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

In The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature Between the Wars, Anke Birkenmaier resituates discussions of race and culture in the 1930s-40s in Latin America within the rise of anthropology in the region. Spanning broad geography and texts published in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, each of the four chapters centers on an anthropologist-writer: Fernando Ortiz of Cuba, French Americanist Paul Rivet, Haitian writer Jacques Roumain, and Brazilian Gilberto Freyre. The book considers not only the less frequently studied works of these writers but also the networks and debates within anthropology through which each writer formulated his notions of race and cultural contact. In this way, Birkenmaier introduces readers to a number of lesser-known figures within these heavyweights' broader professional milieus.

The four writers that structure the study, as Birkenmaier points out, "were temporary or permanent exiles" in the interwar years, a condition that "instigated new reflections on one's own culture and that of 'others'" (9). They all participated in an exchange among Latin American, US, and French Americanist anthropologists that would forge the "Americanist years," a reference to Paul Rivet's French Société des Américanistes that would profoundly influence the development of the discipline in Latin America. These anthropologists engaged in a hemispheric and comparatist dialogue, employed a varied range of methods, and founded their approach in an anti-racist politics intended to undermine the rise of fascism. As transnational American studies continues to gain ground within our contemporary academic sphere, Birkenmaier's study details a deep history of interdisciplinary methodology and political engagement that undergirds contemporary hemispheric approaches to cultural studies and critical race theory.

Through the meticulous tracing of the formation of Latin Americanist applied cultural anthropology in the interwar years––such as in the founding of museums, the creation of journals, critical editions, excavations, conferences, and lecture series––the book's intellectual history of anthropology informs its insightful readings of both well-known and understudied texts. The writers at the center of the book, Birkenmaier argues, practiced the discipline in unique ways, relying on linguistic analysis and the study of colonial chronicles and writing in a style that "straddled the pamphlet and the scientific essay, the novel and the political speech" (144). Their fusion of humanistic and scientific approaches requires an equally interdisciplinary critical lens, which Birkenmaier––who significantly is a literary and cultural studies scholar and not an anthropologist––readily provides. Known for scholarship on Caribbean literature and Latin American avant-gardes in such studies as Havana Beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings After 1989 (2011, co-ed. Esther Whitfield) and Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006), which was awarded the 2007 Premio Iberoamericano from the Latin American Studies Association, Birkenmaier's recent book exhibits an innovative cultural studies approach to the intellectual history of a social science discipline. In this way, The Specter of Races pushes against an Area Studies model of Latin Americanist scholarship––in which humanities-based literature departments and social science programs are kept separate––returning to a moment of scholarly "synergy among literature, linguistics, the visual arts, anthropology, and history in regard to Latin America" (144).

Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Rivet, the intellectual on which the book hinges, is also the least known of the four within Latin Americanism. Rivet's comparatist model of material cultures, or "diffusionism," through which he studied American "culture areas," greatly influenced the development of a Latin Americanist regionalist anthropology (17). Birkenmaier links Rivet's impact in Latin America to the study of Chaco indigenous people in 1930s Tucumán, Argentina by Rivet's student Alfred Métraux. The book also considers Rivet's exile in Mexico and Colombia, where politically-engaged indigenista intellectuals criticized Rivet for his tendency to relegate the study of indigenous cultures to a removed and forgotten past.

Whereas Rivet is lesser known, the chapters on widely-studied writers Gilberto Freyre and Fernando Ortiz...