From Savagery To Sovereignty: Identity, Politics, and International Expositions of Argentine Anthropology (1878-1892)

From Savagery to Sovereignty: Identity, Politics,
and International Expositions of Argentine

Anthropology (1878–1892)
Ashley Kerr, University of Idaho
Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, Argentine intellectual elites turned

to world’s fairs as a place to contest myths of Latin American racial inferiority
and produce counternarratives of Argentine whiteness and modernity. This es-
say examines Argentine anthropological displays at three expositions between
1878 and 1892 to elucidate the mechanisms and reception of these projects.
Florentino Ameghino, Francisco Moreno, and others worked deliberately and
in conjunction with political authorities to erase the indigenous tribes from the
national identity, even while using their bodies and products to create prehis-
tory and garner intellectual legitimacy. Comparison of the three fairs also dem-
onstrates how the representation of Amer-Indians and their artifacts shifted
in accordance with local political needs and evolving international theories of
anthropogenesis. The resulting analysis argues for the importance of consider-
ing the former colonies of the Global South in understanding the development
of pre-twentieth-century anthropology and world’s fairs, particularly when sep
arating them from their imperial context.
I n May 1889, the Argentine politician and historian Gabriel Carrasco was stunned by his visit
to the Paris Universal Exposition, describing it in a letter to a friend as “an ocean in which the
imagination is bewildered and the senses exhausted,” so full of interesting objects that it was
impossible to comprehend fully.1 In addition to delighting visitors such as Carrasco, the riot of
colors, sounds, and novelties that characterized the nineteenth-century world’s fairs functioned
as symbolic projects of negotiating group identities and jockeying for relative position in the
hierarchy of mankind. Many European nations and the United States were able to build on
positive reputations and push imperial pretentions. Latin American countries, in contrast—no
longer colonies but still occupying peripheral positions in the minds of Europeans and locals
alike—used the fairs to grapple with issues of internal colonialism and respond to negative as-
Ashley Kerr is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Idaho. Her research examines the intersections of politics and
racial science in representations of indigenous peoples and Creoles in Latin America. Her book manuscript, “National Bodies,”
explores how anthropological understandings of gender and race defined citizenship in nineteenth-century Argentina. Depart-
ment of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho 83844, USA; akerr@uidaho.edu.
1
Gabriel Carrasco, Del Atlántico al Pacífico y un Argentino en Europa: Cartas de viaje (Buenos Aires: Casa Editora Jacobo Ple-
user, 1890), p. 240 (here and throughout the essay, translations into English are my own unless otherwise indicated).
Isis, volume 108, number 1. © 2017 by The History of Science Society.

All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2017/0108-0004$10.00.
62
Isis—Volume 108, Number 1, March 2017 63
sessments of the region’s racial makeup. This essay analyzes Argentine anthropological materi-
als at the 1878 and 1889 world’s fairs in Paris, as well as a planned, but failed, 1892 exhibition
within Argentina’s borders. I demonstrate the Euro-Argentine elite’s evolving use of the Amer-
Indian to attempt to cultivate a white, modern identity for the nation that would distinguish
it from other Latin American countries and permit it to enter the global capitalist system not
just as provider of raw materials but as cultural equal.2 Additionally, this study advocates for
including Latin America more fully in the history of science.3 While the imperial aspects of
both world’s fairs and the development of anthropology have been well established, analysis of
Argentina’s alternative uses of both suggests the fundamental importance of the study of the
Self and internal Others for discipline and exposition.
Scholars of international expositions such as George Stocking, Jr., Robert Rydell, Sadiah
Qureshi, Pascal Blanchard, Susan Brownell, Nancy Parezo, and Don Fowler have elucidated
the close ties between world’s fairs and anthropology, showing how they are built on mutually
reaffirming comparative frameworks. They have also demonstrated how hegemonic nations
used the comparative space of international exhibitions to demonstrate their cultural and eco-
nomic superiority while racially representing other peoples as inferior in ways that supported
contemporary imperial projects and prepared spaces for new ones.4 For example, although
itself a former settler colony, by the late nineteenth century the U.S. exhibits were oriented
toward demonstrating “the unqualified fitness of the white American ‘race’ to lead that march
[of Progress]” and to supporting expansionary foreign policies, Rydell’s so-called “visions of
empire.”5 Anthropology—including publicly and privately funded displays of bones and arti-
facts, international congresses, living exhibits, and entertainment exoticism—gave scientific
legitimacy to these projects and attracted large numbers of fairgoers. In the literature based on
the experiences of the United States and Europe, international expositions cannot be separated
from their imperialistic context.
In sharp contrast, Latin American nations did not incorporate imperialistic projects into
their displays, focusing instead on controlling undesirable portions of their own populations,
establishing control over internal territories, and counteracting international and domestic
concerns about their fitness. Commentary on the weakness of the Americas emerged shortly
2
Although I am aware that categories such as “white” and “Indian” are context-dependent social constructs that vary greatly
across time and space, I have chosen not to mark every use with quotation marks for better readability.
3
There has been a spike in publications in English about Latin American science in recent years, adding to our knowledge as
well as making ideas that have been available in Spanish for some time more widely accessible. These include the Isis Focus
section edited by Stuart McCook, “Global Currents in National Histories of Science: The ‘Global Turn’ and the History of Sci-
ence in Latin America,” Isis, 2013, 104(4); the special issue “Science and Medicine in Latin America” in Hispanic American
Historical Review, 2011, 91, edited by Julia Rodríguez and Ann Zulawski; and the collection edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da
Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes, Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014). Nonetheless, the region does not even have its own subheading under “Classification by
Geographical Area and Cultural Influence” in the most recent issue of the Isis Current Bibliography (2015).
4
The works exploring these connections take many disciplinary perspectives. For a representative sample see George W. Stock-
ing, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1982); Sadiah
Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. Chicago
Press, 2011); Pascal Blanchard, Gilles Boëtsch, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep, eds., Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage
(Paris: Arles, 2011); Blanchard et al., eds., Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Liverpool: Liver-
pool Univ. Press, 2008); Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the “Native” and the Making
of European Identities (London: Leicester Univ. Press, 1999); Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American
International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1984); Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler, Anthropology Goes
to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2007); and Susan Brownell, ed., The 1904
Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism (Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska Press, 2008).
5
Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair, p. 2; and Rydell, All the World’s a Fair.
64 Ashley Kerr From Savagery to Sovereignty
after the first encounters with Europe. From that point on, as Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has
shown, the advancement of the natural sciences, including astronomy, botany, and zoology,
was intimately tied to efforts to denigrate or defend the American land and people. In the mid-
eighteenth century, these critiques were given new life when George Louis Leclerc, comte de
Buffon, developed the first generalized theory of American inferiority by comparing the fauna
of the Old and New Worlds. As the concept of races as absolutely and biologically different,
inheritable, and hierarchically ranked emerged in the nineteenth century, the dispute of the
New World, as Antonello Gerbi calls it, took on new nuance.6 Comparative anatomy and an-
thropology were pressed into service to “prove” that lower races such as the American Indians
were destined to flounder or disappear altogether owing to natural and inescapable flaws in
their biology. In Spanish America, many intellectuals agreed with these assertions with regard
to blacks and Indians. However, the preponderance of racial mixing in the region meant that
Spanish-American intellectuals often found themselves victims of the same epistemological
system they used to justify the extermination or forced assimilation of the Amer-Indian tribes.
Postindependence, serious doubts about the Latin American republics’ ability to succeed
economically and politically were published in journals such as the Edinburgh Review and the
North American Review. The disorder in the region was often ascribed to biological factors, par-
ticularly the pernicious effects of miscegenation. In Democracy in America, for instance, Alexis
de Tocqueville blamed the Spanish inclination to mix with the natives for their former colo-
nies’ relative weakness in relation to the United States.7 Arthur de Gobineau, George Gliddon,
and Josiah Nott all argued that racial mixing could have disastrous results for a given popula-
tion, and the Scottish anatomist/ethnologist Robert Knox specifically dismissed the Hispanic
hybrid as a degenerate “monstrosity of nature.” These criticisms provoked serious anxieties
over identity among Latin American intellectuals, who agonized over how they should—and
could—be racially defined. As Domingo F. Sarmiento, the president of Argentina, reflected in
1883, “Are we European? —So many copper-colored faces refute us! Are we Indians? —Dis-
dainful smiles from our fair ladies give the only response. Mixed? No one wants to be it, and
there are thousands that will not want to be called either American or Argentine.”8
Given this context, Latin American intellectuals seized on the international exposition as
a fertile space from which to construct and project identities that addressed these concerns.
Unlike the United States or Europe, which could trade on a sense of stability and strength,
Spanish-American nations had “to produce—industrially, commercially, artistically, and scien-
tifically—the image of a modern nation from zero.”9 The world’s fairs projects I will analyze
here did not start at the expositions but, instead, reflected longer-term projects begun at home.
Intellectuals in some Spanish-American countries—particularly Mexico and the Andean na-
tions—responded to the denigration of racial mixture by reconceptualizing the mestizo as vig-
orous and fertile.10 Sarmiento’s ruminations illustrate Argentina’s alternate path. Instead of
6
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Co-
lonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review, 1999, 104:33– 68; and Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the
New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (1955; Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 2010), p. xvi.
7
For an extensive discussion of the myth of Latin American inferiority see Ruth Hill, “Entre lo transatlántico y lo hemisférico:
Los proyectos raciales de Andrés Bello,” Revista Iberoamericana, 2009, 75:719–735.
8
Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations, 2nd ed. (1850;
London: Henry Renshaw, 1862), p. 88; and Domingo F. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonías de las razas en América (Buenos Aires:
D. Tuñez, 1883), p. 1.
9
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1996), p. 19.
10
Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics”: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press,
1991), esp. p. 138. An example is the Mexican José Vasconcelos’s 1925 treatise La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), which argues
valorizing miscegenation, Argentine oligarchs belonging to the so-called Generation of 1837

