AHA Session 139
Saturday, January 4, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Nassau West (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Vanessa Freije, University of Washington, Seattle
Session Abstract
It is widely known that the Cold War’s militarism and developmentalism helped to produce and shape new technologies and scientific knowledges. From space programs to agronomy, the production of scientific data and its circulation formed yet another way to wage the Cold War. In U.S. and Soviet centred histories of the Cold War, Latin American scientists and statesmen are often presented as consumers of new scientific knowledges and technologies. More recently, however, historians of Latin America have centered intermediaries and emphasized local experts and expertise as crucial to the success or failure of scientific endeavors. In this panel, the presenters explore how Latin American archaeologists, social scientists, and Indigenous peoples produced new knowledges and technologies, built hemispheric networks and challenged U.S. and Soviet hegemony in ways that complicate simplistic notions of ‘technology transfer.’ Scientists used expert knowledges and new technologies to critique their own governments, to challenge European and U.S. American policy in the region, and to pursue a decolonial present. What can these histories teach us about how Cold War scientists understood sites of scientific knowledge? How did certain forms of technological knowledge become marked as futuristic and others as antiquated? How did politicians and scientists conceive of “innovation” itself in the Cold War? This panel engages with these questions as part of a three-session workshop on Science, Technology, and Medicine in Latin America’s Cold War.
In her paper, Karin Rosemblatt examines a transnational network of Latin America, US, and European anthropologists and archaeologists whose debates over apparent links between ‘hydraulic civilizations’ and despotism in the ancient past became mechanisms for Mexicans to critique the autocratic rule of their own government, particularly as it sought to overcome environmental constraints with megadevelopment. Eve Buckley tackles the fascinating story of Brazilian physician Josué de Castro who sought to counter U.S. and European neo-Malthusian discourses about overpopulation. Instead of blaming the poor for resource scarcity, De Castro argued for the redistribution of resources both nationally and globally and built networks that spanned the global south. Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines the role of foreign experts to ontologically define the reality of violence before and during the Paraguayan military dictatorship’s genocidal ‘deculturation’ campaign against the Aché people. In her contribution, Clarissa Ibarra examines the Cuban decolonial efforts to a nuclear energy project that would enable independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermaths of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Together, these papers articulate the central place of scientific knowledges and technologies in the transnational networks that shaped the ideological debates over Latin America’s past and future at the heart of Cold War.
