Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Census/Demographics, New Media on 2010-08-27 16:51Z by Steven |
Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Published online 2010-08-03
DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201001471
Raúl Necochea López
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Demographic Knowledge and Nation-Building: The Peruvian Census of 1940. The demographers who organized the 1940 census of Peru portrayed the increasingly mixed-race Peruvian population as indicative of the breaking down of cultural barriers to the emergence of a robust Peruvian identity, a process that, they claimed, would lead to greater national development. This paper analyzes the ways in which demographers constructed cultural heterogeneity as a potential national asset. This reveals how scientific knowledge of miscegenation affected the formation of a nationalist project in the second half of the twentieth century, and also how demographers’ ideological commitments to socialism shaped scientific practice.
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