The Meaning of Blood in Argentina: Genealogy and Darwinism in the Recovery of the Past

This essay addresses how the spread of Darwinian ideas helped to revive concerns about lineage and purity of blood in Argentina by the end of the nineteenth century. An analysis of how blood was engaged symbolically, before and after evolutionary ideas became dominant, underscores how the aristocratic culture that emerged by the 1880s was linked to genealogy. This genealogical thinking deeply affected ideas regarding gender, race, and the possibility of continuity and discontinuity of certain populations. The study concludes by tracing how the return to a genealogical system created a new understanding of what was civilized and modern, one that contradicted many ideas that the Generation of 1837 held on these same questions.