and their intellectual descendants in the Generation of 1880 sought to ensure progress and
“civilize” Argentina by encouraging European immigration and exterminating or domesticat-
ing indigenous peoples.11 By 1885, thousands of tribesmen and women had been killed, im-
prisoned, or redistributed as cheap labor, while droves of immigrants, particularly from Italy,
began to arrive in Buenos Aires.
The natural sciences were a fundamental element in these efforts, as every aspect of the
Argentine land and people was measured, recorded, and compared. During the time period
under study, Argentines and foreigners began to unearth a wealth of fossils in the central and
southern regions of the country.12 The developing related fields of paleontology, geology, and
anthropology collided with Indian policy and national racial projects in an unusual academic
pursuit: an effort to prove the American origin of humankind. The primary leaders of this
charge were Florentino Ameghino (1854 –1911), a teacher and self-taught naturalist, and Fran-
cisco P. Moreno (1852–1919), an explorer, naturalist, and founder of the natural history mu-
seum in La Plata, Argentina. Alternately collaborators and bitter rivals, both were convinced
of the American origin of humankind and worked tirelessly to prove it. Their theses, which
placed the River Plate at the center of world prehistory and ascribed Aryan characteristics to its
people, dovetailed with the larger national ventures of subjugating the Indians and fashioning
Argentina as a civilized nation with potential equivalent to that of Europe or Anglo-America,
thus preparing for its entry on equal footing into world politics and the capitalist system.
Thus Indian policy, questions of national identity and modernity, and racial science col-
lide in the Argentine anthropological displays at the 1878 and 1889 Paris fairs and the Argen-
tine Retrospective proposed by Moreno himself. These displays have not been systematically
studied,13 and the literature on River Plate anthropology remains largely focused on the recep-
tion and spread of Darwinism, Moreno’s natural history museum, and the intersections between
that Iberian America possessed the characteristics necessary for the development of a universal mixed race, based in spiritual-
ity and beauty, that would usher in a new era of humanity. See José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition, trans.
Didier T. Jaén (1925; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997).
11
On the Generation of 1837 see the works of Tulio Halperín Donghi; Proyecto y construcción de una nación: Argentina 1846–
1880 (Caracas: Ayachuco, 1980) offers an excellent introduction and selections of primary sources. Hebe Noemi Campanella,
La Generación del 80: Su influencia en la vida cultural argentina (Buenos Aires: Tekné, 1983), deals extensively with the ideas
of the Generation of 1880.
12
In 1787 the Dominican priest Manuel de Torre discovered the fossilized remains of a Megatherium in the province of Buenos
Aires. They were sent to the Museum of Natural History in Madrid and later identified and described by Georges Cuvier. See
Irina Podgorny, “El camino de los fósiles: Las colecciones de mamíferos pampeanos en los museos franceses e ingleses del
siglo XIX,” Asclepio, 2001, 53:97–115. Argentina continues to prove rich in fossils, with the recent excavation of a new Titanosaur
in Northern Patagonia. See Bernardo J. González Riga and Leonardo Ortiz David, “A New Titanosaur (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)
from the Upper Cretaceous (Cerro Lisandro Formation) of Mendoza Province, Argentina,” Ameghiniana, 2014, 51:3–25.
13
The most wide-reaching study of Argentine participation in international expositions is María Silvia di Liscia and Andrea
Lluch, eds., Argentina en exposición: Ferias y exposiciones durante los siglos XIX y XX (Seville: Consejo Superior de Investigacio-
nes Científicas, 2009), which contains a number of excellent chapters on specific aspects of individual fairs. On the 1889 Paris
fair see also Ingrid Fey, “Peddling the Pampas: Argentina at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889,” in Latin American Popular
Culture: An Introduction, ed. William H. Beezley and Linda Ann Curcio (Wilmington, Del.: SR Books, 2000), pp. 61–85; and
Olga Vitali, “1889: La Argentina en la Exposición Mundial de París,” Todo es Historia, 1987, 243:30–37. On the 1893 Colom-
bian Exposition see Daniel Canogar, Ciudades efímeras: Exposiciones universales, espectáculo y tecnología (Madrid: Ollero,
1992). On Latin American participation more generally see Leoncio López Ocon Cabrera, “La América Latina en el escenario
de las exposiciones universales del siglo XIX,” Procesos, 2002, 18:103–126; and Carmen Norambuena Carrasco, “Imagen de
América Latina en la Exposición Universal de París de 1889,” Dimensión Histórica de Chile, 2003, 17–18:87–122. One of the
few comprehensive studies of a Latin American nation at the world’s fairs is Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs (cit. n. 9).
anthropology and policy toward indigenous peoples.14 This research has productively traced
networks of interaction between Argentina and other regions and demonstrated how main-
stream theories were adopted, modified, or rejected in favor of homegrown innovations in
order to respond to the particular context of the nation. This essay looks more specifically at
how these projects were mounted on a global stage for both scientists and laypeople.
My analysis demonstrates that despite the shared goals of projecting modernity and boosting
commerce, Argentines used anthropological materials and international expositions to reckon
with race in fundamentally different ways from their counterparts in the United States, Eu-
rope, and even other Latin American countries. In the nations of the Global South, the study
of mankind and world’s fair exhibits often focused more intently on a country’s own citizens
than on colonized or to-be-colonized peoples in faraway places.15 Additionally, for settler colo-
nies like Argentina, with racially ambiguous reputations, anthropology posed a fundamental
paradox: while putting the native on display as an object of scientific study could create intel-
lectual authority and provide justification for political projects of extermination or assimilation,
outside the boundaries of the exhibit the native represented the anxieties over identity and risk
of racial contamination that plagued the Creole intellectual. The presence of the “savage”
citizen meant that anthropological theory could not be imported and applied directly, for it
carried within the seeds of destruction.16 Rather, novel approaches to questions of prehistory
and anthropogenesis needed to be developed. In this sense, Argentine science follows a long-
standing tradition of homegrown scientific racism, as demonstrated by Cañizares-Esguerra.17
Thus anthropology and its related practices developed in a dialogue between international
tendencies and local conditions as River Plate intellectuals grappled with the dual role of the
native. Fossilized and on display, the Amer-Indian was essential to developing markers of mo-
dernity such as anthropology and paleontology. As a subject, however, living and working in
the pampas, the same people presented a credible threat to Argentine development projects
and reputation. Argentine response to this duality, as seen in world’s fair exhibits, distinguishes
the country both from imperial nations and from other Latin American nations looking to
reframe miscegenation and indigeneity for global eyes.
14
Of course, these three areas frequently overlap. On Darwinism see Thomas Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura
Ruiz, eds., The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America, and Brazil (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic,
2001); Marcelo Montserrat , “La sensibilidad evolucionista en la Argentina decimonónica,” in La ciencia en la Argentina entre
siglos: Textos, contextos e instituciones, ed. Montserrat (Buenos Aires: Manantial, 2000), pp. 203–221; Leila Gómez, La piedra
del escándalo: Darwin en Argentina, 1845–1909 (Buenos Aires: Simurg, 2008); and Adriana Novoa and Alex Levine, From Man
to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina, 1870–1920 (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2010). On Moreno and the Museo de la Plata see
the substantial oeuvre of Irina Podgorny; see also Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and
Brazil (Pittsburgh: Univ. Pittsburgh Press, 2007). On policy toward indigenous peoples see Pablo Azar, Gabriela Nacach, and
Pedro Navarro Floria, “Antropología, genocidio y olvido en la representación del otro étnico a partir de la Conquista,” in Paisajes
del progreso: La resignificación de la Patagonia Norte, 1880–1916, ed. Navarro Floria (Neuquen: Educo, 2007), pp. 79–106;
Navarro Floria, Leonardo Salgado, and Azar, “La invención de los ancestros: El ‘patagón antiguo’ y la construcción discursiva
de un pasado nacional remoto para la Argentina (1870–1915),” Revista de Indias, 2004, 64:405–424; and the many articles of
Mónica Quijada.
15
In the future, it would be useful to undertake a larger comparative study of settler colony representations of native peoples at
international exhibitions. For example, the Guide Bleu du Figaro et du Petit Journal describes the South African exhibit at the
