instead of the 3 months originally planned, he stayed for almost 6 months. Soon he was speaking Portuguese with quite a good fluency and an unforgettable accent. According to Pavan and Brito da Cunha (2003): The lectures were written by Dobzhansky in English, translated into Portuguese by Prof. Dreyfus and, after a training session for correct Portuguese pronunciation helped by the authors of this article, successfully delivered by Dobzhansky in Portuguese, with the charming Russian accent that was his trademark in any language. After the lectures, there were frequently long discussions, where Dreyfus acted as a translator.

The day after his arrival, Dobzhansky went on to collect flies in the Atlantic Forest with two of his closest collaborators: Crodowaldo Pavan and Antonio Brito da Cunha. The task was to identify species of Drosophila and to choose some of them to start laboratory cultures and to decide which would be amenable for future studies. As a result of these trips around the city of São Paulo, and also to the State of Rio de Janeiro (the city of Rio de Janeiro, or Distrito Federal; at the time, it was the capital of Brazil), an extensive paper was published in the same year, at the Boletim da

510

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras da Universidade de São Paulo (Dobzhansky and Pavan 1943b). The method used for collecting flies was the traditional one: exposure of fermented banana as baits. The flies were transported alive to the laboratory for cultivation and identification of species. At the beginning, the authors refer to the work of a German biologist, O. Duda, who in 1925 published a paper on drosophilids from Peru and Bolivia, and a limited sample from Brazil; however, the material consisted of dry insects, from museums. As the authors say in the Introduction, “the purpose of this survey has been to find native Brazilian species of Drosophila favorable to genetic investigation” (p. 7). They described 31 species of Drosophila, 23 of them being new ones; it is not difficult to imagine Dobzhansky’s excitement at this diversity of species. As the cosmopolitan or semicosmopolitan species D. melanogaster, D. simulans, D. anananassae, D. immigrans, and D. busckii were found close to human habitations; they were not described, although they appeared as key to species identification. An analysis of the results shows that they worked hard: Each description comprised a detailed morphology, measurement of the body size, examination of Malpighian tubes, testes, spermathecae, eggs, puparia, chromosomes (all of them with drawings in seven plates at the end of the paper), geographic distribution, and relationship with other species. Still, in 1943, another paper was published, by Dobzhansky and Pavan in the December issue of PNAS, on the chromosome complement of South-Brazilian species of Drosophila (three species, D. prosaltans, D. sturtevanti, and D. annulimana). They used nerve cells of larval ganglia to get the metaphase chromosomes to be compared between the species. Although the article is completely descriptive, there is an interesting conclusion about the results: We are forced to conclude that in D. prosaltans there are two X and two Y chromosomes: one rod-like and free (X1_Y1) and the other attached to an autosomal rod, forming with the latter a V-shaped complex (AX2_AY2). The formula of the female is, consequently, X1X1AX2AX2, and of the male X1Y1AX2Y2. Such a chromosomal structure (Fig. 3) is unique in Drosophila; it must lead to a number of genetic complications. (pp. 369–370)

The genetic complications the authors stress are those relative to spermatogenesis in males: Four types of spermatozoa would be formed, two of them giving rise of inviable zygotes. To conclude, the first of Dobzhansky’s stay in Brazil resulted in three papers (the third one was by Dobzhansky and Dreyfus 1943, on chromosomal aberrations in D. ananassae) whose results were the product of only 5 months working in field and laboratory. This is not a bad result at all; may be this confirms the dictum about Dobzhansky’s way of working: “a month gone by without a paper sent to press was a wasted month” (Provine 1981, p. 48, after James Bonner comments on Dobzhansky). A detailed analysis of this period, including Dobzhansky’s letters to his friends in the United States, as well as his reminiscences on Brazil, was made by Araújo (2004). Every year, Dobzhansky had to write a report on his activities; the reports were published as the Annual Report of the Director of the Department of Genetics,

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

511

Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book. The no. 43, issued in December 1944, deals with his activities in the year 1943–1944 and apart from his studies in dispersion rates in D. pseudoobscura, in the United States, has a section on “Collecting Drosophila in Brazil” at page 124 (Dobzhansky 1944). There he explains the advantage of studying tropical species, particularly because the modifications in population density from one season to the other are of lesser magnitude. After some data on the number of species he and his Brazilian collaborators collected in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and in the Amazonian biome, he discusses the sexual isolation within a species, with special reference to a strain of Drosophila willistoni: There is, however, a strain collected at Teffé, state of Amazonas, Brazil, the flies from which refuse almost entirely to cross with any other D. willistoni strain, even if no choice of mates is available. When, exceptionally, cross-insemination takes place, viable offspring are seldom, if ever, produced. A comparison of Teffé flies with other strains of D. willistoni fails to disclose any external difference between them except for the slightly smaller body size of the Teffé flies. (p. 125–126) (The question of sexual isolation between strains of D. willistoni was the center of a divergent interpretation between Dobzhansky and Antonio Cordeiro and his doctoral student in the 60s, Helga Winge. Dobzhansky criticized severely the interpretation that Winge advanced at the time, on a probable new subspecies of willistoni. The solution came only recently, in a paper by Mardiros et al., 2016. The authors of this publication, recognizing the correctness of her view, proposed, even without a formal description, a new subspecies, D. willistoni wingei, in her honor.)

After Dobzhansky’s return to the United States, one more paper was published by Pavan and Brito da Cunha (1947) on species of Drosophila from Brazil. Written in Portuguese, the article introduced a new method of collecting flies, directly from fermented natural fruits instead of banana baits, the flies being captured by the usual way of a net with a vial attached at the end. The remaining methodology was the same as the paper by Dobzhansky and Pavan (1943). The authors examined about 500,000 flies and described 9 new species (all from culture in laboratory); other possible new species, which were not amenable to cultivation, were discarded. Other important papers were published by André Dreyfus and Rosina de Barros (Barros and Dreyfus 1947), on genetics and speciation in the repleta group of Drosophila. For instance, Barros (1950) published as a single author, the results that she started to obtain in 1944, collecting samples of Drosophila at the forest around the Paraná river across the west of the state of São Paulo. A new species, Drosophila paranaensis, was described, following the methodology of Pavan and Brito da Cunha (1947). The chromosome number and morphology were also described; the metaphase configuration showed a large difference between D. paranaensis and other species from the repleta group: D. peninsularis, D. mercatorum mercatorum, and D. m. pararepleta. As a matter of fact, she had already published a paper (Barros 1949) on chromosomal aberrations (aneuploids) in D. mercatorum pararepleta, as well as two other papers with Dreyfus as the first author, on chromosomal mutation in the hybrids from the cross of D. m. pararepleta and D. paranaensis. (It is interesting that Rosina de Barros, the second in the academic hierarchy of the Departamento de Biologia Geral (headed by André Dreyfus) did not participate in Dobzhansky’s team. Maybe because she was involved in her doctoral dissertation

512

A. M. d. Arau´jo

which she finished in 1943 on the anatomy of flatworms; later, she developed projects with Tardigrada from the state of São Paulo, which resulted in many papers. When Dobzhansky came back in 1948, to spend a year at the Universidade de São Paulo, she still kept her independence, publishing papers on Drosophila as a single author or with Dreyfus. She retired after Dreyfus’s death, in 1952.) From August 1948 to June 1949, Dobzhansky was back to the Departamento de Biologia Geral (Department of General Biology), at USP, São Paulo. Now the Brazilians had organized very well the activities, inviting a group of young biologists from different parts of Brazil and from abroad to participate in a program to study the genetics and ecology of natural populations of Drosophila, particularly the species D. willistoni and D. prosaltans, which were already being studied. This period of almost 1 year was fundamental for the future development of genetics in different universities in Brazil, outside the state of São Paulo. Under Dobzhansky’s leadership, the group included his wife Mrs. Natasha Dobzhansky, André Dreyfus, Crodowaldo Pavan, Antonio Brito da Cunha, and E. Nascimento Pereira, which had already participated in the journey in 1943 from Universidade de São Paulo – Antonio G. Lagden Cavalcanti and Chana Malogolowkin from the Universidade do Brasil (now Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), at Rio de Janeiro; Antonio Rodrigues Cordeiro, from Universidade de Porto Alegre (now Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), state of Rio Grande do Sul; Marta Wedel from Universidade de Buenos Aires, Argentina, Danko Brncic, from the Universidade de Chile, at Santiago, the capital of Chile; and Hans Burla from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. It is worth to replicate here part of Dobzhansky’s text on the Annual Report to the Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book no. 48 (1949): The work of the above group was made possible by financial assistance extended by the University of São Paulo, the Carnegie Institution Washington and the Rockfeller Foundation. Brazilian military and civil authorities, in particular General Newton Cavalcanti, Brigadier General Eduardo Gomes, the governors and their aides in the states of Goyaz, Amazonas, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and the territories of Rio Branco, Acre, and Guaporé, Dr. Felisberto de Camargo, director of the Instituto Agronômico do Norte at Belém do Pará, and other officials and private persons too numerous to be named, greatly facilitated the field work by providing airplane and other transportation and by extending many valuable courtesies, which made the travel and collection in remote parts of Brazil a success as well as a pleasure. (p. 203)

This group had also sporadic contributions of Osvaldo Frota-Pessoa (Universidade do Brasil) who later continued for a while his work on Drosophila taxonomy by his own, then moving to human genetics. Warwick E. Kerr, who worked under Gustav Brieger at Piracicaba, also kept contact with the group (he later dedicated himself to bee genetics and evolution). A third person has also been involved with the work of Drosophila but was not a part of the group, due to disagreements with Dobzhansky: This was Newton Freire-Maia, coming from the state of Minas Gerais. (Newton Freire-Maia already participated in the 1943 period, as an outsider, learning to prepare Drosophila cultures and all the routine of the laboratory. The disagreement he had with Dobzhansky in 1948 was due to his will to

