What is troubling about encounters in the history of the human sciences? Allow for one example among many that illustrate the challenges they present historians. In the mid-1940s, Carlos Gutiérrez-Noriega, a Peruvian psychiatrist and pharmacologist, criticized Carlos Monge, a high-altitude physiologist, who argued that coca leaf consumption had supposedly degenerative effects on human physiology and mental capacity.Footnote ¹ Having conducted research experiments with coca and cocaine on medical students and subjects confined in Lima’s custodial institutions for many years, Gutiérrez-Noriega left the capital for the Andean highlands, where coca chewing was widespread and where Monge had already experimented on mineworkers. There, he recreated his own laboratory in the field in the province of Huancayo. Armed with diagnostic and measuring equipment, he conducted interviews about coca use with 100 Indigenous and Mestizo peasants, shepherds, and mineworkers. In addition, he performed physiological and psychological examinations on subjects under the effects of coca. He aimed to observe the mental alterations during the “high” produced by the stimulant and also its long-term effects.Footnote ²

While Gutiérrez-Noriega’s publications offered elaborate conclusions about the effects of long-term coca use, they said little about the nature of his encounters with Indigenous populations in the Andean highlands. Much like Monge and other members of Lima’s scientific community, nowhere does Gutiérrez-Noriega acknowledge the potentially troubling dimensions of his interactions with Indigenous research subjects, dimensions that appear problematic to us today as we historicize the making of research ethics in science. Nor does he acknowledge how Indigenous populations shaped interactions and knowledge making with him. Instead, he emphasized Andean peoples’ alterity and embraced stereotypes. He positioned himself as the bearer of expertise, one who could bring about their redemption even as he used them to elevate his reputation.Footnote ³

Gutiérrez-Noriega’s studies occasionally involved attempts at relationality, motivated by desires to understand mental health, personality traits, and differences of behavior among different Indigenous peoples. He had little ability, however, to value them as interlocutors and collaborators. Racial thinking, Peru’s internal colonialism, and concerns about ranking, categorizing, and distinguishing among Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations conditioned his efforts.Footnote ⁴ His story reflects what historian Ann Zulawski calls the “tortured thinking” of physicians and scientists in her research on the history of public health in Bolivia.Footnote ⁵

Gutiérrez-Noriega’s encounters with his research subjects speak to the challenges of reconstructing such interactions in the history of the human sciences now. The one-sided descriptions of his interactions make clear that the organizing logic of many human sciences has often been outward from the scientists/agents toward objects/passive recipients. In other words, Gutiérrez-Noriega’s encounters, methods, and knowledge are exemplary of the implicit logic of much human science. It is also a reflection of the human scientific archive and the structural conditions of its creation, which limit what the historian can access about the past.Footnote ⁶ This book, a collection of provocative case studies that rethink the ethical and material facets of human science in diverse settings, seeks to trouble all such encounters.

Clearly, scientists are important, and assessing them and their work in the past should not be understood as an anti-science stance. We are not investigating scientists as quasi-villains in a broader history of subordination. We see scientists as complex actors who are part of the story of encounters. Human subjects, nonhuman objects (many of which were once human or related to human populations), and contexts explored by human scientists inevitably shaped knowledge and its applications. Our stance is thus one of knowledge constituted through encounters conditioned by the structures and dynamics of colonialism.Footnote ⁷

The word “encounters” is ours, but we also understand it as a primary methodological premise of the human sciences. Thus, while the emphasis of the word encounter is toward the unexpected or the memorable, within the human sciences there was an anticipation of encounters, without which much of the work of those disciplines would have been impossible. Several features of the construction of such encounters are thus salient because they reflect at once this banal expectation and simultaneously its historical evolution through contexts that were themselves rapidly changing, both because of encounters and also as a predicate of settler, nationalist, or imperial struggles. The word encounter also speaks to an important, if uneven, reciprocity, one that may not have always been visible, but which allows for a balancing of scales and stories when taken as a constituent element in the history of the human sciences. Doing so does not naively elide power inequities or romanticize the objects of inquiries. Despite efforts to construe them as such, encounters are not politically neutral.Footnote ⁸ Histories that center encounters as an analytic create subjects and objects in both directions, thereby allowing for a fuller expression of the multiplicity of contexts and meanings evidently present within these interactions.

As an example of these encounters, consider Franz Boas. His name is synonymous with an American school of anthropology while his most significant Indigenous interlocutor, the Tlingit/British cultural broker George Hunt, became known as a mere source of material. Hunt accessed privileged knowledge through his Indigenous mother, sisters, and Kwakwaka’wakw wives, acting as a researcher prioritizing Boas’s needs in ways that marginalized Indigenous women’s voices in the resulting anthropological texts.Footnote ⁹ Recent scholarship has challenged us to ask why would it be strange to think of Hunt (or his mother, sisters, and wives, for that matter) as an agent cultivating and claiming ownership over his own anthropology, or seeing possibilities of discovery in Boas?Footnote ¹⁰

Such an illustration shows that the historical picture of scientific work in the human sciences should foreground the ways Indigenous peoples, Mestizos, or other subalterns claimed scientists through their own dialogues, goals, and forms of collaboration, accommodation, and resistance. An encounter that only one person anticipates, claims, and records is likely more of a projection than an encounter.

