Rudolf Virchow, the pioneering German pathologist and one of the Atlantic world’s most renowned scientific figures in the late nineteenth century, was excited. It was 1879, and his colleague, Carl Hagenbeck, had traveled from South America with three visitors – a man, woman, and child named Pikjiojie, Batzinka, and Luis. The three hailed from the southernmost tip of Chile, a territory also claimed by Argentina. They were Indigenous people from Patagonia, on display for the German scientific audience. Virchow presented his expert assessment of their cranial types, facial measurements, and body features. He recorded his remarks and published them in the top anthropology journal of his day.Footnote ¹

Anthropometry was but one of Virchow’s scientific interests. He was one of the most famous scientists in late nineteenth-century Europe, a brilliant doctor with a broad range of influence, best known for his pioneering work in cell pathology. Virchow had by then also become a major political figure in German liberal reform movements.

Meanwhile, just north of Punta Arenas, Argentina, the young Argentine naturalist Francisco Pascasio Moreno was getting ready for his third major expedition in Patagonia. Moreno, a top scientist in Argentina and member of a powerful family dynasty, published lengthy accounts of his trips, including descriptions of interactions with local Indigenous peoples. On these journeys, Moreno filled multiple roles: geographer, diplomat, adventurer, and scientist. But his main goal was to gather specimens – including human remains – for his growing collection, destined to be housed in Argentina’s first Natural History Museum.Footnote ² The most valuable bounty was the skulls and skeletons he came across on his journeys. Some were from recently deceased Aònikenk (Tehuelche) and Genniken people; others he hoped were remnants of ancient “Man.”Footnote ³

Moreno and Virchow never met in person, yet their work in physical anthropology was intertwined. The intellectual and professional context of their work with human skulls was Americanism, an interdisciplinary scientific project that emerged in near-parallel with anthropology in the late nineteenth century. Initially born in the 1860s of the efforts of naturalists, linguists, and archaeologists primarily from France, Germany, and Britain, within a few decades the movement expanded from a handful of national institutions such as museums and scientific groups to a transnational network of scientists. In 1875, men (and a few women) from scientific backgrounds ranging from medicine to classics joined together to establish a more broad-based group specifically focused on the prehistory, culture, and racial traits of New World populations. Both Moreno and Virchow participated in the meetings of this group, the International Congress of Americanists (ICA). They also crossed paths in other ways, such as exchanging material and correspondence.

Americanist anthropologists dipped into novel scientific methodologies, including the physical analysis of human bodies, or forensics. Anthropology – the “science of man” – itself emerged from a medicalized and body-based approach to human difference, and its practitioners, many of whom were trained in medicine, applied new techniques from biology and anthropometry to their study of cultures and civilizations, human origins, and heritage. These endeavors garnered new levels of state support from nations in Europe and the Americas, as governments funded scientific expeditions as part of larger colonial or postcolonial stratagems.

The emergence of scientific anthropology coincided with the opening of new areas for exploration in the Americas and a corresponding tidal wave of material evidence. Sites in postcolonial Latin America, finally stable after decades of civil war, emerged as promising new sources of scientific material. Argentina, lacking the architecture of Aztec and Maya civilizations, nonetheless constituted a promising site for paleontologists and physical anthropologists. As early as the 1840s, British, French, and Spanish scientific explorers took to the systematic exhumation and analysis of animal fossils in Argentina, and nowhere more than in Patagonia, which remains a major site of fossil finds to this day.Footnote ⁴ Americanists practiced what we now call “salvage” anthropology – the imperative to preserve and record human and cultural products just as they were “disappearing” – as a key component of settler colonialism.

Recognizing cultural production as an ingredient to understanding settler colonialism as “a structure, not an event” extends to the reconstruction of human emotions, or in Ann Laura Stoler’s words, the “distribution of sentiments within and between empire’s subjects and citizens as part of imperial statecraft.”Footnote ⁵ Indeed, historians have turned to the psychodynamic experiences that scientists and their subjects navigated in the context of inherited power dynamics, recognizing affective relations as important and revealing facets of colonial and postcolonial encounters.Footnote ⁶ In any such moment, a range of behaviors is possible; there can be subtle nuances in even the most brutal situations. On the individual level, each scientist who ventured into a foreign zone – just as each person who found themself confronted by an invader – experienced some form of psychological drama.Footnote ⁷ We can characterize many of these moments as triggering the Freudian Uncanny, that is, something or someone who is strangely familiar, always disconcerting. The feeling of unease could result in a specter-like image of Indigenous peoples, simultaneously seen as alive and dead, passive and active, weak and dangerous.Footnote ⁸

The two men shared a passion for scientific discovery; in particular, they sought answers for large and pressing questions about human evolution and racial classification.Footnote ⁹ Comparing Moreno and Virchow’s experiences with Indigenous Argentine individuals expands our understanding of the emotive aspects of relationality; the impact of historical context on these affective relations, in particular the varieties of colonial and postcolonial science in settler societies; the construction of material and spiritual meaning in early anthropology; and like other works in this book, encourages us to consider the boundaries – and the limits – of the moral field concept. Finally, insofar as the behavior and emotional responses of Indigenous individuals were noted, the encounters revisited here provoke us to reflect on the concepts of reciprocity and relationality in moments of contact in the human sciences.

The intertwined stories of the two skull scientists discussed here illustrate, however, that despite significant variations in their affective relations with their subjects, similar psychological and professional goals overruled their humanism. In instances of skull science with Indigenous bodies in South America, our attention to affect, intention, and agency highlights the joint significance of material context and power dynamics on the one hand, and personal experiences of actors on the other.Footnote ¹⁰ Whether colonialism is driven by external or internal forces, both are harmful, albeit in different ways. In this sense, a comparative view of the dynamics between anthropologist and human subjects allows us to trace key and intersecting aspects of the material and psychological dimensions of colonial violence and their implications for the construction of ethical norms for encounters in the human sciences.

Skulls as Uncanny Objects

That prominent scientists like Moreno and Virchow accelerated the collection, analysis, and display of human skulls reflected a growing interest in, if not an obsession with, human parts as the centerpiece of Americanist investigation in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ Anthropological expeditions and displays of artifacts in museums in all major cities on both sides of the Atlantic reflected the growing fetishization of human body measurement as the centerpiece of Americanist investigation. Craniology began in the 1830s, established by figures such as US scientist Samuel George Morton, who assembled a vast collection of human skulls and used them not just to provide evidence for polygenic theories of human biological descent, but also to justify superiority of the Nordic race.Footnote ¹² While Morton had his detractors (such as Rudolf Virchow, who believed in the unity of humankind), the fascination with crania cut across all sides of the evolutionary debate.

While later generations would thoroughly debunk craniology’s scientific and moral failures as well as anthropology’s symbiosis with colonial regimes, late nineteenth-century anthropologists saw skulls at the centerpiece of their field’s most pressing questions. Even when handled in volume, skulls are not just any type of scientific evidence.Footnote ¹³ Cara Krmpotich and coauthors remind us that bones are not mere lumps of matter but are “constantly constituted and negotiated as persons or things, subjects or objects, meanings or matter … The materiality [of bones] engages those they encounter.”Footnote ¹⁴ They draw our attention to bones as “uneasy, ambivalent subject/objects” with the ability to “make present that which is absent.”Footnote ¹⁵ Bones can remind the living of the deceased, creating a haunting effect as scientists imagine who lived in those bones, speculating about the deceased’s spirit, soul, or personality. By the same token, the materiality of human bones, their hard substance lasting longer than flesh, is a reminder of past historical events.Footnote ¹⁶ This uniquely spiritual materiality of human remains impacts our understanding of the person’s place in past events. In the context of skull science in Argentina, the materiality of human remains expands the historian of science’s toolkit.

Moreno and Virchow, embedded as they were in a larger network of Americanist anthropology, placed human skulls at the center of their scientific work. To that end, they both repeatedly engaged with their main sources: dead and living Indigenous bodies. While both scientists directly engaged with Indigenous individuals, one had extensive, close, even life-long contact with his human subjects, and the other was removed from the field. So while there are important differences in the dynamics of these encounters, in the end both were active participants in violent acts of Indigenous erasures, enhanced as they were by their own ambivalence. In this sense, the story of skulls on the Pampa fits Amy Lonetree’s framing of history, which calls us to pay attention to both agency and harm, trauma and resistance. “Hard truths” are recognized just as productive refusal and other forms of Indigenous agency and desire emerge in the narrative.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, the story reveals how personal dynamics between people created multiple, and sometimes unpredictable, outcomes.

The quest for Indigenous peoples’ skulls on the fertile plains of the Argentine Pampa after 1870 was set in motion by a tangle of scientific, economic, and military agendas. The episode implicated actors from local Indigenous people to wealthy elites in Buenos Aires, to intellectuals in North Atlantic capitals. The two scientists seeking skulls in a contested territory were of course shaped by their specific contexts, including differences in Argentine and German political, intellectual, and institutional milieus. For example, Moreno worked for an expansionist Argentine state that had specific goals and assumptions about comparative human worth framing its mission.Footnote ¹⁸ Argentina sits uneasily between models of Northern/British settler colonialism and Latin American internal colonialism. A crowded urban center with a European-descended majority, a relatively low-density population with large “unconquered” tracts until the 1890s, and a late-stage scramble for land were the factors that led to Argentina’s distinct hybrid postcolonial relations. Moreno’s participation in salvage anthropology must be viewed in this unique context.Footnote ¹⁹

Virchow, on the other hand, was shaped by German liberal cosmopolitanism, a philosophy that would later inspire radical egalitarianism in some of his students, most famously Franz Boas. Virchow, a German scientist of great stature, was a political progressive who “saw no contradiction between [his elite status]” and his liberal views.Footnote ²⁰ A close reading of his and Moreno’s own words about their observations and interactions with Indigenous Americans, along with a reading between the lines to extrapolate the experiences of their human subjects, reveals intricate and layered encounters – occurrences that had real consequences for European science, Argentine national goals, and Indigenous peoples’ lives.Footnote ²¹ Their interactions with skulls demonstrate how body parts, especially crania, are key to understanding historical acts of dehumanization, including colonial scientific encounters and state campaigns to physically and culturally annihilate Indigenous peoples in postcolonial settler societies, even as they reveal elements of ambiguity.

The scientific encounter between anthropologist and subject, then, can highlight some of the nuances of what we have come to call colonial science, and the difficulty of navigating damage narratives. The scientists, for their part, performed ambivalence about the human relations they initiated. Indigenous perspectives are legible in these encounters in terms of acts of both reciprocity and refusal. Affective reflections revealed that all parties existed in uneasy tension with each other, characterized by occasional reciprocity and more frequently, heartbreaking acts of annihilation. Not surprisingly, individuals like Moreno and Virchow did not regard themselves as abusive monsters; quite the contrary. They believed they were humanistic champions of progress, imbued with genuine affection for Indigenous people. Philosopher of dehumanization David Livingstone Smith has pointed out that the mere fact of considering the Other as less than human provides a rationalization for violence, but not in a straightforward way: “Dehumanizers often behave towards their victims in a manner that implicitly acknowledges their humanity… In dehumanizing others, we categorize them simultaneously as human and subhuman.”Footnote ²² In colonial and postcolonial settings, uncanny emotions arise when we recognize our savage past in the Other, a concept of direct relevance to anthropologists.Footnote ²³

As these actors ran up against each other on the Argentine Pampa, the skull scientists left a record not just of their findings, but also their personal and emotive reactions to the skulls. At the same time, they noted to varying degrees the reactions, behavior, and emotional states of the Indigenous people they engaged. Moreno and Virchow’s overlapping but distinct encounters examined here dramatically reveal the contours of the uncanny encounter between liberal anthropologist and subject. The affective dimensions of their skull work seamlessly merged with the material realities of frontier violence and the scramble for objects of economic and scientific value. These two scientists, with their close contact with Indigenous people, provide unusually direct examples of these intimate exchanges. How did Aònikenk and other Indigenous peoples’ active roles in the process contribute to the emotive and intellectual dynamics of encounters? Were Moreno and Virchow swayed by their personal relationships with Indigenous individuals, enough to alter the momentum of postcolonial violence? This had been an implicit choice facing centuries of interlopers – and was also true for anthropologists pushing south from Buenos Aires into Argentina’s interior.

Virchow and American Skulls: “These People … Destined to Be Presented Here Today”

Across an ocean, Rudolf Virchow also prepared to engage with human remains plundered from Argentina. In 1871, he awaited a precious shipment of skulls from Peru and Argentina for what would be his first foray into an extensive study of American skulls. By then, Virchow was established as a pioneer of forensic science, and had helped initiate a whole new discipline: Anthropologie, the study of physical remnants of ancient and primitive societies. While secondary to his work in pathology, he pursued his interest in craniometry for the next thirty years, amassing thousands of skulls that he stored at the Pathology Institute at the University of Berlin.Footnote ⁵⁸ Virchow’s commitment to anthropology is reflected in his founding role in creating the first Berlin Anthropology Society [Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, or BGAEU] in 1869.Footnote ⁵⁹ Never to set foot in the Americas himself, Virchow had commissioned the skulls from adventurers in the field as early as the late 1860s, aided by local colleagues in Argentina and Central America.Footnote ⁶⁰ Over the next decades, Virchow published numerous analyses of these skulls, including a significant volume on American craniometry in 1892.Footnote ⁶¹

As Virchow pursued cutting-edge work in forensic anthropology, with a focus not just on German subjects but global ones, his international reputation grew. He was a key figure in building anthropological institutions at home, such as the Berlin Ethnological Museum. At the same time, as an active early Americanist he corresponded with, taught, or mentored nearly all the well-known scientists exploring the material traces of human societies in the Americas and around the globe. Virchow, like many European Americanists at this time, relied on collectors and informants to find and ship him evidence for analysis.Footnote ⁶² He was an armchair scientist, distant for the most part from any face-to-face experience with Americans. Virchow corresponded frequently about skulls with scientists in the field, including other German-speaking anthropologists working in the Americas.

One of Virchow’s most important South American correspondents was Francisco P. Moreno. The Argentine exchanged publications with Virchow and procured human remains for the German to study. In July of 1878, Moreno wrote to Rudolf Virchow to thank him for the BGAEU’s invitation as a corresponding member. In this letter (likely translated into German on Moreno’s behalf), and in another written three days later in Spanish, to a German diplomat, Moreno acknowledged the honor and also expressed his hope that “there will arrive the opportunity to be useful.”Footnote ⁶³ Similarly, a form letter (in French) from Francisco Moreno on a Museo de La Plata letterhead to the BGAEU in 1890 reflected the intellectual and material exchange between Europeans and Latin Americans. Thanking the German organization for the gift of a brochure, the letter offered to continue the “exchange of objects and publications.” Moreno’s letter suggested the unique value of his collections: they contained “all the information [one] may require about the physical and moral history of the southernmost area of America.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Virchow published his first Americanist study, a description of a single skull from Panama, in 1871. The skull, according to Virchow, had been “rescued from the old Indian burial ground” and brought to Europe by a former French consul in Panama.Footnote ⁶⁵ According to Virchow, the burial site included various other artifacts, including jeweled objects and animal figures. Virchow, however, was only interested in the skull, even though it was badly damaged. He measured it carefully, reporting the dimensions. Just a few years later, Virchow was able to locate larger groups of skulls and carry out comparative studies. Then, in 1873, Virchow wrote a report on some skulls that had been sent to him from Argentina by Burmeister, and about which he corresponded with Moreno, who himself had an even larger stash. Virchow carefully compared these four skulls with two in his possession from another region of Argentina, measuring the brain capacity, horizontal and vertical diameters, and length of various parts and bones. He also calculated ratios and percentages of the variable parts of the skull, which he then arranged in a chart in order to compute relative dimensions.Footnote ⁶⁶ In carrying out these measurements, Virchow, despite his humanistic philosophy and geographical and emotional distance from his human subjects, trod the same path as Moreno. When given the opportunity to examine Indigenous people or their remains, Virchow also reduced them to body parts, classified those bodies by group, and placed them in racial schema. He too expressed anxiety about Native American extinction but consoled himself with a role in salvaging their bones. In this sense, Virchow engaged in a common anthropological practice of simultaneously personalizing his subjects and presenting them as “frozen in time” by the assumed fact of impending extinction.Footnote ⁶⁷

