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Becoming an Area Expert During the Cold War: Americanism and Lusotropicalismo in the Transnational Career of Anthropologist Charles Wagley, 1939–1971

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Cold War Social Science

Abstract

This chapter examines how US anthropologist Charles Wagley became an area expert during the Cold War. It tracks key moments from his fieldwork in Brazil during the 1940s and his involvement with the institutionalization of area studies programs in the US during the 1950s, which benefitted from the expanded funding for area studies research from US philanthropies and government agencies. Wagley also developed ambitious hemispheric analyses that moved beyond Brazil and considered the Americas more broadly. Yet Wagley’s Cold War career cannot be reduced to US geopolitical interests alone. By following Wagley through pivotal moments in his career, this chapter shows how Cold War area studies expertise emerged from pre-existing intellectual networks and engagement with viewpoints rooted in contexts beyond the US. In particular, Wagley relied on close links to the transnational field of Americanist anthropology. He also embraced the Lusotropicalist discourse of Brazilian intellectuals and elites.

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Change history

  • 19 June 2021

    There was a typo error in the Chapter title. Lustropicalismo has been changed to Lusotropicalismo. The chapter has been now corrected.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Charles Wagley and Marvin K. Harris, Minorities in the New World: Six Case Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 289.

  2. 2.

    See Louis Wirth, “Morale and Minority Groups,” American Journal of Sociology 47, no. 3 (1941): 415–33. Wirth’s formulation of minority groups was also important to UNESCO’s anti-racist work. See Sebastián Gil-Riaño, “Relocating anti-racist science: the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race and economic development in the global South,” The British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 2 (2018): 281–303.

  3. 3.

    Wagley and Harris, Minorities, p. xi.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., p. ix.

  5. 5.

    Charles Wagley, Area Research and Training: a Conference Report on the study of world areas (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1948).

  6. 6.

    Richard Pace, “The legacy of Charles Wagley: an Introduction,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 9, no. 3 (2014): 597–602.

  7. 7.

    Joel Isaac, “The Human Sciences in Cold War America,” The Historical Journal 50 (2007): 725–46, p. 738.

  8. 8.

    Engerman, “Bernath Lecture,” p. 610.

  9. 9.

    Also see Matthew Farish, The Contours of America’s Cold War. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); David H. Price, Cold War Anthropology: the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

  10. 10.

    For other examples of scholarship that foreground the southern hemisphere see Raewyn Connell, Southern theory: the Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Cambridge: Polity, 2014); Warwick Anderson, “Racial conceptions in the global south.” Isis 105, no. 4 (2014): 782–92; Julia Rodriguez, “South Atlantic Crossings: Fingerprints, Science, and the State in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina,” The American Historical Review, Volume 109, no. 2 (1 April 2004): 387–416.

  11. 11.

    Timothy Mitchell, “Deterritorialization and the Crisis of Social Science,” 148–70 in Localizing Knowledge In a Globalizing World: Recasting the Area Studies Debate, ed. Ali Mirsepassi, Amrita Basu, and Frederick Stirton Weaver (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), p. 148; Karin Rosemblatt, “Mexican Anthropology and Inter-American Knowledge,” Latin American Research Review 53, no. 3 (2018): 581–96; also Ricardo Salvatore, Disciplinary conquest: U.S. scholars in South America, 1900–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

  12. 12.

    William Balée, “Charles Wagley on changes in Tupí-Guaraní kinship classifications.” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 9, no. 3 (2014): 645–59.

  13. 13.

    These biographical details are drawn from Pace, “The legacy of Charles Wagley,” pp. 603–4.

  14. 14.

    Arthur Ramos, A Aculturação Negra no Brasil (São Paulo: Co. Ed. Nacional, 1942).

  15. 15.

    Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville J. Herskovits “Memorandum for the study of acculturation,” American Anthropologist 38, no. 1 (1936): 149–52.

  16. 16.

    Charles Wagley, Welcome of Tears: The Tapirapé Indians of Central Brazil (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 4.

  17. 17.

    Wagley, Welcome, p. 4.

  18. 18.

    Christine Laurière, “La Société des Américanistes de Paris: Une Société Savante au Service de l’Américanisme,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 95, no. 95–2 (2009): 93–115.

  19. 19.

    Edgardo Krebs, “Alfred Metraux and The Handbook of South American Indians: A View From Within,” History of Anthropology Newsletter: Vol. 32: Iss. 1, Article 3. (2005) Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/han/vol32/iss1/3, accessed December 3, 2016.

  20. 20.

    Federico Bossert, “Alfred Métraux y la Utopía del Gran Chaco,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 102, no. 2 (2016): 25–44; Carolyne R. Larson, Our Indigenous Ancestors: Museum Anthropology and Nation-Making in Argentina, 1862–1943 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

  21. 21.

    Charles Wagley, “Alfred Métraux 1902–1963,” American Anthropologist 66 (1964): 603–13; p. 604.

  22. 22.

    Wagley, “Alfred Métraux,” p. 605.

  23. 23.

    Wagley, Welcome of Tears, p. 4.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p.4

  25. 25.

    Wagley, “Alfred Métraux,” p. 605.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., p. 605.

  27. 27.

    Wagley, Welcome, p. 6.

  28. 28.

