d i s c i p l i n a r y c o n q u e st American Encounters /Global Interactions a series edited by gilbert m. joseph and emily s. rosenberg This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholar- ship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and politi cal borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical research. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the past and pro- motes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American En- counters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and reshaped. d i s c i p l i n a r y c o n q u e s t U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 ricardo d. salvatore Duke University Press Durham and London 2016 © 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Typeset in Trade Scala Sans by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Salvatore, Ricardo Donato, author. Disciplinary conquest : U.S. scholars in South America, 1900–1945 / Ricardo D. Salvatore. pages cm — (American encounters/global interactions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8223-6081-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-6095-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-7450-3 (e-book) 1. Latin America—Civilization—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. 2. United States—Foreign relations—South America. 3. South America—Foreign relations—United States. 4. Imperialism. I. Title. II. Series: American encounters/global interactions. f1409.95.u6s25 2016 327.730809 ' 04—dc23 2015031549 Cover art: Hiram Bingham’s expedition staff with Peruvian natives at Machu Picchu, 1911. Hand-colored slide by Harry Ward Foote. Yale Peruvian Expedition Papers (MS 664). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. This book is dedicated to my wife, laura posadas and to the memory of my parents, Marica y Chili This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments ix introduction Disciplinary Conquest 1 one South America as a Field of Inquiry 17 two Five Traveling Scholars 38 three Research Designs of Transnational Scope 52 four Yale at Machu Picchu: Hiram Bingham, Peruvian Indigenistas , and Cultural Property 75 Contents viii five Hispanic American History at Harvard: Clarence H. Haring and Regional History for Imperial Visibility 105 six Intellectual Cooperation: Leo S. Rowe, Democratic Government, and the Politics of Scholarly Brotherhood 134 seven Geographic Conquest: Isaiah Bowman’s View of South America 160 eight Worldly Sociology: Edward A. Ross and the Societies “South of Panama” 187 nine U.S. Scholars and the Question of Empire 211 conclusion 236 Notes 261 References 291 Index 313 a c know ledg ments When Gilbert Joseph was in the process of organiz ing the “Rethinking the Postcolonial Encounter” conference, which would later become the edited vol- ume Close Encounters of Empire , he asked me to contribute some ideas about the current status and possible direction in the study of U.S.–Latin American relations after the cultural-linguistic turn. The paper I presented at the conference (titled “The Enterprise of Knowledge”), hosted by Yale in 1995, launched me on a long journey into examining the formation of U.S. hegemony as a ques- tion of representation and power rooted in a quest for knowledge. Initially, my primary object of curiosity was how the nature and purpose of the U.S. empire in Latin America was represented and encoded into written texts. For a while, the U.S. informal empire and its “representational machines” stood at the center of my intellectual preoccupations. Yet with time my focus shifted toward the role of disciplinary knowledge in the making of U.S. hegemony over Latin America. Somewhat in between that conference and drafting this book, I discovered that “Pan-Americanism” in its various renditions was a force that tended to color much of the discussion about U.S.–Latin American relations since 1910, continuing to exert significant influence during the 1930s and 1940s. My first thanks go to Gil for guiding me into this line of research, which has turned out to be so interesting and rewarding. And to Cathy LeGrand, who started the whole conversation about the communicative and discursive nature of imperial engagements and about the importance of culture in mediating the memory of past U.S. economic, military, and political interventions in Latin America. Since 1998, the year in which Close Encounters of Empire was pub- lished, my opportunities to discuss the American empire, its representations, Acknowledgments x and its forms of knowledge have multiplied exponentially. Consequently, there are many, many people I need to thank. My intellectual debt being so large, I am tempted to simply declare myself in default and be done with it. But that would be unfair. So I will mention a selected group of colleagues, librarians, and students who over the years have helped develop the ideas that are part of this book; at the same time, I extend my acknowledgment and gratitude to the many others who have given me the opportunity to present these interpretations. It was at Princeton, during my stay at the Institute for Advance Studies (1988–1989), that I first discovered a close connection between mercantile ac- tivities and the available body of knowledge about overseas peoples. The ex- traordinary