Knowledge Making and Machiguenga Encounters with the Yale Peruvian Expedition, 1914–15

During their 1914-15 visit to Peru, members of the second Yale Peruvian Expedition focused much of their research on communities and field sites in and around Cusco and near Machu Picchu. However, several expedition members also spent time among the Machiguenga, an Indigenous population located to the north and east of Cusco in the Amazon. Surgeon David Ford, for example, wrote extensively about his encounters with the Machiguenga in his journals, photographed them and measured their bodies as part of a larger anthropometric study of Peruvian racial types, and documented their customs, health problems, and healing practices. He romanticized them as a population largely untouched by Peruvian society, the quintessential “primitives” with all the problematic connotations that term implies. For this and other reasons, his descriptions of his time among the Machiguenga read differently from his accounts of research and travel in the Andean highlands, in which he disparaged Quechua-speaking populations.

Inspired by the work of Margaret Bruchac and Isaiah Wilner on the central role Indigenous informants have played in co-producing knowledge with settler researchers, especially anthropologists, this paper asks about forms of relationality and knowledge making among the Machiguenga, Ford, and other members of the expedition. Records emphasize Ford’s role in studying and creating knowledge about the Machiguenga, but they also reveal some ways in which the Machiguenga deliberately shaped Ford’s thinking and sought to study him and other researchers. By reconstructing a microhistory of the Machiguenga’s encounters with the Yale Peruvian Expedition and comparing these interactions to the forms of relationality common among expedition members and highland, Quechua-speaking populations, this paper considers how we might complicate scholarship on the history of North American researchers and scientific knowledge production in South America.