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

513

get married, which “the boss” did not authorize. When coming back from the short period of honeymoon, he was simply out of the team (interview with Freire-Maia in July 19, 1993). In spite of this incident, they remained friends with no hard feelings.) Some interesting remarks on him are made by Magalhães and Vilela (2014): At that time there was someone else working in the Departamento de Biologia Geral, a young man coming from Minas Gerais, graduated in Dentistry, who came to the building located at Alameda Glette carrying a small book on Genetics, written by himself. He convinced Prof. Dreyfus to hire him as a teaching assistant. (p. 139)

Newton Freire-Maia later founded the Departamento de Genética at the Universidade do Paraná, at Curitiba, state of Paraná, South Brazil, in the decade of 1950 and became an authority in human genetics (consanguineous marriages and associated diseases in the offspring and later dedicated especially to ectodermal dysplasias). However, before doing so, he worked with domestic species of Drosophila, as D. kikkawai and D. simulans, the former suggested by Crodowaldo Pavan, in his return from a 1-year scholarship with Dobzhansky, at Columbia University. As a consequence of a larger group in the period 1948/1949, more research problems were possible to develop. For instance, the ecology of Drosophila species, a subject not fully explored at the time, was the project that Antonio Brito da Cunha started at Dobzhansky’s laboratory at Columbia University after a Rockefeller Foundation postdoctoral scholarship in the academic year 1949/1950. Brito da Cunha studied the attractiveness of different yeasts to individuals of Drosophila species, at Mather, California. The yeasts were obtained from the crops of dissected Drosophila, and placed in Petri plates with propionated malt agar. The yeasts were used in experiments of attraction for three species of Drosophila, persimilis, azteca, and pseudoobscura, and were compared with the attraction of the traditional banana baits, fermented with Fleischmann’s yeast as a control. The data revealed, for instance, that Drosophila azteca males were greatly attracted to the yeast species Zygosaccharomyces pastori (31%), followed by Candida tropicalis (25%), and then banana baits (15%); the yeast Zygosaccharomyces marxianus attracted only 5% of males of D. azteca. This and other results were published in a paper by Brito da Cunha, Dobzhansky, and Sokoloff (1951). One of the main conclusions of the paper was as follows: Experiments described in the present article show that the species of Drosophila which inhabit the Transition Zone of the Sierra Nevada of California are also differentiated with respect to their food preferences. This differentiation does not, however, amount to a rigid specialization. (p. 100)

Based on his experience of 1 year at Dobzhansky’s laboratory, Antonio Brito da Cunha returned to São Paulo and started a new work, with tropical sympatric species of Drosophila. He decided to test the following hypothesis: If in tropical environments there are more species competing for the same resources, then the food preferences should be greater than in temperate environments. He used the species

514

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Drosophila paulistorum and D. willistoni to extract the yeast species to be used in the experiments to test the above hypothesis. The methodology was basically the same as that used in the paper discussed previously. One difference was that he now used as a unit of observation the four neighboring baits with the yeasts found in the crops of males of D. paulistorum and D. willistoni. Four yeast baits were used, numbered as 29, 51, 54, and 82 (only after the experiments have been done, he was informed that the baits 29, 51, and 54 had the same species of yeast). The results showed that the “willistoni” group of sibling species preferred far more frequently the bait with the species Kloeckera apiculate (bait 82, generally above 60%) than the other yeast baits (29, 51, and 54 with the yeast species Candida krusei, about 20% in the average). This was observed in all localities sampled (Belém, Tapajós, both in the state of Pará, Rio Doce, in the state of Minas Gerais, and Cantareira, near the city of São Paulo). The number of species of Drosophila studied was more than 17, and surely the study demanded hard work. This and other results were published by Dobzhansky and Brito da Cunha (1955), which concluded that “more than half of the species of Drosophila which were collected in appreciable numbers have evinced clear preferences for the one or the other of the yeasts” (p. 39). For their disappointment, however, it was not possible to decide if the preferences were more pronounced in the tropics than in temperate places, so the hypothesis advanced initially could not be appropriately tested. The extent of the work in evolutionary genetics produced in the years 1948–1954, as a consequence of Dobzhansky’s second stay in Brazil, can be estimated by the number of papers published in that period: 56, which gives an average of 8 papers a year. Many of these papers were published by those trained by Dobzhansky in that period, after returning to their laboratories in their respective natal cities; some of them will be discussed further (the complete list of papers published from 1943 to 1959 was published by Magalhães and Vilela 2014, Suppl. 1). The background for the third long stay of Dobzhansky in Brazil (July 1955–June 1956) was clearly stated by Magalhães and Vilela (2014): Upon one of his visits to Brazil, flying from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, Dobzhansky saw, as he overflew Angra dos Reis, countless islands which would suit perfectly the experimental model he wanted to test. As he said himself, “they are true natural population boxes”. Population boxes were a kind of equipment used to study in the laboratory, under controlled conditions, a number of genetic issues in Drosophila populations with a known initial genetic composition. (p. 140) (Despite this quotation, Moscoso (1992), says that “there is, however, some ambiguity as to who first thought of using the islands” (p. 35). It seems that Pavan had the idea before Dobzhansky, as revealed in a Rockefeller Archive document.)

Dobzhansky’s plan for the year 1955–1956 was to test one of his favorite hypothesis: that the amount of genetic diversity was maintained by the adaptive superiority of heterozygotes, the so-called “balanced hypothesis.” This hypothesis was in opposition with the “classical” one, which emphasized that the majority of loci in a population of sexually reproducing individuals would be homozygotes; Dobzhansky (1955) himself designated both hypotheses.

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

515

The group of work now was highly international: Charles Birch, University of Sydney, Australia; W. S. Stone, University of Texas; Bruno Bataglia, University of Padua, Italy; Danko Brncic, University of Chile, and Ove Fridenberg, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. As for the Brazilians, apart from the people of the Departamento de Biologia Geral, USP (Pavan, Brito da Cunha, Magalhães, and Elisa Pereira Knapp), there were others from different centers in Brazil: Rio de Janeiro (Antonio Geraldo Lagden Cavalcanti), Bahia (Cora de Moura Pedreira, a physician who was interested in genetics, particularly human genetics; she created the Departamento de Genética of the Universidade da Bahia in 1959), Pernambuco (Myrthes da Silveira Nilo Bispo), Paraná (Newton Freire-Maia), and Rio Grande do Sul (Antonio Rodrigues Cordeiro). The financial support was also different in this case, since there were four sources of funding: The Rockefeller Foundation was responsible for the travel expenses of the foreign scholars; the Universidade de São Paulo provided the stipends for those scholars; the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas (CNPq – National Research Council, created recently, in 1951), and the Atomic Energy Commission of the United States, since one part of the project was to study the genetic effects of radiation, with Drosophila as the model organism. The big project was divided in six parts, four of them being new ones and two others as continuation of former studies. The main study was designed to investigate the spreading of mutants (lethal alleles and chromosomal inversions) in Drosophila willistoni in seven islands of the Angra dos Reis bay, as well as the dispersion rate of the flies (the localization of the islands is indicated in Fig. 4 of Magalhães and Vilela’s paper, 2014). The other project would be developed in the very south of Brazil, in semi-isolated island cold forests in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, as a comparison with the Angra dos Reis islands. A third part of the project was to study the relationship between the flies and their environment, with special emphasis on nutritional ecology, which Brito da Cunha had already started in continental forests of Brazil, after his return of a year spent at Dobzhansky’s laboratory in 1949/1950. The fourth of the novel studies would be conducted again in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, and also at Uruguay and Argentina, in the so-called marginal populations of Drosophila willistoni (interestingly, the project used the concept of marginal populations in a geographic sense, not an ecological one; see Grant and Antonovics (1978) for an excellent exposition of the possible evolutionary consequences of ecologically marginal populations). The two studies that were designed to continue the former ones were on Drosophila populations in northeastern Brazil, which showed no correlation of genetic diversity with environmental diversity (as a matter of fact, this correlation was already obtained in a study of 1948/1949). (Again, as in the case of marginal populations, there was no quantitative data on environmental diversity; it was simply stated by observation.) The objective now was to study natural populations mainly from the states of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Ceará (so the choice of northeastern researchers such as Cora de Moura Pedreira and Myrthes da Silveira Nilo Bispo as stated before). The last study was to obtain new data on the concealed variability of

516

A. M. d. Arau´jo

the species Drosophila willistoni (the common, in the 1943 project) and D. prosaltans (the rare one). The most eagerly awaited study, the one at the islands of Angra dos Reis bay, ended in failure, to Dobzhansky’s bitter disappointment. The story is well discussed by Teodoro Moscoso (1992) and Magalhães and Vilela (2014). As the work of Moscoso was not published, (In a letter to the author of this chapter, Brito da Cunha informed that he was planning to publish Moscoso dissertation in a special volume of the Brazilian Journal of Genetics (letter dated September 22, 1993, after an extensive interview with him in the same year). Regrettably, for unknown reasons, there was no publication. It is interesting to include here some remarks from his text (destinated to get his degree of Bachelor of Arts) (comments in parentheses which appear in the quotation are from the author of this chapter): The importance of this episode of the Angra dos Reis project is that it marked the end of Dobzhansky’s involvement with the Brazilians. (He returned to Brazil in other opportunities, but only to participate in meetings, so staying for few days. In 1966, he came to Brazil for the last time, to participate in the International Symposium on Genetics, organized by the Brazilian Society of Genetics. He was nominated the Honorary President of the symposium, which occurred at Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, in Piracicaba, the same place where genetics has started 40 year before. The Opening Conference was made by him.) Dobzhansky was so displeased with the results obtained that he blamed a Brazilian, Luiz Emundo de Magalhães, and the Danish visiting scientist, Ove Frydenberg, of sabotage, that is, of mixing the populations and of releasing different, erroneous, flies into the islands. The Brazilians defended the integrity of the accused, citing that what probably happened was that, due to the rushed tabulations, there was an error in the preliminary study. Dissatisfied, Dobzhansky left, complaining of the incompetence of Latin American scientists for some time to come, complaints which are even documented in his oral memoirs. (Dobzhansky stressed in the interview for the Oral History Memoir of Columbia University, that “a school of genetics appeared in Brazil, a school which did not existed before, and it is a real disappointment to me that this school did not develop, later, after Dreyfus’s death, as well as it might be developed” (p. 548). It is true that evolutionary genetics in Brazil started with him, although genetics was already done as an applied science. However, his disappointment was completely nonsense, since genetics spread in Brazil in the 20th century, and diversified to human, plant, and genetics of microorganisms.)