Virchow, a European outsider only indirectly affected by Argentina’s internal power struggles, could more easily distance himself from the darker aspects of anthropological collection practices. He had no land holdings or emotional attachment to Argentina; rather, he identified as a seeker of knowledge about humanity. He enjoyed the luxury of remove from the souls who had inhabited the skulls in his possession. His scientific distancing was also a product of his philosophical outlook. Virchow was engaged in the most politically progressive movements of his time. Philosophically and spiritually, Virchow saw himself as the intellectual heir of Alexander von Humboldt, sharing the great naturalist’s underlying belief in the unity of humankind. Uncomfortable with German and British hierarchical classifications of races and peoples, Virchow argued for diversity and variety in human culture.Footnote ⁶⁸ In fact, he was part of a greater scientific enterprise in the human sciences and biomedicine, embraced by scientists across the Atlantic world, to seek universal truths about human nature and origins. Ironically, it was clear that they needed to look to the Global South for answers to the mysteries of humankind. As inhabitants of these areas exhibited, supposedly, various degrees of “savagery” and “barbarism,” scientists experienced ambivalence about their subjects and themselves. They struggled to reconcile competing ideas about universal humanity and racial hierarchies.Footnote ⁶⁹

At the same time, and much like his Argentine counterpart, Virchow’s ultimate ambition vis-à-vis America was the acquisition of Indigenous body parts for science.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the 1873 article, Virchow recounted how he acquired the skulls of two “Pampas Indians,” characterized not as humans who lived in community with others, but as members of a racial group. In his discussion of how he acquired the skulls, he repeated the account that an Argentine bureaucrat he was working with, Herr Oldendorff, wrote in the letter that accompanied the skull to Berlin: “I came to possess the Pampa-Indian skulls as per your wish through Herr Litzmann, and it was taken care of through arrangement by my friend General Rivas, commander of the southern border of this province … It is not so easy to acquire full blood Pampa-Indian skulls, as there has already been much cross-breeding with the mixed races.”Footnote ⁷¹ The remains uncovered by locals such as Olberdorff and Francisco Moreno were not enough, Virchow stated. “One can only hope … that other areas of South America can be searched.”Footnote ⁷²

As he racially parsed the skulls in terms of groups, Virchow also speculated about their individual identities. Despite no direct contact with Indigenous people at this point, Virchow described in the 1873 article what he imagined was their typical physical appearance, including a detailed description of infant board swaddling that might result in a particular formation of the skull. Virchow also mentioned that Oldendorff had noted that one of the old Pampas Indian skulls was that of the “formidable Capitanejo, known to and feared by our border patrol as ‘Juan por Siempre’ [Juan Forever]; a horribly bloodthirsty bandit (his forehead is nearly two fingers wide) who carried out numerous murderous and harmful deeds.”Footnote ⁷³ Here he combined tropes of barbarism with anthropometric references to capture the danger of Capitanejo.

Virchow’s persistent view of Indigenous peoples primarily as specimens was further reflected in his 1878 article on “American craniology,” in which he sought to compile anthropometric data from available objects from North and South America. His main concern was the timing of different groups’ appearance in the human record, based solely on skull shapes and measurement. Different skull types such as “brachycephalic” and “mesocephalic” would prove the relative antiquity of Indian ancestors in different parts of the continent.Footnote ⁷⁴ He even attempted to create an atlas of “ethnic American skulls,” organizing skulls by type.Footnote ⁷⁵ Nevertheless, he avoided generalizing about a common origin:

This last sentence reveals his ambivalent, uncanny sentiment toward the skulls: even at a remove, Virchow recognized the present-tense existence of his Indigenous subjects.

During the live demonstration with Pikjiojie, Batzinka, and Luis in 1879, Virchow seemed unsettled by their presence in his face-to-face meeting with the three Patagonians. (For an interesting parallel, see Sebastián Gil-Riaño’s chapter in this book.) He announced to his audience, “These people [are] destined to be publicly presented today … You will be astonished, as I was, to see these extraordinary phenomena before you.” Repeatedly referring to them as “people” [Personen], Virchow could not avoid describing aspects of their humanity. He noted that “According to the man [Pikjiojie], his tribe consists of only 80 individuals; for this reason, perhaps, it is the group of the Patagonian tribes closest to civilization.” Virchow regarded the three as informants about their land and culture. But, in a dualistic feat of simultaneous humanizing and objectifying, Virchow placed his guests in a classificatory schema of nine Patagonian tribes, “as [Pikjiojie] named them.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Virchow characteristically stated that he was hesitant to draw “anthropological” conclusions, that is, to weigh in on these tribes’ place in the pantheon of human evolution. What he could do, however, was examine, measure, and describe in detail the people before him. Thus the bulk of Virchow’s presentation in 1879 consisted of the comparative analysis of measurements and physiognomic description of both the three living subjects, as well as the skulls in his own collection. He conducted precise measurements of the skull dimensions for his audience, along with typologies of skull shape; he also provided charts of body parts and their lengths. He even compared the living Patagonian in front of him to skulls he had previously classified, from South America and Europe, concluding for example, that their heads appeared similar to the Sami people of Scandinavia.Footnote ⁷⁸

At the same time that Virchow poked, prodded, and measured the Patagonians like the scientific specimens he took them to be, he also noted aspects of their individuality. From his reports we can also infer the mood and experience of the Indigenous people on display. He described their temperaments, for example, stating that:

Virchow must have had to engage in extremely close proximity and communicated intimately with his guests to draw these conclusions, though, notably, he devoted significantly less detail to describing the woman and child.Footnote ⁸⁰

In theory, Virchow could retain a universalist view toward his human subjects, preserving a shred of their personhood, or at least withholding racial judgment until enough incontrovertible evidence emerged. He probably thought he was acting humanely, and compared to others, perhaps he was. Virchow held high moral ground for his era, based on his humanistic philosophy and clinical methods with Indigenous bodies. At the same time, when presented with opportunity to advance his science, he objectified dead and living Indigenous people, reducing them to specimens and body parts. Thus, the violent practices of colonialism, both foreign and internal, were to be tolerated, even subconsciously anticipated, in service to the scientific demand for human skulls.

Skulls, Ambivalence, and Dehumanization

The encounters between these two skull scientists and their Patagonian contemporaries mark a fulcrum, a point of concentrated ambiguity, disquiet, and incipient violence that shadowed the more obvious acts of Argentine internal colonialism and the expansion of international science. The history of the American continent, writ large, can be understood as a series of multiple encounters, including but not limited to enslavement, migration, trade, colonization, war, and scientific exploration. At the same time, these large-scale confrontations contain millions of individual conflicts or compromises, each of which has indeterminate outcomes. These micro encounters are subject to global forces and the inheritances of power dynamics but also to the individual acts and motivations of the participants. Arguably, this is especially true for scientists facing patients or human research subjects.

To wit, late nineteenth-century physical anthropologists and their Indigenous interlocutors carried with them their respective beliefs about land, material wealth, bodies, and identities. Anthropologists like Moreno and Virchow operated within the structures of power born of rich pre-contact societies, centuries of intertribal relations, of European invasions, and finally of postcolonial exploitation. Forensic studies of Pampas skulls occurred in the context of a new era of racial violence with hemispheric and local relevance, and the manner in which the two scientists carried out their work on skulls ultimately served the goal of taking possession of the frontier societies opening up in the Americas. For them, like so many others in the history of anthropology, the temptation to dehumanize outweighed the rewards of cultural exchange, relationality, and reciprocity as they both achieved their goal: turning Indigenous bodies into evidence for the growing corpus of scientific knowledge.

Moreno and Virchow operated within distinct national traditions and worldviews, but their approaches to the Indigenous Other ran parallel and were, ultimately, extractive. They both felt ambivalent about their human subjects – at times disparaging, at others quite positive or even affectionate – as they prioritized their material and professional agendas over human relationships. For his part, Virchow’s work on skulls contributed to the objectification and dehumanization of many others in the Americas in the following decades. He may have resisted hierarchical racial schemes but did not advocate for the full humanity of those he studied, or rail against racial violence, as field collector Alberto Frič, and later Boas, would.Footnote ⁸¹ When given the chance, Virchow chose to see Indigenous peoples as above all objects of science.

Virchow and Moreno, unable to convert their societies into polycultural utopias, and unwilling to fully drop out (as did Frič), remained agents of the larger system. In their personal interactions with their subjects, they may have sometimes held themselves in the balance, but in the end, both scientists participated in the objectification and dehumanization of the people who supplied their evidence. Ultimately, those bodies existed primarily as means to the ends of European science. The temptation of scientific progress was too great, and their status and access to political power made it easy for them to override whatever curiosity about, and personal frisson with, the Indigenous Other they might have had. Moreover, Moreno and Virchow’s scientific wonder and care for Indigenous peoples did not lead to respect and coexistence (despite Moreno’s later mild regrets), but rather facilitated participation in campaigns of violence and erasure, while convinced that they were on the right side of history.Footnote ⁸²

Moreno, as an Argentine, was more familiar with the Aònikenk, Mapuche, Genniken, and Selk’nam (Ona) peoples. The proximity of traditions created even more competition and ultimately appeared to short-circuit any generosity he might have felt. European-descended Argentines and Indigenous peoples had long had encounters on the land. This historical reality in fact raised the stakes, as the question of racial difference was a living and very real issue for Argentines. Moreno had more opportunity and proved more willing than Virchow to judge in detail his informants’ characters and human value, to scrutinize them and their place in the pantheon of humanity. He was motivated in an immediate sense to objectify, classify, and distance himself from his human subjects. Primarily concerned with his professional standing and scientific zeal for collecting and reconstruction the national history of his country, he participated in the displacement of peoples and occupation of land carried out by his government. The annihilating impulse was heightened by the knowledge that Argentines of Indigenous and European descent could (and did) merge biologically and culturally. Moreover, he recognized, and recorded, in his many close encounters with Indigenous people their distress and refusal along with offers of reciprocity. Knowing that, Moreno’s willful betrayal of his “amigos” was all the more brutal.

In the name of scientific exploration, Moreno and his colleagues sought to salvage the remains of a population whose attempted genocide they actively participated in. They focused great attention on Mapuche and Aònikenk peoples and sought to entomb them prematurely in the nation’s past. As Argentines built their institutions, their nationalist science was indelibly marked by dynamics of internal colonialism and racism specific to their particular settler society. Indeed, for anthropologists like Moreno, there is evidence that a psychological need to escape the discomfort of the uncanny led these men to distance themselves from the violent acts of erasure. In Argentina, especially, anthropologists paid a steep price for their scientific prestige: the denial of the Indigenous parts of the national body.Footnote ⁸³

More broadly, the story of skull science on the Pampa illustrates the importance of context on the formation of scientific and clinical method, and even anticipates the emergence of ethical conundrums in anthropological practice. Talented and successful scientists, then and now, are expected to overcome their repulsion for the strange. Anthropologists, specifically, must hold themselves in the tension of competing desires to understand and destroy. Like other human scientists, anthropologists have often been profoundly changed by their interaction with the objects of their research. Outcomes, however, are not predetermined. In the twentieth century, humanitarian, antiracist, and even egalitarian racial schema would emerge, and many anthropologists came to reject the destructive, colonializing aspects of science in this period. The incidents of skull science examined here, including the affective responses of scientists and human subjects alike, demonstrate both the utility and the limits of the moral field concept. Without the benefit of ethical norms and rewards and punishments for unethical behavior, however, it appears that the weight of science’s material demands creates a strong bias toward dehumanization and away from reciprocity and respect.

In the notebooks used to record the anthropometric measurements and physical features of Peruvian highlanders during the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s 1912 visit to the Cusco region, the entry for Justo Rodríguez stands out. Listed as approximately thirty-eight years old and hailing from Abancay, in the rural province of Apurímac, Rodríguez encountered American researchers on August 23, 1912 at the Huadquiña Hacienda, a sugar and sheep-raising estate in the neighboring province of La Convención. There in the semi-tropical mountain forest region known as the ceja de selva, or eyebrow of the jungle, on the eastern slopes of the Andes, the expedition’s surgeon, Luther T. Nelson, took his measuring tools and camera and sought to examine and photograph Rodríguez, one of six men he would study that day and 145 people he would examine that year on haciendas, at the nearby ruins of Machu Picchu, and in the city of Cusco. Working as part of a larger expedition remembered mainly for excavating Machu Picchu, Nelson’s research agenda focused almost exclusively on Andean bodies, race, and health. Using pre-printed forms, he recorded descriptions and measurements of Rodríguez’s hair, nose, teeth, eyes, skin, malar bones, head, face, trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet, and height, and he wrote the number 6 under “No. Children in Family.”Footnote ¹ Taking fingerprints from Rodríguez’s right hand and writing that he “has Spanish blood,” Nelson then added a surprising comment. Since he lacked a designated place for such information on the form, he wrote sideways up the middle of the second page “Subject became impatient and would not stay submit to further measurement.”Footnote ²

Rodríguez is the only research subject at the Huadquiña Hacienda whom Nelson described in his anthropometric notebooks as refusing to be measured. Indeed, his is the only reference of its kind in the 1912 anthropometric notebooks. It seems to correspond, however, to a more vivid description elsewhere of what is likely the same man’s act of refusal. Although Rodríguez is not mentioned by name, Nelson and others included an account of insubordination in their reports and correspondence, now archived in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library.Footnote ³ The Yale Peruvian Expedition’s leader, Hiram Bingham, moreover, published the account almost verbatim in magazine and book-length descriptions of the expedition’s work. For example, in The National Geographic Magazine’s April 1913 article “In the Wonderland of Peru,” Bingham conveyed the following:

This account circulated worldwide not just in National Geographic Magazine, but also in publications that reprinted images and text from “In the Wonderland of Peru” in translation.Footnote ⁵

What can these sources tell us about Rodríguez’s motivations for insubordination and the experiences of others whom Nelson and his collaborators sought to measure and photograph between early July and mid November 1912? Was Rodríguez, the 102nd person measured, the only one who refused outright to cooperate? Did others engage or resist in ways not immediately recognizable to Yale scientists? Nelson’s description of Rodríguez, hastily jotted down in pre-printed anthropometric notebooks, demonstrates how record-keeping forms themselves, the categories that organize them, and scientists’ use of them preclude making anthropometric research subjects’ subjective experiences known. The notebooks included a category for “Expression of Emotions,” which Nelson almost always left blank, and there was little room elsewhere for descriptions of behavior.Footnote ⁶ Subjective experience, in other words, did not have scientific value for the expedition; the form reduced the person to a set of measurements. By publishing the anecdotal description of resistance, on the other hand, Bingham transformed an Indigenous research subject’s struggle into a whimsical account, one that helped frame the expedition’s work as an adventure story designed to entertain a US and global reading public. Rather than providing insight into research subjects’ moral thinking, the expedition’s use of this anecdote mocked and stereotyped Indigenous behavior as irrational.

In many respects, reconstructing Justo Rodríguez’s lived experience presents challenges similar to those Marisa Fuentes encountered in researching enslaved and formerly enslaved women’s histories in Barbados. Fuentes found only fleeting references to such women in the colonial archive, and she argued popular depictions distorted understandings of who specific women really were and their positions in colonial society. The colonial archives’ violence thus silences and prevents their histories from becoming fully knowable, and it challenges historians to find new ways to reconstruct what their lived experiences might have been like.Footnote ⁷ In the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s archival records, traces of Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects’ behavior and practices of engagement and refusal can be identified and recovered to some degree, however tentatively. That said, one must also take seriously our limited ability to fully access, via the archive, past Indigenous Andean forms of perceiving, knowing, and world-making, which Marisol de la Cadena describes in the present as both engaging and exceeding Western forms.Footnote ⁸

Clues as to what the encounters themselves were like can nevertheless be found not only in the expedition’s written records, but also in the hundreds of anthropometric photographs of those subjected to the researchers’ measuring instruments and camera. These photographs were published as part of H. B. Ferris’s “The Indians of Cuzco and Apurímac.”Footnote ⁹ They shed light on how ordinary Indigenous and Mestizo people toiling on haciendas, working at Machu Picchu, and traversing Cusco’s streets may have found more subtle ways than those Rodríguez employed to refuse or resist Nelson’s requirements, and in some cases embrace and subvert them. Moreover, they along with written materials shed light not only on how US expedition members understood their work, but also on how local intermediaries and collaborators may have perceived the ethics and practice of racial science.

