Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences
Troubling Encounters in the Americas and Pacific

A revisionist history of the human sciences reframing research encounters and knowledge-making practices in imperial and colonial contexts.

Adam Warren (Edited by), Julia E. Rodriguez (Edited by), Stephen T. Casper (Edited by)

9781009398138, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 November 2024

388 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.6 cm, 0.7 kg

'This interdisciplinary volume sheds new light on the production of knowledge in the human sciences in the Americas by focusing our attention on the disquieting, often uncomfortable, but also multilayered and sometimes ambiguous, encounters it relied on. In an effort to decolonize histories of science, its chapters tell stories of Indigenous agency, refusal and strategic politics to subvert forms of domination and control. By engaging this past, contributors call for an ethics of research in the present that 'stands with' rather than merely giving back to the communities they write with and about.' Sandra Rozental, Centro de Estudios Históricos, El Colegio de México

In this bold reconsideration of the human sciences, an interdisciplinary team employ an expanded theoretical and geographical critical lens centering the notion of the encounter. Drawing insights from Indigenous and Latin American Studies, nine case studies delve into the dynamics of encounters between researchers, intermediaries, and research subjects in imperial and colonial contexts across the Americas and Pacific. Essays explore ethical considerations and knowledge production practices that prevailed in field and expedition science, custodial institutions, and governance debates. They reevaluate how individuals and communities subjected to research projects embraced, critiqued, or subverted them. Often, research subjects expressed their own aspirations, asserted sovereignty or autonomy, and exercised forms of power through interactions or acts of refusal. This book signals the transformative potential of Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies for shaping future scholarship on the history of the human sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Preface
1. An introduction to troubling encounters Adam Warren, Julia E. Rodriguez and Stephen T. Casper
Part I. Relationality in Field and Expedition Science: 2. 'Skull hunters on the pampa: anthropology as uncanny encounter in Argentina's 'last massacre'' Julia E. Rodriguez
3. 'Subverting the anthropometric gaze: racial science in the 1912 Yale Peruvian expedition' Adam Warren
4. 'Modest witnesses of violence: salvage ethnography and the capture of aché children' Sebastián Gil-Riaño
Part II. Institutional Encounters, Discipline, and Settler Colonial Logics: 5. 'Replacing native Hawaiian kinship with social scientific care: settler colonial transinstitutionalization of children in the territory of Hawai'i' Maile Arvin
6. 'Port of epistemic riches: social science research and incarceration in mid-twentieth-century Puerto Rico' Alberto Ortiz-Díaz
7. 'The imperial logic of American bioethics: holding science and history to account' Laura Stark
Part III. Governance, Politics, and Self-Determination: 8. 'Investigating Cuauhtémoc's bones: politics, truth, and mestizo nationalism in Mexico' Karin Rosemblatt
9. 'Unequal encounters: debating resource scarcity, population, and hunger in the early cold war' Eve Buckley
10. 'Bureaucratic vulnerability: possession, sovereignty, and relationality in Brazilian research regulation' Rosanna Dent
Conclusions and Epilogues: 11. 'Unsettling encounters' Stephen T. Casper
12. 'Feel it in your bones: the difference indigenous studies makes' María Elena García
13. 'The pole is back home' Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: History of engineering & technology [TBX]