Knowledge and Empire

Both of these books explore the relationship between the production of knowledge in the humanities and/or social sciences and the projection of American power abroad. Both raise important political and, for Price, moral questions about how intellectual work produced in educational institutions in the United States contributes to oppressive global agendas by an “imperial” hegemon. While one is uncompromisingly critical of the behavior of many American anthropologists, the other prefers building an analytical framework to situate his subjects to passing harsh moral judgment on them. Salvatore's book analyzes the trajectories of five U.S. scholars in elite institutions who “rediscovered” South America in the early twentieth century. He charts the work of archeologist Hiram Bingham (Yale), historian Clarence Haring (Harvard), political scientist Leo Rowe (University of Pennsylvania), geographer Isaiah Bowman (Johns Hopkins), and sociologist Edward Ross (Wisconsin). Salvatore argues that their collective efforts rendered the region more “legible” and accessible to American diplomatic, economic, and cultural exchange and hegemonic control. All were not driven by broader foreign policy aims. Some though not all were actively engaged in politics. Bingham, who led the Yale Peruvian Expedition that pillaged the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu (“discovered” thanks to the local knowledge of an Indian guide) was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and Kodak and only entered politics after leaving academia in 1924. Haring was “fully devoted to the development of the field of Hispanic American history,” though he did represent the U.S. at various international conferences and gathered intelligence for the Council on Foreign Relations (44). Rowe, by contrast, was a “top-level U.S. representative in the field of inter-American cooperation” (50). He moved from positions in colonial government in Puerto Rico and Panama to serve as the head of the Pan-American Union. In that capacity, he argued for transforming the Monroe Doctrine that, he felt, had been twisted into an instrument of American domination, seeing it instead as a multilateral policy of continental self-defense (215). Bowman served in the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, secured funding for the first issues of Foreign Affairs, was science advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and was Vice President of the National Academy of Sciences. Ross was a progressive thinker strongly opposed to social and racial oppression in Andean South America, travelling the world in search of the basic organizing patterns of societies. In sum, while some these scholars did little more than draw inspiration from the growing interest in South America in the United States in the early twentieth century, others actively put their knowledge at the service of the state and corporate interests, contributing to Pan-Americanism and later to Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy of the early 1930s.

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