The fact is that Dobzhansky probably was in part responsible for the bad results of this first study, since initially he sustained that point mutations should be used. All the preparations were then done for using lethal alleles as genetic markers; however, he later changed his opinion and decided that chromosomal inversions would be best to use (Moscoso 1992). Despite this drawback of the big project, other studies, without Dobzhansky’s participation, were successful, for instance, the one related to the genetic effects of radiation. Pavan and Brito da Cunha presented the data in the X International Congress of Genetics, at Montreal, Canada, which took place from August 20 to 27, 1958. Its main results were as follows: (a) the natural lethals as well as the radiation-induced ones decreased the viability of the heterozygous individuals; (b) both, the natural and radiation-induced lethals, have similar effects in the heterozygotes; and (c) natural lethals and radiation-induced lethals have the same

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

517

frequency in populations, about 6  10 5. Later they published these results (Brito da Cunha et al. 1959). Other results were also obtained: (a) The selection intensity against recessive lethals is not constant, varying with environmental conditions; (b) the elimination of lethals depends on suppressor genes; and (c) due to the so-called synthetic lethals (recombinants of otherwise normal chromosomes), the rate of appearance in populations of lethals is greater than the mutation rate (Brito da Cunha 1989). Comments on the other projects, derived from the main one, developed by geneticists from other universities will be treated in the section “The Diversification of Genetics in Brazil.”

The Foundation of the Sociedade Brasileira de Gene´tica (Brazilian Society of Genetics) On July 4, 1955, as one section of the International Symposium of Biometry, at Campinas, state of São Paulo, the Sociedade Brasileira de Genética was founded (SBG). The meeting was organized by Chana Malogolowkin, from Universidade do Brasil (now Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro) and had 22 participants. Important scientists and statisticians from abroad were also present, such as Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, Hans Kalmus, Gertrude Cox, and William Cochran. During the foundation ceremony, it was decided that the official date for the foundation would be July 5, as a tribute to André Dreyfus’ birthday (Salzano 2011; other details in www.sbg.org). Its first president, Carlos Arnaldo Krug, from Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, at Piracicaba, São Paulo, had, exceptionally, a term of only 1 year (after him, other presidents had a mandate of 2 years). The impact of a society for the Brazilian geneticists was immediate: the opportunity to make an annual meeting (which, in fact, occurred after 1958, until today – there was a meeting also in 1956), the formation of a Human Genetics Commission in 1959, the organization of a South American Symposium of Genetics in 1960 (the proceedings of this symposium were published by Brito da Cunha et al. (1961) and contain a rich amount of data on the beginning of genetics in Brazil) a 3-year plan of Genetics, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1962, the International Symposium of Genetics in 1966, and the participation in the foundation of the Latin American Society of Genetics in 1969, just to mention the first two decades (a list of the events until 2010, as well as details of each presidential mandate can be found in Salzano (2011)). Additionally, in the 1960 decade, the number of associates has grown to 160, and at the end of the 1970 decade it had 1100 associates, being then one of the largest scientific societies in Latin America (Araújo 2004). This number has grown to a maximum of 1318 and later decreased to 455 in the first decade of the twenty-first century, due to several reasons, for instance, the formation of new societies, and former members that were excluded due to defaulting. In 1978, the first issue of the Revista Brasileira de Genética was launched (Brazilian Journal of Genetics), which in 1998 changed its name to the current Genetics and Molecular Biology, with four issues a year. The Society also publishes books, of technical nature, and is dedicated to teaching of genetics as well. Although not published by

518

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Sociedade Brasileira de Genética, but under the influence of the members of the Society, in 1963 and 1966 as a second and larger edition, the Universidade de São Paulo and Companhia Editora Nacional published the book Elementos de Genética, with 18 chapters written by one or more Brazilian geneticists, covering large areas of genetics. This book had a fundamental role in teaching updated genetics for graduate students in several Brazilian universities.

The Diversification of Genetics in Brazil Even before the foundation of the Brazilian Society of Genetics, the area was already growing; in what follows, this diversification will be examined regionally. As briefly presented in the section “Genetics in Brazil: The Early Years,” the Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz, Piracicaba, state of São Paulo, became recognized by researches on the genetics of corn, and other cultivated plants. However, one member of the Cadeira de Genética e Citologia (Chair of Genetics and Cytology), of that school, Warwick Estevam Kerr, gained international recognition by his evolutionary studies in bees and by his studies with Drosophila. Particularly with respect to this later organism, three important papers were published in 1954 on the effects of small populations on the distribution of certain genes, as forked (Kerr and Wright 1954a), bar (Wright and Kerr 1954), as well as aristapedia and spineless (Kerr and Wright 1954b), in respective order of publication. These were basic papers on experiments with genetic drift and natural selection; their results showed that in very small populations the process of genetic drift overcomes natural selection, as the theoretical studies of Sewall Wright predicted. Other papers by Kerr showed, contrary to expected, that in the genus of stingless bee Melipona, the sex determination was genetic, not due to nurture (Kerr 1950a, b). As a member of the team not belonging to the Universidade de São Paulo, in the 1948/1949 period, Antonio Geraldo Lagden Cavalcanti started to work in genetics at Universidade do Brasil, in the state of Rio de Janeiro (the capital of Brazil until 1960). He attended the Natural History course and later the medical school and was soon interested in basic research and teaching; however, genetics called his attention since the early days at university. His academic life has changed considerably after 1950, when he was approved in a contest to become the head of General Biology at the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, working full time. In the same year, he created the Center of Genetic Research, which consisted of three people: Cavalcanti himself, Chana Malogolowkin, and Osvaldo Frota-Pessoa (Cavalcanti 1961). According to him, there were three phases of research at the Center: the first one, when Dobzhansky came to Brazil in 1943, particularly on systematics and morphology of Drosophilidae; the second, in 1948 when he joined Dobzhansky’s group at Universidade de São Paulo, dedicated to the study of genetics of Drosophila natural populations; and a third one, in the 1950s, including the genetics of other insects, such as Rhyncosciara, and human genetics in 1956 with the foundation of the Heredity Clinic (again by himself), which had a short life (Cavalcanti 1961).

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

519

Two young ladies stood out in Cavalcanti’s group by their use of genitalia of Drosophila species, in their taxonomic work: Helena Salles and Chana Malogolowkin (later Malogolowkin-Cohen); the use of such kind of variable was completely new in the literature. The first one published a paper (Salles 1947) on the species D. simulans and D. melanogaster, and Malogolowkin, with the species D. ananassae (Malogolowkin 1948). In her doctoral dissertation, she dealt with the genitalia of the group willistoni (actually, she was the first woman to get a doctoral degree in biology, in Brazil). She published many other papers in the 1950 decade, on genitalia of Drosophilids as well as other biological aspects in different organisms. In 1956, she spent a year with Dobzhansky at Columbia University (she renewed the scholarship for 1 more year), where she studied a Drosophila willistoni strain that did not generate males; this was published in Science (Malogolowkin and Poulson 1957). In the paper, they dealt with abnormal sex ratio in Drosophila willistoni which was due to cytoplasmic inheritance, different from other species of the same genus, where the inheritance was an expression of X-linked genes. Eggs laid by females of the sex-ratio strain were dechorionated in laboratory, and after 2–4 h, half of them start to show translucent areas, presumably being males that do not develop. If the eggs were simply laid to develop, in 24–36 h, about half of them start to darken and not producing embryos. Furthermore, the authors were able to show that injected virgin females with extracted ooplasm from eggs of the sex-ratio strain, in the first 2 weeks, produced normal 1:1 sexual proportion, but after this period, 31% of females had only daughters. This paper represented another of her records: She was the first Brazilian woman to publish in Science. She published many other papers on this problem as single or coauthor (which today is known to be due to the bacteria Wolbachia), a fact that prompted Dobzhansky to praise her in the Oral History Memoir of Columbia University (1962, p. 531). Members of Cavalcanti’s group, as single authors or with one or more coauthors, in the 1950 decade, published more than 30 papers on different aspects of Drosophila genetics and evolution, which is a testimony of their dedication and intense labor. Moreover, in 1956, the Clínica da Hereditariedade was created (Hereditary Clinic), at Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, a long desired dream by Cavalcanti; the clinic was organized in five sectors, one of them dedicated to population studies, and another one to mathematical genetics, that is, both dealing with evolutionary genetics. Unfortunately, this Hereditary Clinic became extinct 3 years later, due to lack of funding. Another loss of the group occurred in 1959, when Chana Malogolowkin decided to leave and create a new group, on biochemical genetics, at the Chemistry Department of Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia, Rio de Janeiro. There she continued her studies on the “sex ratio” factor in Drosophila willistoni and D. equinoxialis, showing that this anomaly could be reversed by treating adults in culture bottles to increasing temperatures from 34  C to 40  C for some hours. At the time, it was believed that the “sex-ratio” condition would be a viral particle (Malogolowkin 1959). Oswaldo Frota-Pessoa had already left the group in 1949, to get a position at the Departamento de Biologia Geral at Universidade de São Paulo. The years in the 1960 decade represent the decline of researches in genetics in the group; Cavalcanti himself started to work in human genetics (after working with James

