Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945 by Ricardo D. Salvatore (review)

Disciplinary Conquest by Ricardo Salvatore poses an interesting debate for those who seek to understand South America: Are simplifications justified if they lead to positive change? Salvatore argues that five U.S. scholars in the early twentieth century had a significant degree of influence over how not only the US public but foreign-policy experts interpreted and understood the continent to their south. He employs the term "simplification," as developed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State, to emphasize their overgeneralizations of the region. Yet, these generalizations were generally palatable, making U.S. policymakers view South America differently from how they perceived the countries of Central America and the Caribbean. They became open to transitioning US-Latin American relations away from Dollar Diplomacy and Big Stick Policy and toward developing friendlier relations under the guise of Pan American Relations. For Salvatore, the final result of their efforts was the Good Neighbor Policy ushered in under the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

By looking at the work of geographer Isaiah Bowman, archaeologist Hiram Bingham, political scientist Leo S. Rowe, sociologist Edward A. Ross, and historian Clarence H. Haring, Salvatore continues arguments he began in the edited volume Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations about knowledge enterprises and the creation of imperial hegemony through the way the production of knowledge buttresses hegemony. But unlike this earlier work, Disciplinary Conquest identifies disciplinary interventions as a diverse assembly of knowledge-producing experiences and representations. By showing the steps in the "construction of disciplinary regional knowledge" (p. 12). The term "disciplinary" in his title is rooted in scientific disciplines while "conquest" comes from the perceived "second discovery" of South America by these five Anglo-American scholars. The scholars engaged in a scientific, positivist pursuit, but as Salvatore shows, their work fostered U.S. economic, technological, and cultural hegemony in the region. As a note, it would be interesting to know why it "fostered" hegemony. Is this an inadvertent failing or is hegemony (a la Foucault), in Salvatore's argument, inherent to all knowledge production?

In addition to an introduction and conclusion, Salvatore develops his arguments in nine chapters. In chapters one to three, he presents the general research design and imperial mentalities of the five scholars. In chapter one, he argues that the scholars, through observation and disciplinary methods, contributed a new position of the U.S. in the world. In the second chapter, he provides the general background of the five scholars, their travels, and their publications. In the third chapter, he discusses how they were pioneers in building research projects of a hemispheric and transnational scope. He also discusses the concept of the "imperiality" of knowledge as a key to understanding these disciplinary interventions. In chapters four to eight, he discusses the research of each scholar. In the final substantive chapter, he analyzes these scholars, the question of empire, and the nuances on how these scholars are imperialists.

Salvatore's major contribution to the discipline of history and cultural studies is twofold. First, he wrote a work that cannot be, or refuses to be, oversimplified into a "colonized" category, such as intellectual history or cultural studies theory. This is an original work, and it should make current U.S. scholars reevaluate how they teach and research topics in South America and U.S.-Latin American relations. Second, it is an excellent composite of the intellectual production by five male scholars that helped influence U.S. policy between 1900 and 1945. He shows how these scholars facilitated the transition in policy, how South America, especially the advanced nations of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, came to be viewed as a region different from the Caribbean and Central America, but not as developed as Europe and United States. During the twentieth century, studies of South America as a whole promoted the goal of understanding this continent...