1889 exposition in language remarkably similar to what the Argentines used: the current status of the nation was attributed to the
hard work of European immigrants who had transformed a desert (a word incredibly important to Argentine identity narratives).
See Figaro Illustré, Exposition de 1889: Guide Bleu du Figaro et du Petit Journal (Paris: Figaro, 1889), p. 277. Warwick Anderson,
“Racial Conceptions in the Global South,” Isis, 2014, 105:782–792, attempts a similar resituating of debates over racial science,
especially in the context of Australia.
16
In Argentina, members of indigenous tribes were legally citizens from the time of the very first Constitution, written in 1853.
17
Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars” (cit. n. 6), p. 35.
Pa r is 1 8 7 8
For the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1878, Argentina was invited to share a hall on the Rue
des Nations with nine other Latin American countries. In order to fill its designated space,
the Argentine National Commission asked leading manufacturers, agricultural producers, and
scholars to send examples of the best of their respective industries, with the goal of proving that
both the immigrant and the investor would find ideal conditions for growth in the River Plate.
Florentino Ameghino, twenty-four years old, heeded the call for natural history materials and
arrived in France in April with “a true Museum” of prehistoric specimens from his personal
collections, as well as photographs and reproductions of objects in the Anthropological and
Archaeological Museum of Buenos Aires and the Natural History Museum of the National
College of Tucumán. Unfortunately, the fragile pieces suffered in the transatlantic voyage and
arrived in Paris in very bad shape. With special permission from the Argentine National Com-
mission and with the help of Paul Gervais, the professor of comparative anatomy at the Natural
History Museum of Paris, Ameghino set about restoring, classifying, and labeling the speci-
mens. The resulting display of almost 7,500 objects was carefully arranged on the right-hand
side of the hall dedicated to Central and South America. Soon after its completion, Ameghino
proudly wrote to family and friends in the River Plate that the magnificent exhibit provoked the
admiration of all the intellectuals who visited it.18
By integrating his personal collections and the contributions from the Argentine museums,
Ameghino developed an overarching narrative that aimed to explain the prehistoric past of
Argentina in order to shed light on the racial present. The catalogue written by Ameghino
and the three texts he presented as explanatory complements to his collections (Antigüedades
indias de la Banda Oriental, La formación pampeana, and La antigüedad del hombre en las
comarcas del Plata) permit us to piece together his argument, much as the visitors to the fair
were expected to do.19
Ameghino’s “material rhetoric” at the 1878 exposition begins with the division of his collec-
tion into two categories, “Paleontology” and “Anthropology.”20 The latter was further divided
into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic eras. The Paleolithic section included dozens
of bone fragments that Ameghino insisted belonged to fossil man, as proved by the flints and
drilled animal bones found in the same area. Displayed alongside mastodon fossils, these bones
and signs of human industry became proof of the contemporaneity of mankind with the large
extinct animals that had been found in the province of Buenos Aires.21 In line with the geologi-
cal knowledge of Ameghino’s time, the spatial continuity of these diverse objects in the River
18
Florentino Ameghino, “Catálogo especial de la sección antropológica y paleontológica de la República Argentina en la Ex-
posición Universal de 1878 en París,” in Obras completas, ed. Alfredo J. Torcelli, 24 vols., Vol. 2: Primeros trabajos científicos (La
Plata: Taller de Impresiones Oficiales, 1914), pp. 243–327, on p. 243; Ameghino, “El hombre prehistórico en el Plata,” ibid.,
pp. 331–399, on p. 331; and Florentino Ameghino to his parents, 10 Apr. 1878, in Obras completas, ed. Torcelli, Vol. 20: Cor-
respondencia científica (La Plata: Taller de Impresiones Oficiales, 1935), pp. 39–41, esp. p. 41.
19
I have been unable to locate this version of La antigüedad del hombre en las comarcas del Plata. Thus I am relying on the
Spanish reprint of the text, “L’homme préhistorique dans La Plata,” published in Paul Broca’s Revue d’Anthropologie (1879,
2nd Ser., 2:210–249) immediately after the exposition in 1879. In it, Ameghino summarizes his exhibit and his views of pre-
historic man, which he says will soon appear in a publication entitled La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata. See Ameghino, “El
hombre prehistórico en el Plata.”
20
David Van Reybrouck et al. define “material rhetoric” as “the regime of material practices that scholars deploy to accompany
traditional, verbal, and pictorial rhetoric with which they distribute their theories and ideas”: David Van Reybrouck, Raf de Bont,
and Jan Rock, “Material Rhetoric: Spreading Stones and Showing Bones in the Study of Prehistory,” Science in Context, 2009,
22:195–216, on p. 198.
21
Ameghino, “Catálogo especial de la sección antropológica y paleontológica de la República Argentina” (cit. n. 18), pp. 243–245.
Plate soil was held to prove their temporal simultaneity, a confluence that Ameghino repeated
in his display.
Ameghino’s argument achieved its full potential only when placed in dialogue with other
displays and scientific texts, echoing on a micro level the overarching theme of comparison
that organized the world’s fairs. His entire exhibit was built on juxtaposing the evidence for
fossil man in Europe with the American specimens he supplied. In his writing, he argued that
the evidence he presented in favor of a fossil American man included every type of proof used
to affirm the existence of European quaternary man except primitive drawings. Since he had
checked all the same boxes as his European counterparts, his materials must be considered
“brilliant proof of the great antiquity of American man,” a race as old as, or older than, the
Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon fossils found in Europe. In other words, both the presence of
large mammals and the evidence of fossil man contradicted the many historical theories of
the racial “weakness” of the American peoples and instead confirmed the robustness and long
history of the region. Ameghino’s exhibit thus joined the work of other Latin American proto-
paleontologists in the effort to prove that the New World was “new” in name only.22 Drawing
back the curtain on the prehistory of the region, these theories presented the Americas as a
territory fully worthy of scientific study and incorporation into the global order.
This material and textual rhetoric, moreover, inserted the Americans into the heart of the
debate over anthropogenesis. While nineteenth-century European and North American intel-
lectuals argued over the single or multiple origin of mankind (monogenesis vs. polygenesis), the
overwhelming consensus was that the civilized (read: European and North American) cultures
shared an Indo-European ancestor. With his 1878 display and accompanying texts, however,
Ameghino advocated for an American origin for mankind. Interestingly, in order to make his
argument he first turned to what wasn’t rather than what was: the great difficulty of proving
any aspect of prehistory allowed him to insert a hypothetical South American ancestor in the
gaping holes in the fossil record.
In the text displayed with his exhibit, Ameghino began by insisting that there was no evi-
dence whatsoever to prove that the Americas were populated by European migrations. Cross-
continental correspondences of botany, zoology, linguistics, philology, and geology did suggest
that the oldest populations of Europe, Africa, and the Americas were in constant communica-
tion, but he found no valid proof that this exchange occurred unidirectionally. The lack of
material evidence allowed for the probability that one or more American autochthonous races
could have emigrated to Asia, matching or reversing the assumed paths of migration. To as-
sign the protagonist role to Europe in the peopling of the world was merely to reproduce the
informational and commodity flows seen in the present rather than to explain reality, accord-
ing to the Argentine, for present-day science was unable to pinpoint the exact location of the
origin of man or his precursor.23 With no specific evidence for either origin, and proof for the
antiquity of man on both sides of the Atlantic, Ameghino insisted that an American origin must
be given equal consideration. The bones he displayed served as a visual reminder of this pos-
sibility, as they made the same journey from the Americas to Europe as Ameghino’s theoretical
autochthonous ancestor had before them. Although he proved nothing, Ameghino’s prehistory
22
Ameghino, “ “El hombre prehistórico en el Plata” (cit. n. 18), pp. 381, 347. See also the work of Francisco P. Moreno, particu-
larly “Antropología y arqueología: Importancia del estudio de estas ciencias en la República Argentina,” Anales de la Sociedad