520

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Neel at Michigan University for 1 year in 1964), and he dedicated a good part of his time to teaching and administration duties. In 1968, the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia was extinct by the military government (which after a coup d’état in 1964 assumed the central government of Brazil) and was substituted by different Institutes, one of them being the Instituto de Biologia, with three departments, one being the Department of Genetics, which is still active. At Universidade de Minas Gerais, in the Southeastern region of Brazil, as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, there was a Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras, with a group dedicated to genetics, headed by Prof. Giorgio Schreiber from 1948, who before was at Butantã Institute and since 1940 was at the Departamento de Zoologia at USP, São Paulo. The works there developed were not in the field of evolutionary genetics but, instead, on quantitative cytology on several organisms. It is for this reason that their publications are not treated here. At Southern Brazil, there are the states of Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in the country. Particularly the Universidade do Paraná and Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul housed groups on evolutionary genetics which deserve to be mentioned in this chapter. There was also Drosophila genetics at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, but this was later, by the decade of 1980. The Laboratório de Genética Humana (Human Genetics Laboratory) was founded in 1951 by Newton Freire-Maia at the Departamento de Biologia Geral of Universidade do Paraná, at the capital of the state, Curitiba. Although the main objective was to study human population and medical genetics, they continued studies with Drosophila started in the end of the 1940s with the group of São Paulo, already discussed. It is unfortunate that many of the papers were published in journals of restricted circulation, and others at the Drosophila Information Service (DIS), a quick publication journal on studies in Drosophila, very appreciated by workers in the field. The publications from 1949 until 1955 deal with chromosome polymorphism in several species of Drosophila including the domestic ones. As for human population genetics, Freire-Maia, from 1951 to 1958, published eight papers, as a single author, on the first data on inbreeding in Brazil (consanguineous marriages); from the standpoint of population genetics, inbreeding is important to express detrimental and lethal genes which, being rare in frequency, could be easily exposed to natural selection. He showed, for instance, that the value of the mean coefficient of inbreeding (which measures the average probability of homozygosis in the offspring of two related people, due to a common ancestor) in Brazil varied greatly, being higher in the Northeastern states, intermediate in Southeastern states, and very low in Southern states (Freire-Maia 1957). Many more papers in the 1950 decade were dedicated to medical genetics, by Freire-Maia and collaborators. In the years to come, he would be recognized as one of the more influential geneticists on ectodermal dysplasias, a group of hereditary diseases. At the city of Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, at Universidade de Porto Alegre (so-called at the time), Antonio Rodrigues Cordeiro created a laboratory of genetics, in 1949, belonging to the Instituto de Ciências Naturais in the underground of the Faculdade de Direito (Law School) of the same

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

521

university. He had been an invited member of Dobzhansky’s team since 1948. Soon he invited a natural history student, Francisco Mauro Salzano, to integrate the laboratory. Both became the pillars of a very productive group on evolutionary genetics in Brazil in the years to come. Both, Cordeiro and Salzano, left Porto Alegre in 1952, the first with a scholarship from Rockefeller Foundation, to stay for 1 year at Dobzhansky’s laboratory in Columbia University (in that same year he published two papers, as single author; Cordeiro 1952a, b). Salzano went to Universidade de São Paulo, to join Pavan’s group and to study cytogenetics and evolution of Drosophila species, mainly with Hampton Carson who was there at the time (two papers resulted from this period, both in collaboration with other authors (Brito da Cunha et al. 1953; Jaeger and Salzano 1953)). In 1953, the laboratory moved to a new building, now occupied by the Instituto de Ciências Naturais, with plenty of space in eight rooms available for Drosophila work (the old laboratory now became “seção de Genética” – section of Genetics – of the Departamento de Biologia Geral). As financing came not only from Rockefeller Foundation, but also from Brazilian official institutions (CAPES – Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Coordination for the Higher Training of University Personnel). Training of University Personnel), and Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas (CNPq – National Research Council), it was possible to hire William W. Milstead, an ecologist, and Joel I. Towsend a geneticist to give their support to the researches as well as to give courses in their respective areas; other courses, such as genetic and evolution, and human genetics, were under Cordeiro and Salzano’s responsibilities, respectively (Salzano spent a year, in 1956, with James Neel, at Michigan University, Ann Arbor to specialize in human genetics). Moreover, as these two researchers were interested in applying biophysical and chemical methods to study Drosophila, the Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul (succeeding Universidade de Porto Alegre) hired the engineer Casemiro Victorio Tondo who had spent a year in France working with biophysical techniques, and Flávio Lewgoy, a chemist who then worked in a state laboratory. Lewgoy in 1956 went to Texas University with a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, to study chemical methods applied to Drosophila. Results, after all these people returned to Porto Alegre and started to work together, appeared soon. For instance, Salzano in 1956 published in a journal, from the Instituto de Ciências Naturais, his whole doctoral dissertation, on the cryptic species of the group bocainensis of Drosophila (Salzano 1956a). As a by-product of the dissertation, he published a paper on chromosomal polymorphism and sexual isolation in sibling species of the bocainensis group (Salzano 1956b). To obtain the results for this paper, he collected individuals in eight localities, five of them in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, one in the state of Paraná and São Paulo and one locality in Argentina. The gene arrangements were studied in the larva of the species (polytene chromosomes) and the sexual isolation by the method of multiple choice. The species studied were D. bocainensis, D. parabocainensis, and D. bocainoides; their frequencies varied greatly among the localities. The conclusions on this part of the paper were as follows:

522

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Our results in a general way confirm those presented by Carson (1954). D. bocainensis is the commonest and most widespread species of the subgroup. D. parabocainensis is more frequent in localities with cool climates, whereas D. bocainoides is characteristic of the superhumid coastal rainforests of Sao Paulo [. . .] In contrast with D. bocainensis, D. parabocainensis presents a very limited chromosomal polymorphism. Only two different inversions were found in this species (p. 291) [. . .] Owing to the fact that there is no D. bocainoides in the state of Rio Grande do SuI, only 10 individuals could be analyzed in this species, all collected at Cantareira. Three of them presented the inversion 2L – Ee and two the inversion 2R – Cc. (p. 292)

The results of sexual isolation showed that the species bocainensis and parabocainensis are, respectively, 97% and 99% isolated from D. bocainoides, which would be expected, since they are totally segregated geographically. However, the species, which lives in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (bocainensis and parabocainensis), showed much less isolation between them, varying from 12% to 49% (using a coefficient of joint isolation proposed by Levene (1949), which was more robust than Bateman’s one, published in the same year). Another paper published in the same year was the one by Tondo and Cordeiro (1956), on the application of paper electrophoresis to separate eye pigments of Drosophila. As part of the big Dobzhansky’s project in 1955–1956, already discussed, Cordeiro and associates (1960) published a paper on chromosomal polymorphism in four semi-isolated natural populations of Drosophila willistoni. They have found interesting results, after releasing about 60,000 F1 hybrid North/South flies: (a) the cytological analysis of the F1 hybrids has shown many inversions of the X-chromosome, not present in the Tainhas locality (where the experiment was conducted); (b) the first sample, after the introduction of the hybrids, showed very high frequencies of the “new” inversions on the X-chromosomes, as well as an increase in autosomal chromosomes inversions; (c) sampling 1 year later in the same place showed a reverse situation, that is, those inversions in high frequencies dramatically decreased (not detected) or have been lost; (d) the autosomal inversions also drop down to the level of the control group of 1 year after release; and (e) the average number of heterozygous inversions per individual presented a similar increase and return to normal values. From 1957 on, the papers on human evolutionary genetics started to grow, thanks to the work of Francisco Mauro Salzano and his studies with Amerindian populations, which he followed until he passed away in 2018. This first paper was about blood groups in South American Indians (Salzano 1957); as for Drosophila studies, the partnership with the chemist Flávio Lewgoy yielded the first fruits, with a paper coauthored by Antonio Cordeiro, on a chromatographic analysis of homoand heterozygotes strains of D. willistoni natural populations (Lewgoy and Cordeiro 1958). Although the work with Drosophila and humans continued intensely in the next decades, the diversification of studies can be seen already in 1959, with a paper by Helga Winge (then a doctoral student) on the cytotaxonomy and polymorphism in the plant genus Alophia of the Iridaceae family (Winge 1959). After her doctoral dissertation, which, incidentally, was with Drosophila species, she dedicated to the

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

523

study of genetics and evolution of the plant genera Briza (family Poaceae), Relbunium (Rubiaceae), and Ilex (Aquifoliaceae) until her retirement in the twenty-first century. To have an idea on the growth of this group, the average number of publications in the 1950 decade was 4 (range 1–8); in the next decade, the average was 12 papers (range 5–17), and in the 1980s, the average was 23 papers (range 14–41) (data in Rocha, 1989 internal publication, without pagination). A general review on genetics and genomics in Brazil was done by Salzano (2011, 2018).