collection of “letter writers” and travel books I found at the Fires- tone Library helped me realize that, for merchants of the American Northeast, gathering information about other lands and peoples was a cultural imperative. In a paper I presented in 1990, at a University of Minnesota history workshop, I attempted to root the expansionist tendencies of the U.S. Northeast in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on both the curiosity awakened by travel and the mandate to register Otherness imposed by mercantile culture. The impulse to acquire transnational or global knowledge was constitutive of the notion of a “good merchant.” By extension, one could expect that this intertwining between foreign commerce and knowledge would continue to in- fluence U.S. expansionism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth— only that now, after the War of 1898, the entanglement between business and knowledge would be projected into a foreign policy view (U.S. Pan American- ism) and re-elaborated by business experts, scholars, and diplomats. Hence, I will begin by acknowledging the good work of the librarians and archivists who helped me find the wide range of materials needed to write this book, among them the librarians at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Yale Uni- versity, Harvard University, Duke University, Georgetown University, and the Columbus Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. Without these resources and the librarians’ advice, this project would have been more difficult to accomplish. As the reader will see, I was able to examine archival documents for three of the five scholars discussed in this volume (H. Bingham, C. Haring, and Leo S. Rowe). For the other two, my analysis is based on their works and memoirs. Second, I would like to thank the institutions that funded my research. A Fulbright Advanced Research Fellowship allowed me to reside in Washington for two months, where I was able to research the papers and work of Leo S. Rowe and the Pan-American Union. A De Fortabat Fellowhip at the Rockefeller Cen- ter for Latin American Studies, Harvard, allowed me sufficient spare time to work with Clarence Haring’s papers. Before that, I spent a semester at Yale Acknowledgments xi University, as an Edward L. Tinker Visiting Professor. There, at the univer- sity archives, I encountered abundant materials about Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition. Back in Argentina, the Secretaría de Ciencia y Téc- nica (SECyT) provided funding for the assistance of graduate students. One of them, Juan Pablo Scarfi, helped me establish connections between the U.S. scholars and local intellectuals. Another group of graduate students worked on a database of U.S. publications about South America during the period under examination. At various workshops, conferences, and symposia, I presented rough ideas about the nature of U.S. Pan-Americanism, the representational nature of the U.S. informal empire, and the multiple activities and processes that led to the establishment of Latin American Studies in the United States. Among these presentations were those I delivered at the annual meeting of the Ameri- can Historical Association in Washington (1999); at a seminar on economic integration sponsored by the University of New Mexico in collaboration with my home university, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (1999); at the interna- tional colloquium “Repensando el Imperialismo” at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (August 2000); at a Duke–Di Tella workshop on “Globalization and the Humanities” at Buenos Aires (August 2001); at a symposium on “Cultural Encounters and Resistance” at University College London (June 2001); at a symposium on “Hybrid Americas” at the University of Bielefeld (2002); at a colloquium on “The Location of Knowledge” jointly organized by Universidad Di Tella and Duke University (2003); at the conference “Looking North” at the Universidade Federal Fluminense of Rio de Janeiro (2004); at the Social Sci- ence Research Council conference on “Empire and Dissent: U.S. Hegemony in Latin America” at Cuernavaca, México (2005); at a Harvard Global History Conference (February 2008); at a meeting of the Associação Nacional de Pes- quisadores e Professores de História das Américas in Victoria, Brazil (July 2008); at the fifth global conference of International American Studies Asso- ciation (iasa) in Rio de Janeiro (July 2011); and at the symposium on “Fugitive Knowledge” at the University of Rostock (September 2012). I want to thank the organizers of these events for their efforts and kind- ness: Linda Hall and Gilbert Merkx of the University of New Mexico; Walter Mignolo, Grant Farred, and Cathy Davidson of Duke University; Nicola Miller and Christopher Abel of University College London; Josef Raab of the Uni- versity of Bielefeld; Carlos Altamirano, Jorge Francisco Liernur, and Claudia Shmidt, my co- organizers of the Buenos Aires colloquium; Virginia Domin- guez, Jane Desmond, and Sonia Torres, organizers of the Rio de Janeiro confer- ence; Itty Abraham and Fred Rosen, organizers of the Cuernavaca workshop; Acknowledgments xii Sven Beckert, organizer of the Harvard conference; Antonio C. Amador Gil, convenor of the meeting at Victoria, Brazil; Patrick