The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

Gadamer has made a tremendous contribution to twentieth century thought, for he has proposed a new and different model of understanding and understanding in the human sciences that carries us beyond the dilemma of ethnocentrism and relativism. This model is not that of a “science” that grasps an object but rather one of speech-partners who come to an understanding together. Three important features of understanding are (1) it is bilateral in character, (2) it is party dependent, and (3) it involves revising goals. It follows that there is an important difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Important to Gadamer’s model of the human sciences is the “fusion of horizons.” This chapter discusses the proximity of Davidson and Gadamer and their differences.