Científica Argentina, 1881, 12:160–173, 193–207; and “El origen del hombre sud-americano: Razas y civilizaciones de este
continente,” ibid., 1882, 14:97–131.
23
Ameghino, “ “El hombre prehistórico en el Plata,” pp. 351, 357.
postulated the periphery as center, the margin as potential origin. This scientific theorization
challenged European claims to superiority and elevated the maligned Americas.
While Ameghino often referred to his fossil man as American, the location of his collec-
tion within the Argentine display at the world’s fair further reduced the most probable origin
of mankind to within the territory of the River Plate. Like the timber and beef on display, the
bones and artifacts were to be seen as fundamentally Argentine, yet still of great value to the en-
tire world. Additionally, unlike other ethnographic collections at the exposition—for instance,
that of Spain—the exhibit assembled by Ameghino contained only specimens found within
Argentine territorial limits.24 This prehistoric patrimony proved two types of Argentine wealth:
the material and the racial-symbolic.
First, the bones themselves held great commercial value, and the fossil richness of the Ar-
gentine soil proved very attractive to European scientists. Ameghino noted that his collection
was examined by Armand de Quatrefages, Louis-Laurent-Marie Gabriel de Mortillet, Edward
Cope, and other specialists, all of whom approved and publicly applauded the majority of
his theses. He even sold a large portion of the collection to Edward Cope of Philadelphia
for 40,000 francs, a decision that allowed him to stay in Europe for several years and publish
his first major book.25 Thus, the 1878 fair exhibit contributed to inserting Argentine lands
and scientists into global flows of information and specimens.26 Less apparent, but even more
important, is that Ameghino’s project also advocated for the incorporation of Argentina on a
racial basis. In its simplest interpretation, his prehistory argued for the strong and autonomous
development of the River Plate civilization, contradicting, as mentioned, any suggestion of the
inherent inferiority of the region. Stretched to its logical conclusion, however, his argument
established Argentina as the cradle of all humankind. The unwritten implication was that if
Argentine soil gave rise to a universal ancestor, then to exclude it from the present on the basis
of racial inferiority was entirely nonsensical.
While Ameghino’s thesis advanced the possibility that human origins were located in Ar-
gentina, it presented a double bind. If the path to locating Argentina within European mo-
dernity implied locating prehistoric man on its soil, his descendants—the present Amer-Indian
populations—were understood as contradicting that same project. The year 1878 marked an
important moment in Argentina’s racial history, particularly with regard to the so-called cuestión
de indios (Indian question). During the 1870s, the Argentine elite became increasingly aware
of the need to resolve the “problem” of the native tribes, for, despite years of miscegenation
and trade, to the dominant culture the indigenous peoples continued to represent not merely
a physical and commercial danger but also a supposedly anachronistic impediment on the
path to modernization.27 In the same year as the Paris exhibition, the Argentine lawyer and
politician Estanislao Zeballos published The Conquest of Fifteen Thousand Leagues: Essay
24
The 1878 catalogue of Spanish anthropological objects included local specimens as well as many from Peru, Mexico, Chile,
Brazil, and other American countries. See Exposición Universal de París en 1878: España: Catálogo de la Esposición de Antrop-
ología y Etnografía (Madrid: Manual Minuesa de los Ríos, 1878).
25
Ameghino, Obras completas, ed. Torcelli (cit. n. 18), Vol. 3: La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata (La Plata: Taller de Impre-
siones Oficiales, 1914), p. 11; and Ameghino to his parents, 26 Sept. 1878, ibid., Vol. 20: Correspondencia científica (cit. n. 18),
pp. 45– 46, on p. 45.
26
Ameghino was neither the first nor the last to sell Argentine fossils at a world’s fair. For an insightful analysis of the role of
Argentina in the world fossil market see Irina Podgorny, “Bones and Devices in the Constitution of Paleontology in Argentina at
the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Sci. Context, 2005, 18:249–283.
27
Nora Siegrist de Gentile and María Haydée Martín, Geopolítica, ciencia y técnica a través de la campaña del desierto (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Univ. Buenos Aires, 1981), p. 49. In 1875 alone, four thousand Indians crossed the frontier and stole three hun-
dred thousand head of cattle, killed five hundred cristianos, and took three hundred captives.
for the Definitive Occupation of Patagonia, which alternately advocated for the incorporation
of the tribes he called a “cancer” and “bandits” and for their total extermination. As Zeballos
concluded, it was only by taking control of the pampas and subjugating the Indians that the
nation would experience “a magnificent and triple evolution—military, economic, and politi-
cal—inspired by the sacred interests of the fatherland and by the great thrusts of civilization.”28
Thus, in 1878 the River Plate elites were eager to eliminate the indigenous element both
physically and in the public perception of the nation. In this context, Ameghino’s display pre-
sented a problem: how to insist on an autochthonous Argentine prehistory without admitting
a valid and valuable indigenous presence in the present. European and Argentine scientists
frequently spoke of contemporary indigenous tribes in the language of prehistory; examples
are John Lubbock’s belief that the “existing savages” were proxies for understanding “our” own
ancestors and Sarmiento’s assertion that the Argentine tribes were “living prehistoric men.”
However, in Argentina prehistory had a different meaning, for in addition to fossil remains
modern savages could be found. The establishment of Argentine prehistory thus created a
dangerous tie between the nation and indigeneity, making it necessary to establish a funda-
mental difference between the safe prehistoric ancestor and the threatening Amer-Indians that
populated the contemporary pampas. In fact, Ameghino’s work sparked debate over the desir-
ability of fossils in a way that is not to be found in Europe: in reviewing his oeuvre in 1915, the
journalist Leopoldo Lugones wrote that “the ethnic connection that might exist between those
primitive men and the few indigenous people of the current era, lacks importance with regard
to the exaltation of patriotism: the Argentine population is European, Argentine civilization is
as well.” To call the fossils found in Argentina “Argentine,” he insisted, would be to “make a
fool of oneself.”29
Although disagreeing with Lugones with regard to the patriotic importance of the fossils,
Ameghino was aware of this danger, and thus his exhibit marked a profound separation be-
tween the indigenous past and the present. The Neolithic Era section of the 1878 display was
composed of stone knives, flints, and pottery fragments that Ameghino attributed to ancient
Amer-Indians. Some of the objects belonged to the Querandís, a tribe that once lived in the
region now occupied by Buenos Aires but that he insisted had disappeared just a few years
after the arrival of the first Spanish conquistadors. The fact that a tribe that continued to exist
after 1492 was classified as “Neolithic” emphasizes the ways in which nineteenth-century an-
thropology denied the temporal simultaneity of the savage Other with the civilized Self, thus
naturalizing the extermination of the former within the discourse of extinction. In Ameghino’s
natural history, which echoed discourses of others in the country, the Argentine Indians were of
another time and thus incompatible with the present. The text accompanying the objects from
the Charrúas in his display also mentioned their “complete annihilation,” leaving no room
whatsoever for them in the present.30 The very same objects—pieces of pottery, flints, and
whittled bones—were used to mark a presence—that is, of an illustrious Argentine prehistoric
28
Estanislao Zeballos, La conquista de quince mil leguas: Ensayo para la ocupación definitiva de la Patagonia, ed. Alberto Pérez
(Buenos Aires: Continente, 2008), p. 313.
29
John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man: Mental and Social Condition of Savages (Lon-
don: Longmans, Green, 1875), p. 1; Domingo F. Sarmiento, “El Museo La Plata: Discurso en la inauguración de una parte
del Museo La Plata,” in Obras de D. F. Sarmiento, 53 vols., Vol. 22: Discursos públicos (Buenos Aires: Mariano Moreno, 1899),
pp. 310–313, on p. 313; and Leopoldo Lugones, Elogio de Ameghino (Buenos Aires: Otero, 1915), pp. 70, 71. For more on the
“safe Indian” see Christopher Matthews, “History to Prehistory: An Archaeology of Being Indian in New Orleans,” Archaeologies:
Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 2007, 3:271–295.
30
Ameghino, “Catálogo especial de la sección antropológica y paleontológica de la República Argentina” (cit. n. 18), pp. 265,
275. For more on the anthropologization of the Other see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes
race—while also affirming an absence—the complete disappearance of indigenous tribes prior

