A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing

Abstract

What do a petroleum geologist from Standard Oil, a market researcher from the J. Walter Thompson Company, National Geographic magazine, and the late historian of Latin America Lewis Hanke have in common? All served the construction of an informal empire based on the development of scientific, commercial, popular, and scholarly knowledge of South America. It is a provocative thesis: while many progressive U.S. scholars and their Latin American colleagues argue passionately that U.S. policy toward the region long suffered from a lack of knowledge about it, Ricardo Salvatore argues that those who studied and traveled to Latin America were essential to the development of informal imperial rule. Mark Berger made a similar argument, showing how the ideology of liberalism in Latin American studies complemented U.S. interventions, especially in Central America.1 Going beyond Berger, who did not assign to scholarship a causal role, Salvatore sees the knowledge industry driving the creation of hegemony. He is interested not only in academics but in the many sectors of U.S. society involved in collecting, interpreting, and distributing representations of Latin America. Applying theories drawn from Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and others, Salvatore examines the discursive construction of South America by U.S. citizens. Like many Latin Americanists from North and South working today, Salvatore finds dependency theory and nationalistic narratives portraying Latin Americans as perpetual victims too limited, ignoring the rich potential of cultural analyses and ignoring Latin American agency.2 The reductionist focus on the pursuit of profit at the heart of some revisionist interpretations presented a one-way movement of capital, technology, merchandise, and military force from the North American center into the Latin American periphery. Salvatore believes this approach leaves out the information produced and disseminated by travel writers, journalists, museum curators, scientists, and scholars.