Development and the “Indian Problem” in the Cold War Andes:Indigenismo, Science, and Modernization in the Making of the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos

Developing selves: photography, Cold War science and ‘backwards’ people in the Peruvian Andes, 1951–1966

“…Intensified efforts of Comintern, the establishment of Radio Moscow in Lima broadcasting stories on Soviet development projects in the Quechua language, and the inspiration of revolutionary activities elsewhere in Latin America facilitated the global reach of the Cold War into Peru. 15 As I have discussed elsewhere (Pribilsky 2009), the CPP by contrast operated under an assumption that indigenous Vicosinos were undeveloped natural capitalists: fundamentally entrepreneurial in outlook, individuated selves -in short, an unrealised homo economicus. Writings by Peruvian anthropologists lauding the resilience of indigenous values such as intrahousehold reciprocity (rantin) and communal labour (minka) carried more than a whiff of an unacceptable primitive communism.…”

Un dispositivo temporal: desastres y la articulación de la (des)aceleración en y más allá del terremoto de Ancash de 1970

“…Like many disaster aid endeavors that are coined and created by asymmetrical global power relations, the support was characterized by specific chronopolitics of "humanitarian government" that precluded the "victims" to deal with the present that often lay or was explained to lay in the past (e.g. impoverishment caused by colonialism) and dependencies that lasted long into the future 60 .…”

Utopian Conservation: Scientific Humanism, Evolution, and Island Imaginaries on the Galápagos Islands

“…Most notably, in Vicos, an indigenous peasant community in the Peruvian highlands, a score of Cornell anthropologists implemented programs in health care, education, and agriculture to, at once, address the long-standing “Indian problem” (of indigenous people resisting state assimilation) and provide a political alternative to communism (Ross 2005). While in fact embedded in a larger geography of Andean land use and trade, Vicos was understood as isolate, so that it could offer “an unprecedented opportunity to create scientific conditions in the field that would approximate a laboratory setting” (Pribilsky 2009, 421). If in Vicos US scholars advanced the capitalist logic of modernization theory (Ross 2005), Dodd in the Galápagos instead relied on the belief in the all-encompassing power of the scientific method to solve societal issues and thus to elevate humankind above religion and politics: “This philosophy of life leaves [the colonists] free to practice the best of Christian brotherly love, or Moslem acceptance of what man cannot modify, or Socialist sharing of the means of production, or democratic equality of opportunity for all men, or American faith in progress for those who try it” (Dodd n.d., 6).…”