to the establishment of the modern nation.
Through this deployment of the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” the remains of the un-
civilized past reinforced the civilized nature of the present. As the Spanish journalist Angel
Fernández de los Ríos remarked with regard to ethnographic exhibits in his guide to the 1878
exposition, the juxtaposition of prehistoric and contemporary artifacts traced the course of
human history from the stone axe to the modern machine, representative of man’s final per-
fecting.31 Set side by side with education textbooks and violins made from native woods, the
crudeness of the Argentine prehistoric objects and the accompanying discourse on the natural
and inevitable disappearance of the native tribes further reaffirmed a nonindigenous, civilized
national identity. The Indian was thus subject to a paradoxical treatment whereby the remote,
unthreatening native was celebrated as part of a universal origin and his bones and artifacts cre-
ated national cultural capital, while at the same time the immediate, present native was writ-
ten out of the nation on the basis of his racial inferiority. While apparently contradictory, this
double discourse, as Rebecca Earle has called it in other contexts, agrees on one fundamental
point: Argentina was not indigenous.32 Ameghino’s exhibit thus welcomed the Indian into the
space of the fair to appropriate his bones and artifacts as scientific and cultural capital, while si-
multaneously making the argument for his disappearance outside of the fairgrounds. The need
to balance nationalism, internal politics, and the desire to contribute to global scientific debate
meant that, ironically, native culture became a pillar of the construction of Creole national
identities through anthropology.33 By the next Paris fair, in 1889, this oppositional mechanism
for projecting a white identity to a foreign audience had given way to a policy of erasure of any
visible native element from the Argentine display.
Pa r is 1 8 8 9
Ameghino and his exhibit found success and some notoriety at the 1878 fair, winning a gold
medal and attracting the attention of specialists from around the world. He was invited to par-
ticipate in the International Congress of Anthropological Sciences that took place in parallel
to the exhibition, thanks to which he toured several European natural history museums and
labs. Afterward, Ameghino continued to establish himself on the Continent and to garner sup-
port for his theories. His success was such that Paul Topinard, Secretary of the Commission
for Anthropology for the 1889 Paris Exposition, wrote Ameghino repeatedly to encourage his
participation in the upcoming fair. In March 1888 he reassured Ameghino that in 1889 the Ar-
gentine Republic would occupy the high position it deserved. In order to ensure this outcome,
he asked Ameghino to send him a few human skulls, “from current or ancient savages.”34 These
letters show the increased value of Argentine anthropology and of Ameghino’s work in particu-
Its Object (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983); Andermann, Optic of the State (cit. n. 14); and Navarro Floria et al., “La
invención de los ancestros” (cit. n. 14).
31
Angel Fernández de los Ríos, quoted in Luis Angel Sánchez Gómez, “Ciencia, exoticismo y colonialismo en la Exposición
Universal de París de 1878,” Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, 2006, 28:191–212, esp. p. 203. On the trope of the “vanish-
ing Indian” see Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Foreign Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
Univ. Press, 1982).
32
Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, N.C.: Duke
Univ. Press, 2007).
33
Regina Horta Duarte, “Between the National and the Universal: Natural History Networks in Latin America in the Nineteenth
and Twentieth Centuries,” Isis, 2013, 104:777–787, examines this balance in other contexts.
34
Paul Topinard to Ameghino, 23 Mar. 1888, 19 Oct. 1888, in Obras completas, ed. Torcelli, Vol. 20: Correspondencia científica
(cit. n. 18), pp. 456, 476.
lar, as well as the important fact that Europeans had taken notice of the Argentine fair display,
thus confirming the space as a fertile location for cultivating and contesting racial identity.
Topinard’s request for skulls, however, reveals again the danger that anthropological exhibits
posed for a country like Argentina that aimed to present itself as civilized and European. True
European countries did not have “current” savage skulls to display: Topinard’s request reaffirms
Argentina’s questionable racial identity. This scientific connection reflected a more general-
ized image of Argentina’s position in world hierarchies: despite increased production, wealth,
and stability throughout the 1880s, the country was often still considered “Latin American”
and thus morally, politically, and socially backward—owing to racial inferiority, among other
factors.35 Furthermore, Topinard’s request suggests that the primary contribution of Argentina
to anthropology was as a provider of raw materials, not theory. Ironically, the very strengths of
Argentina in regard to anthropology and paleontology—its geological diversity and the fossil
richness of its soils—also threatened to marginalize its scientists as mere merchants, “provid-
ers of raw materials but not . . . interpreters of the fossil record.”36 In this aspect, the history of
anthropology reflects a general trend in Latin American participation in world’s fairs. Although
they were frequently encouraged to participate by European and United States organizers, it
was often with the goal of establishing commercial relations to benefit the more developed
industrial nations of the North.37
The absence of many European powers at the 1889 fair—a reaction to the decision to com-
memorate the 1789 French Revolution—appeared to open a space for new participation and
revaluation of the American periphery. Consequently, Paris 1889 represented a giant leap for
Argentine participation in the world’s fairs, in terms of both the quantity and quality of the ob-
jects displayed and the intensity of the racial image that was projected. The whitening project
manifested at the 1878 fair was escalated, and Argentina spent vast amounts of money in 1889
to prove that it was culturally and racially closer to France and England than to neighboring
nations such as Paraguay.38
The first step in this project was to break with precedent and refuse to share a pavilion with
the rest of the Latin American countries. Instead, Argentina insisted on carving out its own sov-
ereign space in the fairgrounds—like the European nations had since the very first fair in 1851.
Although the commission requested 6,000 square meters, Argentina was awarded 1,600 square
meters behind the Eiffel Tower on the Champ de Mars, a space reserved for the Latin American
countries and African colonies. Despite this peripheral location, the Argentine pavilion itself
made a forceful claim for Argentine cultural and racial superiority. Unlike the Aztec-inspired
palace that housed the Mexican exhibits, the Argentine building was designed, built, and deco-
rated entirely by French artists, demonstrating the clear desire on the part of those responsible
for it to separate Argentina from the region by eliminating any exotic elements that could
35
David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War (London: Tauris, 1986), p. 153.
36
Podgorny, “Bones and Devices” (cit. n. 26), p. 250. See also Máximo Farro, La formación del Museo de la Plata: Coleccionistas,
comerciantes, estudiosos y naturalistas viajeros a fines del siglo XIX (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2009). While Farro and Podgorny rightly
point out the continued marginalization of these scientists, others have stressed their integration. For example, Mónica Quijada
has shown that Moreno, Ameghino, and others were published in premier European journals such as the Revue d’Anthropologie
and the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. See Mónica Quijada, “América Latina en las revistas europeas de antropología, desde los
inicios hasta 1880: Desde la presencia temática a la participación académica,” Rev. Indias, 2005, 55:319–336.
37
Exhibitions in the United States not only encouraged Latin American participation but also increased awards “to Latin American
exhibitors who had displays considered important to American manufacturing interests”: Rydell, All the World’s a Fair (cit. n. 4),
p. 93.
38
Fey, “Peddling the Pampas” (cit. n. 13), p. 69. Argentina spent 3,500,000 francs on the pavilion alone, far outspending both
Mexico and the United States.
suggest an undesirable or unmodern national identity.39 Even if unable to pass for fully Euro-
pean, the Argentine pavilion used strong contrasts to make the argument that Argentina had
little in common with the rest of Latin America.
The push for Europeanness seen in the building style also emerged in the anthropological
materials brought to the fair in 1889. Whereas the 1878 display featured thousands of arrow-
heads, bones, skulls, and other indigenous products, in 1889 scientific texts completely replaced
artifacts. Instead of collections, Ameghino sent copies of his epic thousand-plus-page Contribu-
tion to the Knowledge of Argentina’s Fossil Mammals. Francisco Moreno and the Museo de la
Plata likewise sent written works instead of physical specimens or images of the same.40 On the
one hand, these written texts furthered the depiction of the nation as a civilized country. Nicolás
Masa and Ernesto Quesada, representatives of the Buenos Aires Public Library, emphasized
the necessity of using arts and letters and the sciences to demonstrate that the nation had
achieved a “certain degree” of culture. Civilization or culture, in the mind of Latin American
elites, had long been connected to the written word. Santiago Alcorta, a government official
tasked with compiling a comprehensive report of Argentina’s 1889 activities, reaffirmed this
connection. He observed that visitors to the Argentine pavilion would often browse the books,
expecting to see European texts. They expressed great astonishment upon discovering that
these were, in fact, Argentine works.41 The mere presence of the written texts, therefore, ap-
peared to prove that the nation was not backward, uncultured, or less civilized than its peers.
The very act of doing and writing about science made a claim for Argentine modernity.
On the other hand, the transition to text also signaled a shift from the erasure of the modern
Indian seen in 1878 to the erasure of any visible indigenous presence.42 Despite the lucrative
potential of bringing specimens to the fair, as evidenced by Ameghino’s gains in 1878, by 1889
there seemed to be a general consensus among the elites that the benefits were outweighed
by the potential costs. Gabriel Carrasco criticized neighboring Paraguay’s decision to bring
indigenous weapons and artifacts to Paris, stating that while they were very valuable in an
39
Vitali, “1889: La Argentina en la Exposición Mundial de Paris” (cit. n. 13), p. 31; and Norambuena Carrasco, “Imagen de
América Latina en la Exposición Universal de París de 1889” (cit. n. 13), p. 114. The next time Argentina had its own pavilion
at the world’s fair, in 1904, its facade was modeled after that of the Casa Rosada (the presidential palace) in Buenos Aires. While
ostensibly more local, the style still mimicked European architecture and thoroughly avoided reference to indigenous tradition.
See Marta Penhos, “Saint Louis 1904: Argentina en escena,” in Argentina en exposición, ed. Di Liscia and Lluch (cit. n. 13),
pp. 59–84, esp. p. 66.
40
Santiago Alcorta, La República Argentina en la Exposición Universal de París de 1889: Colección de informes reunidos, 2 vols.,
Vol. 1 (Paris: P. Mouillot, 1890), p. 16.
41
Nicolás Masa and Ernesto Quesada, La Biblioteca Pública de Buenos Aires en la Exposición Universal de Paris 1878: Catálogo
sistemático y alfabético de la colección de obras argentinas que se envía con su correspondiente informe (Buenos Aires: Imprenta
de la Penitenciaria, 1878), p. v; and Alcorta, La República Argentina en la Exposición Universal de París de 1889, p. 15. On
the connection of culture and the written word for Latin American elites see Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover, N.H.:
Ediciones del Norte, 1984).
42
Carolyne Ryan Larson argues that Argentine ethnography of the first decades of the twentieth century continued to use the
native to construct Argentine identity: Carolyne Ryan Larson, “ ‘The Ashes of Our Ancestors’: Creating Argentina’s Indigenous
Heritage in the Museo Etnográfico, 1904–1930,” Americas, Apr. 2013, 69:467– 492. This might appear to contradict my assertion
that the native is erased from the anthropology display in 1889. However, I believe that what she observes is a resurgence of prac-
tices developed in the nineteenth century that can be attributed to demographic change. The first two decades of the twentieth
century saw intense European immigration to Argentina, such that by 1914 four-fifths of the middle class and three-fourths of
the working class in Buenos Aires were immigrants. See Rock, Argentina, 1516–1982 (cit. n. 35), p. 175. While nineteenth-
century policy had actively encouraged this immigration, the large influx of foreigners and the perception that they were linked
to subversive organizations such as the anarchist party led to an increase in xenophobic sentiment. See Larson, “ ‘Ashes of Our
Ancestors,’ ” p. 476. These conditions complicated the building of Argentina’s racial identity in the 1920s in a way that wasn’t
relevant in 1889. The European, on Argentine soil, became a threat instead of the inspiration he had represented several decades
earlier. Thus the Indian is once again re-signified in response to local conditions.
ethnographic museum, they were entirely counterproductive at an industrial exposition. It

