Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the United States, 1880s-1930s

Mauricio Tenorio Trillo

Ecce lupus (Behold the wolf [the United States—mocking the habit of making that country into the blameworthy "other" in Mexican historiography]).

—Edmundo O'Gorman, México: El trauma de su historia, 1977

Nowadays the coupling of the terms American and social science seems a redundancy. On the one hand, from a distance sociology, anthropology, folklore, and ethnology appear to be obsolete buildings more or less well constructed, with hypotheses, causes, proofs, and laws. Seen close up from within the violent river rapids of words of which those laws formed a part, social science constitutes choices of utterances within the chaotic and dynamic possibilities for naming things, in sciences, literature, and art. Yet this choice of terms seemed worldwide.	1
On the other hand, America, the continent, has been linked to the very conception of social science as research project and form of human knowledge. The torrent of scientific terms began with the naming of a large part of America as the archetype for barbarism. The American continent became the laboratory for all experiments in development—the word in which hopes of applying social science to benefit society came to concentrate. America is present, for instance, in the use that Friedrich Engels made of the studies of American natives by the United States anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, in the ambivalent fascination of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs with the United States in defining the concept of standard of living, and in the construction of the weightiest utterance in the entire river of scientific words that formed the nineteenth century: race. Likewise, the United States gradually americanized the social sciences as its own product. By the 1920s, America—the continent—was the seat of cosmopolitan scientific language, visible in the Chicago School of sociology, the urban studies of Robert Park, or the archaeological and anthropological studies of Mexican, Peruvian, or Brazilian indigenistas (who found in indigenous peoples the bedrock for their respective nationalisms and great aesthetic and cultural potential). By the 1960s, the world had adopted social science à la américaine as a universal and natural result of human knowledge. In sum, on one side of the equation, modernity, modernization, science, development, and Americanization have become scientific, political, and cultural synonyms. On the other, America invents, exemplifies, and provides the commentary on words without which we still cannot think—race, development, nation, modernization, tradition, class.1	2
How were the modern, seemingly universal, versions of such concepts as race, society, state, progress, people, and nation authored? The history of social science can assist in elucidating the common, global, raw material with which we organize contemporary historical thought. This essay, a partial version of a work in progress, advances both an approach to the study of social science that aims to go beyond conventional national frameworks and specific stories of the development of social science in North America.	3
I take as my point of departure three pivotal ideas, which together give guidance and warnings about how to trace the history of social science. First, social science is not a bizarre and failed version of science but the quintessential modern scientific effort, a cardinal expression of what the nineteenth century meant by human knowledge; it is thus a yardstick to investigate science as a whole. Science, it has been assumed, has furnished us with universal, irremediable, objective, and unavoidable truths. Consequently, science has no nation. Science is nonetheless a social practice, and as such it has a history that cannot be reduced to progressive innovation, which is not to argue that we can desert the scientific contour of our modern minds. Despite today's presumed post-condition, any criticism of science, if honest, necessarily implicates the critic in a collective mea culpa.	. . .