Empirical Colony: Visions of American Social Science in Puerto Rico, 1913-1968

• In Event: 1250 - Social Science and Social Justice: Engagements Past, Present and Future

Abstract

The enduring drama of Puerto Rico’s status in relation to the U.S. has been the defining political reality for Puerto Ricans, whose experiences and views about such basic concepts as self-government, democracy, and citizenship have been filtered through the irreconcilable reality of a modern colony. Within this saga, the voluminous contributions of American social scientists to the construction of knowledge about Puerto Rico and its people have not been properly identified and synthesized. This project aims to uncover what kinds of knowledge American social scientists created about the Island and its people over the course of the American Century, when social scientists’ research agenda grew as Puerto Rico came to be regarded as a perfect laboratory in which to study modernization, industrialization, and social change. Drawing on the archival record of prominent American social scientists, especially John Alden Mason, Julian Steward, and Oscar Lewis, this article advances several claims. First, the marginalization, outright omission, or selective representation of the colonial context is common across this body of work. These claims are supported by analysis of the content and character of research projects, conceived to include materials beyond the final published product, especially original field notes and correspondence. Many of these scholars privately conceded the central significance of the colonial situation in their correspondences but their published work hardly incorporates this lens. Second, the analysis reveals the important role of Puerto Rican intellectual and political elites as well as research patronage by American foundations and nascent Puerto Rican institutions in both shaping the research projects and managing the public response to them. Third, the ontological commitments – and at times debates – that marked social science disciplines at different times, as well as battles around academic freedom and the role of politics in science, matter for understanding these scholars’ Puerto Rico ventures.

Author

• Vanesa Ribas, University of California, San Diego