This book troubles human sciences encounters in the nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Western hemisphere’s colonial, imperial, and national domains. In doing so, it seeks to undo the flat, one-sided narratives of these encounters that long characterized research in the history of the human sciences. Rather than privilege the voices of scientists themselves, contributing authors emphasize the tangled, rarely unproblematic claims different actors and groups made upon each other. Noting the transnational dimensions of such research, individual chapters explore the often internally divisive structural conditions in which such human science research took place as well as the importance of local, national, and global socio-political contexts. This book also navigates colonialisms – settler, internal, or otherwise – and nationalisms as its chapters explore the logics of human science and the practices of relationship-making and unmaking involving human subjects.

We recognize that this intervention in the history of the human sciences comes with the limitations and possibilities of the archive and oral histories, which provide fragmented and narrow accounts of the past and thus require reading “against the grain” or “along the archival grain,” or thinking critically with the dominant narrative.Footnote ¹¹ Unsurprisingly, postcolonial and decolonial theories and methods, which will be discussed at length in the section on Indigenous Studies and postcolonial and decolonial histories in this introduction, provide all of the authors in this book with tools to grapple with the archive and reimagine these encounters. In addition, the authors are united in grounding their arguments in the methods, concepts, and claims of Indigenous Studies scholars globally, who have pushed for more ethical, restorative, and transformative forms of research while moving away from “victim-centered” or “damage-centered narratives.” When combined with simplistic ethics, these narratives deny agency and desire, and assume homogeneity and the ubiquity of past and differentiated experiences of loss.Footnote ¹²

The Scale and Legacy of Encounters

Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences uses the phrase “troubling encounters” to signal a new direction in the history of the human sciences by expanding its critical lens both theoretically and geographically. It undertakes this work through engagement with global Indigenous Studies theories and methods and Latin American Studies scholarship. While it recognizes that included in the latter is a long tradition of research on and by Indigenous peoples that enriches and constitutes a part of the former, it also acknowledges that differences and tensions exist between Latin American Studies and global Indigenous Studies as fields. The centrality of indigenismo within the intellectual genealogies of research concerning Indigenous peoples in Latin America, which several chapters in this book historicize, led to approaches within Latin American Studies that historically centered the role of Indigenous peoples within national frameworks. In addition, much scholarship in Latin American Studies folds studies of Indigenous peoples into studies of race and ethnicity. These differ from approaches within global Indigenous Studies that start from Indigenous frameworks and center Indigenous epistemologies, and that treat Indigeneity as, among other things, a political concept. At the same time, important exceptions exist in Latin America and within Latin American Studies, including Indigenous working groups like the Taller de Historia Andina (Andean History Workshop) and the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche (Mapuche History Community). Scholarship produced in these Latin American contexts proves crucial to this book’s work.Footnote ¹³

Our chapters collectively ask about the nature of research encounters: their ontologies and epistemologies, their scales, their affective dimensions, their power imbalances and other social dynamics, and their ethics. Often the forms that human scientific knowledge took possessed a tangible existence, but the importance of such tangibility for scholars now derives from its legacies, artifacts, and archives, which have often been read by scholars for their alterity.Footnote ¹⁴ Chapter authors decenter scientists as the sole creators of such knowledge while exploring how affective dimensions, structural conditions, and colonial contexts – settler, internal, or otherwise – conditioned what would be taken as legitimate and become knowable.

Beyond these goals, this book records an uneven history of ethical action in the human sciences. Several chapters in this book historicize those ethics while also interrogating their centrality and efficacy in colonialism as an ideology, project, lived experience, and way of knowing and being in the Americas and the Pacific.Footnote ¹⁵ While accounting for the complex historical genesis of ethics, individual chapters show that scientists’ ethical frameworks became muddied by the density of human interactions they experienced in these political and economic contexts, which intermingled with scientific beliefs about race, Indigeneity, gender, place, and home. Historians of the human sciences have been too slow to center this contextualization.

By adopting a geographic sweep that includes Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and the Pacific, one of our goals is to break with frameworks in traditional histories of the human sciences that have circumscribed Europe and North America and separated them from the rest of the world. It will come as little surprise to Latin American and Indigenous scholars that the character of the United States as an imperial project haunted this geography with forms of colonialism and imperialism familiar across the Americas. These include both settler and internal colonialisms within the territorial United States, and near-hegemonic power in trade, global politics, and military interventions further afield. Our hemispheric and transnational approach, mindful of this reality, explores the ethical imperative of centering our research in theories, methods, and approaches developed in global Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies, all of which contend with legacies of colonialism and the realities of empire.Footnote ¹⁶

This book also takes ethics as central to the work of historians, and in contemplating multiple levels of agency in historical sources it unapologetically, even polemically, invites consideration of whether desires for restorative, procedural, and distributive justice are really so anathema to the anti-presentism that is common in histories of science and medicine.Footnote ¹⁷ Make no mistake about our critique: we are not calling for a politically correct, anachronistic, or tendentious history in lieu of some alleged traditional approach, nor are we arguing that all human scientific research only caused harm, and never good. Instead, we invite readers to join us in a productive discomfort with an objectivity that demarcates speaking about what happened in narratives that reference only the affective experience of the powerful and dominant, while avoiding calls for restorative, presentist judgment on the part of the groups marginalized by the official frame and their allies. The contributors to this book thus explore how to decolonize the history of the human sciences and enact a critical and ethical form of historical research and analysis.