Imbert, organizer and com- mentator of the “Geography of Power” session of the iasa conference in Rio; and Gesa Mackenthun, organizer of the event at Rostock, Germany. The reviewers who read this manuscript were very generous with their time and very precise in their criticisms. Their work certainly served to im- prove the coherence and persuasiveness of my argument. My friends Carlos Aguirre and Carlos Forment provided valuable advice in terms of the bibli- ography, as well as continuous support to this intellectual project. And so did Gil Joseph and Cathy LeGrand, already named. My colleagues at Buenos Aires have read drafts of various chapters or papers containing related ideas and re- sponded with useful insights. Among them are Juan Manuel Palacio, Ernesto Boholavsky, Horacio Crespo, Hugo Vezzetti, Guillermo Ranea, Jorge F. Lier- nur, Irina Podgorny, and Karina Galperin. To all of them, I extend my thanks. During the different stages of writing, the content and center of this volume changed. Indeed, three primary revisions were needed for this book to be as readable as it is. For this, I must thank my former editor Valerie Millholland, who provided early guidance, and Miriam Angress, who steered the project to completion. If the reader should notice that the book reads well in English, though written by an Argentine, it is due to the valuable help of the developmen- tal editor Laura Helper-Ferris. My thanks extend also to the various technicians, correctors, and assistants who constitute Duke University Press and contribute to the excellence of its publications. Though I was abroad for extended periods of time, visiting different univer- sities, my academic home has remained Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. I thank my colleagues for making this work environment a precious refuge, isolated from the instability and rhetorical warfare that constitutes Argentine political life. While writing this book, I encountered some unexpected life difficulties. The passing of both my parents between 2008 and 2011, after prolonged periods of illness, profoundly affected my emotional stability. My wife, Laura, helped me to navigate this difficult time, providing the support I needed to continue with my academic work. To her—and to the memory of my parents—I dedicate this book. introduction Disciplinary Conquest From 1900 to 1945, well before the consolidation of area studies, U.S. scholars in the humanities and the social sciences delineated the contours of a recently “rediscovered” land: South America. Their publications provided comprehen- sive and empirically informed visions of the subcontinent that contributed to the United States’ diplomatic rapprochement with the region. Parallel to business prospectors, Pan-American enthusiasts, religious missionaries, and travelers, a group of U.S. scholars came to the region in search of new data and fresh, direct observations to confirm or reject prior generalizations and stereotypes. Little by little, their authoritative representations began to fill the previous vacuum of knowledge, said to represent a major obstacle for more intense economic relations between the two Americas. Enhanced knowledge, the argument ran, would generate greater mutual trust in inter-American relations. These acts of knowing laid the foundations for a substantial apparatus of knowledge in the service of hemispherism. I call these scholarly engagements “disciplinary interventions”: disciplin- ary because they were rooted in scientific disciplines; interventions because they fostered U.S. economic, technological, and cultural hegemony in the region. In a way, these adventures in disciplinary knowledge constituted a continuation of U.S. hemispheric diplomacy through other means. In a region free from direct U.S. military and po liti cal intervention, information gathering Introduction 2 and knowledge production constituted cumulative acts of possession, through which the United States apprehended, systematized, and rendered legible the re- alities of South America. Textual, scientific representations of the region, which later congealed into regional disciplinary knowledge, constituted the appropriate mode of engagement for a benevolent informal empire. In the interwar period, scholars were increasingly engaged in Pan- Americanism, a movement that envisioned a hemispheric system of coopera- tion. Its promoters expected university professors and researchers to produce new knowledge that could reveal the “true nature” of the southern republics, as- certaining the similarities and differences in the region’s cultures. By the time of the Second World War, U.S. scholars had established the infrastructure of Latin American studies: the institutes, the research centers, the experts, the university programs, and the library collections for sustained interdisciplinary research on the region. 