Conclusions This chapter is dedicated to the development of the area known as evolutionary genetics (sometimes viewed as applied population genetics) in a South American country, Brazil, since its beginning, in 1943, until the decade of 1960. It is shown, however, that genetics was already practiced at Escola Agrícola, in Piracicaba, state of São Paulo, since the 1920s, particularly as part of agricultural researches dedicated to the improvement of domesticated plants. Its practitioners usually followed a different rhythm of work, compared to colleagues of other areas, since they worked full time. As a consequence, they were not only up to date on what was happening abroad, but were also able to produce data and publish them, initially at the Revista de Agricultura (a journal created in 1926), and further in international journals. These were the “early years” of the first section of this chapter. This mode of conducting science was replicated after Theodosius Dobzhansky’s arrival in 1943 and became a characteristic of all groups of genetics in Brazil (other areas of the so-called “hard” sciences followed the same standards, everywhere in the country). This philosophy and practice were important for the development of genetics in Brazil, which can be seen by the quality of the papers published and by the reputation it achieved in the international community of geneticists. By the end of the twentieth century, evolutionary genetics in Brazil was being studied in several centers, not only at capitals of states, but also in the countryside. The number of approaches to study evolutionary genetics increased as well, from the classical one, to cytogenetics, ecological, molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics. Of course, the state of São Paulo, due to its economic power, had many universities in cities other than the capital, such as Campinas, Ribeirão Preto, Piracicaba, Rio Claro, and many others, where genetics and sometimes evolutionary genetics were being studied. There were, by the end of the 1970 decade, eight “regionais” (regional centers) of the Brazilian Society of Genetics: Pará, Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul, in geographic order from north to south. In Northern Brazil, an excellent center of primate cytogenetics has been developed in Belém, capital of the state of Pará, by Horácio Schneider and his group (by the end of the century, other groups on molecular genetics were growing at the two campi of Universidade Federal do Pará). In Northeastern Brazil, at the Centro de Ciências Biológicas from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, groups in human, animal, and plant genetics were established in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

524

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Another group on Drosophila evolutionary genetics was created at the Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, which is active until today. A comparative analysis of the development of evolutionary genetics in Latin American countries has not yet been done, but probably Brazil is the first one in the ranking. The task to fully review the development of evolutionary genetics in Brazil is still open; here, a survey of the 1940s until the 1960s was presented. The historiographic approach used was mainly to discuss in some detail the results of publications, with some comments on the interactions of the participants in order to reveal the personal side of the scientific activity. The years from 1943 until the 1950s were discussed in more detail than in the subsequent years, and the São Paulo group, where everything started, received a great proportion of the analysis.

References Araújo AM (2004) Spreading the evolutionary synthesis: Theodosius Dobzhansky and genetics in Brazil. Genet Mol Biol 27(3):467–475 Barros R (1949) Aberrações cromossômicas em Drosophila mercatorum pararepleta. I. Aneuplóides expontâneos (Chromosomal aberrations in Drosophila mercatorum pararepleta. I. Spontaneous aneuploids). Rev Bras Biol 9(3):365–376 Barros R (1950) A new species of the genus Drosophila, with discussion about the speciation in the “mercatorum” sub-group. Rev Bras Biol 10(3):265–278 Barros R, Dreyfus A (1947) Proporção dos sexos no sub-grupo “mercatorum” de Drosophila (Sex-ration in the sub-group “mercatorum” of Drosophila). Gaz Clin 45(4–5):82–83 Brito da Cunha A (1989) The seventy years of life of C. Pavan and science. Braz J Genet 12(4): 691–705 Brito da Cunha A, Dobzhansky T, Sokoloff A (1951) On food preferences of sympatric species of Drosophila. Evolution 5(2):97–101 Brito da Cunha A, Brncic D, Salzano FM (1953) A comparative study of chromosomal polymorphism in certain American species of Drosophila. Heredity 7(2):193–200 Brito da Cunha A, Toledo JS, Pavan C, Souza HML, Melara HE, Garbrusewycz N, Gama MR, Camargo MLP, Melo LC (1959) A comparative analysis of the effects natural and of radiationinduced lethals in heterozygous individuals and of their frequencies in natural populations of Drosophila willistoni. Prog Nucl Res Ser VI Biol Sci 2:359–363 Brito da Cunha A, Frota-Pessoa O, Blumenschein A (eds) (1961) Atas do Primeiro Simpósio Sul-Americano de Genética (Proceedings of the first South-American symposium on genetics), São Paulo, 8 a 11 de Março de 1960 Cavalcanti AGL (1961) Centro de Pesquisa de Genética da Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia da Universidade do Brasil (The center of genetic research of the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia da Universidade do Brasil). In: Brito da Cunha A, Frota-Pessoa O, Blumenschein A (eds) Atas do Primeiro Simpósio Sul-Americano de Genética (Proceedings of the first South-American symposium on genetics), São Paulo, 8 a 11 de Março de 1960, pp 53–58 Cordeiro AR (1952a) Inheritance of variations in the male genitalia of Drosophila paulistorum. Am Nat 86:185–188 Cordeiro AR (1952b) Experiments on the effects in heterozygous condition of second chromosomes from natural populations of Drosophila willistoni. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 38(6):471–478 Cordeiro AR, Salzano FM, Marques VB (1960) An interracial hybridization experiment in natural populations of Drosophila willistoni. Heredity 15(1):35–45 Dobzhansky T (1941) Genetics and the origin of species, 2nd edn. Columbia University Press, New York and London

24

Evolutionary Genetics in Brazil

525

Dobzhansky T (1944) Genetics of natural populations. Annual report of the Director of the Department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book no. 43 for the years 1943–1944, pp 120–127 Dobzhansky T (1949) Genetic structure of natural populations. Annual report of the Director of the Department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington Year Book no. 48 for the years 1948–1949, pp 201–212 Dobzhansky T (1951) Mendelian populations and their evolution. In: Dunn LC (ed) Genetics in the 20th century. The Macmillan, New York, pp 573–589 Dobzhansky T (1955) A review of some fundamental concepts and problems in population genetics. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol 20:1–15 Dobzhansky T (1962) Oral history memoir. Columbia University, Oral History Research Office, New York Dobzhansky T, Brito da Cunha A (1955) Differentiation of nutritional preferences in Brazilian species of Drosophila. Ecology 36(1):34–39 Dobzhansky T, Dreyfus A (1943) Chromosomal aberrations in Brazilian Drosophila ananassae. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 29(10):301–305 Dobzhansky T, Pavan C (1943a) Chromosome complements of some South-Brazilian species of Drosophila. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 29(11):368–375 Dobzhansky T, Pavan C (1943b) Studies on Brazilian species of Drosophila. Bol Facul Filos Cienc Let Univ São Paulo 7:20–64 Dunn LC (ed) (1951) Genetics in the 20th century. The Macmillan, New York Freire-Maia N (1957) Inbreeding in Brazil. Am J Hum Genet 9:284–298 Goldschmidt RB (1951) The impact of genetics upon science. In: Dunn LC (ed) Genetics in the 20th century. The Macmillan, New York, pp 1–23 Grant MC, Antonovics J (1978) Biology of ecologically marginal populations of Anthoxanthum odoratum. I. Phenetics and dynamics. Evolution 32(4):822–838 Haldane JBS (1932) The causes of evolution. Longman, Green & Co. Limited. Reprinted (1966). Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York Jaeger CP, Salzano FM (1953) Drosophila gaucha, a species from Brazil. Rev Bras Biol 13(3):205–208 Keller EF (2000) The century of the gene. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA Kerr WE (1950a) Genetic determination of caste in the genus Melipona. Genetics 35:143–152 Kerr WE (1950b) Evolution of the mechanism of caste determination in the genus Melipona. Evolution 4(1):7–13 Kerr WE, Wright S (1954a) Experimental studies of the distribution of gene frequencies in very small populations of Drosophila melanogaster. I. Forked. Evolution 8(2):172–177 Kerr WE, Wright S (1954b) Experimental studies of the distribution of gene frequencies in very small populations of Drosophila melanogaster. III. Aristapedia and spineless. Evolution 8(4): 293–302 Levene H (1949) A new measure of sexual isolation. Evolution 3:315–321 Lewgoy F, Cordeiro AR (1958) Biophysical genetics. II. Chromatographic analysis of homo and heterozygous strains of Drosophila willistoni from natural populations. Rev Bras Biol 18:353–366 Magalhães LE, Vilela CR (2014) The golden age of Drosophila research at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP): a testimony on the decades 1940–1950. Genet Mol Biol 37(1):135–145. With Suppl 1 from www.sbg.org Malogolowkin C (1948) Sobre a genitália dos drosofilídeos (Diptera). II. Drosophila ananassae (On the genitalia of drosophilids [Diptera]. II. Drosophila ananassae). Summ Bras Biol 1(17): 429–457 Malogolowkin C (1959) Temperature effects on maternally inherited “sex ratio” conditions in Drosophila willistoni and Drosophila equinoxialis. Am Nat 43:365–368 Malogolowkin C, Poulson DF (1957) Infective transfer of maternally inherited of abnormal sex-ratio in Drosophila willistoni. Science 126:32 Mardiros XB, Park R, Clifton B, Grewal G, Khizar AK, Markow TA, Ranz JM, Civetta A (2016) Postmating reproductive isolation between strains of Drosophila willistoni. Fly 16(4):162–171