Reframing the History of the Human Sciences

This book positions itself as a historical contemplation of the human sciences aligned with much literature outside of traditional history of science scholarship.Footnote ¹⁸ While our approaches build on an earlier generation of scholars’ critical insights, among them prominent cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault,Footnote ¹⁹ our turn toward global Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies scholarship, including critical theory produced within those partially overlapping fields, signals our rejection of a Eurocentric framing of science, society and power. By engaging the work of Eve Tuck (Unangax̂), Sylvia Wynter, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and others, we rethink the history of the human sciences vis-à-vis attention to multiple contexts, forms of agency and interaction, and intellectual and epistemological traditions. Recent scholarship on science in Latin America, moreover, focuses attention on power and resistance, asking how the social sciences have justified systems of inequality and motivated projects toward civil rights and the decolonization of knowledge.Footnote ²⁰ Indigenous histories and settler colonial studies, on the other hand, have called attention to the ways in which the human sciences are implicated in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and inform ongoing criticism of the human sciences in the present.Footnote ²¹

While we consider applying these perspectives to histories of science as self-evidently beneficial, we are struck by the fact that such approaches remain revisionist in a historiography that still primarily treats the human sciences as part of a North Atlantic intellectual tradition. Dorothy Ross’s 1994 edited volume Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences is a key example.Footnote ²² At the time a powerful contribution, the volume’s authors treated the human sciences as unidirectional and shaped by European and North American internal patterns, cultural vogues, traditions, and religious, moral, and ethical frames. They elided the instrumental role Indigenous peoples, colonized populations, and women played in codifying those systems of knowledge. Contributors portrayed human scientific knowledge as only expanding outward to other groups through the hegemonic exercise of literacy, power, trade, imperialism, field study, and hedonistic engagement. While critiques of these methodological and framing concepts have emerged in the literature on the history of the human sciences, they nevertheless persist. To that end, the authors of Troubling Encounters take as a starting point that the human sciences themselves have been dependent upon troubling encounters with the very people and material objects marginalized in this canon.Footnote ²³

An example of how this North Atlantic approach has persisted can be found in the recent work of historian of medicine Jan Goldstein. In her 2015 AHA Presidential address, later published in The American Historical Review, Goldstein grappled with whether historians should hesitate before passing judgment on the behavior of past historical actors, who often lived according to notions of right and wrong that differed from our own. She suggested that rather than engage in presentism or reject it altogether, historians should situate people in the context of their own historical “moral fields.”Footnote ²⁴ In her case study of French racial science, however, Goldstein situated moral thinking as ultimately shaped by and within a French culture of ideas, even as that culture itself was obviously contemplating human difference in a context where struggles over empire, exclusion, and belonging were quite tangible parts of its flourishing and reality. In doing so, she, like Ross, employed an approach that erased the way these sciences abetted domination and served central roles in imperial and elite claims to possessing others.Footnote ²⁵ Goldstein’s approach generated much discussion following the publication of her address, including among our authors, but of greater interest to us is the question of how imperial and colonial subjects exercised counter-agency and survivance and shaped those moral fields.Footnote ²⁶

Beginning in the early 2000s, historians of science challenged the preoccupation with the human sciences’ internally evolving epistemologies or genealogies of norms and truth claims. Among them, historian Warwick Anderson called for a hermeneutics of context and encounter in his landmark book The Collector of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen.Footnote ²⁷ Applying Anderson’s strategy to the history of the human sciences entails studying collaboration, power, and the struggles over power that collaborations engendered. Like Anderson, we conceive of science as a transnational praxis and narrative that crossed borders but was itself also shaped by long histories of different kinds of imperialism and colonialism (and responses to each), both at the sites where research took place and within the societies and institutions where those sciences came into being and developed. Such an approach allows us to continue to trace the broader global movement of scientific ideas but also permits focused examinations of ethics, structural conditions, and encounters that reveal a spectrum of human scientific knowledge-making practices within and beyond societies.

As many studies have shown – especially studies by Indigenous scholars and scholars from the Global South – racial science engendered multiple forms of violence, dehumanization, and racism. Empirical histories of research structures and practices like those in this book probe the specific power relations imbued in knowledge production. Many histories of human science are histories of violence. Evidence gathering, photography, and other forms of documentation are themselves often violent acts, in addition to being motivated by curiosity, approximation, and desires for preservation. Anthropology, in particular, has facilitated cultural and physical disappearance and “salvages,” with scientists a party to colonization, settlement, and modernization processes. As “civilizing projects,” anthropology, and later economics and development studies also participated in constructing or attempting to impose social norms and expectations on those scientists researched.

The authors in this book have sought to account for these histories of violence and dispossession, so inextricable from practices in the human sciences, while also providing narratives of connection, survivance, and thrivance.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, by drawing on recent theories from global Indigenous Studies, they seek to balance a reckoning of trauma and harm with celebration, futurities, and desire.Footnote ²⁹ To that end, many of the chapters in this book draw on Indigenous theories of reciprocity, repair, and right relations to frame complex case studies from across the Americas and the Pacific that, taken together, decenter standard North Atlantic histories of science and the narratives of interaction and encounter they traditionally emphasize.Footnote ³⁰

Building on scholarship by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Mariola Espinosa, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, and others who have called for globalizing the history of science and medicine and centering Latin America’s (and other regions’) contributions to knowledge production, our approach is also transnational, though local and national scientific traditions often form part of the story.Footnote ³¹ We trace not only practices related to research on the ground at the field site, but also the movement of information and knowledge to research centers and their eventual publication, circulation, and reception among broader audiences. The chapters emphasize relations: between scientists and material objects, places, and human subjects, including intermediaries and local assistants. They explore how power and resistance have been understood and performed in the context of the researchers’ gaze, how human science projects related to larger forces and structures of inequality and violence, and how they were (and are) critiqued and subverted from the perspective of the research subject. In this sense, we trace how moral justifications and frameworks came to be constructed over time and space in the human sciences.

