This chapter focuses on micro encounters engendered by the Yale Peruvian Expedition, exploring via textual and photographic evidence the racial scientific research that shaped encounters in Peru between expedition members and Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, some of whom served as the expedition’s workers and assistants. Reading these sources in relation to the broader context of rural unrest in the Cusco region, the emergence of an urban and university-based indigenista movement that promoted the study of Indigenous peoples, and the rise of American-led expedition science, Warren questions how different groups imagined and contested the moral and ethical dimensions of such work. He argues that when measured and photographed, Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects ultimately subverted the expedition’s efforts to document accurate visual depictions of racial types. Drawing on the concept of ethnographic refusal in Indigenous Studies while also identifying other forms of engagement, Warren criticizes the univocal conception of moral fields as the possession of imperial researchers but not of Indigenous and Mestizo people subjected to their gaze.

This chapter rethinks Indigenous bodies and remains as unstable sources of scientific knowledge during a period of great violence and settler expansion: the late nineteenth-century incursions into Indigenous lands in Southern Argentina. Rodriguez compares the experiences of two prominent anthropologists, one an outsider (the German Rudolf Virchow) and one an insider-outsider (Argentine scientist Francisco P. Moreno) to show how their methods both overlapped and diverged based on their positionality. Rodriguez reads the scientists’ reports of their own emotive states as well as their interpretation of Indigenous peoples’ against the grain, revealing that underneath the authoritative scientific conclusions lay uncertainty and unease.

This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

This chapter examines the published work and careers of American conservationist William Vogt and Brazilian physician-geographer Josué de Castro during the early Cold War. It emphasizes the different affective strategies that the two men employed to persuade readers of their competing positions regarding the relationship between human population, arable land, food supply, and global security. As a briefly prominent intellectual from the global South, De Castro challenged the emerging, US-led consensus that population control was essential for economic development. Based on his own experiences among marginalized Brazilians, De Castro viewed Vogt’s concern with “carrying capacity” limits as an imperialist imposition on the autonomy of less empowered people. He feared that prioritizing population reduction as the solution to resource scarcity would undermine movements for social and economic transformation, such as agrarian reform in rural Latin America. With little personal experience of the world’s poor, Vogt projected a pessimistic vision of the future on continents overrun by desperate, starving hordes. De Castro’s contrasting vision, on the other hand, stemmed from frequent encounters with the chronically hungry and a more sympathetic understanding of their plight.

This epilogue closes the volume by inviting us to reflect on the afterlives of culturally significant items when they are returned to the original Native communities. Examining Harvard University’s Peabody museum’s return of a totem pole to the Gitxaała Nation in late 2022 followed by a ceremony in the museum a few months later in Spring 2023 Soto Laveaga ponders what it means to close “a circle that should never have been opened” as a member of the Gitxaała Nation described. How will narratives of troubling encounters like this one be narrated in the future when a coda explains that, hopefully, an object has been returned? How will museums curate spaces vacated by objects that were never meant to be exhibited on walls or in cases? Moreover, how will the stories be told when ancestrally powerful objects imbued with living spirits return home? As we enter a new era of repatriation centered on respect and reciprocity, this epilogue reminds us that when it comes to collecting, the human sciences, and Indigenous people the story remains far from finished.

This chapter probes the relation of both science and Indigeneity to nationalism – and of all of these to gender. Rosemblatt focuses on a controversy that began in 1949–1950, when remains said to have belonged to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor, were found buried in Ixcateopan, Guerrero. Two official commissions denied the authenticity of the burial, but local officials, along with the broader public, found the story expedient, and anthropologist Eulalia Guzmán lent support to their view. Intellectuals who grounded Mexican greatness in their own cosmopolitan scientific neutrality faced off against those who stressed the Indigenous roots of Mexican national identity. The episode reveals differing views of what constituted scientific proof and how science and indigeneity were related to nationalism and politics more generally. Because the pro-authenticity group was led by a woman, it provides a window onto the gendering of scientific authority. The village of Ixcateopan, the chapter argues, actively engaged science along with Guzmán and her allies.