Regímenes e instrumentos de medición: Las medidas de los cuerpos y del territorio nacional en el siglo XIX en México.

Abstract

Today, we live in a quantified world made out of physical and social measurements, administered by states and sciences, based upon the implicit assumption that numerical measures ensure the elimination of the peculiarities and the whims of those who measure and of that which is measured. But, how is it possible for corporal experience and spaces to be classified into precisely-measured standards? and, how is it that they define our ailments, that which we possess, and even what we are? In this paper, I inquire into the modern compulsion to quantify bodies and territorial extensions, by focusing on the knowledge and instruments of physicians at the National Academy of Medicine, and by juxtaposing them with those of engineers involved in surveying missions that mapped Mexico’s national territory. The measuring carried out by physicians and engineers cannot be isolated from the instruments that produce the measurements that medical diagnoses or topographies and plans demand; instruments seem as depositaries of precision and standardization. Their practices reveal that measuring does not begin nor end up in a cold, instrumental, mathematical mechanism, but rather in preconcieved norms, corporal disciplines and local knowledge giving all measurements a political face, and reflecting the values of the epoch and place that produced them. Here, we study the national project designed to control and administrate corporal, cultural differences and hierarchies, in a homogeneous national history and territory.