Science, Empire, and Colonialism

What would it mean to collectively rethink the history of the human sciences in ways that center the role of such sciences as technologies, successful or failed, of imperialism and colonialism? Our endeavor builds on a robust literature on colonial/imperial science that has appeared in the last fifty years or so. Early influential works largely followed a center–periphery model of knowledge transfer and diffusion.Footnote ³² Later, circulationist, local, “bottom-up,” and subaltern studies of imperial science augmented and complicated these approaches.Footnote ³³ There also developed a group of thoughtful theoretical analyses of colonial science as glimpsed through the lenses of postcolonial theory. In the last ten years, historians from and of the Global South have broadened these conversations significantly, building on the foundational work of scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter.Footnote ³⁴

At the same time, historians have reconsidered various cases of human science research and its imperialist dimensions in Latin America in the modern period, in some cases reinforcing the center–periphery model while deemphasizing the role of local interlocutors and flattening their desires. Ricardo D. Salvatore proposed in his 2016 book Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 that US-led projects in the first half of the twentieth century were prime examples of imperial knowledge production, reflecting expansionist tendencies of capital, technology, and culture.Footnote ³⁵ Salvatore emphasized the unequal power relations, extraterritoriality, extraction, and exploitation implicit within the actual processes of knowledge production, which involved materials “constantly flowing toward centers of knowledge” in the Global North. Peripheries thus functioned “as great repositories of evidence to the center,” as treasure troves of facts that researchers could gather and transmit for processing in the center without any possibility of a reciprocal relationship or concern about ethics.Footnote ³⁶ In this way, Salvatore ensured that the center–periphery model endured, repackaging it as one in which academic knowledge from the center was contingent on the extraction and accumulation of data from the periphery.

Other scholars took an alternative approach that showcased Latin America as a central site of transnational science. Histories of anthropology are indicative of this trend, as Karin Rosemblatt has recently shown.Footnote ³⁷ In her 2018 book The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910–1950, Rosemblatt closely examined social scientists on both sides of the border. There were important distinctions between the two countries’ intellectual trajectories, scientific thinking around race, and aims for policy outcomes, even as scientific communities in each nation freely shared ideas with each other. In the United States, the overarching goal was “sensitive” acculturation of Indigenous people matched by the assumption that Indigenous cultural expressions would “disappear.” Mexican scientists’ energies, in contrast, were largely devoted to documenting in great detail the cultural diversity in their nation, and they resisted generalizing theories. An article by Sebastián Gil-Riaño offers yet another transnational perspective. Carefully examining anthropologists’ and social scientists’ roles in the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race, Gil-Riaño found that “in [the] transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly antiracist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive.” Even mid-century antiracist human scientists worked comfortably across borders within colonial, postcolonial, and modernization frameworks. As a result, “the retreat of scientific racism did not signify an end but rather an amplification of racial politics.”Footnote ³⁸

Gil-Riaño’s point is well-taken. Since its inception, anthropology has engaged many subjects, but most of its work has been with and on Indigenous peoples. Anthropologists’ writings reveal that they were often handmaidens to colonial states and capital expansion, not to mention racial and gendered violence. Anthropological encounters were also almost always transactional, but there were numerous cases of ambiguity, opening to other types of relationships, and even a desire for right relations. Anthropologists, however, were not alone. As is evident in this book, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, demographers, biomedical researchers, and geographers also navigated these situations. Even as they analyzed groups and subcultures in ways that accorded priority to the scientists’ normative preferences (e.g., internal attributes, evolutionary history, proper behavior, propensity for mental disease, gender and sexuality, and relationship to the natural environment), they also grappled with the dynamics of encounters.Footnote ³⁹

Race and racial science are a central focus in our book, because they prompted human scientists’ appropriation of colonial logics that now trouble us. In the Americas, the race concept and racism have histories that extend back to the early Spanish colonial period.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano wrote in 2000, in the moment when the Americas emerged within the world market and created the opportunity for a world capitalism, a new mental category emerged codifying “the relations between conquering and conquered populations” and producing an “idea of ‘race’ as biologically structural and hierarchical differences between the dominant and dominated” as natural. In reflecting on these matters and articulating his notion of the “coloniality of power,” in which race is central, he observed:

For Quijano, this new mental category extended beyond mere matters of “external or physiognomic differences” and into considerations of “mental and cultural differences,” hierarchized in terms of a superior point of reference or center and its others. These concepts of difference constituted classification schema with material consequences, against which colonized groups contended.