526

A. M. d. Arau´jo

Moscoso T (1992) Genetics and geneticists in Brazil: an essay about Latin American science and scientists. Bachelor of Arts dissertation (unpublished), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Oliveira GMB (2011) A participação do Brasil na Segunda Guerra Mundial e a importância da liderança em conflitos mundiais (The participation of Brazil in World War II and the importance of leadership in world conflicts). Monography presented for obtaining the Bachelor’s degree in International Relations, University of Brasilia Pavan C, Brito da Cunha A (1947) Espécies brasileiras de Drosophila (Brazilian species of Drosophila). Bol Facul Filos Cienc Let Univ São Paulo 86(7):3–46 Pavan C, Brito da Cunha A (2003) Theodosius Dobzhansky and the development of genetics in Brazil. Genet Mol Biol 26(3):387–395 Provine WB (1981) Origins of the genetics of natural population series. In: Lewontin RC, Moore JA, Provine WB, Wallace B (eds) Dobzhansky’s genetics of natural populations I–XLIII. Columbia University Press, New York Salles H (1947) Sobre a genitália dos drosofilídeos (Diptera). I. Drosophila melanogaster e D. simulans (On the genitalia of drosophilids [Diptera]. I. Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans). Summ Bras Biol 1(15):311–383 Salzano FM (1956a) O problema das espécies crípticas: estudos no sub-grupo bocainenses (Drosophila) (The problem of sibling species: studies in the subgroup bocainensis [Drosophila]). Bol Inst Cienc Nat 4:1–89 Salzano FM (1956b) Chromosomal polymorphism and sexual isolation in sibling species of bocainensis subgroup of Drosophila. Evolution 10(3):288–297 Salzano FM (1957) The blood groups of South American Indians. Am J Phys Anthropol 15(4): 555–579 Salzano FM (org) (2011) Recordar é viver – a história da Sociedade Brasileira de Genética (Remembering is living – the history of the Brazilian Society of Genetics). Editora Cubo e Sociedade Brasileira de Genética, São Paulo Salzano FM (2018) The evolution of science in a Latin-American country: genetics and genomics in Brazil. Genetics 208:823–832 Tondo CV, Cordeiro AR (1956) Biophysical genetics. I. Paper electrophoresis separation of the eye pigments and other components of Drosophila. Rev Bras Biol 16(4):519–526 Winge H (1959) Studies on cytotaxonomy and polymorphism of the genus Alophia (Iridaceae). Rev Bras Biol 19(2):195–201 Wright S, Kerr WE (1954) Experimental studies of the distribution of gene frequencies in very small populations of Drosophila melanogaster. II. Bar. Evolution 8(3):225–240

Index

A Academicism, 44 Acculturation, 124 Acosta Solís, M., 108 Actor-network theory, 325 African slaves, 402 Agamben, G., 295 Agency, 295–297, 299 Agricultural knowledge, 344 Agricultural production, 349 Agricultural science, 317 history of, 319–322 in Latin America, 327 Agriculture, 56, 58, 343–348, 351, 377, 378, 382, 385, 388 Agroecology, 332 Agronomic-organic research, 344 Aguilera, J., 288 Aguirre Beltrán, G., 454–457 Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center, 308 Ambystoma mexicanum, 294, 297 Ameghino, F., 121, 126, 184, 185, 187, 189, 190, 193, 195, 201, 208 common descend, 198 conceptual developments, 186 darwinism, 196–198, 200 demarcate, 189 drastic reformulation, 195 elucidate, 189 epistemological disdain, 187 explanatory objectives, 187 honoris causa, 192 indigence, 190 legitimization, 186 less rigorous, 192 opaque intellectual, 193 paleontology, 184 penury, 190

researches, 187 spontaneous subordinated integration, 187 uncertainty, 190 unit of type, 198 valuable works, 192 American tropics, 90 Anatomy, 185 Anglo-American historiographies, 433–436 Animal history, 295, 299 Animal studies, 296 Anthropology, 162, 167, 453 Anti-Afro-Mexican racism, 413 Anti-imperialism, 342 Anti-indigenous racism, 413, 414 Anti-tuberculosis drugs, 29 Appropriation, 147–148 Arab slave trade, 401 Archeion, 121 Archives, 207, 220 Argentina, 474, 475, 478 Artists, 99 Atlantic human trafficking, 400 Atlantic Ocean, 93 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 285 Ayahuasca, 495–497 Aztec, 294

B Babák, E., 307 Babini, J., 122 Bacle, C.H., 221 Balam Pereira, G., 458–461 Balanced hypothesis, 514 Barfurth, D., 307 Barreda, G., 125 Basalla, G., 21, 24, 25, 27, 34, 122 Basalla’s diffusionist model, 3

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Barahona (ed.), Handbook of the Historiography of Latin American Studies on the Life Sciences and Medicine, Historiographies of Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74723-7

527

528 Bazin, A., 295 Belfast, 303 Belgium, 303 Beltrán, E., 121 Bergson, H., 119 Bergsonian vitalism, 119 Bernal, J.D., 122 Bibliographic-hemerographic research, 67 Bibliometrics, 83–86 Bidirectional flow of knowledge, 75 Biochemical analysis, 457 Biocultural body, 470–471 Biogeography, 185, 199, 479 dispersalist, 228 ecological and historical, 232 evolutionary, 234 history of, 226–228 Latin American, 233 Biographies, 72 Biologisches Centralblatt, 306 Biology and the body, 468 Biomedicine, 295 Biopiracy, 489, 494, 498 Biotypology, 434, 482 Blacks, 161, 163 Blyth, 303 Bogotá, 93 Bolivia, 125 Bonpland, A., 95, 220 Botany, 94 Brazil, evolutionary genetics, 506–517 Brazilian Society of Genetics, 517–518 diversification of genetics, 518–523 Brazil, 128, 482 Brazilian politics, 28 Bromatological analysis, 455 Brongniart, A., 210 Bullock, B., 302 Burbank, L., 347 Burmeister, 126 C Caenorhabditis elegans, 298 Calvo, F., 107 Capitalism, 42, 324–328 Carbonnier, P., 304 Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), 450, 451 Cartographers, 96 Cartography, 96 Catholicism, 397 Cenogenesis, 233 Center and periphery, 40–46, 51

Index Center-periphery geometry, 77 Central valley, 249 Chalco, 294 Chile, 473, 474 Chorographic Commission, 98 Chromosomal inversions, 516 Ciencia periférica, 125 Cinchona, 98 Circulation of ideas, 145–147 Circulation of knowledge, 5–9, 82, 274 Civilian social movements, 26 Cladistic biogeography, 233 Cold War, 323, 344 Colloquium on the reception of Darwinism in Iberoamerica, A comparative Analysis, 128 Colombia, 92 Colonial bureaucracy, 219 Colonial dependence, 42 Colonialism, 132, 433 Coloniality of knowledge, 318 Coloniality of nature, 331 Coloniality of power, 318 Colonial Mexico caste system, 425–428 Colonial science, 21, 22, 24, 27, 79 Columbian Exchange, 297 Commission for the Study of Marginal Zones, 461 Commission scientifique du Mexique, 301 Committee on History of the Pan-American Institute of Geography and History, 121 Commodities histories, 327 Commodity disease, 331 Comparative embryology, 185 Comparative history of science, 124 Comparison, 481 Complexity principle, 140, 142–145 Compulsory sterilization, 477 Conflict thesis, 150 Conry’s approach, 160 Constitutional medicine, 482 Contextual analysis, 6 Controversy of Valladolid, 398 Cooperativism, 349 Coplamar, 460–462 Corn, 447, 449, 453, 455, 456 Cortés, H., 294 Cortázar, J., 295 Creationism, 236–237 Creole(s), 103, 106 expertise, 319 knowledge, 319 science, 319

Index Crespo, L., 107 Criollos, 404–406 Critical reviews of Mutis, 102 Crops, 101 Cruz, Oswaldo, 23, 28 Cuba, 126 Cultural approach, 81 Cultural differences, 342 Cultural heterogeneity, 343 Cuvier, G., 208, 210, 301 Cuvierian correlations, 200

D Danio rerio, 298 Darwin, C., 92, 208, 304, 507 Darwinism, 24, 33, 41, 49–51, 53, 199, 277, 411 in Bolivia and Mexico, 125 in Chile, 125 and emergence of history of science and history of ideas, 118–123 and eugenics, 128 geography in Latin America, 160–162 in Iberian America and Spain, 131 on medicine in Latin America, 166–167 in Mexico, 250 and religion in Latin America, 168–169 on science in Latin America, 162–166 in Spain, 125 in Uruguay, 126 Darwinism, in Latin America, 139 diffusionism, comparative studies and complexity principle, 142–145 evolutionism, 142 geographies of knowledge, 148–149 and post-colonialism and circulation of ideas, 145–147 science and religion, 150–151 de Asúa, M., 298 de Blainville, H.M.D., 210 de Caldas, F.J., 103 de Gortari, E., 121 de Lhyus, É. D., 301 de Saint-Hilaire, A., 220 de Saint-Laurent, P.R., 218 de Sausurre, H., 305 Deep time, 277–280 Degeneration, 472, 474, 477, 480 Demarcation, 425 Dependency theory, 22, 41 Deppe, F., 302 Derrida, J., 130

529 Developmental biology, 295 Development programs, 322 D’hombres-Firmas, L.A., 210 Dialectical materialism, 72 Díaz, P., 271 Díaz Romero, B., 107 Diet, 444–446, 448–460, 463, 480, 481 Dietary habits, 471 Diffusion, 124 Diffusionism, 142–145 Diffusionist, 70 Diffusionist model, 21, 317 Disability, 469 Discrimination, 432 Division of History of Science and Technology (DHST), 23 Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 506–516, 518, 519, 521–523 Doctrine of design, 150 d’Orbigny, A., 208, 211 Drainage system of Aztecs, 257 Drosophila, 299, 507, 509–515, 518–522, 524 Drosophila Information Service (DIS), 520 Drosophila melanogaster, 298 Dubois-Reymond, E., 299 Dugès, A., 305 Duméril, A., 301, 302 Duméril, C., 301 Dynamic genetics, 506

E Ecological system, 257 Ecologies of knowledges, 333 Ecuador, 92 Electric catfish, 299 Electrophorus electricus, 300 Embryology, 295, 307 Endersby, J., 299 Endocrine functions, 470 Endo-racism, 415 Enlightenment, 73 Environmental determinism, 468 Environmental history, 328–333 Envirotech, 330 Epidemics, 28 Epigenetics, 470, 471 Epistemological history, 201 Ernst, A., 108 Escola Superior de Agricultura Luiz de Queiroz (ESALQ), 507 Ethnicity, 438 Ethnocentrism, 399, 402, 404

