The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier (review)

The concept of transculturation, introduced in 1940 by Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, responded to prevailing models of acculturation by shifting critical focus away from racial mixing to the convergence of cultures. The term is perhaps most studied in relation to the formative role it played within the multiple theories of hybridity developed by Latin American cultural studies during the 1990s. In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier examines the origins of this lineage of Latin American cultural anthropology through a comparative lens. Creating what might best be described a cultural history of anthropology between World Wars I and II, Birkenmaier draws upon archival research to examine four key scientist-writers' approaches to the Americas, including the well-known figures of Ortiz and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre as well as the less canonical Frenchman Paul Rivet and Haitian Jacques Roumain. Her goal is to demonstrate how each scholar's reconsideration of the study of race led to formative shifts in both disciplinary and social attitudes. She argues that these two decades were formative to cultural anthropology as a scientific pursuit, for European and American scholars idealistically looked to New World cultures to provide models of renewal in the face of conflict affecting other global regions.

In addition to tracing each thinker's key shifts in practice during the interwar era, along with primary intellectual networks of influence, Birkenmaier also draws attention to the institutional advancements the men helped initiate, from the creation of ethnological museums and the initiation of interdisciplinary journals to political service on both national and international levels. As Birkenmaier notes, the four anthropologists did not practice field research in the way scholars accept as a standard today, yet while the reductive understanding of race in biological terms may date their intellectual paradigms, the basic questions they asked remain pertinent to twenty-first century preoccupations in the field.

Although the four chapters that constitute the book all feature to varying degrees a response to mestizaje as an appropriated form of racial identity politics, they are not designed to be cumulative, but rather are primarily independent case studies. Chapter 1, for example, follows Ortiz's emerging rejection of pan-Hispanism, which he understood to be based on deterministic European academic models. This is particularly evident in his opposition to the recent push to celebrate Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World in terms of "Día de la Raza." From his study of Cuban folklore in the 1920s to his attempt to update the Royal Spanish Academy's dictionary of the Castilian language through the inclusion of local etymology, Ortiz's cultural turn brought to public attention both the important role that African language and customs had upon shaping contemporary Caribbean society and the promise of addressing issues of social injustice. Along the way, Birkenmaier considers other contemporary Cuban anthropologists influenced by Ortiz, before concluding with a discussion of Ortiz's public critique of the racial logic supporting José Martí's foundational manifesto of pan-Hispanism "Our America" (1891).

Chapter 2, by contrast, examines the work of Americanist Paul Rivet, both in his native France and during his World War II exile in Colombia and Mexico. Founder of the French Institute of Anthropology, Rivet sought to unite opposing methodologies of sociology and ethnology through his interest in the Americas, thus Birkenmaier focuses primarily upon the impact generated by his creation of the Museum of Man in 1937 along with his examination of Amerindian cultures' influence upon contemporary society (54). While Rivet eventually became involved with UNESCO, Berkenmaier suggests that awareness of his contributions faded in postwar Latin America in part because Claude Lévi-Strauss's popular structuralist approach more directly dialoged with US models and shifted focus away from the culture of specific regions to explore universal organizing concepts.

Returning to the Caribbean, Chapter 3 is organized in a...