Building on Julia Rodriguez’s study of expedition science’s affective dimensions in this book, this chapter examines the history of moral thinking among Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects, foreign scientists, and local collaborators to reconstruct a fuller picture of the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s field encounters and the forms of relationality they engendered and entailed. It argues that histories of the human sciences can and should combine Indigenous Studies methods and concepts with the moral field framework to understand more fully the nature of research encounters involving Indigenous peoples. Inspired by works by Helen Verran and de la Cadena on encounters between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems, this study posits “moral fields” in the plural to describe coexisting, separate, yet partially overlapping practices of perception, evaluation, and judgment among populations brought into contact with one another.Footnote ¹⁰ While the archival record has limits, it enables us to reconstruct behavior, identify the structures of expedition scientific research, and map the broader political and social world that shaped moral thinking and decisions among figures like Justo Rodríguez.

Focusing on moral thinking, however, should not require withholding judgment of historical actors or treating the past as separated off from the present. This chapter explores what kinds of decolonial work engaging the lived experiences and moral thinking of past research subjects can do in the present. It asks, in particular, how this history of engagement and challenges to the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s racial science research might inform recent Indigenous encounters with transnational scientific projects rooted in similar settler colonial logics, such as that which Rosanna Dent describes later in this book and its counterpart in Peru. In this sense, it hopes to be of use to those engaged in moral thinking around the politics of human scientific research in the Andes today.

A Note on Method

In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith noted in the 1990s that within many Indigenous communities, vigorous debate centers on the practices of research and the roles of both researchers and those who are researched. These debates, she suggests, can be summarized by questions about the ownership and control of research, the methods employed and questions asked, the production and dissemination of results, and the interests served.Footnote ¹¹ I have taken these questions to heart in thinking through my work and subject position as a privileged, non-Indigenous, non-Andean, white American scholar from a North American research university. I am still figuring out the answers and sitting with the discomfort these questions present.

Admittedly, this chapter deviates from the decolonizing methods Smith and others rightly and forcefully articulate and promote. It is not a collaborative project framed in consultation with contemporary Indigenous people in the Cusco region, nor does it draw on their participation in gathering and analyzing archival materials or drafting findings. In part this is due to the location of archives in the United States, but it is also because I did not initially envision this project through a decolonizing framework. That said, there are also practical issues involved in seeking the approval of communities, whose past residents Nelson and his assistants measured and photographed. The anthropometric notebooks from 1912 include records of Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects from sixty-three communities in sixteen provinces.Footnote ¹² Seeking the approval of each community’s asamblea comunal, or communal assembly, is unfeasible. At the same time, the only entities that claim to speak for these communities as a whole are provincial and departmental governments and the Peruvian national government. For various reasons, I resist organizing my work around seeking approval from governing bodies and institutions of the Peruvian state, a political formation that has its own troubled history of anti-Indigenous racism and internal colonialism, and that continues to enact violent and extractive policies that disadvantage Indigenous peoples to the benefit of others.

Beyond these matters, I share historian of Hawai‘i Adria Imada’s concern about intruding in communities that may have been “talked out.” Indigenous peoples in the Cusco region have been subject to what Eve Tuck describes as “ongoing colonization by research,” and many communities are deeply entangled with foreign and domestic tourism, which require and entail particular ways of performing Indigeneity and engaging outsiders.Footnote ¹³ Taking these considerations into account, over time I hope to strengthen existing relationships in the Cusco region and explore new ones, while remaining mindful of Imada’s modeling of an “ethics of restraint.”Footnote ¹⁴ I also plan to make this research available in Quechua to Indigenous communities encountering a new generation of research scientists, who seek DNA samples in a renewed effort to study human variation.Footnote ¹⁵

This project has also required that I give thought to the kinds of sources employed and how I describe and reproduce them. Working with anthropometric photographs and written records of the expedition’s racial scientific work is a fraught exercise. As the published account of Rodríguez’s refusal shows, the images and descriptions that Nelson and others created capture various subjective experiences for Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects, among them trauma, and the violence of transnational scientific projects rooted in US imperialism, its settler colonial logics, and its goals of capitalist expansion. To borrow from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, such sources serve as vestiges of “damage-centered research” in action and evidence of the harm it can cause.Footnote ¹⁶ That harm, moreover, extends beyond the invasive, ephemeral moments in which the images were taken and engages Peru’s history of internal colonialism. Amy Cox Hall argues that by emphasizing themes of poverty and primitivism, the expedition’s anthropometric images reflected and furthered damage, lending credence “to the notion of a glorious Incan past and a miserable indigenous present.”Footnote ¹⁷ As a central feature of creole nationalism long before Bingham arrived,Footnote ¹⁸ such depictions of Indigeneity denied Indigenous people full rights of citizenship and correspond to what Aníbal Quijano theorizes as the centrality of race in the “coloniality of power.”Footnote ¹⁹

In working with the 1912 images, I have chosen to reproduce anthropometric photographs only when their inclusion as historical evidence can be purposeful. Photographs appear when analysis of their composition or subjects’ visible actions and behaviors is necessary for understanding arguments about encounters with researchers and corresponding forms of resistance, refusal, engagement, and desire. In this sense, my approach builds upon scholarship on the history of photography in Andean and Latin American Studies, which emphasizes the behavior and self-fashioning of photographed subjects.Footnote ²⁰

On Regional Contexts

What were social and political conditions like in the Cusco region in 1912, the year Nelson measured and photographed Justo Rodríguez and 144 other Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects? How might Rodríguez have experienced and navigated this world, and how did it inform the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s work? In Los sueños de la sierra: Cusco en el siglo XX, José Luis Rénique describes the southern departments of Peru as a “land of Indians and lords, united by the bonds both violent and subtle of a paternalist culture woven over centuries.”Footnote ²¹ Yet, he and others also shed light on specific features of the Cusco region at this time, noting that broader economic changes and aspirations among the region’s elite in the previous decades had transformed conditions in the valleys to the north of Cusco, where Machu Picchu and the Huadquiña and Santa Ana haciendas are located. These changes did not put an end to “the inherited structures of colonial domination”Footnote ²² to which Indigenous people were subjected, but rather intensified them. Such intensification likely proved fundamental in shaping Indigenous peoples’ perceptions of the Yale Peruvian Expedition.

Long seen as a backwater in Peru, the city of Cusco was experiencing a resurgence in 1912. While parts of the regional economy had begun to grow and diversify as early as 1895,Footnote ²³ such processes accelerated with the construction of a railroad connecting Cusco to Arequipa, other southern departments, and the port of Mollendo on the Pacific coast. The railroad opened in September 1908, inserting Cusco into a broader commercial network fueled by Arequipa’s expanding wool economy. In the department of Cusco the railroad transformed the power equation, resulting in importers-exporters from Arequipa joining with large hacendados of La Convención province, where Huadquiña Hacienda is located, and Lares province as the dominant sectors of the department.Footnote ²⁴

Located in the northern part of the department, La Convención and Lares were nowhere near the railroad line to Arequipa, They had been transformed, however, by efforts to modernize Cusco and expand its economy prior to the railroad’s inauguration. As Mark Rice explains, Machu Picchu’s environs were “not the uncharted wilderness described in Bingham’s accounts but a key economic frontier of Cusco.”Footnote ²⁵ Beginning in 1897, members of the newly formed Centro Científico del Cusco (Cusco Scientific Center) argued that the eastern slopes of the Andes in these regions and elsewhere could become sites for increased production of lucrative goods; trade routes to the Atlantic, moreover, could be established via Amazon waterways. Motivated by the boom in rubber and gum exploitation already underway, their efforts to attract state investment increased the political and economic power of large hacendados from these provinces and the output of their estates. In the 1890s, a road was blasted through the Urubamba Valley toward Vilcabamba to expand commerce with the area’s rubber producers and haciendas.Footnote ²⁶

In 1910 and 1911, these same hacendados campaigned to create and extend the Santa Ana railroad north from Cusco to their provinces. Local politics focused on this project, which Peru’s president, Augusto B. Leguía, approved. His decision reflected the persistence of an entrenched power structure in the Cusco region, in which large hacendados and other local powerholders called the shots and exercised influence over government officials. This structure had consequences for people like Justo Rodríguez. According to Rénique, “a large part of the Indigenous population remained at the mercy of local powerholders, resulting from a combination of economic forces and authority, of despotism and paternalism, a system known as gamonalismo.”Footnote ²⁷ As figures wielding authority, hacendados “could demand that indigenous people comply with a series of personal services, which despite being legally eradicated, would continue in effect until well into the twentieth century.”Footnote ²⁸

As will become clear, the Yale Peruvian Expedition exploited these relationships between hacendados, local officials, and the national government in the city of Cusco and the region around Machu Picchu. They also drew on military support to carry out their work and gain access to Indigenous and Mestizo bodies, both as sources of labor and as subjects for anthropometric experimentation. These entrenched power structures, however, should not be interpreted as preventing resistance. Rather, while much scholarship on peasant rebellions in early twentieth-century Cusco has focused on the period after 1915 and especially the 1920s, the early 1910s were also a time of struggle. As Christopher Heaney notes, when Bingham arrived in Peru in 1911, President Leguía warned him that the region he intended to visit, the valleys of the Urubamba and Vilcabamba rivers, had witnessed upheaval a few months before, when “Indian farmers and rubber collectors there had rebelled against the region’s landowners.”Footnote ²⁹ Describing the lower Urubamba Valley, Heaney adds that “The place was a human tinderbox” because “The state was weak, and the landowners dominated the peasants with a mixture of paternalism and abuse.”Footnote ³⁰ Some villages that had rebelled remained unwelcoming to American visitors.Footnote ³¹ Rodríguez’s refusal should thus be understood within this broader picture of simmering tensions, as should the behavior of others Nelson measured at Huadquiña Hacienda and elsewhere.

Expedition Strategies, Racial Thinking, and Coercion

In this political, social, and economic context, members of the 1912 Yale Peruvian Expedition adapted their approach and reframed their own rationales to fit local conditions. That said, given that the expedition was the fourth of its kind that Hiram Bingham, a lecturer in history at Yale, led to South America, it also drew on his ingrained prejudices and learned strategies. Born in Hawaiʻi to American missionaries, Bingham trained as a historian at Yale, UC Berkeley, and Harvard. As Cox Hall notes, however, he “might best be characterized as an explorer and collector with a scientific purpose.”Footnote ³² He was a generalist who ended up carrying out research on history, geography, and archeology before eventually entering politics. According to Ricardo Salvatore, he might also be considered a “‘gentleman scholar’ with no financial limitations on travel overseas,” since he had married an heir to the Tiffany fortune.Footnote ³³

An interest in exploring South America’s past inspired and shaped Bingham’s various trips. In 1906–1907, Bingham and Dr. Hamilton Rice, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, traveled from Venezuela to Colombia, retracing Simón Bolívar’s route nearly a century earlier.Footnote ³⁴ In 1908, before attending the Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago, Chile, Bingham traveled from Buenos Aires to Potosí to map the old royal road. He then continued with Clarence Hay, the secretary for the US delegation to Chile, to Cusco in early 1909, where they established contacts with locals and traveled to the ruins of Choqquequirau. According to Salvatore, Bingham became fascinated with Inca civilization and history on this journey, most likely at a local museum of Incaica in Cusco, in a visit to the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, and through conversations with local informants.Footnote ³⁵ This journey inspired a return trip with a team of researchers in 1911, in which Indigenous people brought them to Machu Picchu. Bingham’s original goal was to find Vilcabamba, the site to which the Inca leadership had fled after the Spanish invasion, but Machu Picchu came to dominate his subsequent work.

Bingham’s racism permeated all aspects of these journeys and was evident in his published accounts. According to Cox Hall, in his description of his 1906–1907 travels with Rice, Bingham acted “as the anointed translator and knowledge broker for future travelers” and explained the moral character of the people they encountered through racial categories prevalent at that time.Footnote ³⁶ In his description of his time in Potosí in 1908, moreover, Bingham’s racism and arrogance led interactions with an Indigenous man to turn violent. He wrote that when an innkeeper rejected a bill that appeared to be from an untrustworthy bank, “The idea of having a servile [Quechua] decline to receive good money was irritating.” A scuffle ensued, in which Bingham, on horseback, rode the man up against a wall. The explorer wrote, “I fully expected that he would follow us with stones or something else, but as he was only a [Quechua] he accepted the inevitable and we saw no more of him.”Footnote ³⁷

Bingham viewed Indigenous peoples in the Cusco region through this same disparaging lens in 1909, including them in broad generalizations about South Americans that ultimately shaped the 1912 expedition’s thinking and behavior in the field. Influenced by salvage anthropology in North America and by settler colonial logics within science and beyond it, he organized the expedition’s research around the assumption that “pure” Indigenous people would disappear as modernization progressed across the continent. He understood South America through an evolutionary and industrialist paradigm, one in which the continent’s challenges stemmed from its climate and “race history” while the United States constituted “the apex of modernity.”Footnote ³⁸ As a result, from his perspective little effort could or should be made to learn from contemporary Indigenous people. Notably, none of the expedition members in 1911 or 1912 could speak the Indigenous language Quechua; it was not until the third expedition in 1914–1915 that any were tasked with learning it.Footnote ³⁹ While Bingham wrote of “securing from the natives (by the offering of rewards for certain highly desired information) what data they could give regarding the presence of ruins, the frequence [sic] of certain animals, the peculiarities of the climate, etc.,” he employed disparaging terms like “stupid boy” to describe young assistants and guides.Footnote ⁴⁰

Bingham’s previous expeditions also laid groundwork for how the 1912 expedition would navigate local power relations and inequalities to curry favor, engage different communities, and secure Indigenous labor in the field. In his 1908 trip from Buenos Aires to Potosí and his 1909 trip to Cusco, for example, Bingham initiated a practice of coordinating with government officials, the military, and powerful landowners to facilitate his work. He did so through the language of friendship. According to Salvatore, when Bingham arrived in Potosí, “The local prefect received the U.S. party with red-carpet treatment. Celebrations in his honor lasted a week, including bullfights, dinners, balls, fireworks, and illuminations.”Footnote ⁴¹ When he and Hay traveled to Abancay, the city listed as Justo Rodríguez’s place of origin, some months later, they did so with a military lieutenant’s assistance. They were greeted by twenty-four landowners and soldiers, who “cheered and escorted the American científicos into the small city, where they met Abancay’s prefect.”Footnote ⁴² Leaving by mule two days later, Bingham and Hay were accompanied by the lieutenant and a team of Indigenous men the lieutenant had conscripted, who “were paid a pittance and could be jailed if they refused to work.”Footnote ⁴³

Bingham had no moral quandaries with these exploitative practices and returned to them in 1911, drawing on the support of the military and the Abancay prefect, who by then had become prefect of Cusco. Emphasizing the rhetoric of friendship and diplomacy in later published descriptions, Bingham wrote of first “establishing friendly relations with the foreign Government and securing of requisite permits from various governmental bureaus and introductions to large landowners; and second, in making local arrangements such as establishing connections with reliable business houses, purchasing equipment and supplies, and securing the most efficient native assistants.”Footnote ⁴⁴ At the same time, he lamented building connections with locals as time “wasted in diplomacy” and noted that “stupid officials, suspicious land owners, and ignorant natives” could interrupt or undermine the expedition’s work.Footnote ⁴⁵ The rights and wishes of Indigenous and Mestizo men, furthermore, mattered little to him. Two government officials accompanying the expedition traveled from farm to farm, greeting such men, and slipping silver dollars into their palms when they shook hands. In doing so, they effectively paid the men in advance for their work, “threatening them with imprisonment or worse if they refused.” According to Heaney, “The farmers pleaded that they had to tend to their crops, that their families could not spare them, that they lacked the food for a week’s march into the jungle. But the officials were implacable, and Bingham soon had a dozen porters.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In 1912, such practices formed a routine part of the expedition’s strategy, one consistent with its members’ views but infrequently mentioned in published accounts. Indigenous men from the town of Ollantaytambo served as conscripted paid laborers, having been rounded up by the governor and imprisoned “to see that they did not run away” before joining the expedition.Footnote ⁴⁷ Relations between these workers and American expedition members generated discord, with the reluctance of the former stemming from being uprooted from their communities and “forced into the abusive practices of the lower Urubamba, where tensions between Indians and whites ran high.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Particular events further undermined trust and pretenses of actual friendship. At Mandor, Pampa workers encountered the stabbed body of an Indigenous man. They likely also knew that an Indigenous child had died accompanying Bingham’s expedition a year earlier, swept away by the Urubamba River under suspicious circumstances. At Machu Picchu workers set a fire that nearly took the lives of the Peruvian soldier accompanying the expedition and an expedition member, leading to suspicion of foul play.Footnote ⁴⁹ While it is unclear if such stories reached Justo Rodríguez and informed his act of refusal the following month, they would have shaped the thinking and behavior of others conscripted to work for the expedition and measured by Nelson.