530 Eugenics, 27, 128, 174, 175, 469, 472–474 hard and soft, 475–479 Latin, 473–475 Stepan on, 471–472 Eurocentrism, 29, 32, 70 European and national scientists, 97 European colonialism, 42 European immigration, 33 European modernity, 55 Evolution, 165, 167, 168, 174 Evolutionary biogeography, 234 Evolutionary biology, 197 Evolutionary developmental biology, 295 Evolutionary genetics, in Brazil, 506–517 Brazilian Society of Genetics, 517–518 diversification of genetics, 518–523 Evolutionary ideas, 283 Evolutionary theism, 107 Evolutionary theory, 141 Evolutionism, 109–110, 142 Evolutionist theory, 254 Exercise, 470, 471, 481 Expeditions, 94, 101 Experimentation in situ, 254 Explorations, 93 Expressive realism, 253 Externalism, 74 Externalist camp, 123 Externalist interpretation, 73 F Feminism, 476 Field sciences, 318 Filogenia, 185, 188, 193 Financial–industrial dependence, 42 Fiocruz, 23 Foods, 479 Forey, É-F., 301 Fossil(s), 211, 279 collections, 222 mammals, 206, 207 Foucault, M., 130, 423 Freiburg, 304 Freire, D. J., 28 French, R., 298 French Revolution, 410 Friedreich, N., 304 G Gallardo, J.G., 216 Gallus gallus, 298 Gamio, M., 451, 453, 454, 459

Index Gaos, J., 121 Gaud’s enthusiasm, 364 Gegenbaur, C., 307 Gegenbaur, K., 304 Genetically determinist, 471 Genetics, 474 Geographical patterns, 232 Geographies of knowledge, 148–149 Geography, 94 Geological Institute, 282, 287 Geology, 250–252, 275, 278 Gerais, M., 206 Gerbi, A., 22 Germany, 303 Gigantology, 217 Glick, T.F., 118, 124, 126, 128, 132 Global circulation, 81 Global Darwin, 131 Global historiography, 79 Global history, 3, 5, 6, 29, 30, 33, 34 dynamics, 342 Globalization, 3, 30, 340, 341, 435 Global Spencerism, 131, 144 Global turn, 105 Goldschmidt, R., 506 Gómez, P., 32 Goodsir, J., 299 Granny, 297 Great Depression, 445, 447 Green fluorescent protein, 308 Green Revolution, 323, 343, 344 chronology of, 356 in Costa Rica, 369–370 dominant narrative of, 356–360 market forces, 359–360 new narratives, 360–363 as unique process, 357–358 Grupo Argentino de Historia de la Ciencia, 121 Gurdon, J., 299 Gutiérrez, J.M., 221

H Haeckel, E., 159, 161–163, 165, 166, 170, 173, 177 Haeckel’s Darwinism, 142 Hagiographic vision, 102 Hans, C., 297 Health, 376, 378, 379, 383 Heinemann, C., 308 Herrera, A.L., 125 Hippocratic predecessors, 480 História, Ciências, Saúde–Manguinhos, 27

Index Historiography(ies), 4, 9–12, 138, 146, 150 Anglo-American historiographies, 433–436 inclusive, 228–232 Mexican historiographies, 429–432 synthetic, 232–236 History of Darwinism, 109–110 History of ideas, 120 History of Science, 120 History of scientific ideas, 71 History of the Earth, 273, 279 Hoffmann, J., 273 Holmberg, 126 Home, E., 302 Homo Neanderthalensis, 251 Homo Sapiens, 251 Honoris causa, 192 Hopwood, N., 299 Human being, 169 Human diet, 445, 448, 463 Human diversity, 422 Human evolution, 163 Human Genetics Laboratory, 520 Human genome diversity project (HGDP), 490 Human origin, 164 Humboldt industry, 102 Hunger, 444, 445, 448–450 Huxley, J., 307 Hybridization, 30, 31 Hydraulic technology, 258 Hygiene, 472, 475, 476

I Iberian Muslims, 425 Iberian Peninsula, 397 Iconographic sources, 105 Iconography of a museum, 283 Identity politics, 343 Immobility, 387–388 Imperialism, 25, 104, 342 Impressionism, 264 Independent art, 261 India-Mexico: Similarities and Encounters Throughout History, 343 Indigenism, 453, 457 Indigenous diets, 451, 454 Indigenous knowledge, 492 central tensions in biomedical research practice, 494–495 use of, 488 Indigenous people, 161, 164, 172 Indigenous therapeutics, 68 Industrial agriculture, 329

531 Industrial products, 262 Industrial revolution, 326 Infrastructure, 376–383 Ingenieros, J., 119, 123 Inheritance, 468 of acquired characters, 165 Institute of Philosophy and History of Science, 122 Institutional cloning, 366–369, 371 Institutionalization, 100 Instituto Soroterápico Federal, 23 Instrumentalism, 44 Internalism, 74 Internalist camp, 123 International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, 294 International communication, 284 International formalization, 342 International Labor Conference, 447 International Labor Organization (ILO), 447, 449, 456 International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), 344 International politics, 342 International science, 2 International Seminar for the Study and Methodology of the Social History of the Sciences in America Latina, 127 International Union for Conservation of Nature, 294 Inventories, 97 I Shall Never Ask for Pardon, 345, 347 Isolation, 209

J Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation, 301 Jesuits, 98 Jonstonus, J., 301

K Kazan, 303 Khankhoje, Pandurang, 342–351 agricultural development initiatives, 343 anti-British sentiment, 348 manufacturing techniques, 346 military and agricultural education, 346 political and agronomic presence, 344 political commitment, 346 research, 347 revolutionary movements, 346 Knowing world, 320

532 Knowledge, 340–344, 346–349, 351, 352 co-production, 66 networks, 81 production, 317 scientific, 317 studies, 317–324 Kohler, R., 298 Kölliker, A., 304

L Laboratory animals, 298–300, 306, 308 Labscapes, 321 Lake Texcoco, 294 Lamarck, J-P., 107, 212 Lamarckian mechanism, 173 Lamarckism, 170, 199 La Naturaleza, 260, 305 Land, 479, 480 Landesio, E., 275 Landscape(s), 479, 483 painting, 248, 251, 259, 270 Larrañaga, D., 219 Latin America, 8–12, 20–27, 29–35, 184, 186, 188, 264 center and periphery, 41–46 epistemic appropriations and emancipation, 53–59 positivism, 144 reception and appropriation of knowledge, 46–49 Latin American and the Caribbean, 316, 318 agriculture-technology in, 327 agro-exporting model of, 329 histories of agricultural science, 324 historiography, 322 Latin American cultural studies, 346 Latin American science, 77 Latin American Society for the History of Science and Technology (SLHCT), 21, 22, 26, 28, 77 Latin American Society for the Study of History of Science and Technology (SLHCT), 127 Laufberger, V., 307 Laws of Burgos, 397 League of Nations, 444–449, 451, 456 Legal immigrants, 415 Liberalism, 161, 164, 168, 171, 411 Liberals, 173 Lichtenstein, M.H., 302 Life sciences, 322 Linear and progressive advancement, 72

Index Linneaus, C., 296 Local history, 80 Local knowledge, 90, 320 Local scientists, 101 Lovejoy, A.O., 120 Lund, P., 208, 209

M Malaspina Expedition, 95 Malnutrition, 456, 458–461 Maps, 103 Marginalized, 444, 457, 462 Marquis of Loreto, 216 Material culture, 80 Maurer, F., 307 Maya, 450, 451, 460 McCrea, R.C., 119 McLeod, R., 25 Medical history, 27 Medicinal flora, 68 Megatherium, 208, 214 Mendelianism, 472–474 Mendelian population, 507 Merleau-Ponty, M., 295 Mesoamerican diet, 343 Mestizaje, 162, 166, 172, 409–415, 426, 429–431, 433, 434, 436–438, 472, 480 Mestizo(s), 160, 162, 163, 170, 172, 407, 409, 411, 414, 469, 471, 482 Metamorphosis, 303, 307 Mexican academics, 429, 432 Mexican anthropology, 414, 429 Mexican axolotl, 294 animal history in life sciences and medicine, 297–300 animals and history, 296–297 history of natural history of, 301–302 laboratory creature, 306–308 in Paris, 302–304 transformation, 304–306 Mexican biota, 237–239 Mexican cuisine, 480 Mexican geological environment, 281 Mexican historiography, 66, 72, 75, 81, 429–432 Mexican post-revolutionary period, 433 Mexican program, 358 Mexican Revolution, 342, 349, 436 Mexican Scientific Society, 348 Mexican Society for the History of Science and Technology (SMHCT), 74

Index Mexican Society of Natural History, 70, 248, 276, 286 Mexican sui generis racism, 409–416 Mexican transition zone (MTZ), 234 Mexico, 125, 227–228, 239, 295, 308, 342–348, 350–352, 383, 469, 471, 473–475, 478, 479 Balam Pereira and Coplamar reports on Yucatan, 458–462 Colonial Mexico caste system, 425–428 for drawing and doing research, 263 Mexican diet, 451–457 Mexico City, 294 Mexico’s geography and natural resources, 66 Micredo, 191 Mieli, A., 121 Migration, 478 Milan, 303 Milk, 446, 448, 453, 456 Minas Gerais, 206 Mixed races, 474 Mobility, 380, 381, 387–388 Modern agriculture, 333 Modern European science, 54 Modernismo, 264 Modotti, T., 342, 344, 345, 349–351 Molecular biology, 49, 51–53, 60 Molina Enríquez, A., 452 Morgan, T.H., 299 Moscow, 303 Müller, J., 302 Multiculturalism, 435 Multi-sided knowledge, 323 Muñiz, F.J., 208 Muñoz, B., 219 Museo Americano, 221 Museum of Natural History in Vienna, 250 Mus musculus, 298 Mutis, J.C., 102 Mutis, S., 103