In 2003, Afro-Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter expanded on Quijano’s “coloniality of power” and Walter Mignolo’s related concept of “colonial difference” in her essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”Footnote ⁴² Wynter argued that “Man,” the Western bourgeois notion of the human “which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,” in practice defines itself against non-white, especially Black and dark-skinned others. Furthermore, “Man” must be examined both in relation to its development in the Enlightenment era and in relation to earlier Judeo-Christian notions of what it meant to be “human.”Footnote ⁴³ Positioning the Copernican Revolution as a turning point, Wynter suggested that these differing concepts of the human correspond to contexts of knowledge making distinguished by the shifting influence of religion and science. Arguing that the notion of “Man” as a rational subject is in fact predicated on its opposite, the nonrational subject who is excluded from the category of human, Wynter links the development of these ideas to Iberian colonization of the Americas and European expansionism into Africa. By focusing on “‘the rise of Europe’ and its construction of the ‘world civilization’ on the one hand, and, on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation,” her work firmly links the very subject of the human sciences, “Man,” to empire.Footnote ⁴⁴

Scholarship in settler colonial theory, which has long been used to interrogate structures of colonialism in former British colonies such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, adds further nuance to these discussions of classification schema with relevance across the hemisphere. Drawing Latin America into discussions of settler colonialism and settler colonial science in US territories throws into relief the complexities, diversity, and overlapping histories of colonialism and imperialism in these different locations. In fact, the chapters in our book ultimately required engagement with various theories of colonialism and neocolonialism that have long been treated as applicable to separate contexts in North America, Latin America, and the Pacific. To that end, chapters focus not just on postcolonial nations like Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, but also territories of the formal US Empire such as Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, and the Akimel O’odham nation, which also variously claim sovereignty.

This hemispheric scope complicates the common sense of what we mean by colonial encounters and requires that we acknowledge how much there is to learn from Latin America, in particular, when held up to histories of British and British-derived settler colonialism.Footnote ⁴⁵ With its distinct local and regional histories and its large and in some places dense Indigenous populations, the region and its many nations bring distinct cases and conditions of domination and contestation to the table. Latin America has long been home to processes of colonialism and internal colonialism and its peoples have experienced the legacies of multiple empires, including pre-Columbian Indigenous empires as well as settler ones. These histories result in distinct experiences regarding, for example, the impact of Iberian versus British legal regimes on Indigenous rights.Footnote ⁴⁶

Recently, scholars have also made compelling arguments about the value of settler colonial theory for understanding Latin America, especially in the contexts of modern nation building, US imperialism, and global capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, insights from Latin American and Latin Americanist theorists inform our relational framework for studying the region and the US Empire. Such scholarship pushes back against the flattening effects of settler colonial theory, which sometimes reduces historical actors to settlers and non-settlers with little nuance. Many of the chapters engage an expanded corpus of scholarship on colonialism and Indigeneity, one that places theories such as settler colonialism in productive dialogue with theories of internal colonialism and coloniality, among others. Some also touch on Blackness in the Americas to better incorporate and engage case studies of human sciences research involving populations of African descent. In this way, the chapters herein focus on more than elimination or salvage and include themes of race, gender, labor, Mestizaje, acculturation, and nationalism.Footnote ⁴⁸

We highlight these overlapping histories of imperialism and colonialism with an eye to unique dynamics in local and national contexts. A notable consequence of earlier North Atlantic and settler colonial frameworks is that they have hindered the development of hemispheric discussions and theorizations of Indigeneity and Blackness in relation to multiple forms of colonialism. Moreover, different societies have varying timelines in terms of their colonial and imperial experiences. The end of European colonial rule in the “Latin” part of the Americas unfolded by and large in the nineteenth century, but the entire region eventually fell under US purview. Some societies have yet to break free from the yoke of colonialism and imperialism. This is especially true of US territories, all of which are at different junctures in their relationship with the United States.Footnote ⁴⁹ Long a subject of Latin American scholarly and political critique and more recently a focus of much Anglophone scholarship, the US Empire was forged in slavery and dispossession and shifted over time toward capital extraction and concentrated positions of military power, which by the twentieth century became global in their extent. Like other nations in the Western hemisphere, the territorial United States also had and has its own colonial subjects, including Indigenous peoples, emancipated slaves, and their descendants.Footnote ⁵⁰

While practically unknown among historians of the human sciences in the North Atlantic context, Latin American theorists of empire recognize Quijano’s critiques of the human sciences and their links to ongoing manifestations of colonialism. They also engage Wynter’s discussions of science in the construction of “Man” and the notion of the human to understand racism in the present. By analyzing encounters between human scientists and Black, Indigenous, and mixed communities, our book dialogues with these scholars and acknowledges that colonialism and coloniality are familiar frames for exploring uneven and violent encounters. For example, Quijano pointed out the contributions of Eurocentric knowledge production alongside shifting relations of production in the establishment and expansion of Iberian colonies. Natural philosophy and eventually science in the nineteenth century codified “the relations between conquering and conquered populations” and naturalized and ascribed to biological theories of race “hierarchical differences between the dominant and dominated,” ideas that persisted into the national period in Latin America.Footnote ⁵¹

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has taken these critiques yet further, proposing that an ethical coherence be applied in a practical decolonization of knowledge production in Latin American contexts, and that it be based on the Andean concept of ch’ixi (roughly: motley or mixed).Footnote ⁵² By critiquing the notion of hybridity and centering ch’ixi, Rivera Cusicanqui, writing as a person of double ancestry in a historically colonial context, refers to the experience of living with unreconciled and coexisting cultural differences that inform one’s identity and “antagonize and complement each other.” In her words, ch’ixi shapes epistemologies by constituting “a double and contentious ancestry, one that is denied by the process of acculturation and the ‘colonization of the imaginary’ but one that is also potentially harmonious and free if we liberate our half-Indian ancestry and develop dialogical forms for the construction of knowledge.”Footnote ⁵³ While Rivera Cusicanqui does not endorse a decolonial approach to knowledge, her scholarship informs how we interrogate and historicize different actors’ ways of perceiving and acting upon research in the human sciences when positioned through relationships understood as colonial.

