2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

Jorge␣ Canizares Esguerra SUNY, Buffalo
HSS Abstracts
Postcolonial Nature:
Nature Narratives and Nation-Building in 19th-century Latin America.
In the nineteenth century, Latin American countries faced the challenge of
building nations out of scratch while contending with a multiplicity of centrifugal
forces tearing them apart. Historical narratives, we are now told, have been
central to the emergence of nations as communities of citizens. Historical
narratives have also proved important in their undoing. “Nature” narratives might
have played a similar role by either facilitating or obstructing the consolidation
of these imagined communities. The search for “typical” local, regional, and
national landscapes, the surveying and mapping of territories, the study of how
climate affects labor, culture, and the economy exercised the imagination of
Latin Americans in the nineteenth century. I seek to explore how these processes
both facilitated and impeded the emergence of the new nations.
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Cong Cao University of Oregon
Ideology and Chinese Science
In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, scientific disciplines
were claimed to carry distinctive ideological character. The Communist Party
promoted one school while devaluing others from an ideological rather than a
scientific standpoint. The domination of Lysenko biology and the suppression
of Morgan’s genetics in China during the 1950s and 1960s are a welldocumented
example. The paper is going to review other cases—the ban of
sociology, the criticism of Pauling’s theory of the chemical bond and the attack
of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and answer the question of why ideology
came into play in Chinese science. It is the Soviet influence, the difference in
the training of Chinese scientists and China’s political climate that made a
field proletarian or revolutionary, and bourgeois or reactionary, which resulted
in the different destination for the field and for scientists working on it.
John Carson University of Michigan
Peace Work: Intelligence, Merit, and the Limits of Democracy
In this paper, I will examine in detail one part of this story of the co-production
of notions of merit and social order, the development of the civilian group
intelligence test in the United States and the reverberations its deployment and
use on a mass scale engendered in the inter-war period. To its promoters,
measurements of intelligence promised simultaneously to reveal one of the
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