Tensions, resistance, and refusal of various kinds continued in the months that followed and during the 1914–1915 expedition. In analyzing Bingham’s correspondence, Salvatore notes signs of unease, including “Indian laborers who abandoned the camp without reason, peasants who refused to sell mules to the expedition, Mestizo guides who kept Indian laborers away from the Yale camp, and commoners who denounced the wrongdoings of the Yankee explorers to the press.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Hacienda owners likewise did not necessarily look upon the expedition favorably, especially with regard to its hiring of workers. Although some hacendados such as Señora Carmen, the owner of Huadquiña Hacienda where Nelson measured Rodríguez, and the Duque family of Hacienda Santa Ana, coordinated with Bingham and formed friendships with him, in other cases the expedition disrupted long-standing patron–client relationships between hacendados and peons. According to Salvatore, when the expedition returned in 1914–1915, “landowners charged that the excavations were luring away their workers.”Footnote ⁵¹ This was partly because the expedition paid higher wages at $1 per day and paid workers in cash. However, it also provided workers free medical care, which undermined hacendados’ prestige and “showed indigenous peasants a side of modernity that local landowners were not ready to embrace.” As a result, the Yale Peruvian Expedition, through its forms of recruitment, constituted a “menace, for they raised wages, defied traditional social hierarchies, and engaged peasants in the search for Inca artifacts.”Footnote ⁵²

Local Intellectuals, the “Indian Problem,” and Expeditionary Science

Racist views on Indigenous peoples also formed part of the moral thinking of urban Cusqueños who interacted with Bingham and his team, and who initially welcomed and then debated and critiqued the expedition’s work. As Mark Rice notes, “colonial era concepts of race and ethnicity remained stubbornly powerful”Footnote ⁵³ in the early twentieth century. This was even true of intellectuals who campaigned to bring about Indigenous peoples’ uplift and fought against their exploitation on haciendas. Intellectuals in Cusco fell roughly into two different camps, traditionalists and indigenistas. The former sought to maintain long-standing social and political structures, while the latter positioned themselves as vindicating the region’s Indigenous peoples after centuries of exploitation. Such views among indigenistas, however, did not signify abandoning long-standing ideas about difference that characterized Peru’s entrenched internal colonialism. According to Yazmín López Lenci, indigenismo was “a theory woven together on an essentialist opposition between what is ours (lo propio) and what is others’ (lo ajeno), and thought about in essentialist racial categories.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, as they sought to defend and bring about Indigenous peoples’ uplift, indigenistas engaged the logic of racial thinking and speculated about communities’ potential for modernization. The language used in indigenista scholarship bears this out. Research shed light on the “Indian problem,” the notion that Indigenous culture and living conditions hindered the region’s progress.Footnote ⁵⁵

When Bingham arrived in Cusco in 1911, he deliberately sought to build connections and alliances with indigenista scholars and their students at the local university. Recent political events had given rise to a new generation of intellectuals and students there, who sought to transform thinking about Cusco’s regional identity and its Indigenous peoples. Having formed the Asociación Universitaria (University Association) in 1909, students went on strike, closing the campus. This led President Leguía to appoint an American professor, Albert Giesecke, as the university’s rector with instructions to modernize it. Giesecke reorganized the university and created a more democratic environment, in which research about Indigenous peoples was encouraged. López Lenci writes that his administration emphasized “promoting among students knowledge of the existing reality in and around Cusco, and the requirement that they write on the basis of what they have seen and verified.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Giesecke supported Quechua language classes and archeological and ethnological research expeditions.Footnote ⁵⁷ The number of Cusqueños doing research in the countryside thus grew significantly,Footnote ⁵⁸ leading to broader practices that Jorge Coronado, describing indigenismo in Peru more broadly, characterizes as representing and speaking for Indigenous people.Footnote ⁵⁹

By establishing ties at the local university and the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima (Geographical Society of Lima), Bingham hoped to gain information and connections to facilitate his research. Through meetings and public talks, he gave local intellectuals the sense that “they had been invited to participate in this project of knowledge.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Some specialists even traveled with the expedition and served as intermediaries. For example, a professor of Spanish and literature from the university, José Gabriel Cosío Medina, accompanied the 1912 expedition as the Peruvian government’s and the Geographical Society of Lima’s official delegate. Students also became involved. Among them were sons of hacendados and other families who held land in the Urubamba River Valley and along the Vilcabamba River. These students invited the expedition to visit their family estates, shared knowledge of ruins, and facilitated additional connections.Footnote ⁶¹ Such intermediaries proved crucial in enabling expedition members to conduct their work, despite doing so at a time when, according to López Lenci, “in confrontation with travelers’ representations of Cusco, there existed a struggle over representation, which was a struggle over the construction of place.”Footnote ⁶² Through collaboration, they influenced expedition members’ assumptions about the acceptable treatment of workers and research subjects.

Heated debate soon arose in Cusco over the expedition’s removal of artifacts from Peru. Nelson’s 1912 anthropometric research, however, never generated controversy or concern among students and scholars. This is true despite the intrusiveness, violence, and questionable ethics that characterized Nelson’s interactions. It may be partly attributed to the fact that, as others have shown, traveling research expeditions and local scientists in the Andes had already debated racial difference and employed anthropometric photography before the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s arrival.Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, Cusqueños had been carrying out racial scientific research for decades. One such scholar was Antonio Lorena, a physician who published extensively on racial differences and ideas about racial fitness beginning in the 1890s, and who invoked the logics of creole nationalism by questioning whether contemporary Indigenous peoples were related to the original inhabitants of the region responsible for its monumental ruins. As a member of the Sociedad Arqueológica Cusqueña (Cusco Archeological Society), his research continually emphasized the settler colonial idea that “pure” Indigenous peoples in and around Cusco were a race destined to vanish. In the years immediately preceding Bingham’s first trip to the region, Lorena’s work included comparing measurements taken from ancient skulls to the cranial dimensions of living Indigenous peoples thought to be free of racial admixture, who resided near ruins from which said skulls had been recovered. Lorena presented this study at the 1908 Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago, Chile, which Bingham attended.

Another scientist interested in questions of racial continuity or discontinuity, José Coello y Mesa, conducted research involving anthropometric and craniological practices not unlike those of the Yale Peruvian Expedition. As a delegate of the Asociación Pro-Indígena del Cusco (Pro-Indigenous Association of Cusco), Coello y Mesa analyzed skulls from other parts of Peru as well as human remains excavated near Cusco, comparing them to the region’s living Indigenous people. He aimed to determine whether multiple migration patterns explained what he perceived to be differences among Indigenous populations from distinct regions. He published his findings in 1913, having traversed the countryside around Cusco with scholars in years prior to measure community members in Pantipata, Colquepata, and Chincheros. His work and Lorena’s thus established the precedent of intrusive scientific research in these rural communities, at least one of whose residents Nelson later encountered and measured.Footnote ⁶⁴

The Yale Peruvian Expedition’s anthropometric research goals overlapped with Lorena’s and Coello y Mesa’s work around questions of racial origins, racial continuity and discontinuity, and ideas about the vanishing Native. It is unclear, however, to what degree Cusqueño racial scientists influenced Bingham’s and other expedition members’ thinking about anthropometry. Yale researchers did not acknowledge local researchers’ work in their publications. For example, H. B. Ferris, the physical anthropologist who analyzed Nelson’s data back at Yale, instead described Nelson as conducting racial scientific work in response to the urging of the prominent Czech anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička.Footnote ⁶⁵ Elsewhere, the expedition positioned itself as building upon other foreigners’ photographic studies and anthropometric research, emphasizing works by Alcide d’Orbigny and Arthur Chervin on the Quechua and David Forbes on the Aymara.Footnote ⁶⁶

One way that the Yale Peruvian Expedition did differ significantly from local research efforts, however, was in terms of its structure and members’ training. Bingham organized the 1912 expedition on a model developed in polar exploration, in which there was “a large, semipermanent, multidisciplinary team of experts organized like a naval expedition, whose captain won the lion’s share of the credit.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This model relied on local Indigenous assistants, much like Naval Commander Robert E. Peary’s expedition to the North Pole in 1909.Footnote ⁶⁸ Looking back on the 1912 expedition’s work, Bingham hailed it as a success and example of what multidisciplinary research based on friendship and camaraderie could achieve. The paleontologist’s work, for example, had benefited from the civil engineer’s discovery of a rare fossil. Similarly, the botanist had identified an important feature on an ancient monument that the expedition’s archeologist had missed.Footnote ⁶⁹ The contributions of local informants whom Bingham described through the language of friendship, on the other hand, were rarely acknowledged.

Despite receiving fame and credit for these exploits, most of the men from the United States working alongside Bingham possessed limited levels of specialized knowledge. None across the three expeditions had received extensive training in archeology, arguably the most important science for the expedition’s work and reputation. They came from a world in which nonprofessional scientists were commonplace, and in which dabbling in science was not unusual among educated people. Lack of training, however, ultimately mattered little to Bingham, an explorer for whom ambition and outside sponsorship shaped and legitimated everything. While benefiting from local intellectuals’ and others’ research and insights, he portrayed his fellow members’ work as building upon a longer history of scientific expeditions and travelers’ accounts of the Andes, such as those of Alexander von Humboldt, Clements Markham, and others.Footnote ⁷⁰ According to Salvatore, Bingham “was trying to outdo the work of William Prescott and Sir Clements Markham” as the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s scope expanded.Footnote ⁷¹ Bingham critiqued these travelers and others, arguing that “too often in recent years expeditions had gone out with a very narrow viewpoint, equipped only to do astronomical or anthropological or paleontological or physiographic work.”Footnote ⁷² By concentrating the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s work on the Cusco region, on the other hand, he sought to benefit from taking “a relatively small, unexplored area and covering it as thoroughly as possible, in a way making it a type area to which other areas can be compared.”Footnote ⁷³

Cosío Medina noted the limited expertise of several of Bingham’s men while also acknowledging their ambition and role as part of a transnational system of information extraction. Having been sent to accompany and observe the expedition, he wrote of Nelson’s work:

This was a system of imperial knowledge production, one Salvatore connects to the expansionist tendencies of US capital, technology, and culture.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, as a participant in this system, Nelson, a knowledgeable surgeon, having been hired primarily to address the expedition’s medical needs, mostly served as a poorly trained anthropometric data collector.Footnote ⁷⁶ Ultimately, his research would generate tense encounters with Indigenous and Mestizo people compelled against their will to serve as research subjects.

Photography, Refusal, and Desire

How did Nelson undertake the expedition’s racial scientific research? His diaries suggest he had no background in anthropometry prior to leaving for Peru, and that he had only studied Alphonse Bertillon’s instructional works on standardized anthropometric measurements and photography during the ocean voyage to South America. Once in the Andes, the surgeon spent several months in 1912 photographing and measuring Indigenous and Mestizo people in urban and rural settings. He used camera equipment provided by Kodak along with a measuring set, which included long and short folding rods (rulers) for measuring height, a craniometer, two sliding compasses for large and small measurements, a steel tape, a grip dynamometer, and equipment for taking fingerprints. Numerous subjects measured and photographed were workers who accompanied the expedition and assisted in its excavations, while others had little or no relationship to it. In total, Nelson examined 145 people, all but one of whom were men, taking thirty-eight different measurements. His subjects ranged in age from seventeen to eighty-eight. Their photographs formed but a fraction of the 12,000 photographs taken between 1911 and 1915, of which 1,000 documented racial types and another 1,000 depicted Indigenous customs and social life.

As H. B. Ferris, the physical anthropologist who analyzed the data at Yale, described it, the research constituted an effort at “the acquisition of data for the study of the anthropomorphic and physiognomic characters of the Quichua.”Footnote ⁷⁷ A sense of urgency motivated this work, since “it is simply a question of a comparatively short time when there will be no race that has not suffered recent admixture.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Nelson’s photographic records are notable, however, for deviating from the requirements and standards of anthropometric photography. He sought to mimic racial scientists’ work in the United States and Europe, who in previous decades had made advances in its development. Indeed, building on the criminal identification method of Alphonse Bertillon in France, anthropometric photography had largely become standardized and was regarded as a reliable means to index precisely and scientifically the dimensions, features, and measurements of individuals. By following set procedures for positioning subjects before the camera, by employing devices to hold them in place, by placing them in front of a neutral background, by controlling lighting, and by positioning rulers and measuring devices near them in the frame, racial scientists believed their photographs could reveal truths about the physicality of racial difference (Figure 3.1).Footnote ⁷⁹

Figure 3.1 Self-portrait of Alphonse Bertillon, inventor of anthropometry, on anthropometric data sheet, dated August 7, 1912.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Many of the conditions necessary for creating such photographs were unavailable to Nelson during his travels in the Cusco region. He did not have a formal photographic studio or a scientific laboratory for carrying out his work, but rather used a hotel room in Cusco and indoor and outdoor spaces on haciendas and at Machu Picchu to create makeshift studios for measuring and photographing subjects. His technology was also limited to tools and camera equipment brought from the United States. As a result, subjects appeared at various distances from the camera and often were not centered in the viewfinder properly, limiting the possibility of accurate comparison. Moreover, Nelson photographed them at angles in front of doorways, against stone walls or decorated adobe walls, or in exterior arcades with arches and cross-beams (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). His work thus failed to conform to one of anthropometric photography’s key requirements: posing subjects against blank, neutral backgrounds without any depiction of depth as a means to prevent misperceptions of what constituted their physical form. To address this, Nelson sometimes improvised by hanging a sheet behind the subject, the edges of which are visible in some images (Figure 3.4). The photographs can thus at best be described as approximations of Bertillon’s practices of “accurate” and “measurable” depiction. They failed to achieve the consistency of composition required for “objective,” “scientific” visual analysis of the racialized physical form.

Figure 3.2 Anthropometric photographs 7–10, 12, and 14 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru

Figure 3.3 Anthropometric photographs 260–265 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru

Figure 3.4 Anthropometric photographs 28–32 and 34 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru

In journals and reports, Nelson and Bingham provided fairly curt descriptions of how the surgeon should acquire research subjects. These methods made use of local intermediaries while drawing on broader practices and assumptions about needing to engage and secure the cooperation of Indigenous people through coercion and force. For example, at the Huadquiña Hacienda where Justo Rodríguez refused to be measured and photographed, Nelson reported that “the administrator of the hacienda was the man who mustered Indians to be measured.”Footnote ⁸⁰ He did so on the orders of the hacienda owner, Señora Carmen, who befriended Bingham. In Cusco, on the other hand, Bingham’s activities on July 5, 1912 included arranging for Nelson “to continue taking portraits and measurements of Indians. The Lieut. Sotomayor gets Indians and translates, Nelson measures and photographs and then gives the Indian [sic] a media. It takes from 40 minutes to 1.5 hr. to do the stunt.”Footnote ⁸¹ According to Nelson, Lieutenant Sotomayor had been secured “through Mr. Bingham’s influence with the prefect”Footnote ⁸² and spoke Quechua. He caught Indigenous men off the street and main square and brought them by force into the Hotel Central, where Nelson had a room for taking measurements and photographs. There, a local “man of leisure”Footnote ⁸³ and friend of the expedition, Carlos Duque, assisted Nelson and translated with Sotomayor. Duque was the son of the owners of Santa Ana Hacienda mentioned previously, had spent time in the United States, and spoke English, Spanish, and Quechua.

