Chapter 2 redraws the genealogies and characteristics of the different players involved in long-distance Tunisian activism. These various constellations of actors were pro-regime, Islamist, leftist and trans-ideological, and they created political parties, associations or other movements within which to conduct their politics in the trans-state space of mobilisation. This space represented a political and relational battleground on which the position of each actor played a role. The chapter shows how Tunisian activists were able to politically survive despite distance from the homeland, and the extent to which they were able to adapt to new configurations to continue their activism. The organisation of long-distance Tunisian politics assumed a specific and complex configuration in the French environment, so it cannot be considered as a simple replication of Tunisian politics.

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.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

The Preface outlines the origins, motivations, history, and stakes of the project that led to the publication of this book, and it discusses the project’s relationship to scholarship in Indigenous Studies and engagement of key works in that field. It explores what an approach informed by Indigenous Studies can bring to the history of the human sciences, and how it might build upon existing scholarship on this topic.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.