03 Nov 2018 01:30 PM - 03:45 PM(America/Vancouver)
20181103T133020181103T1545America/VancouverNegotiation and Development in Latin America: Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Western Hemisphere
In 1967, Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso published their classic work Dependency and Development in Latin America. "Western" investment, far from placing Latin American nations on a path to progress, had created dependent nations struggling to chart their own path, stunting attempts at autonomous development. At the same moment, Science published George Basalla's "The Spread of Western Science." "Colonial science has its drawbacks," Basalla wrote, "but it is in the fortunate position of being able to utilize the resources of existing scientific traditions while it slowly develops a scientific tradition of its own."
In this panel, we hope to better elucidate the relationship between the politics of development and "Science at the Periphery." We underscore the unique nature of scientific enterprise in the twentieth century, stemming from processes of negotiation between "Western Science" and local actors: the stories we tell about a diverse range of Latin American experiences show that science has not been the product of a graft, but of centuries of coevolution between foreign and local epistemological traditions. We hope our answer to this traditional debate advances an understanding of the developmentalist role of science in the region. How did the priorities for applied science set by the region’s various actors speak to their anxieties and hopes about the prospect of becoming culturally, economically, and politically independent polities in the twentieth century? How did debates in the scientific arena resonate with broader debates about national representation and citizenship, market and state interactions, and regional self-determination?
Organized by Steve Server (University of Chicago)
Jefferson B, Fourth FloorHistory of Science Society 2018meeting@hssonline.org
In 1967, Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso published their classic work Dependency and Development in Latin America. "Western" investment, far from placing Latin American nations on a path to progress, had created dependent nations struggling to chart their own path, stunting attempts at autonomous development. At the same moment, Science published George Basalla's "The Spread of Western Science." "Colonial science has its drawbacks," Basalla wrote, "but it is in the fortunate position of being able to utilize the resources of existing scientific traditions while it slowly develops a scientific tradition of its own."
In this panel, we hope to better elucidate the relationship between the politics of development and "Science at the Periphery." We underscore the unique nature of scientific enterprise in the twentieth century, stemming from processes of negotiation between "Western Science" and local actors: the stories we tell about a diverse range of Latin American experiences show that science has not been the product of a graft, but of centuries of coevolution between foreign and local epistemological traditions. We hope our answer to this traditional debate advances an understanding of the developmentalist role of science in the region. How did the priorities for applied science set by the region’s various actors speak to their anxieties and hopes about the prospect of becoming culturally, economically, and politically independent polities in the twentieth century? How did debates in the scientific arena resonate with broader debates about national representation and citizenship, market and state interactions, and regional self-determination?
Organized by Steve Server (University of Chicago)
Que nuestro Pueblo Viva como Gente: Mexican Citizens, Consumers, and Bodies under CardenismoView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science01:30 PM - 02:03 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 20:30:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC
The start of the Cárdenas administration in 1934 is often seen as the moment when the promises of the Revolution were finally made real for the wide array of Mexicans who had fought in the decade-long conflict of the 1910s. Mexican citizens were able to farm land communally, had access to state-regulated education, had protected labor rights, had access to public health resources. But the progress of the 1930s brought a critical question to the fore: was Mexican economic and political life to be “top-down” or “bottom-up”? Was the health of the nation to be found in Mexico City, or the nation’s rural localities? In this paper, I explore the relationship between national economic and political “health” and physical health during the period. By reference to medical journals, medical student theses, and health department memos, I show that physical health was not merely a practical concern for the state, the hope being to create scientifically literate, productive, “modern” Mexicans. Physical health also became a vital rhetorical space for Mexicans to negotiate the terms of Mexican progress, in domains such as labor organization, school curricula, ethnic and indigenous rights, and political representation. It was the language of health that served as the lingua franca for the ongoing negotiations which would determine the ultimate character of the Mexican state—and of Mexican development.