N Nantes, 303 Naples, 303 National Heritage of Mexico, 266 National Homage, 248 National Indigenist Institute, 454 National Institute of Geology, 250 National Institute of Nutrition, 454, 457, 460 National Medical Institute, 70, 79 National Museum, 248 National Museum of Mexico, 282

533 National Research Council, 509 National science, 79 Natural history, 78–82, 90, 94, 97, 105, 295, 298, 300, 302 Natural History Museum of Vienna, 282 Natural science, 248 Natural selection, 163, 165, 169, 172, 173 Natural Selection Theory, 129 Neo-Hippocratic medical traditions, 479 Neo-Lamarckian theories, 472, 473 Neoteny, 307 Netherlands, 303 New Laws of the Indies, 397 New Spain, 396, 398, 416 African populations, 400–404 criollos, 404–406 mestizos and castas, 406–409 Nieremberg, J., 301 Nieto Olarte, M., 32 Non-capitalist revolutionary pedagogy, 349 Nutrition, 444–461, 463, 476, 481 standards, 445 surveys, 457, 461 value, 455, 457

O Olm, 303 On the Origin of Species, 50 Optimal human diet, 448 Optimal nutrition, 446–448 Origins of life, 250 Ornithological captures, 101 Oryctognosy, 212 Oryctology, 212

P Paedomorphosis, 307 Palaeontological themes, 287 Palaeontology, 210–213, 297 Paleoart, 276 Paleontology, 185, 189, 194 Palmer, S., 31 Pampas, A., 206 Pan-American, 478 conferences, 472 Pan-American highway system, 376 expansion of automobile and motor roads, 379–384 origins of, 378–379 popular resistance, 384–386 regimes of Immobility, 387–388

534 Panbiogeography, 227, 233 Pani, A., 444, 445, 456 Panorama general de historia de la ciencia, 122 Paoli, U., 121 Papp, D., 122 Paradigm, 75 Paradise fish, 304 Paris, 301 Pastor, J.R., 121 Patent legislation, 492 Peale, T., 214 Pellicer, C., 265 Peripheral science, 125 Periphery, 126 Perspectiva artificiale, 255–260 Peru, 128 Peruvian biologist, 475 Petrifactions, 207, 211 Pátzcuaro, 305 Pharmaceuticals, 492–493 Pharmacopoeia, 71 Photographers, 99 Photography, 260 Physical anthropology, 162, 431 Physiologic variety, 475 Physiology, 300 Plant geography, 103 Poison dart frog, 497–500 Political ecology, 343 Political project, 369 Polygenist, 163 Popular knowledge, 31 Positivism(s), 123, 160, 167, 168, 171, 174 Positivist history, 67 Positivist school, 166 Postcolonial criticism, 55 Post-colonialism, 145–147 Postcolonial studies, 77 Poverty, 469, 475 Power, 104 Prenuptial certificates, 474 Presentist, 72 Principle of vera causa, 229 Private naturalists, 98 Progress and technology, 255 Provincial science, 193 Puericulture, 472, 476

Q Quaternary Period, 251 Quesada, E., 118, 120

Index Quetzalcoatl, 295 Quipu, 21, 122 Quipu-Revista Latinoamericana de Historia de las Ciencias y Tecnología, 127

R Race, 161, 163, 166, 172, 420–424, 426, 429–439, 469, 471, 478 in nineteenth and twentieth century Mexico, 428–429 Racial degeneration, 480 Racial hierarchies, 452 Racialization, 420, 425, 433 Racial metabolism, 450 Racial mixture, 482 Racial poisons, 476 Racism, 399, 402, 404, 410, 412–416, 420, 421, 423, 424, 426, 428–433, 435–438, 449, 459 Raimondi, A., 107 Rathke, M.H., 302 Rattus norvegicus, 298 Reception and appropriation of knowledge, 47–49 Recognition of sources, 104 Reconfiguration of scientific knowledge, 286 Regeneration research, 295 Regression of the species, 254 Religion, 173 Religious vision on nature, 261 Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 305 Residential science, 321 Revolutionary period, 69 Rivera, D., 263 Rockefeller Foundation, 28, 31, 377, 508 Röthlisberger, E., 108 Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain, 95 Royal Botanical Expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru, 95 Royal Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada, 95 Rozella, 294 Rudolphi, K.A., 302

S Saber y Tiempo, 27 Sachs, C., 300 Saint Petersburg, 303 San Carlos Academy, 281 Sarton, G., 120

Index Schaxel, J., 307 Schmalz, S.R., 212 Schwartzman, S., 23 Science, 104 and art, 274–277 and Empires, 25 and religion, 150–151 and the public, 81 Science’s acclimatization, 75 Science-state perspective, 79 Scientific biography, 79 Scientific Commission of the Pacific, 98 Scientific community, 75 Scientific essays, 260 Scientific exchange, 284 Scientific illustrations, 251, 253, 260, 261 Scientific institutionalization, 24 Scientific internationalism, 284–286 Scientific knowledge, 49, 57, 59, 341, 343, 346, 347, 349, 351, 352 Scientific missions, 101 Scientific networks, 5, 98 Scientific representations, 275 Scientific Revolution, 32, 73 Second Pan American Scientific Congress, 119 Second slavery, 324 Secret history of Mexico, 75 Sellow, F., 208, 220 Semper, K.G., 307 Servicios, 368 Sexual education, 476 Short trips, 262 Simon, E., 304 Simpson, G.G., 121 Siredon tigrina, 252–255 Situated knowledge, 319 Slavery, 324 Slave trade, 401 Smith, B.R., 300 Smith, H.M., 294 Smith, W., 210 Social Darwinism, 106, 159 and early globalization, 174–175 in Latin America, 175–177 and Latin American politics and economics, 169–174 Social history, 78, 428 Social justice, 342 Social liberalization, 410 Social medicine, 455, 458 Social transformation, 347 Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural, 305

535 Société imperiale zoologqiue d’acclimatation, 301 Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), 77 Socio-professional networks, 286–288 Sodiro, L., 108 Soler, R., 121 Soto, L.G., 31 South America, 207–208 Spain, 105 racial ideas, in medieval Spain, 423–425 Spatial dimension, 77 Spencer, H., 118, 159 Spencerian evolutionism, 118 Spencerian positivism, 160 Spencerism, 174 Spencer’s Darwinism, 142 Spengel, J.W., 306 Spontaneous subordination, 186 Stages of metamorphosis, 254 Standardization, 481 Static genetics, 506 Sterilization, 469 Struggle for existence, 170 Substitution phenomenon, 124 Sweden, 303 Switzerland, 303 Synthetic biogeography, 232–236 T Tafalla, J.J., 104 Tarija, 206 Taxonomy, 185 Technological and industrial dependence, 42 Technology, 324, 326 Technology transfer, 363 Teleomechanism, 304 The Dispute of the New World: History of a Controversy, 1750-1900, 22 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 252 The Long Green Revolution, 361 The Mexican Society of Natural History, 279 The New York Times, 303 Theoretical coordinates, 187 Theory of evolution, 164 Thyroid gland, 307 Toulouse, 303 Toxicity, 488, 497 Toxicological models, 492–493 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 492 Traditional historiography, 421 Traditional knowledge, 57

536 Traditional medicine, 459 Transactions, 208 Transformist, 107 Transmutacionism, 236–237 Transnational approach, 435 Transnational companies, 327 Transnational historiography, 274 Transnational networks, 147 Transnational perspective, 82 Transnational science, 2 Transportation, 380–383 Travelers, 81 Tropical America, 90, 94, 95, 106–108 Tropical medicine, 25

U Under construction, 321 Unger, F.X., 279 United States, 472, 473 Universal Exhibitions in Paris and Chicago, 262, 287 Universal knowledge, 68 University of Kentucky, 308 University of São Paulo (USP), 508 Ure, A., 214 US Cold-War policies, 21

V Valle de Mexico desde el cerro de Atzacoalco, 256 Vallée, H., 302 Valley of Mexico, 294 as a natural laboratory, 263 Varsavsky, O., 43, 52 Velasco, J.M., 296, 305, 306 perspectiva artificiale, 255–260 photography, 260 as scientist and painter, 248–249 Siredon tigrina, 252–255 variety of visual motifs, 261 Velasco, J.S., 270 Venezuela, 92, 300 Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigations, 44 VIII International Geological Congress, 283

Index Villavicencio, R., 108 Virgin of Guadalupe, 256 Visual representations in science, 275 von Baer, K.E., 304 von Chauvin, M., 296, 304 von Frantzius, A., 305 von Humboldt, A., 92, 95, 210, 301 von Sömmering, S.T., 210 von Waldheim, G.F., 210 Voss, H., 308

W Wagner, M., 304 Wallace, A.R., 130 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 46 Water landscapes, 259 Water management, 265 Weismann, A., 118, 119, 254, 296 Western civilization, 46 Western knowledge, 342 Western racism, 421 Whites, 161 Wolf, T., 107 Working classes, 481 Würzburg, 303

X Xenophobia, 415 Xenopus laevis, 298 X Geological Congress, 284 Ximénez, F., 301 X International Geological Congress, 287 Xochimilco, 294, 306 Xolotl, 295

Y Yucatán, 450, 451, 458, 460, 463

Z Zea, L., 121 Zooarchaeology, 297 Zoological collections, 101 Zoology, 300, 303, 306