1 Most of them were proud that the knowledge attained by their disciplines served to inform U.S. policies toward the region. Implicit in the de- sign of Latin American studies was a constitutive connection with U.S. foreign policy. This connection gave meaning and substance to many of the research efforts deployed to “know” South America. In addition, scholars expected that, once disseminated to the U.S. population at large, this new knowledge would bring about feelings of sympathy and understanding for South Americans. In this book I explore the engagement of U.S. scholars with distinct as- pects of South America—its natural environments, human settlements, pre- Columbian cultures, colonial history, and contemporary social relations and forms of government— during the period 1900–1945. I examine the growth of academic knowledge about the region in relation to the building of informal empire. More precisely, I investigate the connection between the region’s inte- gration as an object of U.S. scientific inquiry and the “economic conquest” of South America. In Disciplinary Conquest I argue that knowledge enterprises could be considered ancillary activities in the making of imperial hemispheric hegemony. Scholarly visions of South America made the countries of the re- gion more easily apprehensible, their “realities” more readable both to U.S. foreign- policy experts and to the U.S. general public. My inquiry focuses on the works of five scholars: a historian (Clarence H. Haring), a geographer (Isaiah Bowman), a politi cal scientist (Leo S. Rowe), a sociologist (Edward A. Ross), and an archaeologist (Hiram Bingham). While restricted, this selection of scholars and disciplines provides a panoramic over- view of knowledge production about South America in the United States. In other words, the work of these five scholars could be considered as represen- tative of the modalities of U.S. scholarly engagement with the realities of the Introduction 3 southern republics. Disciplinary Conquest deals with the parallel and comple- mentary expansion of the U.S. informal empire and the formation of regional knowledge about South America. Increased commercial and investment op- portunities in South America motivated these scholars to extend disciplinary research into this new and unexplored territory. Interest in Inca citadels de- veloped into a full-blown inquiry of Andean archaeology. A geograph i cal sur- vey along the 73rd meridian provided the initial step for the project of South American geography. Interest in the administration of the Spanish colonial system and in U.S.-Latin American diplomatic history served to configure the field of Hispanic American history. In areas as different as geography, govern- ment, social relations, economics and finance, education, and history, scholars made a concerted effort to survey, report, and interpret the complex realities of the region, comparing them with Europe, the United States, and former Iberian empires. My claims refer specifically to the period 1900–1945, which corresponds to the construction of Pan-American institutions and ideals. 2 Before 1900, the very rarity of specialized regional knowledge made the interaction between knowledge and state power less frequent and effective. First proposed by Secretary of State James G. Blaine in 1881, the Pan-American ideal was envi- sioned as a loose cooperative union of the American republics. 3 Later, under President Woodrow Wilson, as the U.S. launched a rapprochement with South America, the notion developed into a full ideology, hemispherism, which centered on ideas of economic cooperation, cultural engagement, and collective security. By the mid-1930s, support for Pan-Americanism reached a peak of enthusiasm. Throughout the country, “Pan-American societies”—associations devoted to promoting inter-American friendship and understanding—received the broad support of U.S. functionaries, corporations, universities, and munici- palities. Indeed, Pan-Americanism became a government-sponsored social movement. The Good Neighbor Policy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, served to deepen U.S. rapprochement with the subcontinent. 4 The era of Pan-Americanism was a particular conjuncture in which eco- nomic opportunities made knowledge of South America a special concern shared by U.S. businessmen, foreign policy makers, and scholars. Diplomatic efforts to gain the cooperation of the South American republics presented U.S. officials with many questions about the opinions of South American intellectuals. This study focuses on South America, the region geographically located south of Panama. After 1900, diplomats, scholars, businessmen, missionar- ies, and other travelers delineated an enduring geopolitical division of the Introduction 4 hemisphere. In the academic discourse of the period, “South America” stood for a region quite different from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, where the U.S. exerted more direct forms of intervention. North of the Panama Canal were nations with frequent revolutions, with illiterate populations living under conditions of extreme poverty, and subjected, because of their proximity to the United States, to close and frequent supervision by Uncle Sam. South of this divide, in South America, were more politi cally stable republics, some of which had attained a significant degree of economic progress, particularly the so-called abc powers, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, as well as, by extension, Uruguay. In the U.S. foreign-policy community and in business circles there developed during this period a temporary fascination with—at moments bor- dering on perplexity at—the rapid progress attained by the abc powers. 