Americanism and the Ranking of Civilizations

After 1875, international networks of natural and social scientists coalesced and intensified around a new articulation of “Americanism,” understood as the continent-wide study of racial and cultural diversity of American peoples. The birth of Americanism was as much a moment of idea formation as it was one of institution building. Anthropologists developed crucial theories of human behavior, morality, and worth in this period, influencing debates on social and military policy in and between American nations. This paper will explore one of the foundational concepts incorporated by this transnational group of scientists as they addressed native American and mixed-culture populations in the Americas: evolutionary theory. It will reflect on how Darwinism created a framework for the Americanists’ classification and ranking schemes, with particular reference to the cultures south of the Rio Grande. It will explain how Darwinist-inflected ideas about the evolution of civilizations fed key assumptions about the nature of American “civilization” itself. The paper will focus on how such ideas were developed and circulated in two sources: the proceedings of the International Congress of Americanists, especially between 1895, date of the ICA’s first meeting in Mexico City, and 1922, when it met in Rio de Janeiro; and the magazine Inter-america, a U.S.-sponsored Pan-American intellectual forum published from 1918 to 1926.