Light Beyond Modernity's Long Shadow: Social and Medical Science in the Making of the 'State' of Guatemala, 1871-1900
type: CreativeWork
description: The present investigation situates late-nineteenth-century Guatemala’s nation-state building project in a broad nexus of Atlantic-World intellectual, medical, and political movements fusing the art of governance to the sciences of nature and humankind; and statesmen, to the ideas, understandings, methodologies, solutions and outcomes they promised. Racial and cultural criteria had long been primary determinants of social status, power, and privilege in colonial and early-Republican Guatemala. However, transnational debates over the meaning behind the concept of race and ever-evolving notions of culture emerged with renewed vigor after mid-century in historical interpretations of the national past, and to serve as a prism for prognosticating the nation’s future. Once combined in a single analysis, they functioned as a meta-language – a discursive bridge connecting disparate phenomena, temporally and spatially. During the processes of analysis and representation, the biases and prejudices of authors originating from within and beyond the national frontier were translated into the language of science in terms of dissimilar states of being human and being in civilization. Biological, and even more so, psychological and sociological diversity, became increasingly associated with fluid ideas surrounding national-level racial and cultural distinctions amongst separate nations in works produced by writers in the United States and Great Britain. Guatemalan authors tended to downplay the significance of race by focusing more intently on reifying the meaning of cultural differences between ‘Indians’ versus ‘Ladinos’ inhabiting the national space. Professional scholars laboring in history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, sociology and political science variously associated national-level differences with atomization at a time when contemporary philosophies of governance throughout the Americas and Europe aimed for coalescence, cohesion, and collective collaboration to a…
abstract: The present investigation situates late-nineteenth-century Guatemala’s nation-state building project in a broad nexus of Atlantic-World intellectual, medical, and political movements fusing the art of governance to the sciences of nature and humankind; and statesmen, to the ideas, understandings, methodologies, solutions and outcomes they promised. Racial and cultural criteria had long been primary determinants of social status, power, and privilege in colonial and early-Republican Guatemala. However, transnational debates over the meaning behind the concept of race and ever-evolving notions of culture emerged with renewed vigor after mid-century in historical interpretations of the national past, and to serve as a prism for prognosticating the nation’s future. Once combined in a single analysis, they functioned as a meta-language – a discursive bridge connecting disparate phenomena, temporally and spatially. During the processes of analysis and representation, the biases and prejudices of authors originating from within and beyond the national frontier were translated into the language of science in terms of dissimilar states of being human and being in civilization. Biological, and even more so, psychological and sociological diversity, became increasingly associated with fluid ideas surrounding national-level racial and cultural distinctions amongst separate nations in works produced by writers in the United States and Great Britain. Guatemalan authors tended to downplay the significance of race by focusing more intently on reifying the meaning of cultural differences between ‘Indians’ versus ‘Ladinos’ inhabiting the national space. Professional scholars laboring in history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, sociology and political science variously associated national-level differences with atomization at a time when contemporary philosophies of governance throughout the Americas and Europe aimed for coalescence, cohesion, and collective collaboration to a…
author: Mangraviti, Max
language: en
keywords: Guatemala, Indian, Maya, Medicine, Public Health, Science
date published: 2020
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:56:11Z
provider: University of Arizona
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Arizona.

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/641754