5 As a consequence, authors called for a differential treatment of the region relative to the rest of Latin America. For diverse reasons, the Washington establishment never considered these republics as possible targets of military intervention. Promoters of Pan-Americanism, such as John Barrett, presented the southern republics as “lands of opportunity” to U.S. investors and merchants. 6 Once they had constructed the divide, U.S. scholars filled this construed geopolitical entity, “South America,” with meaning. In this book, I examine sev- eral instances in which U.S. scholars presented this crucial geopolitical differ- ence (the Great Divide) as a constitutive element of Latin American studies. In the works of geography, government, archaeology, sociology, and history I review, the specificity of “South America” resonated clearly and vividly. My inquiry traces the steps taken by U.S. scholars in making regional disciplin- ary knowledge, my central preoccupation being the ways in which this newly acquired knowledge helped diplomats and policy makers envision new U.S. foreign policies toward the region. I demonstrate that new knowledge about South America brought greater order and enhanced visibility both to U.S. schol- ars and to U.S. foreign-policy makers. 7 Scholars endeavored to order the great diversity of observed phenomena with concepts, methods of direct observation, and generalizations proper to their academic disciplines. By aggregation, these observations developed into general panoramic vistas of history, society, poli- tics, culture, and the environment. These synthetic views condensed under- standings about race, gender, nation, and power in South America. Certain aspects of these knowledge-producing activities were constitutive of Latin American studies: comprehensive visibility, the attempt to describe and un- derstand regional and subnational diversity, and the prestige associated with scientific methods of observation. Introduction 5 In addition, these acts of knowing presented a purportedly scientific vision of the subcontinent that businessmen and foreign-policy experts deemed nec- essary for the United States as an emerging international power. The possibil- ity of viewing the whole field from a distance and the authority to pronounce general statements about the region’s past, present, and potential future con- stituted a pervasive and enduring form of power. 8 In relation to this, we can claim that there was an intellectual conquest of South America, in the sense of appropriating and incorporating the region within the field of vision and range of influence of U.S. academic knowledge. The institutional and developmental issues of the region would not have developed into “problems” without thor- ough regional disciplinary work in the social sciences and in the humanities. Regional knowledge was a precondition for the construction of hemispheric influence and power. I present various instances of the production of regional knowledge: the ex- ploration of Machu Picchu by the amateur archaeologist Hiram Bingham; the mapping of South America by the American Geographic Society under Isaiah Bowman’s leadership; the social landscapes of Andean nations drawn by the sociologist Edward Ross; the comprehensive revision of Spanish colonialism made by the historian Clarence Haring; and the studies of government in colo- nial and neocolonial situations pioneered by Leo Rowe. These studies entailed a recurrent adjustment or calibration between preconceptions and realities, between national generalizations and subregional description. I examine the processes that created such new knowledge and the circumstances and rela- tionships that made it possible. These scholarly interventions—together with others not discussed in this volume—generated new understandings of South America. The increased academic interest generated by these interventions caused U.S. diplomats and businessmen to reappraise the region’s limitations and possibilities. By studying these scholars’ intellectual trajectories, research designs, and foreign-policy opinions, Disciplinary Conquest revisits the question of the ori- gins of Latin American studies from a different perspective: an understanding rooted in the mutual constitution of disciplinary regional knowledge and the U.S. exertion of economic and cultural influence over South America. First, until now, the consolidation of Latin American studies has been erroneously dated to the early 1960s and understood as a by-product of the Cuban Revolution. 9 My position is that the fundamental intellectual apparatus of the Latin American field was already established prior to this—in fact, before the Second World War. Second, I emphasize the connection between U.S. scholarly engagements Introduction 6 and U.S. foreign policy, arguing that the motivations for knowing South Amer- ica “scientifically” were diplomatic, economic, and political. The disciplines’ move toward regional knowledge cannot be separated from the discussions about the U.S. role in the hemisphere, the ideal of Pan-Americanism, and the cultural turn in inter-American relations implicit in the Good Neighbor Pol- icy. Endowed with the authority of disciplinary knowledge, U.S. scholars inter- vened in foreign- policy debates, gauged the possibilities of further economic penetration, and argued for or against the convergence of Anglo-American and Spanish-American cultures. Whether they were staunch supporters of Pan- Americanism or not, scholars tended to envision the nature of the U.S. hegemony in South America as something to be wrought in the terrain of cul- ture. In this regard, their views sustained and accompanied the transition from Big Stick diplomacy to the Good Neighbor Policy. Disciplinary Conquest is intellectual history with a twist. 