To guarantee an adequate supply of subjects, Bingham had instructed the soldier to “arrest any Indians that seemed to be of pure blood and who proclaimed by their costumes and general appearance that they were typical Mountain Indians.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Nelson noted the trauma some men experienced upon being detained unexpectedly, yet he was largely indifferent to it. He wrote that many captured in Cusco’s square feared they were being recruited for military service “and not a few shed tears at the thought.”Footnote ⁸⁵ However, others “were only curious and much relieved when they were set free.”Footnote ⁸⁶ He even conveyed the story of an Indigenous man the soldier had brought in who allegedly “took very kindly to the idea. Military honors appealed to him. The teniente answered his many questions in the quichua [sic] tongue, and, when the measurements were taken, told him to come back in a month to be enlisted.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Suggesting a broader range of affective relations that may have shifted after the initial encounter and during the examination, Nelson claimed more generally that “The Indians are very fond of having their picture taken.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Indigenous people and others in the Cusco region were not strangers to photography by the early twentieth century, as Deborah Poole and Jorge Coronado have documented.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, the extent of their previous experience, if any, in front of the camera varied and few would have recognized the surgeon’s measuring tools or his gaze. It is not surprising then, that Nelson’s assertion of fondness does not appear to correspond to other accounts of research subjects’ behavior or clues about their moral thinking. Descriptions suggest multiple ways of perceiving, engaging, and in many cases resisting, subverting, or co-opting the expedition’s racial scientific work. The predominant sentiment conveyed, however, is reluctance. In Cusco, few people expressed willingness to be measured and photographed without the threat of force. A reflection of the ubiquity of violence as a form of encounter, this behavior became especially evident on a day when the soldier was absent. Left on their own, Nelson and Duque “tried to round up some Indians but found they would not come. We succeeded in getting only one, and that one by aid of a policeman.”Footnote ⁹⁰ A similar phenomenon occurred at Huadquiña Hacienda, suggesting Rodríguez was not the only research subject there to refuse Nelson’s efforts. Nelson noted that while the hacienda administrator had been assigned to bring men to be photographed and measured, “He was occupied with other business nearly all the time, the result being that it was rather difficult for me to get an Indian promptly when I was ready for him.”Footnote ⁹¹ Conditions worsened, moreover, when the owner, Señora Carmen, departed for Cusco with her relatives, servants, and the administrator himself. Their absence “put a stop to measuring Indians,” indicating the centrality of coercion and threats of violence to the expedition’s research.Footnote ⁹²

In other cases, local officials came to Indigenous peoples’ defense, objecting to the intrusive and coercive nature of the expedition’s examination of reluctant subjects’ bodies. In Arequipa, for example, city officials soundly rejected Nelson’s efforts to set up a studio. Despite the expedition’s lobbying, officials saw the work of measuring and photographing Indigenous research subjects as invasive and an affront to decency and privacy. According to Nelson, the sub-prefect informed the expedition that “the sentiment of Arequipa was different from that in Cuzco to the extent that the people would resent any action compelling an Indian to submit to measurements.” Nelson also noted a further impediment to acquiring subjects, which was that “practically the only pure blooded Indians in Arequipa are those who come in for commercial purposes, driving their llama trains loaded with produce.”Footnote ⁹³

Having failed to perform research in Arequipa and instead provided medical and surgical care to notable residents and a member of the Duque family, Nelson lamented the challenges he faced there and in the Cusco region as anthropometric data collector. Reflecting Bingham’s and the expedition’s racist thinking and broader disdain for South Americans, he expressed frustration with local officials and a dismal view of Indigenous Andean peoples. While he praised their apparent eagerness at other moments, in these cases he invoked racial fitness categories prevalent at the time, disparaging them as backward and asserting that “the Indians [sic] are dull mentally. How much coca has to do with this condition is hard to determine.”Footnote ⁹⁴ In other cases when traveling, he and others resorted to force to compel Indigenous people to obey their instructions. For example, he lamented in the town of Arma that “We could not get any food from the Indians [sic] without using force, and then we would succeed in getting small amounts only.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Accounts thus reflect Nelson’s and other members’ failure to exert influence over Indigenous people in various settings, despite the assistance and support of powerful figures in Cusqueño society.

Photography itself proved especially provocative within these encounters. In at least one case, Indigenous people attacked expedition members and their camera equipment while they were traveling. Osgood Hardy wrote of encountering a group of Indigenous men who turned aggressive and specifically “laid violent hands on the tripod.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Resistance is also evident among research subjects in Nelson’s anthropometric photographs. Rather than exhibit the emotionless, unfocused stares that typify the genre of standardized anthropometric portraits Bertillon had developed in France, and which Bingham expected Nelson to recreate, subjects frequently exhibited confusion, fear, and annoyance. They either focused directly on the camera or looked to the side when photographed head on (Figure 3.5). In some cases they appear to have refused to sit still. While the body remains in focus, the head appears blurred as if they moved to resist being photographed. Subjects’ shoulders, moreover, were often positioned with one higher than the other, rather than at equal levels. In some cases, men kept bundles strapped to their backs and hats on their heads, thus reducing the viewers’ ability to discern their physical form (Figure 3.6). In an ethnological picture of a woman, moreover, it appears that someone was positioned behind the subject, perhaps to hold her in place (Figure 3.7). In this way, research subjects’ behavior undermined Nelson’s work and its value as a comparative study of physiognomy and race; he could not exercise control fully in his improvised anthropometric studios.

Figure 3.5 Anthropometric photographs 105 and 107–111 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru.

Figure 3.6 Anthropometric photographs 93–98 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru.

Figure 3.7 Anthropometric photographs 269–271 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru.

These photographs’ most revealing aspect, however, is the way research subjects articulated desire, as theorized by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. This becomes evident in subjects’ use of a ruler to express their sense of self in the face of scientific practices that depicted them in a demeaning fashion. In anthropometric photography, the ruler should be positioned in exactly the same location and angle in every portrait. Likewise, the camera should be the same distance from every subject to make their portraits consistently measurable and comparable. In the Yale Peruvian Expedition photographs, however, research subjects held the upper portion or tip of a folding ruler (described in journals as a “folding rod”) in their hand, rather than having it placed alongside their head. Although Nelson wrote in one of his anthropometric notebooks that “In the photographs each subject holds a metre rule so as to give an idea of height of the individual,” the subjects he photographed positioned it at different angles and directions in their portraits, undermining its precision as an anthropometric tool.Footnote ⁹⁷ Some held it directly outward in front of them at an angle, while others leaned it to the side and still others appeared to hold it upright or raise it off the ground (Figure 3.8). In some cases, moreover, they treated it like a cane, grasping it as if they would put weight on it or stabilize their balance with it when walking. In still other cases, they actually held it like a vara, a traditional ceremonial staff that officials in Andean communities used to connote authorityFootnote ⁹⁸ (Figure 3.9). Research subjects thus subverted the ruler’s function, adopting poses with it that consciously or subconsciously challenged expedition members’ authority and reflected their own sense of community, identity, and status. The ruler became little more than a gesture toward the expedition’s goals of “scientifically” depicting racial difference. Research subjects used it to assert power and fashion how they would be depicted in accordance with their desires and claims of local autonomy.

Figure 3.8 Anthropometric photographs 191–192, 194, and 196–198 by Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru.

Figure 3.9 Anthropometric photographs 61, 74, 77, and 199, Luther T. Nelson, 1912.

Source: National Library of Peru.

Finally, cases exist in which men appear to have gone to more extreme lengths to seize control of how they would be perceived in anthropometric photographs.Footnote ⁹⁹ They, too, expressed what Tuck and Yang would describe as desire. For example, Bingham’s “In the Wonderland of Peru” includes an account of an Indigenous man, who “when he found he could have his picture taken for free, dressed in his Sunday clothes. The next day he returned to the photograph. When he was shown the negative he refused to believe that it was his picture, because he could not see the colors and the spangles that decorated that Sunday coat he wore.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ While Bingham no doubt included this story to entertain a US and global reading public and reinforce stereotypes of Indigenous unfamiliarity with photography, it can be read differently. Much like the men who held the ruler as if it were a vara, this gentleman chose to co-opt the anthropometric photograph to make it a depiction of how he saw himself and wanted others to see him. He rejected the photograph’s purpose as a demeaning, ostensibly “scientific” record of his physical form. The makeshift anthropometric studio thus became a site of negotiation and assertion of Indigenous identity and desire, in addition to being a site of attempted domination, coercion, violence, resistance, and refusal.

Conclusion

Although photographs and written records provide valuable clues and insights, there remains much that the archive cannot tell us about the research subjects Nelson sought to measure and photograph. For example, we know little about Justo Rodríguez and his reasons for refusing to comply beyond the fragmentary descriptions included in anthropometric notebooks and published materials. Given where he and Nelson encountered one another, he likely worked as an hacienda peon. If true, then he bore witness to the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s use of Huadquiña Hacienda as a base camp and stopping point, from which they organized their efforts to excavate Machu Picchu. He may even have joined the expedition’s workforce, one of many hacienda workers whose contributions went unacknowledged. That said, he may equally likely have had little, if any, connection to the expedition, his behavior an act of refusal by someone suddenly and unexpectedly caught within its scientific gaze.

Rodríguez, however, was one of many research subjects who pushed back against Nelson’s efforts through forms of resistance, refusal, and subversion. Others embraced or co-opted aspects of the project for their own ends. In the process, such figures acted not within a single moral field that was widely shared across Cusqueño society. Rather, they acted on the basis of the various positions they occupied within a complex, highly unequal, rural agrarian society marked by internal colonialism and undergoing rapid expansion and economic growth. Furthermore, their ways of knowing, perceiving, and judging likely engaged and exceeded the categories expedition members and their Peruvian scientific and intellectual counterparts employed in written accounts. In this sense, the concept of the moral field need expanding and complicating in order to include the experiences of ordinary people and explain their decisions. This is especially true for colonial contexts where transnational science has typically operated. In writing about those settings, historians must avoid reconstructing moral fields in the singular and only in reference to the circulation of widely shared ideas and beliefs. To do so without considering different epistemologies and political, social, and economic realities is to suggest that those people historians and others have traditionally identified as intellectuals act within moral fields, while others do not.

Coda

How can this study of past scientific research encounters inform the present? Since 2000, two conflicts over scientific research have brought the Peruvian government, Indigenous communities, and other constituencies from the Cusco region into conflict with the institutions that sponsored the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s research in the 1910s. First, under the governments of Alejandro Toledo and Alán García, tensions escalated between the Peruvian government and Yale University over the repatriation of artifacts and, to a lesser degree, human remains removed under Bingham’s supervision. Efforts by Peru’s First Lady, Eliane Karp, to draw attention to the dispute, lawsuits brought by the Peruvian government against Yale, and other factors resulted in Yale signing an agreement in November 2010 and transferring its Machu Picchu collection to Cusco in 2011. While doubts persist in Peru as to whether Yale returned all items, the collection now sits in a museum in Cusco along with tattered exhibition materials Yale provided.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In 2011, a second conflict emerged between Indigenous peoples and a project organized by the National Geographic Society. As Kim TallBear describes, the community of Hatun Q’eros refused to cooperate with researchers from Genographic, a scientific project that sought samples of community members’ DNA. Funded by the National Geographic Society, Genographic wanted this genetic material because the Q’eros claim to be descendants of the Incas and to lack Spanish admixture. Genographic’s goal was to chart human populations’ origins and development worldwide through modern genomics. In this sense, despite being led by scientists who framed their research from an antiracist stance, Genographic engaged questions of racial origins that had motivated the Yale Peruvian Expedition’s work and Peruvian scientists like Lorena and Coello y Mesa a century earlier. Like Nelson, who meticulously recorded which research subjects appeared to be of racially “pure” Indigenous origins, Genographic pursued racial purity through science.Footnote ¹⁰²

The community of Hatun Q’eros refused Genographic scientists’ requests for DNA samples and questioned how they engaged Indigenous communities. As reported in a communiqué, the Q’eros took this action based on concerns about the project’s ethical dimensions, citing dubious methods employed to seek informed consent, questions about who owned or would have control over samples, questions about what the National Geographic Society might do with data, and doubts about the project’s treatment of Indigenous knowledge. The communiqué outlined seven reasons for refusal that centered on ethics. Genographic ultimately suspended its project in the Cusco region.Footnote ¹⁰³

Comparing these recent conflicts and situating them in relation to the material in this chapter raises questions that complicate our understanding of moral thinking, the ethics of expedition science, and contemporary Indigenous rights and self-determination. Why has Peru’s government struggled with Yale to repatriate artifacts and prioritized them over human remains while ignoring the possible return of reams of physiological data stored there? What, on the other hand, can be learned about the National Geographic Society by situating conflicts between the Q’eros and Genographic within a longer history of racial scientific research that it sponsored? By focusing on desire in this chapter and making the work available in translation, I hope this study of how past Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects resisted, refused, engaged, subverted, and co-opted racial scientific research can further inform Indigenous communities’ already deep historical understandings of their relations with outside researchers.

During the heyday of salvage anthropology – the ethnographic study of supposedly vanishing “races” – practitioners often praised the moral integrity of their own work. In a preface to the 1939 book Une Civilisation du Miel: Les Indiens Guayakis du Paraguay (an exemplar of the salvage genre), the French anthropologist Paul Rivet applauded the objectivity of the book’s author: the French naturalist Jehan Albert Vellard. Rivet described his compatriot as a “biologist at heart” with “extraordinary knowledge” of “tropical nature.” He also marveled at how quickly Vellard adapted to the demands of anthropological fieldwork and praised Vellard’s monograph for its firm basis in “observations made in direct contact with reality and not summary impressions.” For Rivet, Vellard’s rigorous observations stood in sharp contrast to those of amateur ethnographers who produced a “superficial and hasty literature[,] which the taste for exoticism and the age of communication have so annoyingly made fashionable.” The clarity of Vellard’s narrative was thus like a “documentary filmed on the spot, at the risk of his life” rather than a “fake film executed in a comfortable studio.”Footnote ¹ By championing Vellard’s moral and scientific acumen, Rivet thus rendered him a quintessential “modest witness” – a type of observer that Donna Haraway classically described as an “authorized ventriloquist for the object world” with a “remarkable power to establish the [unadorned] facts.”Footnote ² By emphasizing Vellard’s modesty and sacrifice, Rivet also implied that he was doing both the Aché and the anthropological community a favor by capturing the remnants of a disappearing people.

Rivet also revealed that Vellard’s narrative went beyond mere representation. As another example of Vellard’s virtue, Rivet highlighted one of Une Civilisation du Miel’s most striking passages: the story of how, in 1932, the French biologist adopted a young Aché girl and named her Marie-Yvonne. “With what simplicity,” Rivet mused, “J. Vellard reports the most moving episode of the beautiful adventure he lived.” Like many French anthropologists from the interwar period, Vellard’s book represented a literary counterpart to the scientific monographs that emerged from his fieldwork.Footnote ³ With literary flair, Vellard’s account of Marie-Yvonne’s adoption framed the episode as a benevolent rescue mission. In his own telling, Vellard described how the “fugitive Indian guides” who assisted him during his fieldwork brought Marie-Yvonne to him when she was approximately two years old. The guides discovered the girl after they had fled from Vellard’s group and stumbled upon an Aché camp with two women and a child. When the women fled, the guides seized the girl and brought her to Vellard who observed that she “had been badly abused and … was terrified.” Once brought to Vellard, he claimed that Marie-Yvonne chose to stay with him and his family – “she came with us and has not left us since,” wrote Vellard. By his own reckoning, Vellard assumed a benevolent paternal role that stood in stark contrast to his “fugitive” guides and the Aché women who supposedly abandoned Marie-Yvonne. Vellard thus presented himself as rescuing Marie-Yvonne from the clutches of his unruly guides and her neglectful family members.