Indigenous Studies and Postcolonial and Decolonial Histories

Mohegan writer, historian, and storyteller Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel has eloquently and forcefully articulated how, through various unethical research projects involving Indigenous communities in North America, “outside researchers have posed a real and constant threat.” She advises that “if we are ever to recover from these issues, the ethics of engagement call for serious consideration.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In conversation with Indigenous Studies scholars at a 2018 University of Washington workshop, we further expanded our consideration of decolonizing methodologies and recognized the need to diversify our list of contributing authors and our approaches. Among other things, we encouraged contributors to consider the questions at the heart of Māori education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work about who owns research, who designs it and carries it out, where research findings are disseminated, whose interests research serves, and who benefits from it.Footnote ⁵⁵

Since not all the chapters in this book directly address questions of Indigeneity to the same degree, we have encouraged a multiplicity of approaches to navigating the ethical, relational, political, epistemic, and reparative questions that decolonizing methodologies rightly center. We invited our authors, when possible, to ground their research in relationships with the communities whose contemporaries or ancestors appear in the pages of this book. When seeking authorization from communities has been feasible and authors have raised this possibility, we have encouraged it along with other forms of collaboration. However, we have also made the deliberate decision that this should not be a requirement of the book. In multi-sited studies that trace the travels of scientists across broad regions in the past, questions of scale and the sheer number of communities involved may make such practices impossible. In other chapters, authors focus on scientists who researched and discussed Indigenous communities in the abstract through data and statistical information, rather than engaging in direct relations with such populations.

Decolonizing methodologies, of course, entail far more than just reliance on authorizing strategies and are wider ranging than Smith’s guidelines. In her recent book on photography and the leper colony in Molokai, for example, Adria Imada advocates for an “ethics of restraint,” a strategy that reflects deeply on the subject position and responsibility of the researcher to accommodate the desire of some communities not to be contacted or subjected to an outsider’s gaze. Imada’s example does not avoid questions of ethics, accountability, and obligations, but rather makes them central to her research.Footnote ⁵⁶

Miranda Johnson’s recent article in History and Theory, likewise, questions to what degree Smith’s methods are uniformly applicable to different contexts. Johnson reads Smith’s work in the context of its production to understand its limitations and possibilities. She troubles tensions within Smith’s framework “between objectivity and intersubjectivity, on the one hand, and between essentialist identity and hybridity, on the other,” and asks why Smith’s methodology “hinges on dichotomizing nonindigenous and indigenous researchers, who are by turn constrained in a colonial present.”Footnote ⁵⁷ By historicizing Smith’s framing of decolonizing methodologies in relation to the characteristics and genealogies of Indigenous politics and engagement of history and anthropology in Aotearoa New Zealand in the late twentieth century and earlier, and by revisiting these ideas in relation to contemporary problems and historical justice movements, Johnson asks what other categories of historical actors and formulations of relationality might be possible within a decolonizing framework.Footnote ⁵⁸

More generally, historians of science have reflected productively on the differing uses and understandings of decolonizing methodologies in postcolonial and decolonial historical research. Sharing Warwick Anderson’s caution that attempting to cordon off postcolonial approaches from their decolonial counterparts “might limit the power, range, and agility of both,” this book’s contributions fall along a spectrum between postcolonial and decolonial historical analyses. They offer readers multiple models for centering and writing about, or refusing to write about, Indigenous peoples and other subaltern or colonized actors.Footnote ⁵⁹

Settler Australian scholars Timothy Neale’s and Emma Kowal’s recent discussion of decolonizing methodologies is especially helpful. Neale and Kowal identify postcolonial approaches as engaging in “epistemic decolonizing,” a practice in which historians and other scholars, having identified the origins of social inequalities between groups “in the domination of one episteme, or way of knowing, over others,” seek “more ‘horizontal’ relations between histories and knowers, or foster ‘a pluriverse’ of onto-epistemes.” They continue, “whatever the particular pathway, and many have been mapped, the ambition is to halt the domestication of othered subjects by first resisting their conceptual domination.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Such observations have also been made elsewhere, as in, for example, Achille Mbembe’s work on colonial vernaculars in African contexts.Footnote ⁶¹ These methods within postcolonial historical analysis have taken various forms,Footnote ⁶² but they have generally served to overturn and eliminate grand narratives of the rise of science by “provincializing science into one ‘indigenous knowledge tradition’ among others or assiduously drawing attention to hybridity and ‘contact zones’ in order to undercut the past, present or future supremacy of supposedly universal knowledge practices.”Footnote ⁶³ They thus reinforce what Anderson describes as the “‘unstable economy’ of science’s shifting spatialities as knowledge is transacted, translated, and transformed across the globe.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Neale and Kowal contrast these epistemic decolonizing practices with what they call “reparative decolonizing,” a decolonial approach that works “toward an explicitly material end: returning to Indigenous peoples the power and resources taken from them through (ongoing) colonialism.”Footnote ⁶⁵ In this approach, “the analysis of the West moves from being favored to becoming the central analytical strategy,” and the analysis itself serves a liberatory purpose.Footnote ⁶⁶ The works of Tuck and Yang, Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate scholar Kim TallBear, and Métis scholar Michelle Murphy are examples of this method. TallBear’s deliberate refusal to analyze Native Americans’ own views of DNA serves as “an explicitly ethical move from an explicitly situated place,” one that supports Indigenous governance of knowledge production by studying “the under-studied non-Indigenous actors who currently dominate that sphere.”Footnote ⁶⁷ TallBear provides a valuable provocation for troubling how we center ethics in the study of human science encounters.

