Dam Despots! Debating Technology and Power in Cold War Mexico

In 1953, US and Mexican anthropologists and archeologists staged a symposium on ancient waterworks. This debate on “hydraulic” or “irrigation” “civilizations” in ancient Mesoamerica, Peru, Mesopotamia, and China provides a window onto technological change and its relation to politics and power during the Cold War. Participants in the debate sought to develop a universal scheme for categorizing societies based on their level of material and sociocultural development. They also asked how forms politico-religious formation and state structures, including questions around the centralization of power and despotism, related to economic development. Like modernization theorists, they used functionalist analyses that conceptualized economy and technology as integrally related to politics.

This paper first recreates the networks that spawned this debate, networks that spanned Peru, Mexico, Europe, the United States, and beyond. The debate built from the work of the German emigré Karl Wittfogel, a Marxist archeologist turned anti-communist crusader, who drew on Marxist notions of the Asiatic mode of production to argue that despotism emerged where political centralization was used to overcome environmental constraints. His was a thinly veiled critique of the Soviet Union and China. For Mexican archeologist Angel Palerm and other Mexicans, it provided a vehicle for talking about the autocratic rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional; Mexico’s developmentalist push, which led to the building of massive irrigation dams and the application of other Green Revolution agricultural technologies; US technical assistance policies; anti-Communism; and the political consolidation of Mexico’s

Participants in this debate could be quite specific how ancient history illuminated forms of causality operating in their own societies. At times, however, the study of ancient societies functioned more as an allegory. These allegories read differently for scholars of or from in Mexico than did for US-based scholars.