Doctoral Dissertation Reason and Faith: A Study of Interwar Chilean Eugenic Discourse

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project focuses on interwar Chile to understand the dynamic relationship between Catholicism, gender and eugenics in Latin America. Historians of science often argue that eugenics (efforts to improve the proportion of positve traits in human populations by selective breeding) was distasteful to most Latin Americans, scientists and laymen, because of their Catholic identities. However, using a variety of scientific pamphlets, ephemera, treatises and instruction materials, this project will illuminate how Latin American Catholics engaged eugenic science. Latin Americans, Chileans included, generally latched on to the Lamarckian contention that creating a eugenic environment would gradually improve populations over time, rather than encouraging the separation of unfit individuals from the rest of society. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its focus on the complicated relationship between science and religion in Chile. This relationship has been studied in the United States and Europe, but this is not true of the Latin American case. Many historians overlook Latin America as a place of scientific innovation precisely because of its religious identity. The result of this has been the relative dearth of scholarly work on the history of science in Latin America, particularly science practiced by Latin Americans without the intervention of Europeans or Americans. Scholars who do discuss Latin American science often portray it as flawed or derivative. This project, however, will treat Chilean eugenics as legitimate. This approach will better historiographically link Chilean eugenics to literature on the relationship between religion and science in North Atlantic countries. The broader impact of this project will be an examination of the power scientific discourse had in the creation of Latin American interwar gender norms. Both religious and secular Chileans shored up notions of modernized, patriarchal gender systems that emphasized the role of women as wives and mothers through the use of eugenic discourse. This allows for the exploration of how both Catholicism and modernized patriarchy affected the development of eugenic science in Latin America. This project was funded by way of NSF's Science, Technology and Society Program.