Paper short abstract:

Histories of field science can help us understand how scientists have situated themselves within, and contributed to, expanding commodity frontiers in the past. In Latin American contexts, scientific fieldwork is still often confronted with increasing capitalist extractivism.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution uses history of science approaches to highlight the involvement of scientific field researchers with the commodity frontiers that marked the environments and communities in which they situated their work. Historians of science have long noted that field scientists were embedded in specific landscapes and rural communities. Scientific archives (e.g. field notes) therefore contain observations of environmental transformations, often detailing expanding commodity frontiers. Beyond that, archaeologists, anthropologists and botanists were also active participants in expanding commodity frontiers. This is particularly applicable in Latin American history, where the overlap between commercial prospectors and scholarly study was considerable throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I draw on specific case studies of the expansion of the chicle industry in Guatemala’s northern Petén department in the 1940s, the banana industry’s rapid spread in the Caribbean lowlands in the 1910s, and the coffee industry in Guatemala’s Western highlands in the 1890s, where scientific and tourist infrastructure and developed alongside, and in cooperation with, the infrastructure and labour markets of commodities and extractivism.

Today, scientific researchers in many of these disciplines still share spaces with indigenous people, and work in environments threatened by increasing extractivism. They now often consider themselves as advocates for the rights of indigenous people and environmental conservation. Their work is however also entangled with contested alternative models of touristic development, such as the proposed “Tren Maya” in Mexico. We can understand such challenges better by examining the historical roots of rural landscapes as a shared space between science, commodities, and communities.