This panel explores challenges of scale in the history of science, race, and medicine in the twentieth century Americas. In recent decades scholars have expanded from national to local, transnational, and imperial approaches to these histories. Doing so has clarified how diverse colonial and post-colonial knowledges of racialized bodies in Latin America shaped the formation of anthropological, sociological, medical, and epidemiological fields of study often defined by their trajectory in Europe and the United States. Retracing these fields’ overlapping circles has shown that even the most institutional of sources and archives are rife with traces of more conflictual, Indigenous, and creole approaches to knowledge. At the same time, scholars have also revealed the displacement of bodily and epistemic violence, from the non-consensual research and collection of groups’ and individuals’ racialized bodies, to the long trains of data and textualization that historians then must decide how to contextualize and curate.

This panel’s three geographies—Peru’s Andes and Amazon, urban and rural Guatemala, and a Washington, D.C. shaped by coastal Peru—connect these plural ways of knowing bodies to the challenges of re-identifying survivors, collaborators, relations, and harm in hemispheric archives. They do so by modeling a variety of scales in national, imperial, and microhistorical approaches. First, Adam Warren’s “Knowledge Making and Machiguenga Encounters with the Yale Peruvian Expedition, 1914-15” moves from the transnational and Andean scales of that expedition’s intervention on Machu Picchu’s “Inca” and “Quechua” geographies to focus on one American surgeon’s with Machiguenga peoples north and east of Cusco in the Amazon. By reading that surgeon’s journals, photographs, and measurements as histories of interaction, Warren’s paper underlines how Indigenous informants could co-produce knowledge with foreign researchers to draw them into their own fields of relation and study. Next, Alexandria Herrera’s paper, “Guatemalan Collaboration in the Guatemala Syphilis Experiments (1946-1948) and its Implications for Justice,” recontextualizes the U.S.-directed midcentury infection of sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, mental hospital patients, and orphans with syphilis in urban Guatemala. Extending scholarship regarding the national and imperial U.S. goals of this research, Herrera’s paper shows how it also relied upon on Guatemalan officials and researchers who had long developed their own racialized understandings of the poor, Indigenous, pathologized, and relation-making Guatemalan body. Last, Christopher Heaney’s “Hall 25: Peruvian Anthropology and the Smithsonian's First Hall of Physical Anthropology, 1900-1965” explores the degree to which U.S. anthropology’s most maximalist representation of its study of the embodied human past was composed of more than a century of encounter with Andean and Peruvian sciences of ancestry, race, healing, and the dead. Re-collecting these histories, and re-engaging with the human and archival remains that continue to form their outline, highlight the useful tension between national and imperial analytical frames and those that find healing, relation-making, and other epistemologies in more local and transnational scales.