was, he suggested, more beneficial to make known “not the weapons of savages, but rather the
progress that had already proceeded from civilization.”43 Consequently, the only sign of the
natives in the 1889 Argentine pavilion was carefully hidden between the covers of heavy
volumes, cloaked in the legitimizing forces of science. The works of Ameghino and others
were intended to be read by the proper authorities.44 However, the vast majority of the visitors
to the Argentine pavilion would only see the books on their shelves and would never be aware
of their content. Thus, the written text both made the Indian disappear and served as an affir-
mative reminder of a civilized, white identity. The shift from artifact to text from 1878 to 1889
demonstrates the increasing belief of the Argentine elite that the Indian had no place at all in
the present or future of the nation.
A further erasure of the native can be seen by comparing the display synchronically with
those of other countries, as opposed to diachronically within the Argentine tradition. Although
I have thus far stressed imperialist tendencies, U.S. exhibits frequently presented and engaged
with American Indians. In contrast to the Argentine erasure, however, U.S. Indian displays at
fairs such as the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition were designed to stress the Indian’s adapt-
ability and place in the present. Although Indians were still considered inferior and had to be
carefully controlled, these displays made a space for them in the national future and advo-
cated for tolerance. What is more, W. J. McGee, the architect of the anthropological exhibit,
believed that the Indians on display at the fair would actually benefit from being exposed to
(white) American ideals during their stay at the exhibition, thus accelerating the civilizing
process.45 In contrast to the Argentine exhibits’ insistence on the doomed nature of the Amer-
Indian, the United States, perhaps freed by its lack of association with the discourse of miscege-
nation and degeneration, allowed the possibility of adaptation and assimilation.
Other Latin American nations adopted different strategies. To mention just one example,
the Mexican “wizards of progress” of the 1889 world’s fair similarly emphasized European con-
trol of the nation but also acknowledged its large mestizo and indigenous populations. Their
display celebrated the indigenous past, even as they shaped it carefully to highlight the nobility,
exoticism, good faith, and hygiene of the Mexican Indian. This responded to a history of pride
in the indigenous heritage of the nation and a belief that it—and subsequent mestizaje—could
positively contribute to achieving the nation’s modern goals.46 The Indian exoticism exploited
to great effect by Mexico and other Central American and Andean countries was not to be
found in the Argentine displays.
The use of living exhibits presents another Argentine particularity. From the time Christo-
pher Columbus brought New World peoples to the Spanish courts, the Other had been put
on display in a variety of settings. The 1889 Paris Exposition was the first to see large-scale
exhibits of live people, as both colonial powers and former colonies brought indigenous men
and women to the fair. In addition to their commercial and scientific value, these native types
contrasted with and gave meaning to the objects on display in the national pavilions and the
“civilized” people who observed them.47 The American anthropologist Otis Mason remarked
43
Carrasco, Del Atlántico al Pacífico y un Argentino en Europa (cit. n. 1), p. 247.
44
Letters in his Obras completas show he sent copies to Lydekker, Topinard, Broca, Quatrefages, Fischer, Gaudry, de Mortillet,
and others. See Ameghino, Obras completas, ed. Torcelli, Vol. 20: Correspondencia científica (cit. n. 18).
45
Parezo and Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair (cit. n. 4), p. 136.
46
Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs (cit. n. 9), pp. 53, 67.
47
Sander L. Gilman’s discussion of how difference is created and given meaning, particularly his chapter on the Hottentot
Venus, is illuminating: Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), esp. Ch. 3.
of the 1889 fair that, as well as ancient Mexicans, “it was possible to see there twelve types of
Africans, besides Javanese, Tonkinese, Chinese, Japanese, and other oriental peoples, living in
native houses, wearing native costumes, eating native food, practicing native arts and rites on
the Esplanade des Invalides side by side with the latest inventions and with the whole civilized
world as spectators.”48 Seemingly, the whole world was on display at the fairs, and the interested
visitor could experience mankind in all of its varieties in just a few hours. However, whereas
in other contexts River Plate indigenous peoples were put on display both in Argentina and
abroad, living human beings were never sent to any world’s fair or exposition by the official
Argentine delegation.
That is not to say that there were no Southern Cone Indians at the fairs. In 1889, in fact, nine
Selk’nam Indians from the extreme southern archipelago of Tierra del Fuego were brought to
Paris by the Belgian Maurice Maitre. However, the official Argentine display made no attempt
to claim them as its own, despite the fact that “savages” were exceptionally good business and
would likely have attracted many visitors to the pavilion. This rejection is not particularly
surprising, given the racial project previously described—as well as the fact that the Selk’nam
were presented as cannibals and regularly fed chunks of raw meat.49 In promotional materials
the Selk’nam were identified simply as Fueguian Indians. Here, the European’s fuzzy knowl-
edge of American geography played in the Argentine’s favor: the lack of a national label made
extremely difficult the connection of this midway display with the official national pavilion,
further distanced by its French facade. Thus, the Selk’nam existed at the fair as “extraterritorial
subjects . . . coming from a territory of imprecise sovereignty.”50 The work of scientists such
as Ameghino further shored up this barrier: even if the public were to identify the savages as
Argentine, the archaeological and anthropological displays primed the audience to view them
as “fossil men,” anachronistic relics doomed to disappear. The Selk’nam, effectively distanced,
could not contradict the modern image presented at the fair.
Thus we observe a change in the Argentine anthropological participation and crafting of
the native in 1878 and 1889. In 1878, although the Argentine anthropologists appropriated
and then discarded the Indian, he was very much present in the displays of bones and artifacts.
As national debate still left open the possibility of the incorporation of the Indian, so long as
he was sufficiently assimilated and civilized, the Argentine exhibit permitted the inclusion of
the Indian, so long as his symbolic power was harnessed and manipulated to serve the national
racial project. By 1889, however, the possibility of a role for the indigenous tribes in the nation
had been all but eliminated, and thus the past, present, and future forms of the Indian were
made invisible at the fair.
The two expositions’ positions as bookends of the Conquista del desierto (Conquest of the
Desert) suffice to explain much of this shift. General Julio A. Roca began this campaign, long
theorized and dreamed of, to subdue the native tribes and take control of the nation’s interior
once and for all in 1879. On 20 February 1885, after several long years, General Lorenzo Vintter
48
Otis Mason, “Anthropology in Paris during the Exposition of 1889,” American Anthropologist, 1890, 3:27–36, on p. 31.
49
Blanchard et al., eds., Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage (cit. n. 4), p. 35; and Peter Mason, “The Onas Exhibited in
the Musée du Nord, Brussels: Reconstruction of a Lost File,” in Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle, ed. Blanchard et al. (cit. n. 4),
pp. 151–158, on p. 154.
50
Alvaro Fernández Bravo, “Las fronteras de lo humano: Fueguinos en las ferias mundiales, 1881–1889,” in Argentina en ex-
posición, ed. Di Liscia and Lluch (cit. n. 13), pp. 85–113, on pp. 102, 104. In fact, even today we do not know if this particular
group lived on the Chilean or the Argentine side of the border. Some say they came from Felipe Bay, Chile, while other accounts
give their homeland as the Bay of San Sebastián, Argentina (ibid., p. 102). In some ways, this historical imprecision brings us
closer to the mind-set of the ethnographic specimens themselves, for it is very doubtful they would have adhered to any national
identification, preferring instead their tribal one.
sent a telegram to General Domingo Viejobueno, proudly declaring that there were no longer
any tribes in the countryside that had not been overcome, either voluntarily or by force. In
1889, the same year as the exhibition, the French engineer Alfred Ebelot wrote of Argentina,
“The Indian no longer exists.”51 I would argue, however, that instead of merely reflecting an
Indian-free reality, the 1889 exposition was actually part of the same process that allowed for
this type of statement. That is to say, without the exposition and similar anthropological acts,
Ebelot would not have been able to insist that the Indian was gone, for the truth was that he
was not. Enrique Hugo Mases has effectively demonstrated the continued persistence of the
indigenous peoples after 1885 as both living beings and subjects of state policy. Even today,
the country has a larger relative and absolute indigenous population than Brazil, despite being
frequently depicted as a white, European country, the “Paris of the South.”52 Thus, although
there were perhaps fewer natives and they certainly posed less of a threat to Argentine com-
merce and stability after 1885, the absence of indigenous peoples at the world’s fair was instead
a conscious decision to project that there were no more Indians; instead of reflecting reality,
this absence helped to mold it.
The intentionality of this project can be seen in the words of then–Vice President Carlos
Pellegrini. In 1889 he wrote to his brother from Paris to recount his generally favorable impres-
sion of the Argentine pavilion and its effect on the public. Nonetheless, he lamented that the
twenty soldiers guarding the entrance struck a discordant note. Despite being strong, good-
looking, and wearing European-style uniforms, the men were “chinos,” or mestizos. Pellegrini
lambasted the organizers for sacrificing “aesthetics” to “truth,” for although the men accurately
represented a large portion of the Argentine population, they clashed violently with the whit-
ened image Pellegrini and his peers wished to project. As he recalled—perhaps wishfully—
confused fairgoers responded to this juxtaposition by asking how it was possible that, “given
that Argentines were white, the soldiers were mulattos.” His distaste for the impingement of re-
ality on the carefully crafted narrative is clear, demonstrating the Argentine elite’s awareness of
the need to project a certain image. Reminiscing about the fair fifteen years later, he expressed
a similar aversion to seeing how the exhibit betrayed the myth of Argentine modernity the elites
