Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860–1910)

Abstract

Ashley Elizabeth Kerr's monograph examines racial science, Indigenous peoples, and nation building in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentina through the lens of gender. As she notes, this period of Argentine history has been studied by many scholars and from many different angles. Kerr contributes to this existing literature through her multifaceted focus on gender, which she argues has been largely absent in previous scholarship and prompts a reevaluation of the scientists and literary authors whose work she highlights. Kerr compellingly demonstrates the value of gender analysis here, and although the book contains some missed opportunities in terms of engagement with existing scholarship, it makes a valuable contribution to the field that will interest historians and literary scholars alike.Some particularly strong analytical cases here include Kerr's examination in chapter 2 of Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, in which she offers a thought-provoking reading of Carmen, the Indigenous woman tasked with communicating with Mansilla during his negotiations with cacique Mariano Rosas. Kerr reads Mansilla against the grain to argue that Carmen actively used her own gender positionality to manipulate Mansilla, even as he thought that he was manipulating her. Likewise, Kerr's discussion of both the Sociedad de Beneficencia's efforts to distribute Indigenous women and children among wealthy Argentine families after the Conquest of the Desert and the Catholic Church's proposal for Indigenous boarding schools underlines not only the importance of gender in understanding Argentine ideas about race and nation in this period but also Argentina's provocative connections to similar experiences faced by Indigenous peoples elsewhere. In addition, Kerr's analysis of the photographs taken by Samuel Boote (images of Indigenous peoples in captivity during the 1880s) challenges readers to consider the silences and unanswered questions at which the photographs hint. She argues that even if many of these questions cannot be answered, they are nonetheless important to ask because they reveal “a strong historical bias against the details of women's lives and the intimate aspects of history” (p. 93). Finally, analysis of masculinity is perhaps the most powerful part of this book, not least because most of the available sources were written by men. Kerr effectively deconstructs what it meant to be a man (including as citizens and as scientists), as well as men's views of women's roles in creole and Indigenous society. In dialogue with her analysis of women authors like Florence Dixie and Eduarda Mansilla, Kerr reads her male-authored texts against the grain in search of women's agency, often to great effect.Kerr's interesting and wide-ranging study also contains some missed opportunities. Some of the assertions that Kerr makes about existing scholarship overlook research that could have contributed to her own analysis. She argues, for instance, that many historians “have tended to accept nineteenth-century scientific productions and first-person observations at face value, often citing the very texts they have needed to interrogate” (p. 10). This statement seems to ignore the work of ethnohistorians, historians of science, and others who have read these texts critically and whose work could in fact support Kerr's arguments. Similarly, Kerr suggests that existing scholarship has been caught in a false “dichotomy between [understanding nineteenth-century anthropology as] heroic science and genocide,” which discounts the work of historians and cultural studies scholars who have examined the moral complexities of nineteenth-century anthropology (p. 68). Kerr's contribution to the field speaks for itself, and these statements unfortunately distract from the value of her arguments. The absence from the book of scholarship that could support its arguments and even help to answer some of the questions posed as rhetorical (including the work of Axel Lazzari, Ana Ramos, and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, among many others) perhaps simply reflects a difference of disciplinary approach and certainly is a perennial challenge for interdisciplinary scholarship.Kerr's book compellingly demonstrates the presence and importance of women as actors in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions about racial science, Indigenous peoples, and national belonging in Argentina. She also makes clear that gender-based analysis of these historical developments, as well as some of the key literary texts that helped shape these events, is fruitful for generating new questions and insight. This book will be valuable to historians and literary scholars of Argentina, as well as to other scholars interested in gender, race, and Indigeneity in other settings.