Animals and the Construction of Indigeneity in Peruvian Racial Science, 1930–55

In the 1930s and 1940s, high-altitude physiologist Carlos Monge and coca scientist Carlos Gutiérrez-Noriega both made use of human-animal comparisons to construct arguments about indigenous alterity in Peru. For Monge, Andean animals such as the llama and guinea pig were the only appropriate animals for gaining insights into indigenous Andean physiology, since much like indigenous Andean peoples, they had supposedly adapted over centuries to the environment of the highlands, where temperatures were cold and the air was thin. For Gutiérrez-Noriega, the effects of coca use on indigenous physiology and psychology could be explored through laboratory-based research on non-human subjects of various kinds. Paying little regard to questions of environmental provenance, Gutierrez-Noriega carried out experiments with coca and cocaine on both doves and dogs in Lima, arguing that the results confirmed theories of indigenous degeneration through the leaf's consumption. Drawing on scholarship from animal studies as well as the history of racial science, this paper grapples with the problematic ways scientists used animals to imagine and make racist claims about indigenous people and their place in nature and society. As indigenista scientists, Monge and Gutiérrez-Noriega reached very different conclusions. Monge combined ideas about animals with research on human subjects to argue that indigenous Andean peoples were a distinct variant of the human race, one closer to nature than "modern" Peruvians. Gutiérrez-Noriega, on the other hand, used standard laboratory animals to claim that indigenous people only differed from other racial groups through their pernicious, destructive habits, which prevented them from becoming "modern."