Making Human Populations

摘要

In the 1930s, the Otomi people living north of Mexico City became a model population for addressing the problems of poverty and “backwardness” of the Indian population. Mexican physiologists working in the capital chose the Otomies not least because they lived in easy reach of their laboratories. A collecting trip could be managed in a day and samples safely handled and promptly transferred to laboratory conditions. Following the Mexican teams that were funded by the newly created Autonomous Department of Indigenous Affairs, French researchers descended on the Otomies to study their metabolism, using the networks and infrastructures put in place by their local colleagues. Their investigations, aimed at establishing a standard against which to compare the metabolism of French peasants, required chosen individuals to come to the capital and undergo extensive testing under controlled dietary conditions. Through these studies, Joel Vargas-Domínguez argues, the Otomi people acquired “a new physiological dimension” that in part reformulated what it meant to be Otomi (Vargas-Domínguez this issue). How did the Otomi people react to these interventions? What was their view about the singular attention being devoted to their means of subsistence, dietary habits and, above all, their metabolism? Have these perceptions changed over time? The historical resources, the author tells us, “have silenced the voices of the Otomi people…. While we may hear whispers of the voices of these subjects of experimentation… reconstructing completely those silenced voices escapes the reach of this paper” (this issue). Historians have increasingly engaged in recovering these voices by combining a variety of historical, anthropological and literary approaches.1 The “population of cognition” analytic the editors have proposed as a general framework for the essays could be understood to include such an approach. Yet engaging with this problematic is not the main thrust of the essays collected in this special issue.What the essay on the Otomi people and the other essays in the collection provide is a rich reflection on how populations were made and how they became the subject of scientific inquiry and political intervention in the Latin American context. In this process, the notion of population itself comes under scrutiny.