Rivet, who was prominently involved in antifascist and antiracist struggles in interwar France, took Vellard’s adoption story at face value and interpreted it as offering important correctives to scientific debates about race and heredity. Reflecting on these events several years later, Rivet noted that under the care of Vellard and his mother, Marie-Yvonne had grown into a charming, intelligent, and “pretty” ten- to eleven-year-old girl. Rivet also marveled at the fact that she spoke fluent Portuguese and French and had quickly adapted to an entirely new environment without “heredity” diverting her from the path of “civilized life.” Had she not been adopted and cared for by Vellard, Rivet conjectured, Marie-Yvonne would likely have lived “the precarious and primitive life of which J. Vellard gives us a striking picture.” In Rivet’s estimation, her remarkable change in fortune offered a potent argument against racism – “I deliver [the facts of Marie-Yvonne’s story] to the meditations of those who believe in the irreducible inequality of races and the imprescriptible laws of heredity.” Marie-Yvonne’s adoption story thus gave Vellard’s “beautiful” book a “a human value, which should ensure the success it deserves in so many other ways.”Footnote ⁴ From Rivet’s perspective, Vellard’s book and the adoption story it told did more than just preserve the fading remnants of a disappearing people, it provided ammunition for the international struggle against racism that he and other prominent anthropologists like Franz Boas had been involved with.Footnote ⁵

In the following decades, Marie-Yvonne’s adoption story was retold by scholars and journalists who built on Rivet’s humanitarian and antiracist framing. Marie-Yvonne’s story was retold in public-facing articles published by the UNESCO Courier in 1950 and Reader’s Digest in 1960. These articles continued to celebrate her adoption as a golden opportunity to escape primitivism and join civilization. Yet this humanitarian framing ignored the violent circumstances and colonial structures surrounding Marie-Yvonne’s adoption. In Paraguay, Marie-Yvonne’s story corresponds to a period when the reigning Liberal government introduced Indigenous assimilation policies inspired by the Jesuit missions – the reducciones, or reductions – of the seventeenth century. These policies promised Native land to religious organizations and others who could successfully “reduce” Indigenous people and thus created the conditions for an intensification of violence and abuse toward Indigenous peoples with the grim manhunts of the Aché serving as a prime example.Footnote ⁶ Through publications like the UNESCO Courier and Reader’s Digest, Marie-Yvonne’s story also circulated in settler colonial states such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. From this global perspective, the circulation of Marie-Yvonne’s story coincides with a period when settler colonial governments, notably Australia and Canada, encouraged the forced separation and removal of thousands of Indigenous children from their families as part of state assimilation policies. In a global historical context that scholars have retrospectively described as genocidal, how is it that Marie-Yvonne’s story became framed in the redemptive terms of humanitarianism and antiracism?Footnote ⁷

By examining the various retellings of Marie-Yvonne’s story and the many stories of captured children that populate ethnographic studies of the Aché, this essay tracks how colonial violence against Indigenous peoples was repackaged within a powerful conceptual framework that challenged the biological basis of race. I argue that the transnational celebration of Indigenous assimilation at play in Marie-Yvonne’s story relied on a set of epistemic, affective, and moral dispositions that were shared by human scientists, and which ultimately authorized the removal of children from their families and territories in the service of science and international struggles against racism. While the redemptive accounts of her story did important work by challenging biological determinism, they also concealed how the practices of mid-century human scientists ignored and at times enabled the forced removal of children from their families and the dispossession of Indigenous territory. In fact, as this chapter demonstrates, until the 1960s ethnographic studies of the Aché were based primarily on children captured under violent circumstances and attest to an established practice and economy of buying and trading Aché children as servants. Although researchers who studied captured Aché children positioned themselves as civilized men of science, they did not condemn the trafficking of Aché children that they benefited from and instead presented it as a fait accompli that they could only observe as modest witnesses. Thus, although Marie-Yvonne’s story indexes important epistemic shifts in the trajectory of race science, it also reveals how human scientists’ ethical horizons were beholden to colonial structures that persist from the Iberian conquest of the sixteenth century.

Civilization and the Science of Children

Rivet and Vellard’s redemptive framing of Marie-Yvonne’s life bears the imprint of major trends in the human sciences from the first half to the twentieth century, which amounted to a rejection of biological determinism and fixed racial hierarchies in favor of cultural and environmental approaches to human diversity. Beginning in the interwar period and intensifying after World War II (WWII), human scientists in North America and Europe moved away from conceptualizing human diversity through the prism of static typological races and instead adopted frameworks that emphasized how human differences are transmitted through cultural and social practices.Footnote ⁸ As part of this shift, which scholars have called the retreat of scientific racism, many experts turned to children and child-rearing in order to observe how values, attitudes, habits, and practices persist from one generation to another.Footnote ⁹ For instance, in the United States, adherents of the cultural and personality school such as the anthropologists Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Otto Klineberg, Edward Sapir, and Ashley Montagu rejected biological explanations of human behavior in favor of cultural and linguistic studies that examined how specific groups transmit culture from one generation to the next through child-rearing practices and through language acquisition during infancy.Footnote ¹⁰ Through ethnographic studies of Indigenous groups in the South Pacific and the United States, culture and personality researchers turned child-rearing and children themselves into prized research objects that promised insights on how environmental factors such as cultural patterns and socioeconomic opportunities mold the personalities and intellectual abilities of individual subjects.

Examples of this research in North America abound, and they had implications both for domestic and international policies and for applied social scientific research conducted elsewhere. In his landmark experimental study of “racial” differences in intelligence, the Canadian psychologist Otto Klineberg administered an array of intelligence tests to “Native American” and “Negro” children and concluded that their comparatively low performance was due to having been raised in cultures that prioritized accuracy over speed.Footnote ¹¹ With longer test-times, Klineberg’s analysis suggested, the observed differences between Black and Indigenous children and their white counterparts would disappear. After WWII, Klineberg gave expert testimony in the Brown vs. Board of Education trial that ended segregated schooling in the United States and played an important role in the development of UNESCO’s race campaigns, which challenged scientific racism. In the context of this ostensibly nonracial domain of knowledge in North America, conceptions of “culture” thus offered alternative ways to theorize human variation that prioritized the role of nurture in producing difference and lent themselves to liberal projects of reform.Footnote ¹² In applied social science projects, this emphasis on culture and nurture also often aligned itself with projects of assimilation that identified Indigenous and other non-European cultures as backward and used anthropological insights for the purposes of attempting to reengineer these cultures in conformity with Western modernity.Footnote ¹³ By framing Marie-Yvonne’s story as one that disproved racist hereditarian theories, Rivet’s preface to Vellard’s book thus echoed these interwar trends in the human sciences of North America.

To understand Rivet and Vellard’s descriptions of Marie-Yvonne, however, we must also examine the influence of intellectual trends from Europe and South America. In Southern Europe (especially France and Italy) and South America, eugenicists mostly rejected rigid Mendelian approaches to heredity in favor of a neo-Lamarckian approach to heredity that emphasized racial improvement through environmental and sanitary reform. This environmentalist approach was often tied to pro-natalist politics concerned with the nurture and care of life.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet unlike the North American context where this environmentalist framing emerged out of the social sciences and through a rejection of eugenics, in “Latin” countries this environmentalist approach was part and parcel of the eugenics movement and one that was adopted by a wide array of experts including physicians, public health officials, and human scientists. As scholars of Latin eugenics have argued, it was also a style of eugenics that meshed well with Catholic values concerning reproduction and, in some cases, with fascist politics.Footnote ¹⁵ In France, eugenics grew out of the medical discourse of puericulture, which was broadly concerned with a scientific approach to child-rearing. The term was coined in 1865 by a French physician named Alfred Caron who studied the health of newborns out of a concern with “improving the species” and taught courses on the education of young children. Though the term did not initially gain much traction, it was revived and popularized in the 1890s by Adolphe Pinard, the Chair of Clinical Obstetrics at the Paris Medical School. Pinard adopted the term “puericulture” to describe a program concerned with prenatal care for pregnant women.Footnote ¹⁶ The term gained widespread support in the pro-natalist context of fin-de-siècle France and was also quickly adopted in other Southern European countries and Latin America where legislators and medical professionals adopted French practices for infant well-being and maternal protection as benchmarks for their own societies. By the early 1900s, for instance, physicians from Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, and other countries established milk stations called “gotas de leche” that were based on French institutions and served as community-based clinics for infant and child health.Footnote ¹⁷

In the settler colonial states of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, government officials and experts also embraced environmentalist conceptions of culture and educability as part of an effort to assimilate Indigenous children through forced reeducation. Policies of Indigenous assimilation in settler colonial societies were often informed by discourses of racial improvement that bore a similar logic to the arguments put forward by Rivet and Vellard. For instance, as Fiona Paisley has argued, at the beginning of the twentieth century, settler colonial states sought to replace Christian missionaries’ concern with the spiritual salvation of Indigenous people with the “racial sciences of mind and body.”Footnote ¹⁸ In Australia and Canada, educators, politicians, and church officials pushed this ideology to an extreme and created a system that forcibly removed Indigenous and mixed-descent children from their families and placed them in boarding schools and foster families, where they were often subject to neglect and abuse.Footnote ¹⁹ In Australia, this practice of taking Indigenous children from their parents – what are now referred to as the “stolen generations” – garnered strong support from late nineteenth and early twentieth-century anthropologists, physicians, and physiologists who viewed Australian Aboriginals as heading toward extinction and advocated for a policy of “racial absorption” that often targeted “half-caste” children.

Two of the most prominent ideologues of this system were the physician Cecil Cook, who served as chief medical officer and “chief protector of Aborigines” in Australia’s Northern Territory, and the civil servant A. O. Neville, who also served as chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. Both men challenged policies of racial segregation and instead argued that the best hope for Australia’s dark-skinned Aboriginals was full cultural and biological “absorption” into Australia’s settler white community.Footnote ²⁰ Their stances typified international approaches to Indigenous assimilation and modernization and bore similarities to questions that researchers were asking in Paraguay. Cook envisioned a path to absorption through a program of scientific breeding that targeted “half-caste” girls who he viewed as having inherited the best qualities of both white and Aboriginal “stock.” Yet he also viewed aboriginal culture as exerting a negative influence on childhood development and advocated for the creation of a program offering domestic training for “half-caste” girls that would render them suitable housewives for white men in frontier regions. Neville similarly viewed Aboriginal families as incompetent and advocated for the creation of boarding institutions that would remove Aboriginal children from the supposed negative influence of their families and offer technical and industrial training.Footnote ²¹

In these settler colonial contexts, race experts thus framed the removal of Indigenous children from their families as a benevolent and even humanitarian civilizing mission that was necessary for the future prosperity of the nation. Such practices thus exemplify Robert Van Krieken’s thesis of the barbarism and violence that inheres in civilization discourse.Footnote ²²

Captured Children as Research Objects

Anthropological studies of the Aché exemplify the scholarly interest in children and acceptance of removal that featured so prominently in the human sciences of the first half of the twentieth century. While many Indigenous groups in Paraguay and especially the majority Guarani established economic and political relationships with Europeans following the Iberian conquest, the Aché refused to establish relations with both Europeans and neighboring Indigenous groups. The distance that they chose to maintain, stoked speculation about their supposedly barbaric practices and exotic appearance. And it also thwarted ethnographic accounts based on direct observation. Up until the 1960s, instead of direct ethnographic observation scholars relied on captured children as evidentiary sources.

Before the late nineteenth century, the only written account of the Aché came from an eighteenth-century source – a seven-page summary of their culture written by Pedro Lozano, a Jesuit missionary. Lozano based his account of Aché culture on a group of about thirty Aché who had been captured by small groups of Guarani who had been sent out by Jesuit priests hoping to settle the Aché in one of the Jesuit reductions.Footnote ²³ Jesuit reductions were one of the Iberian empire’s key instruments of colonization. By establishing settlements in Indigenous territories and enticing or capturing Indigenous populations to live with them in the missions, Jesuits sought to transform the Native inhabitants of the Americas into a productive and Christianized workforce. The reduction where Lozano observed the Aché was one populated primarily by Guarani, who represented the majoritarian Indigenous group in the region and who had historically waged a war of extermination against the Aché. In Lozano’s reduction, Jesuit missionaries sent out small parties of Guarani hunters to capture Aché prisoners and bring them back to the settlements where they could be brought up as neophytes.Footnote ²⁴ Lozano’s description of Aché culture was thus based on observations of children and teenagers who were captured and raised by Jesuit missionaries.

Given their hostile relations with Guarani groups and Iberian settlers and two major wars in Paraguay, the Aché remained forest-bound throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. They remained purposefully at a distance from the encroaching agricultural settlements and they were known to Mestizos and settlers through the campfires and other remains they left in their forest or through occasional raids of livestock and tools. In fact, in the period between Lozano’s study in the late eighteenth-century reduction up until Vellard’s visit, direct observations of the Aché were based primarily on captured children who were raised in Paraguayan estancias, or cattle ranches.

Kidnapping Aché Children for Science

The research conducted on an Aché girl named Damiana Kryygi in the last decade of the nineteenth century serves as an iconic example of how early researchers relied on captured children as sources. Damiana’s story, like that of many other Aché children, also attests to the existence of an informal market for Aché children that encompassed Paraguayan ranchers, neighboring Guarani groups, and European anthropologists. After being captured at the age of two by Paraguayan settlers who killed her parents to avenge the killing of a horse, Damiana became an object of fascination for European anthropologists. During an ethnographic mission in 1896 to study the Aché on behalf of the Museo de la Plata in Argentina, the French anthropologist Charles de la Hitte and his Dutch colleague Herman Ten Kate conducted anthropometric measurements of Damiana’s head and took photographs of her while she was in the care of her parent’s murderers and described her as sad and sickly.Footnote ²⁵ In 1898, Damiana was sent to live in San Vincente, an Argentinian town close to La Plata, where she was raised as a “maidservant” by the mother of Alejandro Korn, the director of the psychiatric hospital Melchor Romero in Buenos Aires. Korn’s mother was a German immigrant and in this period Damiana learned to speak Spanish and some German. By the time she was approximately fourteen or fifteen years old, Korn arranged for the director of the Museo de La Plata, the German anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, to observe Damiana on two separate occasions. During these visits, Lehmann-Nitsche took photographs of her naked body and conducted a series of anthropometric measurements. Lehmann-Nitsche observed that she had followed a path of “normal development” until she hit puberty at which point she developed a sexual libido so “alarming” that “all education and punishment on behalf of the family proved ineffective.”Footnote ²⁶

Not ones to tolerate such insubordination, the family resolved to send her to Melchor Romero – the psychiatric hospital directed by Korn – where she was looked after by the nurses. Damiana died from tuberculosis shortly after arriving at the hospital and her remains were quickly snapped up for further scientific studies. Lehmann-Nitsche sent Damiana’s head and brain as a gift to the German anatomist Hans Virchow, son of Rudolf Virchow, at the Charité hospital in Berlin. Virchow quickly incorporated Damiana’s head into the anatomical collection of the Charité and performed a series of dissections on it as part of a comparative study on facial muscle attachments. After publishing a series of papers based on these dissections, Virchow then handed over Damiana’s skull to the Charité collection in 1911, where it was kept for the next hundred years as part of its anthropological collection. Lehmann-Nitsche preserved the rest of Damiana’s body as a skeleton at the Museo de La Plata, where it was stored away in a cabinet that was only recently rediscovered and identified in 2010. This prompted the museum to return the remains to the Aché who gave her a traditional burial in their ancestral homelands. In 2012, the Charité restituted Damiana’s skull, which Aché leaders buried alongside Damiana’s remains that had been buried in 2010.Footnote ²⁷

Vellard’s Mission: French Ethnology and the Capture of Marie-Yvonne during the Chaco War

Damiana’s mistreatment in the name of science was unfortunately not an isolated incident. In fact, abducted children like Damiana feature prominently in the early ethnographic literature on the Aché. In this early literature from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period, anthropologists viewed children like Damiana through the frame of race science and regarded their prospects for improvement as limited by an innate biological inferiority or “savagery.”

By the early 1930s, however, when Marie-Yvonne’s story begins to appear in the literature, anthropologists had begun to question the biological determinism at play in race science and instead began to adopt redemptive stories that cast Aché children as objects of improvement. This approach to Aché children exemplified a new style of anthropology that emerged in France during the interwar period and whose adherents proclaimed to have broken with the discipline’s racist past. One of the most important figureheads and institution builders within this new anthropology was the socialist Paul Rivet. A military physician by training, Rivet decided to devote himself to the study of anthropology after participating in a geodesic mission to Ecuador (1901–1906), which was a joint venture between French and Ecuadorean militaries and gave Rivet the opportunity to conduct ethnographic and anthropometric work on Indigenous groups in the Andes and Amazon. Dissatisfied by the centrality of physical anthropology and race science in French anthropology from this period, Rivet devoted himself to transforming and modernizing the discipline upon his return to France. Instead of the narrow approach of anthropometry that predominated in turn-of-the-century French anthropology, Rivet worked toward professionalizing the discipline by bringing it in line with the four-field approach that had been institutionalized in the United States and other North Atlantic nations and by raising the profile of ethnographic fieldwork. In collaboration with Marcel Mauss and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and with the financial and administrative support of the French colonial administration, Rivet created the Institut d’Ethnologie at the University of Paris in 1925. In the following years, Rivet, Mauss, and Lévy-Bruhl trained a new generation of anthropologists, including Alfred Métraux who was one of the Institut’s first and most distinguished students, and taught them to combine the study of the “social facts” of non-Western cultures with museum work and physical anthropology.