Michelle Murphy’s intersectional interventions are also relevant here. Murphy views the main objective of her research as “the ‘dismantlement’ of colonial power,” and proposes “world-building” as an active complement to this process.Footnote ⁶⁸ She argues for

Murphy invokes the work of Frantz Fanon “as a starting point for a decolonial STS,” highlighting

Given that this book’s authors engage postcolonial and decolonial methods in different ways and to different ends, we believe the chapters provide valuable material for discussing how decolonizing methods should be conceptualized and incorporated into research on the history of encounters, ethics, and affect within the human sciences. Moreover, many chapters provide an opportunity to consider Neale and Kowal’s provocative, and from our vantage point problematic, assertion that “a reparative approach that centers Indigenous peoples’ politics and analytics while refusing to analyze Indigenous people and communities generates its own consequences and problems.”Footnote ⁷¹ Such an assertion would certainly generate discussion and potentially disagreement among our authors.

Overview of the Book

The book is divided into three groups of historical studies, in addition to this introduction, the conclusion, and epilogues. In the first section, three chapters reexamine interactions between people and subjectivities in the field, with special attention to the affective dynamics of encounters on the part of both scientists and Indigenous human subjects and informants. The first chapter in this section, by Julia E. Rodriguez, rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion in the late nineteenth-century Indigenous lands of Southern Argentina. Rodriguez reads scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

Next, Adam Warren takes the reader to witness micro encounters engendered by the Yale Peruvian Expedition, exploring via textual and photographic evidence the racial scientific research that formed the relationality that shaped encounters in Peru between expedition members and Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, some of whom served as the expedition’s workers and assistants. Warren questions how different groups imagined and contested the moral and ethical dimensions of such work. Drawing on the concept of ethnographic refusal in Indigenous Studies while also identifying other forms of engagement, Warren criticizes the univocal conception of moral fields as the possession of imperial researchers but not of Indigenous and Mestizo people subjected to their gaze.

Like Rodriguez and Warren, Sebastián Gil-Riaño’s chapter turns to unexplored dimensions of contact in the field between distinct actors, interrogating a little-known story of Indigenous child abduction in twentieth-century Paraguay. Gil-Riaño uses his case to explore the underside of antiracist, redemptive stories of cultural assimilation that circulated in cosmopolitan institutions like UNESCO, arguing that these liberal ideas were in fact congruent with other instances of material and cultural decimation. As an examination of the scientific effacement of settler colonial violence, Gil-Riaño’s study of forced child removal and its role in the human sciences captures the affective complexities that accompanied these violent encounters.

The second section turns toward institutions located within the United States Empire and the settler colonial logics that shaped encounters between researchers and research subjects within their walls. In many respects, what these three chapters interrogate is how settler colonialism operates within science. Moreover, they demonstrate how the normative practices of settler colonial science sought to deny and discipline Indigenous and racial differences and thereby created patterns of agency, endurance, and refusal.

In her study of settler colonial social science in action in the territory of Hawaiʻi, Maile Arvin calls attention explicitly to the way American social sciences shored up white supremacist imperial domination of the islands. What colonial authorities of the United States Empire construed as rehabilitative and objective truths about and applied to Native Hawaiians and immigrants of color, Arvin, focusing on the fertile ground of settler training schools, shows to be tools of domination that abetted countering and enduring patterns of resistance to the structure of Hawaiian settler colonialism.

Alberto Ortiz Díaz, meanwhile, shows how similar logics played out in mid twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Ortiz Díaz argues that human sciences researchers faced pressure to abandon earlier traditions and embrace the methods and biomedical enterprise of the US Empire’s scientific modernity. Drawing on the history of mental testing and inmate assessment as well as designs for a new penitentiary, Ortiz Díaz contends that while mid twentieth-century American social science engaged in intense processes of othering that aligned with imperial expansion, Puerto Rican social scientists combined American psychometrics with older Spanish ethnographic traditions that powerfully resurfaced in the 1940s. This resulted in a blended, “creole” nationalist science with decolonial aspirations, but one that was colonial-populist in practice.

In both cases, Arvin and Ortiz Díaz show that while settler colonial science informed and exemplified attitudes about what “civilizing,” disciplining, and reforming dominated subjects required, it bore signs of local inflections. Laura Stark adds to these deliberations by looking at boundary making in the Americas – scientific, bioethical, and racial. She leverages the provocative case of the National Institutes of Health and the surprising trajectory of one so-called normal research subject, Carolyn Matthews. Troubling Matthews’s vernacular archive, Stark shows that over the course of a life spent participating in scientific research as an experimental subject and a technician gathering human subjects’ data, Matthews acquired a new bioethical awareness. Yet, Mathews’s time spent as an x-ray technician in a field study involving the Akimel O’odham tribe in the Sonoran desert, which was predicated on past and present US racist imperialism, did not form part of her reflections and criticisms. Stark asks whether Matthews’s example shows state settler power operating through and with science, and in a compelling twist, emphasizes in her essay that bioethics was itself a product of the settler state project.