Indigenous Nuclear Technologies, Development, and Sovereignty: The Atomic Age in Argentina and BrazilView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science02:03 PM - 02:36 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:03:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC
From 1945 to the present, scientists, technicians, and diplomats in Argentina and Brazil have been among the developing world’s vanguard in harnessing the promise and power of nuclear energy technologies. The Atomic Age created a wholly new set of criteria of modernity to which a nation’s leaders and citizens might aspire. It also offered an unparalleled opportunity to refashion the relationship between science and the state, and that between the developing scientific periphery and the technologically advanced nations of the North Atlantic.
Brazil and Argentina have stood, since the 1980s, among a different club of elite nuclear nations, joined by only four countries that have uranium enrichment facilities that nonetheless chose not to build nuclear weapons. While much of the unbridled pursuit of advanced nuclear technology in these South American neighbor countries can be explained as an attempt to realize long-sought economic development, other aspects of this history of technology and diplomacy fit much more neatly into a defiant assertion of sovereignty against a North Atlantic center increasingly opposed to transfers of nuclear materials and technologies. How did Argentina and Brazil learn the rules of the new nuclear game, and how did they rewrite them to their own ends? What did responsible global citizenship and sovereignty mean within and outside Latin America as the Atomic Age progressed? This paper examines these two questions of nuclear technology and diplomacy against the larger background of economic and scientific development.
Presenters Christopher Dunlap Naval Postgraduate School - Visiting Faculty
Innovation on Standby: Political Pitfalls, Economic Uncertainty, and Scientific Frustrations in Local Computer Innovation at Rio de Janeiro’s National Computer Science Laboratory (LNCC)View Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science02:36 PM - 03:09 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 21:36:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC
While the recent Lava Jato financial crisis and impeachment of ex-president Dilma Rousseff have resulted in widespread repercussions across Brazil, this string of national events has been absorbed with a decolonial view that approaches these events as the latest wave in a series of violent oscillations understood as Brazilian history. This paper examines the ways in which Brazilian technological experts have constructed a culture of innovation despite, or because, of such contingencies and crises.
In a case study on computer innovation in Brazil, I analyze the National Computer Science Laboratory (LNCC) established in Petropolis in 1980. The LNCC has received recent media coverage for building South America’s largest supercomputer, “Santos Dumont”, and for its high profile international projects like “Pampa Azul”, which focuses on genetic mapping of the Zika genome. However, due to the LNCC’s most recent, highly publicized budget cutback in response to the crisis, the laboratory has placed a significant number of its projects on “stand by”, resulting in immediate questions of closure for the LNCC. Utilizing archival and ethnographic methods, this presentation examines the complicated business of scientific innovation in Brazil in crisis mode. The laboratory’s use of open-source software geared towards scientific discovery provides a unique example of national innovation while at the same time presenting a case for how the government continues to support its scientific platforms despite state-wide budget cuts.
Constructing Technologies and Imaginaries of Mass Migration: The Case of Western MexicoView Abstract Part of Organized SessionNon-Western Science03:09 PM - 03:42 PM (America/Vancouver) 2018/11/03 22:09:00 UTC - 2018/11/03 22:42:00 UTC
My paper, framed by the beginning of World War II and the end of the guest worker Bracero Program in 1964, examines the growth of binational transportation and hydraulic networks, industrial agriculture, and rural Mexican outmigration. This study of technocrats and campesinos, industrialized landscapes and bodies, and human movement and hubris analyzes the intersections of the infrastructures, policies, and imaginaries of mobility that entrenched a culture of migration in western Mexico. An official, zealous commitment to postwar public works expansion transformed Mexican realities and notions of spatial and upward mobility as well as perceptions of space, time, and belonging. By imposing statist, modernist visions of order and progress through domestic civil engineering and US-backed agricultural regimes Mexican elites and técnicos helped aggravate land loss, joblessness, debt, and inequality in the Mexican countryside. These policies intensified rural migrant flows and altered migrant trajectories to the United States via rapidly expanding binational highway and transportation networks, informing dehumanizing and criminalizing binational discourses of transnational Mexican migrancy. These narratives, in turn, shaped notions of illegality and race which ultimately restricted Mexican migrant mobility and denied migrants substantive citizenship rights in both polities.
Christopher Dunlap