10 For although I am concerned with scholars’ intellectual trajectories, influences, and interests, I do not separate the ideas and visions of these scholars from the social context and the material dimensions of their labors: their teaching, their travels, their editorial tasks, their networking activities, and their politi cal and social inter- actions. In conjunction, all these activities contributed to shape U.S. academic visions of South America, which, in turn, were crucial for building the foun- dations of disciplinary regional knowledge in U.S. universities and learned societies. In this sense, my perspective follows the agenda, advanced in Close Encounters of Empire , of examining the postcolonial encounter in its multiple, ground- level manifestations and representations to ascertain the relationships construed and the positions claimed by U.S. representatives in Latin America. 11 This time, though, the object under study is a collection of disciplinary inter- ventions, themselves a diverse assembly of knowledge-producing experiences and representations. An empirical impulse guided these scholars, and their “findings” tended to emphasize differences internal to the object of study (South America). In the book, the reader will see the perplexity of scholars as they tried to account for an array of nations and negotiate the obstacles in collecting evidence, the sat- isfaction when they successfully carried the evidence to their home universi- ties, the temptation to make great generalizations about the whole region, the pausing to consider the challenges that a certain piece of evidence presented to existing understandings. In this terrain, I greatly benefited from Bruno La- tour’s insights about the nature of scientific work: research is socially and insti- tutionally grounded; there is a constant circulation of materials and concepts; and interpersonal networks of scholars matter. 12 Introduction 7 My argument is not reductionist, nor does it lend itself to a facile instru- mentalist interpretation. The U.S. economic expansion and the diplomatic rap- prochement that followed Secretary Root’s visit to the region in 1906 opened up many questions about the nature and condition of South America. U.S. scholars posed these questions within their disciplines and realized that, to answer these questions, they needed field observations. This data gathering foregrounded the emergence of regionally based knowledge. Within three to four decades, initial regional subdisciplines came together as Latin American studies. Disciplinary Conquest shows that the content of the new regional disci- plines was informed by several forces, among them the problems posed by for- eign policy, the availability of library and archival collections, contemporary currents of thought, expert definitions and concepts, academic politics within universities and learned societies, technologies of observation and recording, and the interest awakened in the U.S. public about “South America.” U.S. scholars brought back to their home universities and learned societ- ies new claims about South America’s natural environment, population, his- tory, politics, social relations, and antiquities that in time consolidated into formidable structures of regional knowledge. Their research constituted new subdisciplines, such as Andean archaeology, South American geography, and Hispanic American history. Inquiries into politics and government in the re- gion did not generate a discipline called “South American politics,” just as the interest of sociologists in social relations in South America did not produce a “South American sociology.” 13 These intellectual contributions acquired meaning in discussions internal to U.S. academe, and also in dialogue with questions posed by U.S. foreign-policy makers. The common theme that con- nected scholars and diplomats was the role the United States had to play in the hemisphere. In this book I consider scholarly interventions in South America in relation to the growth of research universities and disciplinary knowledge in the United States. 14 These were the expansive forces that accompanied the deployment of U.S. cultural authority and disciplinary knowledge in South America, at a time of unprecedented expansion of U.S. investment and trade in the region. During this period, there was a complementary relation between the expansion of knowledge capital and that of financial and physical capital. For this reason, it is quite difficult to separate neatly the economic and knowledge imperatives of informal empire. Many forces were connected in this period, including capi- tal and knowledge, research universities and progressive ideals, a cosmopoli- tan, post- isolationist national outlook and the apparently insatiable quest for knowledge of the outside world. 15