Demographic knowledge and nation-building: the Peruvian census of 1940
López, R.úl.N.
Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 33(3): 280-296
2010
ISSN/ISBN: 0170-6233 PMID: 21466143 DOI: 10.1002/bewi.201001471Document Number: 229942
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.