Ángel Rodríguez (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School), “The Ecology of Scientific Expeditions: Vestiges of the Health and Human Sciences from Quiriguia, 1880-1935”
Abstract: This article is about Quirigua, the ancient Mayan city located in the Motagua Valley of eastern Guatemala. It tells the layered story of its discovery as an outcome of scientific expeditions during the late-19th and early 20th-century. Specifically, this history examines three expeditionary efforts to Quirigua led by Harvard affiliated scientists in Archeology, Anthropology, and Tropical Medicine.
What is an expedition? How is it an activity or accomplishment in anthropology and medical science? How do we assess the specimens, publications, and other knowledge products as they circulated or remained in the library, museum, and laboratory? Ecology, for the purposes of this paper, serves as the organizing principle to tether these expeditions to the environment, disease patterns, indigenous culture, political economy, and international development across the region under study. This analytical framework allows us to retreat from the duality of Empire and Colony, center-periphery, or a postcolonial “theory” from below. The objective here is to focus on the connection between two sites--Harvard and Quirigua-- by acknowledging my own participation in a long genealogy of scholars to do so.
Comment by Lee Baker, Duke University
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