Excavating Americanism

In 1875, naturalists, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and ethnologists gathered for the first meeting of the International Congress of Americanists. Animated not by quests for gold or forced labor, Americanists convened with the common goal of unearthing knowledge about the fundamental nature of humankind. They set off for Latin American field sites, where objects, scientists, and informants would inspire field-changing developments in scientific discourse and come to define modern cultural anthropological inquiry. Following their evidence trails across Latin America, historian Julia E. Rodriguez uncovers the history of Americanism as an area of study and illustrates how it shaped our understanding of the hemisphere. Rodriguez examines scientific publications from this era, field notes, and archival material from eight countries in Europe and the Americas. She reveals the complex aims and ambiguous outcomes of Americanist science, including the legitimization of, and challenges to, existing ideas about race, comparative civilizations, as well as the status and personhood of Indigenous peoples. By exposing the increasingly local and embedded nature of Americanist science, Excavating Americanism challenges the accepted North Atlantic narrative about the history of anthropology and demonstrates Latin America’s central role in the development of anthropological methodologies and concepts taken for granted today.