During the interwar period, Rivet further established himself as a powerful figurehead of French anthropology by transforming the imperial nation’s major ethnographic museum. In 1928, he was appointed Chair of the Trocadéro ethnographic museum and completely transformed it over the next decade and eventually converted it into the Musée de l’Homme, which opened its doors in 1938. As Alice Conklin has argued, Rivet and Mauss’s ambition with the Musée de l’Homme was to create an institution with state-of-the-art research facilities that would gather all the branches of French anthropology under a single roof.Footnote ²⁸ It was also meant to serve as an important civic institution that would teach the French public about the equality of all peoples and cultures and thus reflect Rivet and Mauss’s socialist and antiracist commitments. Yet, like their previous endeavors, the Musée relied heavily on the financial and institutional backing of the French imperial nation-state and many of its collections came from colonial ethnographic missions like the Dakar to Djibouti mission, where anthropologists collected artifacts under dubious ethical circumstances.Footnote ²⁹

It was in the context of this ambitious project to reform French anthropology and transform its institutions that Rivet developed the idea for an ethnographic mission to Paraguay. An “Americanist” – the term used then to refer to those who studied the Americas – Rivet was a prominent member of the Société des Américanistes de Paris and a regular participant of the yearly meeting of the International Congress of Americanists.Footnote ³⁰ Thanks to the extensive South American contacts and correspondents he cultivated through these Americanist networks, Rivet obtained financial and political support from Argentinian, Brazilian, and Paraguayan authorities to conduct the ethnographic mission in Paraguay. Rivet’s main goals for the mission were to conduct ethnographic and natural historical studies of Paraguay, especially the Gran Chaco region, and to cultivate closer ties between the scientific communities of Paraguay and France.Footnote ³¹

At this point, thanks in part to the efforts of Alfred Métraux, the lowland plains of the Gran Chaco (which spanned parts of Paraguay, Bolivia, and Argentina) and its Indigenous peoples were emerging as promising research objects for European Americanists. With Rivet’s help, Alfred Métraux became the founding director of the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Tucumán in northern Argentina in 1928. As director of this institute, Métraux sought to emulate Rivet’s institution-building efforts in France by turning the Tucumán Institute into the leading center for ethnographic study in South America. To this end, Métraux led numerous expeditions to the Gran Chaco region, where he collected artifacts for an ethnographic museum in Tucumán. Describing the newly created institute at Tucumán and Métraux’s efforts, Rivet wrote that “colonial questions” were becoming more and more pressing every day and would only be solved if approached with “a scientific spirit.” According to Rivet, it was due to these colonial circumstances that ethnology experienced a dramatic development in France. With the creation of the Institute of Ethnology at Tucumán, he also prophesied that Argentina was now poised to find solutions to its “indigenous problems.”Footnote ³²

In contrast to Argentina, Paraguay did not have well-developed ethnological institutions at this time, which likely spurred Rivet’s interest in sending a mission there. To lead the Paraguay expedition, Rivet chose Jehan Albert Vellard – a physician by training who had spent most of the 1920s in Brazil and had become known to anthropologists in France through his studies of spider poison, curare, and other Indigenous medicines in South America.Footnote ³³ Vellard traveled to Paraguay in 1931 and spent two years there. His trip to Paraguay coincided with the Chaco War (1932–1935) – a conflict over the northern part of the region thought to be rich in oil that was fought between the landlocked countries of Bolivia and Paraguay. Many observers consider this war to be the bloodiest armed conflict in Latin America during the twentieth century. During his two years in Paraguay, Vellard made several ethnographic trips to the Gran Chaco, which followed Rivet’s goals of gathering ethnographic and natural historical data and establishing links between French and Paraguayan scholars.Footnote ³⁴ More narrowly, Vellard’s missions had the purpose of conducting ethnographic studies on the “least known tribes” of Paraguay and gathering objects for the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum and for the Musée de l’Homme.Footnote ³⁵ Vellard’s missions thus advanced Rivet’s agenda of updating France’s ethnological institutions and were similar to missions that Rivet helped to organize in other colonies and regions where France exerted political influence. These missions include the Dakar to Djibouti mission in Africa and the Easter Island (Rapa Nui) mission in the South Pacific, which also enjoyed the patronage and support of Paul Rivet.Footnote ³⁶

During his fieldwork in Paraguay, due to the Chaco War, Vellard required guidance and help from Paraguay’s president, the Minister of War, and various military officials and armed guides, who advised him on his itineraries and shepherded him through regions where armed conflict was erupting.Footnote ³⁷ For his first trip to the Gran Chaco region, Vellard collaborated with the Russian general Juan Belaieff. Belaieff had been recruited by the Paraguayan minister of war and navy to conduct a reconnaissance mission and ethnographic census of the Chaco, which gave Paraguay a tactical advantage in its war with Bolivia. Belaieff had previously trained in military science and ethnography and had conducted several ethnographic studies in the Caucasus of Russia.Footnote ³⁸ When Vellard joined him in the Chaco region in 1931, Belaieff had already established relations with Indigenous groups in the region and when war broke out he advised Paraguayan soldiers to rely on Indigenous people from the regions as guides. With Belaieff’s input, Vellard drew up a plan to study the least known Indigenous groups from the region. With the support of the military barracks built in the region and a Mestizo sergeant who served as his guide, he spent three and half months collecting as much anthropometric and linguistic data, and material artifacts, as he could.Footnote ³⁹

Vellard did not last long in the Gran Chaco. His report of the mission described the region as desolate and neglected and during the month or so that he stayed he encountered regions where the fighting between the Paraguayan and Brazilian militaries impeded fieldwork. His only notable ethnographic achievement during this time was a brief encounter with the Maká tribe whom he described as very hospitable. According to Vellard, the Maká were also eager to exchange goods with his crew and would demand “big gifts” in exchange for the smallest object “without having the slightest notion of the value of things.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite these differences, Vellard eagerly reported that he quickly gained the Maká’s trust and was thus able to gather “a nice collection for the Trocadero.”Footnote ⁴¹ Yet after traveling to the town of Nanawa at an ill-fated time when fighting between the Paraguayan and Bolivian armies had killed hundreds of civilians in the region, Vellard grew increasingly disillusioned with his Gran Chaco fieldwork. He was eventually arrested by the Paraguayan military for reasons unknown to him and, after having his firearms taken away, escorted back to Asunción where he plotted a second expedition to a less turbulent region.Footnote ⁴²

After his unrewarding fieldwork in the Gran Chaco, Vellard decided to travel to the region inhabited by the “Guayaki Indians” (the name formerly given to the Aché by anthropologists) whom Rivet had flagged as a group that was “little known” and “highly interesting” since they were difficult to access.Footnote ⁴³ For this trip, Vellard secured the help of the wealthy Balanza family who owned a large estancia (ranch) situated at the entrance of the forest where the Aché roamed. The Balanza family consisted of the sons of a French botanist named Benjamin Balanza, who had made several collecting trips to Paraguay for the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in the late nineteenth century and bought property. His sons turned the terrain into an industrial farm.Footnote ⁴⁴ To Vellard’s good fortune, the Balanza brothers proved to be very generous hosts who supported his fieldwork in numerous ways. According to Vellard, they lent him horses to travel into the forest, helped him to recruit men who could serve as his guides, and shared all manner of useful information on the region. Thanks to their help, Vellard was able to settle in a small ranch even closer to Aché territory, which was owned by one of the Balanza brother’s employees, and the brothers sent weekly provisions for Vellard and his guides.Footnote ⁴⁵ The success of Vellard’s fieldwork in Paraguay was thus dependent on the relations and exchanges he established with people who possessed knowledge of the region as well as material resources and social connections.

Though it proved more rewarding than his Gran Chaco fieldwork, Vellard’s descriptions of his Aché research reveal a context similarly marked by violence. Through Rivet described Vellard’s account of his Aché research as “beautiful,” Vellard’s narrative was often framed as a difficult “hunt” through the forest peppered with fleeting moments of violent contact.Footnote ⁴⁶ Given his lack of experience with the territory, Vellard relied on a team of Paraguayan laborers from nearby ranches and Indigenous guides from a nearby mBwiha village that he described as “semi-civilized.” At the time of Vellard’s fieldwork, relations between the Aché, Paraguayan ranchers, and the mBwiha had grown tense due to a recent bout of Aché raids on neighboring ranches where they killed several cattle, horses, and sheep. Both the Paraguayan laborers and the mBwiha guides viewed the Aché with a combination of fear and hostility. As they pursued the Aché through the forest, Vellard and his crew thus resolved to always keep firearms and machetes on hand. Yet Vellard’s crew found it incredibly difficult to observe the Aché in any meaningful way. The Aché were constantly foraging and hunting for food and incredibly skilled at concealing their tracks. Vellard and his crew thus found it nearly impossible to observe them directly or establish direct contact. Much of their time was spent searching aimlessly for signs of their presence while attempting to maintain their energy and morale.

After several failed attempts to establish “friendly relations,” Vellard and his crew gave up on the idea of direct contact and instead resolved to observe the Aché camps from a safe distance and to raid them at opportune times. Yet the raids of the Aché camps did not always go as planned and even descended into violent skirmishes on two occasions. Although they failed to establish amicable relations with the Aché, Vellard and his crew used these violent encounters to collect material artifacts that were sent back to the Trocadero Museum in Paris and offered a small window into the Aché’s way of life. And it was during these two violent encounters that Vellard and his crew adopted two Aché children – Marie-Yvonne as well as a young Aché boy who they named Luis.

Vellard described the team’s first violent encounter, which led to his adoption of Marie-Yvonne, as a significant breakthrough in their journey. On this occasion, Vellard’s team found “fresh evidence” pointing to the presence of an Aché group nearby. By following this trail of evidence, Vellard’s team approached the Aché without being detected and found a hiding spot that they surmised was about 100 meters away from the Aché camp based on what they could hear in the distance. In the light of the next day, Vellard’s team drew closer to the Aché camp and hid in the forest, which prompted their mBwiha guides to flee fearing a violent response from the Aché. Vellard’s team was able to observe the Aché from a distance over the course of a day. When they attempted to get even closer the next day, they were spotted by Aché hunters who quickly fired a sea of arrows in their direction. Before “orders could be given,” Vellard’s men began to fire their guns in response to the Aché, thereby injuring one of their men and prompting the entire group to flee. Once the group had fled, Vellard and his crew quickly descended upon their camp and collected as many objects as they could. At this point, the Paraguayan laborers accompanying Vellard became increasingly difficult to control and spoke of “massacring the lot of them.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Eager to avoid “unnecessary violence,” Vellard resolved to bring his team back to their main camp. Over the course of their return journey during the next two days, they were closely followed by Aché hunters who occasionally fired arrows at them, which Vellard’s men returned with gunfire. When they finally arrived at the small house that they were using as their base, Vellard’s men were joined once again by the three mBwiha guides who had previously fled. Vellard’s three “fugitive guides” brought back their own spoils from a raid of another Aché camp, namely, a pot of honey, a coati, and a baby girl whose mouth they had stuffed with dead leaves after “tying her feet and hands together.”Footnote ⁴⁸ After some prodding from Vellard, the mBwiha confessed that the inhabitants of the camp they raided consisted of two women and the baby, and that they intended to rape the two women and instead captured the girl when the women fled, with the intention of selling her.Footnote ⁴⁹

Vellard and his crew captured Luis, an Aché boy, during similarly violent circumstances on what would be their last encounter with the nomadic group. Vellard’s crew encountered Luis after a botched raid on an Aché camp that led the camp’s inhabitants to flee after Vellard’s men resorted to gunfire and injured one of the Aché men. Luis was not able to flee with the rest of the camp and instead decided to follow Vellard and his men on their return journey to their ranch. According to Vellard, Luis did not demonstrate any desire to find his relatives, and he left him at the Balanza ranch under the care of the family. However, Vellard concluded that Luis was not as intellectually gifted as Marie-Yvonne. Although Luis helped him to produce a vocabulary of Aché words, Vellard noted that the boy’s attention would tire very quickly. Vellard similarly noted that although the boy had a highly developed “visual memory,” he did not seem to have great skill in retaining “strange words and sounds” and was slow to learn Spanish and French.

Having decided to keep Marie-Yvonne and leave her in the care of his mother, Vellard also had to decide what to do with Luis. While the decision to keep Marie-Yvonne seemed easy, Vellard struggled to figure out what to do with Luis. Though he left him in the care of the Balanza brothers, he also offered Luis to Rivet and asked for his advice as to what to do with him. Yet when he wrote to Rivet, it was not the boy’s well-being that seemed to be Vellard’s main concern but rather how he might best be incorporated into an ethnological research program. Indeed, Vellard reported to Rivet that he planned to study the boy by taking photographs and x-rays of him and, if possible, by measuring and weighing him. Yet he also asked Rivet if he had any recommendations for specific studies to conduct on the boy and wrote “or do you want him? Is there any interest in keeping him with me for studying his development?”Footnote ⁵⁰

Vellard normalized the capture of Marie-Yvonne and her adoption by explaining that many ranchers from the region had purchased Aché children in similar fashion and that they treated them “very well.” Indeed, Vellard explained that Aché children could be bought for 200–300 Paraguayan pesos. In his book on the Aché and in one of the scientific articles he published, Vellard devoted an entire section to descriptions of Aché children who were raised on ranches.Footnote ⁵¹ Here Vellard noted that in addition to the well-documented case of Damiana, at least four other captured children had been observed by anthropologists; he had also learned of at least five other children in nearby regions who lived with Paraguayan settlers. Although most of these children adjusted well to their new surroundings and often learned multiple languages, Vellard noted that in some cases they developed “unstable personalities” later in life and were prone to disappearing for days to “vagabond in the forest.”Footnote ⁵² On the basis of these observations, Vellard felt inclined to offer some general reflections on the “character” of Aché children raised in “more or less civilized environments.”Footnote ⁵³ In general, Vellard concluded, Aché children raised in these circumstances tend to be “soft, docile, affectionate, very fearful, generally intelligent (several speak two languages and frequent school).” Yet after puberty, in some instances, they become “volatile, restless, and inclined to take flight.”Footnote ⁵⁴

From his earliest publications on the Aché, Vellard expressed a keen interest in studying Marie-Yvonne and Luis’s physical and intellectual development and how they adjusted to their new environments. And like many human scientists from the interwar period, Vellard framed the observations and measurements he made on captured Aché as ones that offered insights on the nomadic group’s distinctive racial type and immunological profile. In his first article on the Aché, Vellard explained that he was closely following Marie-Yvonne’s development now that she was under his mother’s care and that he was confident that this would yield some “valuable observations.” He also mentioned that the Balanza brothers would keep him up to date on Luis’s development and on his adaptation to “civilized life.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In another article, where he offered detailed notes on the physical type, character, and state of health of the captured Aché children, Vellard also summarized his observations and measurements of another Aché girl living on a ranch whom he called Fortunata. Based on the direct observations and measurements he made of Marie-Yvonne, Luis, and Fortunata as well as the facts he could glean from the accounts of previous researchers who had studied Aché children like Damiana, Vellard affirmed the prevailing orthodox view that the Aché represented a highly homogenous racial type. “Coloration of the skin, hair, and irises,” were the only traits that Vellard discerned to be “highly variable.”Footnote ⁵⁶ After observing that Marie-Yvonne and Luis, like many other captured Aché children, quickly succumbed to various respiratory illnesses after encountering non-Aché, Vellard also confirmed the views of previous writers that the Aché were highly sensitive to “contact with civilized people.” Yet in contrast to previous writers who speculated that such sudden onset in illness stemmed from dietary changes, Vellard insisted that it stemmed from a much “deeper cause,” namely, “… the absolute lack of immunity against many germs, in particular the pneumococcus, against which the civilized have a great resistance.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Decades later, Vellard returned to the observations he made on captured Aché children in an article on the “Biological Causes of the Disappearance of American Indians.” In this article, Vellard argued that the demographic collapse of Indigenous populations in the Americas occurred primarily due to biological forces and that the use of systematic violence and cruelty by Iberian colonizers played a minimal role. According to Vellard, the disappearance of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas occurred due to a lack of immunity to European diseases that was itself a by-product of geographic and biological isolation. One of the key pieces of evidence that Vellard used in these accounts were the stories of the captured Aché children he had encountered and written about. As he looked back to his experience with Marie-Yvonne and Luis, Vellard framed the diverging trajectory of these two children as a sort of natural experiment. According to Vellard, Marie-Yvonne’s fortune stood in stark contrast to those of other captured Aché children. Although Marie-Yvonne contracted pneumonia shortly after her capture, she was also vaccinated against tuberculosis and ever since enjoyed a normal and illness-free development even after traveling to major city centers. Marie-Yvonne’s story thus demonstrated that if Indigenous children are “artificially” placed in civilized conditions and vaccinated for diseases then their development will be equivalent to those of civilized children. By contrast, Vellard described Luis’s fate as a tragic one. Like Marie-Yvonne, Luis also contracted pneumonia a few days into his “life with civilized people” yet he did not receive a vaccine against tuberculosis. As a result, Luis suffered from poor health for the rest of his life and eventually ended up succumbing to tuberculosis.Footnote ⁵⁸ For Vellard, the stories of Marie-Yvonne and other Aché children thus served as object lessons for how vaccination could reduce the biological distance between Indigenous and European populations who had acquired immunity through hereditary mechanisms, in other words the “biological shock of European conquest.” Through these historical narratives, Vellard ultimately identified biological forces as the main causes of demographic collapse and thus minimized and denied the historical responsibility of European colonizers, an early version of what David Jones has aptly called “immunological determinism.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Marie-Yvonne’s Life as a “Lesson for Humanity”

For Vellard, Marie-Yvonne’s story thus served as an object lesson for the immunological adaptation of Indigenous groups to modern civilization. By contrast, for Vellard’s colleagues like Rivet and Métraux, who were plugged into internationalist antiracist networks to a much greater degree, and for American journalists, Marie-Yvonne’s story was framed as a striking example of the benefits of cultural assimilation. While Vellard’s narrative displaced European agency through immunological determinism, these contrasting accounts of Marie-Yvonne’s story amplified European agency by casting European scientific experts and educators in the role of civilizers.

