This dissertation project focuses on interwar Chile to understand the dynamic relationship between Catholicism, gender and eugenics in Latin America. Historians of science often argue that eugenics (efforts to improve the proportion of positve traits in human populations by selective breeding) was distasteful to most Latin Americans, scientists and laymen, because of their Catholic identities. However, using a variety of scientific pamphlets, ephemera, treatises and instruction materials, this project will illuminate how Latin American Catholics engaged eugenic science. Latin Americans, Chileans included, generally latched on to the Lamarckian contention that creating a eugenic environment would gradually improve populations over time, rather than encouraging the separation of unfit individuals from the rest of society.
The intellectual merit of this project lies in its focus on the complicated relationship between science and religion in Chile. This relationship has been studied in the United States and Europe, but this is not true of the Latin American case. Many historians overlook Latin America as a place of scientific innovation precisely because of its religious identity. The result of this has been the relative dearth of scholarly work on the history of science in Latin America, particularly science practiced by Latin Americans without the intervention of Europeans or Americans. Scholars who do discuss Latin American science often portray it as flawed or derivative. This project, however, will treat Chilean eugenics as legitimate. This approach will better historiographically link Chilean eugenics to literature on the relationship between religion and science in North Atlantic countries.
The broader impact of this project will be an examination of the power scientific discourse had in the creation of Latin American interwar gender norms. Both religious and secular Chileans shored up notions of modernized, patriarchal gender systems that emphasized the role of women as wives and mothers through the use of eugenic discourse. This allows for the exploration of how both Catholicism and modernized patriarchy affected the development of eugenic science in Latin America.
This project was funded by way of NSF's Science, Technology and Society Program.
This dissertation project, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Science and Society Program, focuses on Chile between 1900 and 1950 to understand the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and science in Latin America by studying eugenics. Eugenics, or the study of how to improve the human species through breeding techniques, was considered to be distasteful to most Latin Americans, scientists and laymen, because of their Catholic identities. However, using a variety of scientific pamphlets, ephemera, treatises and instruction materials, my dissertation illuminates how Latin American Catholics engaged eugenic science. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its focus on the complicated relationship between science and religion in Chile. This relationship has been studied in the United States and Europe, but this is not true of the Latin American case. Many historians overlook Latin America as a place of scientific innovation precisely because of its religious identity. The result of this has been the relative lack of scholarly work on the history of science in Latin America, particularly science practiced by Latin Americans without the intervention of Europeans or Americans. This project treats Chilean eugenics as legitimate, despite the ways in which it was inflected with religious thought. I show that Chilean intellectuals dialoged with the global scientific community even as they embraced religious views. The broader impact of this project will be a more nuanced look at the relationship between religion and science. Specifically, my work shows how Catholicism actually inspired certain types of scientific discourse and experimentation. This will affect how historians look at science practiced in Latin America and elsewhere. It opens up the history of science to a variety of new approaches and speaks to the variegated nature of scientific practice. Over the course of the research period (August 2010 – May 2011), I used the archival collections at the Biblioteca Nacional and the Facultad de Medicina at the Universidad de Chile. In these locations, I reviewed books, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets all related to the issue of public health and eugenics. Using these items, I identified a small circle of intellectuals who wrote about the issue of eugenics. Some of these individuals included: Waldemar E. Coutts (Director of the Health Ministry), Bernardo Gentilini (Catholic writer), Lucas Sierra (long time government doctor) and Amanda Labarca (public intellectual and feminist). Focusing on the publications of these individuals over the course of the first half of the twentieth century showed that they were all equally concerned with reorganizing and modernizing the Chilean social structure. What was most compelling was that while Catholic actors favored a moral code influenced by religious customs, secular actors were equally interested in creating a social structure based on morality. Upon completing my research in May 2011, my findings support these conclusions. I have now surveyed over a thousand different types of documents which demonstrate that Chilean intellectuals, both secular and religious, were equally involved in the creation of a new scientific discipline. Analyzing this data, I have outlined the entirety of my dissertation. I also completed a chapter of my dissertation in December 2011.