wished to construct. He wrote that upon entering the pavilion he immediately turned around
and left, owing to the great shame provoked by seeing Indian products such as lassos on display
in the industrial section. Having such primitive (yet effective) technologies on display did not
support the image projected by the French-designed facade and the carefully constructed an-
thropological displays. Echoing Carrasco’s comments on Paraguay, Pellegrini recommended
that Argentina bring only raw materials to the 1904 St. Louis fair to avoid further disgrace, leav-
ing all manufactured materials, particularly artistic products, at home.53
Intention is one thing; success is another. To what extent were the Argentine exhibits ef-
fective at creating and disseminating a racially superior, civilized national identity? Pellegrini’s
recounting of the public’s confusion with regard to the mixed-race guards shows the immedi-
ate success of this whitewashing. Horace Morgan’s guidebook to the 1893 fair, The Historical
World’s Columbian Exposition and Chicago Guide: Authentic and Reliable Instructor for Visi-
tors to the Exposition and the Most Profitable Companion for the Sight-Seer Who Has to Stay
51
Gen. Lorenzo Vintter, quoted in Enrique Mases, Estado y cuestión indígena: El destino final de los indios sometidos en el sur
del territorio (1878–1930) (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2010), p. 59; and Alfred Ebelot, La Pampa: Costumbres argentinas
(Buenos Aires: Clordia & Rodríguez, 1952), p. 16.
52
Mases, Estado y cuestión indígena; and Gaston Gordillo and Silvia Hirsh, “Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities
in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 2003, 8:4–30, on p. 6.
53
Carlos Pelligrini, quoted in Augustín Rivera Astengo, Pellegrini, 1846–1906: Obras, 5 vols., Vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Coni, 1941),
pp. 213–214; and Pelligrini, quoted in Penhos, “Saint Louis 1904” (cit. n. 39), pp. 65, 66.
at Home, further hints at the efficacy of Argentine efforts at previous fairs. In Morgan’s descrip-
tions, Argentina’s participation is completely divorced from colonial or indigenous nuances.
There is no mention whatsoever of indigenous people in the entry for the Argentine Republic,
which is described as educated, with a postal service, “numerous hospitals, asylums, homes,
public libraries, and free art schools.” Argentina is furthermore identified as capitalist, progres-
sive, and closely associated with its capital, Buenos Aires, “the Chicago of South America.”54
This comparison highlights the different roles settler colonies played in world politics at this
time. Although potentially subject to the same racial censure as the Latin American nations,
the United States is instead held up as a model to which to aspire, in large part owing to the
discourse on miscegenation highlighted previously. At the same time, the projects I have stud-
ied ensured that Argentina was distinguished from other Latin American countries. Guatemala
is described as “value[d] most” for its “connection with prehistoric races,” and several other
countries (including Bolivia, Honduras, and Mexico) are also identified primarily by their indig-
enous heritage, reflecting the aesthetics of exoticism imbuing their exhibits. In fact, in Morgan’s
list of participating countries, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and Algiers physically come between Ar-
gentina’s listing and those of American countries associated more strongly with native peoples,
highlighting the extent of this racial ideological separation.55 It appears, therefore, that the
Argentine whitewashing projects of 1878 and 1889 were effective and important steps in the
process of negotiating national identity on the world stage.
T h e E x p o siti o n T h at Ne v e r Was
Despite the successes detailed above in promoting a certain racial and scientific image to the
world, Argentine participation at the world’s fairs entailed a number of difficulties, including
the large distances and excessive costs of transporting specimens and other materials.56 Limited
time and resources often meant that the collections sent fell far short of their desired goals, as
Francisco Moreno, Honorio Leguizamón, and Samuel Lafone Quevedo complained when
they pieced together the Argentine contribution to the Exposición Histórico-Americana de Ma-
drid in 1892.57 Additionally, as shown previously, participation at world’s fairs in Europe and
North America meant constantly battling to break out of the subservient position of peripheral
country or former colony and establish oneself on equal footing. Might there be a better way?
In a letter dated 25 May 1889, Francisco Moreno proposed an Argentine Retrospective
Exposition that would form part of the upcoming 1892 worldwide celebrations of the four
54
Horace Morgan, The Historical World’s Columbian Exposition and Chicago Guide: Authentic and Reliable Instructor for
Visitors to the Exposition and the Most Profitable Companion for the Sight-Seer Who Has to Stay at Home (St. Louis: James H.
Mason, 1892), pp. 276, 277. Morgan’s informant, one Mr. Curtis, also reports that Buenos Aires has two universities, “which rank
in standing and course of study with either Yale or Harvard.” This comparison of Argentina to the United States is particularly
interesting given Argentina’s earlier efforts to mimic the United States with regard to Indian policy. In 1877 Miguel Malarín, the
military attaché to the U.S. embassy, was tasked with studying that country’s strategies and their applicability to the Argentine
push for control of the pampas. See Mases, Estado y cuestión indígena (cit. n. 51), p. 64. The positive valuation of Argentina
found in Morgan’s text suggests that the approach was a successful one.
55
Morgan, Historical World’s Columbian Exposition and Chicago Guide, pp. 276, 310, 30–31.
56
Ameghino to D. J. Bonnement, 13 Oct. 1878, in Obras completas, ed. Torcelli, Vol. 20: Correspondencia científica (cit. n. 18),
p. 47. In this letter, Ameghino lamented the difficulty of transatlantic transport of delicate materials, complaining that the fossil
collections for the 1878 fair arrived in Paris in millions of pieces and that their restoration required “infinite work” on his part.
For the 1889 fair, the shipment of copies of Contribution was delayed in transit and did not arrive until February 1890: Albert
Gaudry to Ameghino, 22 Jan. 1890, in Obras completas, ed. Torcelli, Vol. 20: Correspondencia científica (cit. n. 18), p. 539.
57
Samuel Lafone Quevedo, Honorio Leguizamón, and Francisco P. Moreno, “Catálogo de los objetos que presenta la República
Argentina a la Exposición Histórico-Americana de Madrid,” in Catálogo General de la Exposición Histórico-Americana de Ma-
drid, 2 vols., Vol. 1 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1893), p. 3.
hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Moreno detailed plans for a vast
exposition to be held in the newly founded provincial capital of La Plata, with a parallel exhibi-
tion of the Argentine mercantile present to be organized in Buenos Aires, the national capital.
The date of the letter is revealing: the Paris World’s Exposition had opened just three weeks
earlier, and the overlap of Moreno’s proposal and the ongoing fair suggests the possibility of an
exposition on the margins supplanting the established venues in Europe and North America.
Why focus on an exposition thousands of miles away, Moreno seems to ask, when similar results
could be achieved at home? In the proposal, he insists that it will be cheap and easy to transport
intellectuals to La Plata from varied American and European ports, enticing them with the
promise of materials not readily available in central museums.58 In these comments and oth-
ers, Moreno reveals the ways in which national identity, race, and scientific authority could be
negotiated in the space of a local fair.
Like Ameghino’s anthropological display at the 1878 world’s fair, Moreno’s dreamed-of ex-
position would promote a certain racial identity for Argentina that carefully linked the present
with a prehistoric past. Like Ameghino, he insisted on the role of Argentina in universal prehis-
tory. In a series of conferences given at the Sociedad Científica Argentina in 1882, Moreno
used Joseph Hooker’s theory of continental drift and observed similarities between the crea-
tures of North and South America to suggest that a lost austral continent (corresponding to Ar-
gentine Patagonia) could very well have been the source of the world’s large fauna. In a parallel
fashion, the presence of contemporary indigenous people in the region possessing traits that
were seemingly prehistoric implied that Patagonia was also the likely starting point of mankind.
Moreno had long maintained contact with Paul Broca and Paul Topinard. In his written texts,
he allows citations from letters from the French anthropologists to make the suggestion of an
autochthonous American race that, according to Broca, could be the origin of European civi-
lization. Topinard writes that Moreno’s evidence “is such to make one wonder if the Neander-
thal might not be incidental in Europe in quaternary times, and if his real homeland might not
be southern South America.59 This deft rhetorical strategy adds legitimacy to the text by letting
established authorities from the recognized scientific and cultural center of the world suggest
the most potentially controversial hypothesis instead of Moreno himself.
Studies of comparative anatomy allow him to argue for the existence of a lost originary
dolichocephalic race that had since been replaced by brachycephalic races that had migrated
from other regions. The presence of dolichocephalic skulls in Argentina “proved” this origin,
although the reality is that Moreno had to fudge his measurements in order to make them fit
his hypothesis.60 With this theory, Moreno establishes a fact essential to his racial project: the
current Indians, whose skulls did not necessarily match those of the Patagonian fossil man,
were later invaders of the region or degenerated forms worn down by environmental factors.
This simple maneuver, like Ameghino’s interpretation of the fossil record, allows him to re-
move the contemporary Indians from any glory that would accrue from being related to the
58
Francisco P. Moreno, “Proyecto de una Exposición Retrospectiva Argentina con motivo del cuarto centenario del descu-
brimiento de América,” Revista del Museo de la Plata, 1891, 1:152–155 (this is the published version of Moreno’s letter). In
addition, 25 May is the day that Argentines celebrate the first events that led toward independence from Spain in 1816. This
connection further underscores the national identity aspect of Moreno’s project.
59
Francisco P. Moreno, “Patagonia: Resto de un antiguo continente hoy sumergido,” Anal. Soc. Científ. Argentina, 1882, 14:97–131,
esp. pp. 100, 103–104; and Paul Broca and Paul Topinard, quoted in Moreno, “El origen del hombre sud-americano” (cit. n. 22),
p. 182.
60
Moreno, “El origen del hombre sud-americano,” p. 182. On Moreno’s measurements see Navarro Floria et al., “La invención
de los ancestros” (cit. n. 14), p. 407. Stephen Jay Gould analyzes this phenomenon in The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed. (1981;
New York: Norton, 1996).