    Ibid., p.6.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., p. 6.

  30. 30.

    p. 20.

  31. 31.

    Wagley, Welcome, pp. 11, 16.

  32. 32.

    Charles Wagley, “The Effects of Depopulation Upon Social Organization as Illustrated by the Tapirape Indians,” Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 3, no. 1 Series II (1940): 12–6.

  33. 33.

    Charles Wagley and Eduardo Enéas Galvão, The Tenetehara Indians of Brazil: A Culture In Transition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. vii.

  34. 34.

    For more on the purposes and aims of this Committee, see: U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs, Guide to the Inter-American Cultural Programs of Non-Government Agencies in the United States (Washington, D.C.: 1943), p. 135.

  35. 35.

    Wagley and Galvão, The Tenetehara, p. viii.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., p. viii.

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Charles Wagley, “Preface” in Amazon Town.

  39. 39.

    Marvin Harris, “Charles Wagley’s Contribution to Anthropology,” in Looking Through the Kaleidoscope: Essays in Honor of Charles Wagley, Florida Journal of Anthropology Special Publication, No. 6 (1990): 1–6, p. 1.

  40. 40.

    Harris, “Charles Wagley’s Contribution,” p. 2.

  41. 41.

    Richard Pace, “The legacy of Charles Wagley,” p. 605.

  42. 42.

    Wagley, Area Research, p. 39.

  43. 43.

    Julia Rodriguez, “No ‘mere accumulation of material’: Land as Evidence in Americanist Anthropology,” HSS Workshop Talk, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, February 19, 2018.

  44. 44.

    Laura Giraudo, “Neither ‘Scientific’ nor ‘Colonialist’ The Ambiguous Course of Inter-American Indigenismo in the 1940s,” Latin American Perspectives 39, no. 5 (2012): 12–32.

  45. 45.

    Giraudo, “Neither ‘Scientific’ nor ‘Colonialist’”.

  46. 46.

    “Correspondence to Charles Wagley from Antonio Goubaud C., October 29th, 1938,” Charles Wagley Papers Digital Collection, University Archives, George A. Smathers Libraries University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00103035/00001/citation?search=guatemala, accessed Feb 2020.

  47. 47.

    Harris, “Charles Wagley’s Contribution”, pp. 1–2.

  48. 48.

    Pace, “The legacy of Charles Wagley,” p. 605.

  49. 49.

    Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 8–48.

  50. 50.

    For an excellent account of the project, see Marcos Chor Maio and Magali Romero Sá, “Ciência na periferia: a Unesco, a proposta de criação do Instituto Internacional da Hiléia Amazônica e as origens do Inpa.” História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 6, suppl. (2000): 975–1017.

  51. 51.

    Charles Wagley, “A Social survey of an Amazon community with recommendations for future research,” (Paris, UNESCO, 1948), p. 4. Accessed October 8, 2019: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000153779.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., p. 4.

  53. 53.

    Ibid. p. 5.

  54. 54.

    Gilberto Freyre, The Masters And the Slaves (Casa Grande y Senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Knopf, 1964), p.13.

  55. 55.

    Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: the National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). For more recent work on the transnational impact of Lustropical thought, see Warwick Anderson, Ricardo Roque, and Ricardo Ventura Santos (eds.), Luso-Tropicalism and its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism (New York: Berghahn, 2019).

  56. 56.

    Charles Wagley, Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), p. 1.

  57. 57.

    Wagley, Amazon Town, p. 5.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 5.

  59. 59.

    See Per Wisselgren’s chapter in this volume for further insights on the DSS’ role in promoting internationalism in social science.

  60. 60.

    Charles Wagley, Race and Class in Rural Brazil, 2nd Ed. (New York: Unesco International Documents Service and Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 8.

  61. 61.

    Wagley, Amazon Town, p. 6.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., p. 7.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., p. 289.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., p. 292.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., p. 428.

  66. 66.

    The paper was re-published as Charles Wagley, “On the Concept of Social Race in the Americas,” in Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America: A Reader in the Social Anthropology of Middle and South America and the Caribbean, ed. Dwight B. Heath and Richard N. Adams (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 531–45.

  67. 67.

    Charles Wagley, “Plantation America: a Culture Sphere,” in Caribbean Studies: a Symposium [2d ed.], ed. Vera D. Rubin (Seattle: University of Washington, 1960), pp. 3–13.

  68. 68.

    Wagley and Harris, Minorities, p. 294.

  69. 69.

    Charles Wagley, An Introduction to Brazil, revised edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), p. xi.

  70. 70.

    Wagley, An Introduction, p. xi.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., p. 278.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., p. 278.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., p. 297.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., p. ix.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., p. 305.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., p. 312.

  77. 77.

    Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, “Modernization, Dependency, and the Global in Mexican Critiques of Anthropology,” Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (2014): 94–121.

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  1. Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Sebastián Gil-Riaño

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  1. Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Mark Solovey

  2. Science, Technology and Society Unit, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Christian Dayé

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Gil-Riaño, S. (2021). Becoming an Area Expert During the Cold War: Americanism and Lusotropicalismo in the Transnational Career of Anthropologist Charles Wagley, 1939–1971. In: Solovey, M., Dayé, C. (eds) Cold War Social Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70246-5_5

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