'Which in European races is characteristic of the castrate and eunuchoid conditions’: Indigenous Body Hair Studies in Chile, 1933–1946

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

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.