This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.

This chapter shows how human sciences researchers in Puerto Rico faced pressure to abandon earlier traditions and embrace the methods and biomedical enterprise of the United States empire’s scientific modernity. Drawing on the history of mental testing and inmate assessment as well as designs for a new penitentiary, the chapter contends that while mid twentieth-century US-American social science engaged in intense processes of othering that aligned with imperial expansion, Puerto Rican social scientists combined US-American psychometrics with older Spanish ethnographic traditions that powerfully resurfaced in the 1940s. These diagnostic and descriptive tools revealed that incarcerated people required discipline, tutelage, and treatment, but that they also had redemptive potential regardless of social difference. Social scientists put mental test results into dialogue with ethnographic narratives of convicts to forge what to them were forward-looking treatment programs, illustrating how racialized racelessness and intersubjective exchanges transformed Puerto Rican corrections for a time. The result was a blended, “creole” nationalist science with decolonial aspirations, although one that was colonial-populist in practice.

This chapter examines the history of Marie-Yvonne Vellard, an Aché girl from Paraguay who was captured in the 1930s at the age of two and raised by a French scientist named Jehan Albert Vellard. By examining the various retellings of Marie-Yvonne’s story and the many stories of captured children that populate ethnographic studies of the Aché, this essay tracks how colonial violence against Indigenous peoples was repackaged within a ostensibly antiracist framework. While the redemptive accounts of her story did important work by challenging biological determinism, they also concealed how the practices of mid-century human scientists sometimes encouraged the forced removal of children from their families and the dispossession of Indigenous territory. In fact, as this chapter demonstrates, until the 1960s ethnographic studies of the Aché were based primarily on captured children and attest to an established practice and economy of buying and trading Aché children as servants. Although researchers who studied captured Aché children positioned themselves as civilized men of science, they did not condemn the trafficking of Aché children that they benefitted from and instead presented it as a fait accompli that they could only observe as modest witnesses.

This chapter looks at the history of three institutions operated by the Territory of Hawaiʻi: the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys (opened in 1902), the Kawailoa Training School for Girls (opened in 1929), and the Waimano Home for the Feeble-Minded (opened in 1921). The combined rhetorics of correction and care for Hawaiʻi’s children at play in these carceral institutions echoed the broader, paternalistic justifications for annexing Hawaiʻi as saving the islands both from other colonial empires and a Hawaiian Kingdom that white settlers characterized as uncivilized and childish. The Territorial government repeatedly used the scientific imprimatur of work by those like psychologist Stanley Porteus as well as models of training schools and homes for the “feebleminded” in the continental United States as justifications for institutionalizing Native Hawaiians and immigrants of color. This chapter focuses on two main themes. The first tracks the settler colonial process of pathologizing Native Hawaiian and other non-white forms of kinship and care, and attempts to replace it with institutionalized care. The second theme examines how a critical history of these institutions offers a different picture of the Territorial period in Hawaiʻi.

In the twentieth century, settler states have operated through science. At the same time, the field of American bioethics has safeguarded the moral authority of science. It has done so by upholding the settler logics of the sciences that it claimed to hold to account. This chapter explores how the imperial logic of American bioethics works – through its concepts, practices, and imperceptions. To do so, the chapter follows Carolyn Matthews, an everyday American with a rich “vernacular archive” and apt work experiences, across three medical sites and over three postwar decades. It tells Carolyn’s story in two registers – setting Carolyn’s work experience prior to 1974, when the US Congress passed laws for the treatment of human subjects, alongside Carolyn’s moral recounting of those work experiences in the late 1970s. Carolyn’s case offers insight into how the vocabulary and framework of modern American bioethics embeds a moral ontology organized around civic individualism and its safeguarding, as opposed to anticolonialism and its dismantling. The aim of this critique of bioethics through the Americas is to strengthen existing alliances for justice-based science and to inform anticolonial practices – in science, history, and transformative bioethics.

Chapter 1 focuses on the narratological strategies that turned a set of mathematical equations into an economic model in Robert Solow’s “Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” the article behind the classic reference “Solow 1956.” In the first place, the paper was all about the setup of a smoothly working neoclassical growing economy, which consisted in the interplay of algebraic equations, diagrammatic visualizations, and verbal accounts. The article revolved around this artifact, made (up) by the narrator figure and, at the same time, to be used and experimented with by others, independently of its construction history. While denoting the artifact “a model” throughout, references to a world beyond its narrow boundaries were vague. Straightforward was its function as an exemplar for how proper economic reasoning should look. The text presented its model as improving a so-called precursor, the “Harrod–Domar model.” In this way, it contributed to canonizing earlier dynamic theory with its focus on instability and crisis and set the course for an angled historiography of growth theory that downplays the differences in approaches and objects until the present day.

The 1940s saw the reconciliation of mathematical wartime techniques with social scientific theorizing. This chapter examines how the economy was depicted as a huge optimization problem that would soon be solvable by electronic computers. Investigating input–output analysis as it was done at the Harvard Economic Research Project (HERP) under the directorship of Wassily Leontief illustrates the difficulties of making an economic abstraction work in measurement practice. Chapter 3 draws a trajectory to the Conference of Activity Analysis of 1949, where mathematical economists combined techniques of linear programming with what they saw as conventional economics. The move from planning tools to devices for theoretical speculation came along with a shift in modeling philosophies and notions of realism. Focusing entirely on mathematical formalisms and abandoning the concern with measurement brought about the main research object of the economics profession in the subsequent years: The economy as a flexible and efficient system of production in the form of a system of simultaneous equations. This was the economy that provided the primary point of reference for Solow’s model.

Chapter 4 situates Solow’s model in the heterogenous landscape of mathematical economics in the early 1950s. Robert Solow got acquainted with different strands of structuralist and mathematical reasoning before he devised the model more or less incidentally in the context of teaching engineering students at MIT. Here, I describe Solow’s model as a miniature not of the world but of other models. Its smaller scale and reduced mathematical form fit older mathematical economics while, at the same time, it related to the more sophisticated systems of proof and proposition characteristic of general equilibrium theory. While rigor and axiomatization also played a role in the construction of the miniature, the related style of modeling did not revolve around the austere beauty of proposition and proof. Rather, it centered on creating simple and manageable artifacts that upheld the promise of being useful tools for economic governance. The efficient shape of Solow’s model made it a particularly talkative artifact. Not least, it provided a starting point for a number of stories, including what economists themselves called “fables” or “parables” about growth.