In the hands of Rivet and later in a UNESCO article, Marie-Yvonne’s story stood in stark contrast to Damiana’s. Unlike Damiana who was described as reverting to a state of “savagery” once puberty hit, Marie-Yvonne’s story was one of permanent transformation. In the case of the UNESCO article, Marie-Yvonne’s story was further couched in a language that suggested the influence of the individualized and psychologically oriented research program of the behavioral sciences. Within this ostensibly nonracial regime of truth Marie-Yvonne’s story became a morality tale about how to escape the trappings of a culture doomed to poverty and stagnation. This redemptive framing of Marie-Yvonne’s story can be most clearly observed in an article published in the UNESCO Courier in 1950, which was titled “An Indian Girl with a Lesson for Humanity.” The article was penned by Alfred Métraux – one of Paul Rivet’s most accomplished students – who directed UNESCO’s campaign against scientific racism during the 1950s. In his article, Métraux argued that had she not been adopted at the age of two, Marie-Yvonne would have been condemned to a “primitive and rudimentary culture” that wanders “at large in the forest” hunting animals and gathering fruits and whose way of life is “very little different from that of the first bands of men who colonized the empty spaces of South America thousands of years ago.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet by virtue of being “brought up exactly as a white girl,” Marie-Yvonne became “an attractive, intelligent girl of twenty and a typical product of the cultural environment in which she has lived for 18 years.” For Métraux, Marie-Yvonne’s story was precisely the kind of evidence that could be used to convince the “layperson” of the arguments put forward in the 1950 Statement on Race. Above all, Métraux argued, Marie-Yvonne’s story proved one of its central arguments, namely, that “… given similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same.”Footnote ⁶¹ Despite the violent circumstances described in Vellard’s account, journalists, educators, and Métraux thus adapted the story of Marie-Yvonne’s capture into a feel-good tale about bridging the temporal chasm between modern and primitive life.

This redemptive framing also persisted in other popular accounts of Marie-Yvonne’s life. For instance, in 1960, Reader’s Digest published a four-page story penned by the California journalist Reese Wolfe, which described Marie-Yvonne Vellard’s life as “the remarkable story of a child who, born of Stone Age people, bridged a gap of 5,000 years to become a twentieth-century scholar.”Footnote ⁶² Like Métraux in the UNESCO Courier, Wolfe’s story relied on a framing that equated social, spatial, and temporal distance – an imperial trope that postcolonial theorist Anne Mclintock refers to as the production of “anachronistic space.” Yet in a postwar context in which a booming US economy gave rise to the liberal ideal that everyone could prosper regardless of their race, Wolfe framed children as potent symbols of upward social mobility who had the ability to escape a damaging culture. For instance, Wolfe’s story noted that “ethnologists” like Vellard knew that an “infant from a primitive environment, brought up as a modern child, readily adapts to civilization.”Footnote ⁶³ As such, Vellard’s encounter with Marie-Yvonne offered an unprecedented chance to “witness this remarkable transformation” and Wolfe mused that when Vellard first saw her she was a rare “baby born into a tribe still living in the Stone Age!” Like Métraux, Wolfe also obfuscated the violent circumstances surrounding this encounter. Indeed, Wolfe’s story did not mention Vellard’s guides’ hostility toward the Aché and instead implied that Marie-Yvonne had been rescued from tragic circumstances. “Her emaciated body, the tell-tale bloat of her belly, the long red weals on her coffee-brown skin, bore eloquent testimony to hunger and abuse,” lamented Wolfe. By appealing to temporal tropes such as being born into the Stone Age and highlighting signs of ill-health, Wolfe, like Métraux, implied that Marie-Yvonne was destined to suffer if she were to remain with her birth family.

Wolfe’s article also offered a much fuller portrait of Marie-Yvonne’s intelligence and astonishing transformation into a “twentieth-century scholar.” During her first few days in Asunción where she was looked after by Vellard’s mother Amèlie Vellard, Marie-Yvonne was silent and fearful and “clung fiercely” to all of her possessions even while asleep. She also resisted Vellard and his mother’s attempts to teach her French. Yet after weeks of effort, her adoptive grandmother noticed her repeating the same word in a low voice and then later burst into her room to “triumphantly” declare “Grandmère!” multiple times. From this point on, Marie-Yvonne quickly acquired more and more words and soon became fluent. She became a fixture in the Vellard family and stayed with them as they relocated first to Brazil, where she became fluent in Portuguese, and then Peru, where she learned Spanish. With her grandmother’s support she learned to read and write at an early age and “adapted herself to numerous schools, never failing to receive high marks.”

According to Wolfe, it was at the age of fourteen, when Marie-Yvonne accompanied Jehan Vellard on a field trip to study an Aymara community on the shores of Lake Titicaca that her transformation into a scientist began in earnest. During the first day of Vellard’s mission, the Aymara community shunned the team and did little to make them feel welcome. “They stood in the doorways of their hovels in hard-eyed silence and watched their intruders,” wrote Wolfe. Deflated by the poor reception, Jehan decided that they were best off camping for the night outside the village. Marie-Yvonne, on the other hand, “sensed the Indian’s hidden pride and fears” and became determined not to be refused by them. She thus approached a group of “sullen-faced Aymaras” and told them in a mixture of Spanish and the few words of their language she had learned that “she came from an Indian tribe in the far-off jungles to the south” and that she had been adopted and raised by the “white man” who had come to study them.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to Wolfe, after Marie-Yvonne’s impassioned plea the “sullen” Aymaras “stirred uncertainly” until one of the women finally beckoned them to come in. Having established a rapport, Jehan and Marie-Yvonne then spent the summer living among “their new friends” and learning about “their daily lives, their fiestas, [and] their sacred ceremonies.”Footnote ⁶⁵ After this first taste of fieldwork, explained Wolfe, Marie-Yvonne became certain that ethnology was her calling. “She began to learn the painstaking art of scientific observation and note taking,” wrote Wolfe. And she also quickly became adept at learning to communicate with “the tribes she studied.” By the age of twenty-one, after four years of “distinguished work” at the Instituto Riva Agüero, a Peruvian research institution, Marie-Yvonne obtained a degree in ethnology. With her training complete, she continued traveling with her adoptive father on ethnographic trips that purportedly took her as “far afield” as Tierra del Fuego and “to Eskimo Villages near the Arctic circle.”Footnote ⁶⁶ And in the spring of 1959 Marie-Yvonne began her own series of independent studies, which took her to a remote village in the Peruvian Amazon where she told the Indigenous inhabitants that “their special ways of weaving, cooking and pottery-making would soon be lost if no one made a record of them.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Territorial Confinement and the Golden Age of Aché Research

Almost a decade after Métraux published his story in the UNESCO Courier, a Paraguayan rancher named Manuel de Jesus Pereira succeeded in “pacifying” two Aché groups, who came to live on his ranch. Pereira captured the first group in 1959 and the second group in 1962, doing so with the help of neighboring settlers known for “hunting” the Aché. Pereira also persuaded the Aché who were living with him to track down and capture members from other forest-dwelling Aché groups and bring them back to his ranch where they were “pampered and then released to bring in the others of their group.”Footnote ⁶⁸ By 1963, Pereira had convinced the Aché from two major groups to live under his protection and was given a government post and salary to administer this newly created “reservation.”

After these groups of Aché settled on Pereira’s ranch, more than half of their population died from disease under Pereira’s watch. Yet despite these violent circumstances, anthropological research on the Aché blossomed thanks to urgent appeals made by Alfred Métraux. From this moment forward, anthropologists and human biologists began to visit the Aché more regularly and for much longer periods. They no longer had to rely on captured children as sources of evidence. Despite this change in circumstances, subsequent experts continued to center children and the study of childhood in their research regimes. This is particularly evident in Carleton Gajdusek’s genetic studies, which he conducted while serving as director of the “Study for Child Growth and Development and Disease Patterns in Primitive Cultures” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Maryland.Footnote ⁶⁹

Perhaps not surprisingly, scientific research on the Aché spiked in the subsequent years. Upon the recommendation of Alfred Métraux, anthropologists Pierre Clastres, Helene Clastres, and Lucien Sebag – three of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most promising students – traveled to Pereira’s reservation to conduct detailed ethnographies of the Aché. For Pierre Clastres, although he lamented that they were destined to disappear, the Aché became exemplars of societies “against the state” and the kernel for a new research program in “political anthropology” that would help transform French political thought after 1968.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the period that the Clastres’s and Sebag did their fieldwork on the Aché reservation, Métraux also met the human biologist and Kuru researcher Carleton Gajdusek and encouraged him to visit the Aché.Footnote ⁷¹ With the help of the Clastres’s and Sebag, Gajdusek collected numerous blood samples of Aché children and adults, which he later published as part of a larger study comparing the genetic markers of Indigenous groups throughout Paraguay.Footnote ⁷²

Yet as more researchers began to visit the Aché and spend longer stretches of time with them they also grew less passive in the face of violence. During the 1970s, the plight of the Aché began to attract international scrutiny when several anthropologists and legal scholars accused the Paraguayan government of promoting an intentional government policy of genocide against the Aché.Footnote ⁷³ Although activists warned of their imminent demise, the Aché endured and began attracting a new set of US-based biological anthropologists in the 1980s, who were trained in human ecology and interested in understanding the fertility and mortality patterns of “hunter-gatherer” and other “unacculturated, technologically primitive” populations in an effort to understand the degree to which their demographic curves differ from those of “modern populations.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Since the early 2000s leading Aché specialists and human ecologists, Ana Magdalena Hurtado and Kim Hill, have played a prominent role in combating what they view as “antiscientific” attacks on anthropology (such as the controversies sparked by the publication of journalist Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado) by articulating more robust ethical guidelines for anthropological fieldwork on Indigenous communities. Yet their interventions have often been guided by the colonial narrative of Indigenous peoples as “vanishing” populations in need of salvage. A key component of their ethical strategy has been to question the self-determination framework adopted by many nations toward Indigenous peoples and to instead emphasize the need for greater “epidemiological surveillance” of Indigenous groups and “controlled contact” with “isolated” or “uncontacted groups.” In advancing these proposals, Hill and Hurtado often cite the case of the Northern Aché as a model of “well-designed” and controlled contact led by missionaries, anthropologists, and physicians who were able to provide medicine and care to Aché members who became ill.

Conclusion

In August of 2008, at the height of the pink tide (leftist electoral victories) that swept through Latin America, a forty-seven-year-old Aché woman named Margarita Mbywangi was appointed Minister of Indian Affairs by President Fernando Lugo. After her ministerial appointment, Mbywangi attracted, much like Marie-Yvonne, considerable international attention and her story was retold in a wide range of news outlets including the Guardian, the Financial Times, El Pais Uruguay, and Indian Country Today. She had also been abducted in childhood; unlike Marie-Yvonne, however, Mbywangi’s circumstances gave her much greater control over her own narrative. Though there were certainly outlets that describe Margarita’s life as a straightforward redemption story, she also gave extended interviews where she told her story with greater complexity. For instance, Margarita gave an interview published in the Financial Times magazine where her narrative struck a delicate balance between describing the damage she suffered at the hands of Paraguayan settlers and the desires that prompted her to eventually become a leader within her community and a national politician.

In her biographical interview with the Financial Times, parts of Mbywangi’s story share some troubling similarities to the stories of captured children that populate the Aché ethnographic archive. At the age of five, she was captured by Paraguayan ranchers who sold her for 5,000 guaraníes to a family of ranchers with ten children, who adopted Margarita as their servant. With help from one of her adopted “sisters” who worked as a teacher, Margarita enrolled in school and attended until the fifth grade yet was unable to continue because she had no birth certificate. At the age of sixteen, Margarita escaped from her adopted family and began working as a domestic servant. In contrast to the stories of other Aché children, Margarita’s account offers a revealing portrait of her attitude toward her adopted family, which is something we can only infer in Marie-Yvonne’s story. In her narrative, Margarita strikingly describes her relationship to her adopted family in strictly transactional terms. “I called the lady who bought me ‘Mum’,” she explains in her interview “but I cleaned the house and looked after the grandchildren.” Throughout her interview she refers to her adopted siblings in quotes – “I called them my ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’” – and she also points out that, unlike her, “none of them worked, they studied.” Her narrative also describes a stark contrast in the affection she received compared to her adopted siblings. “I wore their hand-me-downs but I never had any presents and no one ever showed me love,” she explained. “I was a servant.”Footnote ⁷⁵ From Margarita’s perspective, a story that non-Indigenous actors like Vellard and Métraux might have framed through the benevolent terms of adoption and kin-making is revealed instead to be a harsh economic project of forced removal and servitude.

Yet Mbywangi’s account also departs from the stories of captured Aché children like Damiana and Marie-Yvonne insofar as it describes her escape from Paraguayan society. After fleeing her adopted family at the age of sixteen she found a job at a bar where she was eventually recognized by one of her “brothers” who then attempted to have her arrested. After this incident, Margarita returned to her adopted family but then escaped for good and spent the next two years tracking down her birth village with the help of a priest. She was then able to return to her village at the age of twenty. When she returned, one of her “real brothers” recognized her, but she was no longer able to speak Aché. She struggled to adapt to sleeping around a fire without blankets and questioned why she had come back. She “became an alcoholic.” Yet she eventually re-learned her language and completed a nursing course. By the time she gave her interview she had proudly become the cacique (chief) of her community, Kuetuvy. Leading up to the 2008 elections, leaders of the Tekojoja movement that backed the leftist President Fernando Lugo asked her to run for the senate and although she did not win, Lugo asked her to become Minister of Indigenous Affairs. Yet she did not thrive in this position. “I consider myself a leader but I think politics is dirty,” she explained “and it was hard being in an office all day.” After a few months in office, she left her post yet continued working with the Tekojoja movement as well as with an association of Aché communities. Although she found it difficult to balance her political career with family life – she is the mother of three kids – she also believed that her service would pay future dividends for her community. “But this work gives me strength to give to others what I never had: love and a family.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Mbywangi’s trajectory thus marks an important departure from the stories of captured children that populate the Aché ethnographic archive. Whereas her political and personal desires feature prominently in her story, the prevailing assumption of most early ethnographic experts was that the Aché would be irrevocably damaged, or even destroyed, through contact with “Western” civilization. As this chapter has shown, the fact that Aché children were routinely captured and sold as domestic servants was one that ethnographers from the first half of the twentieth century described as matter of fact but did little to oppose. Such passivity in the face of violence, this chapter argued, factored prominently into the ways that ethnographic experts constructed their moral and professional duties. As modest witnesses, they framed their moral duty as one to observe, preserve, and collect the traces of what they presumed to be a vanishing people and thereby implied that there was little they could do to stop the Aché from disappearing let alone thriving. Such fatalistic narratives persisted well into the 1960s and can be observed in the work of Pierre Clastres, who described how the Aché population had collapsed after his stay and was “eaten away by illness and tuberculosis, killed by a lack of proper care, by lack of everything.” For Clastres, the dwindling of the Aché’s population demonstrated that the “whole enterprise that began in the fifteenth century is now coming to an end” and that “an entire continent will soon be rid of its first inhabitants.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The example of Clastres, who was an anarchist, as well as his French predecessors such as Rivet and Métraux who were prominent antifascists and antiracists, demonstrates that such fatalistic damage narratives coexisted with progressive and internationalist politics. Mbywangi’s personal narrative thus accentuates and renders visible the colonial ideologies that persisted within well-intentioned scientific discourses well through the latter half of the twentieth century.