Themes of affective relationality and the colonial logics of science – settler, internal, or otherwise – bring issues of governance, politics, and self-determination to the foreground. The three studies in this book’s third section show that self-determination needs to be interrogated beyond the work and experiences of history’s subjects to include political contexts and desires for sovereignty. Analyzing the public controversy in Mexico over “Cuauhtémoc’s Bones,” a set of human remains that were discovered alongside other objects under the floor of a church in rural Ixcateopan, Guerrero, in 1949 and that villagers and some scientists attributed to the last Aztec emperor, Cuauhtémoc, Karin Rosemblatt problematizes how locals came to engage the human sciences and how they, alongside members of the scientific community sent to examine the remains and political officials, debated the discovery’s significance at the local and national levels. Rosemblatt argues that the rich tensions in her story resulted from conflicts over gender, sexuality, and scientific authority and a specific vision of Mexico at the national level, which favored “a whitened, cosmopolitan, masculine identity and was unconcerned with the needs or histories of villages like Ixcateopan.” Locals, however, articulated alternative forms of nationalism.

Navigating a transnational framework rather than a national one, Eve Buckley engages the local and the global to look at how formative years spent living alongside impoverished Black and mixed-race populations in the northeast of Brazil shaped Brazilian scientist Josué de Castro’s critiques of overpopulation discourse and the eugenicist, neo-Malthusian arguments advanced by North American conservationist William Vogt. Through his book, The Geography of Hunger, and subsequent writings and correspondence, de Castro articulated a radically different vision of resource scarcity, hunger, population growth, and development that was grounded in relationality and a critique of economic systems. Buckley observes that these decisions were inherently political ones in a context where wealthy nations deployed the tools and expertise of the human sciences, often through a racial lens, to inform ideas about global security, modernization, development, and governance. De Castro proved more than able to turn the tools of human science around to challenge naturalistic arguments about scarcity.

Rosanna Dent’s chapter examines not only how the Brazilian government has regulated researchers’ access to Indigenous peoples through webs of bureaucratic oversight, but also how a particular Indigenous community in Brazil, A’uwẽ (Xavante) of the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Territory, has constructed its own frameworks and protocols for engaging outsiders. Dent argues that Brazilian state regulatory systems, which were intended to protect Indigenous interests, resulted in new forms of risk for them. As some contemporary geneticists seek ethical workarounds to avoid Brazil’s bureaucracy, they use old biosamples created under prior ethical regimes. Indigenous peoples, in turn, find themselves in what she describes as a bureaucratic double bind, one in which non-Indigenous experts are inevitably “called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the [Brazilian] state.” Dent shows that by establishing their own relationship-based practices for engaging outsiders, A’uwẽ navigate the possessive logics of both the state and researchers in ways that further their sovereignty.

Conclusion

Reflecting on encounters in the ways outlined in this chapter should in no way abet reactionary anti-scientism or challenge claims to expertise in the United States and elsewhere. Our concern is to gain insight into the colonial structures and tangled, complex encounters that have shaped research in the human sciences – for indeed they did. That concern, ethical in its frame of reference, does not end with the book’s historical case studies. We argue that its subject matter presents an ongoing challenge for historians of the human sciences now and in the future as they write about encounters. The difficulty of doing so stems not just from guiding logics that have informed approaches within the history of the human sciences, but also from the way research scientists have customarily written about encounters, their adherence to protocols, and their own understanding of ethics and what ought to be said.

This challenge can be seen clearly in a 2020 article in Nature and its related New York Times op-ed, both of which discussed new findings on the genetic history and population size of pre-contact Caribbean peoples and their relations to contemporary Caribbean islanders. In the op-ed, geneticist David Reich and sociologist Orlando Patterson characterized research for the project as having been carried out “in collaboration with Caribbean scholars, with permission from Caribbean governments and institutions and in consultation with Caribbean people of Indigenous descent.”Footnote ⁷² Likewise, the research article in Nature directs readers to a broader discussion of ethics in a supplementary information section, having noted that results of DNA analysis performed on ancient skeletal remains “were discussed before submission with members of Indigenous communities who trace their legacy to the pre-contact Caribbean and their feedback was incorporated.”Footnote ⁷³ The supplementary section, however, mentions not a single community or individual specifically identified as claiming such a legacy. Instead, it lists the museum officials and representatives of other institutions who granted permission for analysis of skeletal remains in their custody. How was the feedback of communities of Indigenous descent sought, heard, and incorporated? What did this collaboration look like? Who was considered a legitimate interlocutor? The statements caution that genetic data “are a form of knowledge that contributes to understanding the past; they co-exist with oral traditions and other Indigenous knowledge,” and that genetic ancestry “should not be conflated with perceptions of identity, which cannot be defined by genetics alone.” In this sense, the researchers may have provided clues for answering these questions and suggest their respect for Indigenous epistemologies.Footnote ⁷⁴

While the editors of Empire, Colonialism, and the Human Sciences have no doubt that the authors of the study went to significant lengths to engage Indigenous communities, the form by which this protocol is communicated may leave the more critical reader to wonder about that which is always left unsaid, regardless of who does the narrating. It is time for historians to interrogate these encounters in depth, and in ways that attend to multiple voices, as we reconstruct the broader trajectory of the human sciences.