ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Andean Sciences Untranslated

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines how Andean knowledge systems and their representatives were contested as they moved across colonial, imperial, and transnational contexts from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. While histories of science can cast the Andes as a peripheral site of extraction, these papers show these epistemes and actors as mobile, intellectually generative, but conditioned by colonial expectations.

Mackinley Fitzpatrick reconsiders khipus not as undeciphered “texts” but as material technologies whose fibers, twists, and craft practices constituted dynamic modes of knowledge production. His archaeology of khipus challenges script-centered narratives and expands the history of information beyond alphabetic models. Bruno Stori turns to the early-seventeenth-century Huarochirí manuscript to analyze how mountains, animals, and rivers acted as epistemic agents, revealing how Indigenous and European understandings of geography and personhood interpenetrated in colonial Peru. Christopher Heaney traces an overlooked moment of scientific diplomacy in the 1790s, when creole Peruvian ilustrados appealed to British savants to join them in interpreting ancient remains—an overture met with scientific skepticism and political anxiety in London. Marcia Stephenson follows the first Bolivian students sent to study natural science in Paris alongside Alcide d’Orbigny, mapping how political dynamics, personal trajectories, and their disappointment shaped the circulation of scientific expertise in nineteenth century trans-Atlantic world.

Together, these papers argue for an Andean science in and out of translation: knowledge traditions whose negotiation across languages, empires, nations, media, and bodies, make them useful to broader nineteenth-century histories seeking to account for the loss and survival of prior Indigenous and imperial epistemes.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Christopher Heaney, Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Geographical knowledge and the more-than-human lived landscapes of Huarochirí, late-16th-century Peru - Bruno Stori, Pennsylvania State University

• Peru Writes to London: Andean Epistemes and the Making of a Transatlantic Science of the Dead - Christopher Heaney, Pennsylvania State University

• Natural History in Translation: Alcide d’Orbigny and Bolivia’s First International Students in France, 1833 - Marcia Stephenson, Purdue University

• Horseshoes in Science: The Role of Equine Veterinary in the Configuration of Scientific Thought in the Andes - Laura Helena Arraya Pareja, FLACSO ECUADOR