earliest predecessors of mankind. If the Indians living in Patagonia were in fact invaders from
another region, their claim to the land was no more legitimate than that of the Europeans who
arrived in the sixteenth century. If they were of the same race, but degraded, then they were
also unworthy of attention as they were on a downward spiral toward extinction.
Moreno’s theory goes further, building on the diffusionist theory of population found in
Charles Lyell’s earliest works on geology and prehistory.61 In his conference series on the ori-
gin of civilization, he concludes by asserting that the people who created the pyramids and
all those who contributed to the rise of Western civilization originated in the austral regions,
spreading “through a long series of physical and social evolutions.” As man moved throughout
the world, he picked up “fertilizing elements” and progressed intellectually, socially, and physi-
cally. The final step of this process occurred in recent centuries and continued to Moreno’s
time: “The wave returns and fertilizes America with its new components, thus converting its
humble cradle into a priviliged land.” This version of human evolution depicts European civili-
zation as the rightful owner of Argentine territory, returning after thousands of years of progress
to take control of land currently being wasted by anachronistic degenerates destined to die out
whether the Europeans intervened or not. This equivalence of ancient Argentines and ancient
Europeans reflects a general interest in pre-Colombian Aryanism that permeated the River
Plate museum, academic, and literary cultures of the time. In addition to the scientists studied
here, intellectuals including Domingo F. Sarmiento and Vicente Fidel López also advocated
for the Aryan roots of indigenous Argentines and a proto-Caucasian origin for the nation.62
With this final piece, Moreno launches a defense of a maligned sector of whiteness: the
Latin races. Although the general agreement was for white superiority, the nineteenth-century
racial scientists also insisted on a hierarchy within whiteness. Despite being European, the
Spanish and Portuguese, alternately categorized racially as Mediterranean or Iberian, were
considered to be inferior to the races of Northern Europe. Nott and Gliddon identified two
types of Caucasians in their Types of Mankind: the biologically inferior and darker Spanish
and Portuguese and the superior, fairer Anglo-Saxons.63 Iberian inferiority was explained by a
host of racial theories that centered on geography, climate, and miscegenation. Often cited,
for example, were the Iberian Peninsula’s geographic and historical ties to Africa, the biologi-
cal and cultural influence of the African Moors, and the warmer climate of Southern Europe,
which was said to cause laziness, degeneration, and a general lack of development that was
both innate and immutable. In the case of the Americas, the developmental contrasts of the
two regions (North and South) were often attributed to this racial legacy: the backwardness of
Spain had irreparably harmed the new republics.64 Moreno’s Argentine Retrospective Exposi-
61
While many scholars agreed with this theory, it was far from uncontroversial. Robert Knox called the idea that American Indi-
ans could have migrated from somewhere else “sickening, silly follies” best left to “those who hate the truth—the romanticists,
the novelists, the tourists”: Knox, Races of Men (cit. n. 8), pp. 251–252.
62
Moreno, “El origen del hombre sud-americano” (cit. n. 22), pp. 222, 223. For more on the Latin American tradition of
Aryanism see Ruth Hill, “Ariana Crosses the Atlantic: An Archaeology of Aryanism in the Nineteenth-Century River Plate,”
Hispanic Issues On Line, 2013, 12:92–110; and Mónica Quijada, “Los ‘incas arios’: Historia, lengua y raza en la construcción
nacional hispanoamericana del siglo XIX,” Histórica, 1996, 20:243–269.
63
Josiah Nott and George Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paint-
ings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), p. 107. On hierarchy within whiteness see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: Euro-
pean Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998); and Galen Joseph, “ Taking Race Seriously:
Whiteness in Argentina’s National and Transnational Imaginary,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2000, 7:333–371.
64
Hill, “Entre lo transatlántico y lo hemisférico” (cit. n. 7), p. 724. Jesús Torrecilla has traced the trope of Spanish laziness back
to at least the early sixteenth century: Jesús Torrecilla, España exótica: La formación de la imagen española moderna (Boulder,
Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2004), p. 155.
tion was designed to protest this attitude, proving that the Latin races had the same ability to
evolve as the Anglo-Saxon races and silencing critics at home and abroad. In addition to the
paleontological evidence his museum presented, what better proof of the modern nature of the
Latin race than La Plata itself, a city only recently founded and yet already in possession of a
world-renowned Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology? In fact, the American naturalist
Henry A. Ward had visited the city and the museum in 1887 and was amazed by the moder-
nity of La Plata and the “incalculable scientific value” of the museum, which in his opinion
equaled or surpassed even the greatest natural history museums in Europe.65 The whole of La
Plata would become a sort of living village, where the citizen and the self became anthropo-
logical evidence for the world.
Moreno’s elaborate exposition of prehistory as developed throughout his work allows him
to represent an unknowable extinct prehistoric Indian as a positive boon to Argentine identity,
whitewashing it via a long stay in Europe or Asia in order to exalt the European past of Argen-
tina. It simultaneously situates the modern-day Indians as illegitimate invaders or degraded
forms whose inability to keep up in the struggle for life has left them as anachronistic remnants
destined to disappear. The Retrospective Exposition would present this image to the world by
combining solid scientific samples with the power of the imagination to “resuscitate” the lost
organisms that populated the prehistoric past. Visitors to the exhibition would see “beings that
progress and transform” parade in front of their very eyes, including giant plants and animals
that became more numerous and varied with the passage of time. The dramatic spectacle of
evolution would play out as the public walked through the exhibits, watching the less fit disap-
pear in the “unequal struggle called progress,” until finally coming face-to-face with their own
likeness.66 Steeped in the language of Darwinian evolution (particularly as further developed
by Herbert Spencer), Moreno lays out the history of Argentina as a slow trek toward perfection,
as represented by the modern, urban Argentine citizen. Indigenous peoples are unequivocally
associated with the “less favored”; they were “vestiges” who represented earlier stages of prog-
ress, had been overcome, and therefore in no way belonged to the category of “our likeness.”
The Indian is thus made invisible: even alive he is dead, already relegated to the past, while the
European Argentine stands at the very heart of mankind.
C o n c l u si o n s
Studying these three expositions complements our understanding of the history of science
by highlighting several characteristics of anthropology in a Southern context. First, we have
seen how Argentina’s use of native bodies and cultures at world’s fairs changed over time, with
anthropological processes and results conditioned by local needs at the same time as they are
used to justify or question the very policies creating those conditions. Furthermore, Ameghi-
no’s displays and Moreno’s planned exhibition illustrate how, in Argentina, anthropology and
international exhibitions were closely tied to the study and representation of the self. Although
historiography of the United States and Europe points to a desire to control external popula-
tions at the heart of the development of anthropology and world’s fairs, in Latin America the
Self and the Other were two sides of the same coin, tied together by geographical proximity and
a centuries-long history of biological, cultural, and commercial intermixing. The presence of
the modern savage necessitated developing anthropology in ways that allowed racial “inferiors”
to be put on display for the world at the same time that they were erased at home. It would not
65
Moreno, “Proyecto de una Exposición Retrospectiva Argentina” (cit. n. 58), p. 155; and Henry A. Ward, “Los Museos Argen-
tinos,” Rev. Museo La Plata, 1891, 1:145–151, on p. 151.
66
Moreno, “Proyecto de una Esposición Retrospectiva Argentina,” p. 153.
be unreasonable to imagine a similar dynamic in other settler colonies such as Australia, which
was frequently compared to Argentina in nineteenth-century literature and similarly grappled
with the understanding and control of an internal Other.67
Of course, the American nations did not all agree as to what the displays at these fairs would
look like, who could participate, or the anthropological and exhibitionary strategies to be used
in order to achieve their goals. Whereas the United States stressed the potential incorporation
of the Indian and Mexico traded on the exoticism of the indigenous past, Argentina, as I have
shown, paleontologized and erased the native, turning his or her body into currency for buying
whiteness. Although imperialism remains an important context for the development of both
anthropology and world’s fairs, addressing these issues in the Global South refines our under-
standing of what expositions could and did do, as well the ways native bodies were placed at the
center of symbolic identity projects while being physically erased from national landscapes.
67
For instance, Darwin believed the Australians and Fuegians to be the lowest races of humankind: Charles Darwin, The Voyage
of the “Beagle” (1839; Auckland: Floating Press, 2008), p. 376. The Argentine journalist Roberto Payró described his journeys
through Patagonia, which he called the “Argentine Australia” owing to its extension, Southern location, and frontier status, in La
Australia Argentina, published in 1898: Roberto Payró, La Australia Argentina (Buenos Aires: La Nación, 1898).

From Savagery To Sovereignty: Identity, Politics, and International Expositions of Argentine Anthropology (1878-1892)

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From Savagery To Sovereignty: Identity, Politics, and International Expositions of Argentine Anthropology (1878-1892)

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From Savagery to Sovereignty: Identity, Politics,

and International Expositions of Argentine

Ashley Kerr, University of Idaho

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, Argentine intellectual elites turned

Isis, volume 108, number 1. © 2017 by The History of Science Society.

valorizing miscegenation, Argentine oligarchs belonging to the so-called Generation of 1837

race—while also affirming an absence—the complete disappearance of indigenous tribes prior

ethnographic museum, they were entirely counterproductive at an industrial exposition. It

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