“‘Which in European races is characteristic of the castrate and eunuchoid conditions’: Indigenous Body Hair Studies in Chile, 1933–1946”
|
Date:
|
May 1, 2012
|
|
Time:
|
12:00 to 1:00 p.m.
|
|
Location:
|
CHF
315 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106 |
| Event Type: |
Open to the Public |
|
Fee:
|
Free
|
A talk by Kurt MacMillan
Population research and comparative analyses of race were a notable trend in Chilean science during the 1930s and 1940s. Scientists, intellectuals, and technocrats aimed at taking stock of the national body as a means of defining public policy during the Popular Front era. Many of these studies focused on the Mapuches, a large indigenous population inhabiting Chile’s southern frontier, which had been conquered in the late nineteenth century, long after the Spanish colonial era. On the edge of this borderland the newly established University of Concepción recruited European faculty to lead modern scientific programs in physiology, histology, and pathological anatomy. As agents of modernization, these scientists approached the Mapuches and other indigenous groups as objects of study. In this lecture MacMillan traces the genealogy and movement of a constitutional discourse on body hair used to classify the Mapuches and the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego during the 1930s and 1940s. This discourse originated in European sex endocrinology of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly in the work of Alexander Lipschütz and Gregorio Marañón. Lipschütz’s relocation to the University of Concepción in 1926 led to the introduction of body-hair typologies in southern Chile. Their translation from Europe to Latin America produced analogies between sexualized and racialized bodies in the two regions. MacMillan illustrates how body-hair studies developed at the intersection of national politics and transnational scientific cultures to shape the “indigenous question” in mid-twentieth-century Chile.
Kurt MacMillan is a dissertation writing fellow at the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds minors in critical theory and women’s studies at Irvine. He completed a B.A. in history at Rutgers–New Brunswick in 2002 and worked for several years at the Princeton University Art Museum before beginning graduate studies. His dissertation, “Hormonal Bodies: A Transregional History of Sex and Race in Constitutional Medicine, 1911–1965,” examines the scientific research and transnational connections of three doctors from Spain, Ecuador, and Chile who drew on constitutional medicine as a means of studying socially marginal individuals and populations in their respective countries.
About Brown Bag Lectures
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.
For more information, please call 215.873.8289, or e-mail bbl@chemheritage.org.
Register for an event link