The Fully Realized Man: Thinking Through A Mexican Universalist Earth Science

• In Event: Ecologies and Material Politics of the Inorganic: Rethinking/Reframing

Abstract

“By being good scientists, true to our vocation, perhaps we may…reach the highest ideal of the ancient humanist founders of our nation: in omacic ozuichtli, the fully-realized man” (Lomnitz: 1996).

In a speech commemorating the 50th anniversary of Mexico's Premio Nacional de Ciencias, geophysicist Cinna Lomnitz describes ineluctable tensions between "universalist" and located science. He contextualizes them in Mexico, arguing that Nahuatl philosophers were familiar with these tensions long before they encountered European science.

In this talk, I explore how some Mexican earth science researchers, “true to [their] vocation,” use the soils, rocks, and forces with which their discipline is intimately concerned in order to think through the tensions that Lomnitz describes, performing what amount to ontographies of scientific knowledge. Drawing on data from my ongoing ethnographic research with geophysicists and engineers in Mexico City, this talk will demonstrate how the materials of Mexican territory are taken up as tools for thinking through the nature of universalist science, Mexican territory, and the relations between the two.

The kinds of worldings that I will attend to may readily be framed with concepts like “postcolonial science” and “science on the periphery," but, as I will argue, require of my interlocutors more than an analytics of core/periphery or local/global. Their strategies for thinking science are particularly important to attend to in light of contemporary efforts to better understand the materially-situated knowledge practices that today comprise "universalist" science around the world— and what ideals they may be entangled with.



Bibliography

Lomnitz, C. 1996. “Flor y Canto: Presencia de la cultura científica mexicana.” Nexos (271)

Author

• Elizabeth Reddy, University of California, Irvine