About the Book
Latin eugenics was a scientific, cultural and political programme designed to biologically empower modern European and American nations once commonly described as ‘Latin’, sharing genealogical, linguistic, religious, and cultural origins.
Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective offers a comparative, nuanced approach to eugenics as a scientific programme as well as a cultural and political phenomenon. It examines the commonalities of eugenics in ‘Latin’ Europe and Latin America. As a program to achieve the social and political goals of modern welfare systems, Latin eugenics strongly influenced the complex relationship of the state to the individual. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources in many languages, this book offers the first history of Latin eugenics in Europe and the Americas.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Precursors
2. Early Latin Eugenics
3. Latin Eugenics in Interwar Europe
4. Latin Eugenics, Catholicism and Sterilization
5. Eugenics in Interwar Latin America
6. The Latin Eugenics Federation
7. Latin Eugenics and Scientific Racism
Conclusion
Epilogue: Latin Eugenics after 1945
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Marius Turda is Reader in 20th Century Central and Eastern European Biomedicine in the Department of History at Oxford Brookes University, UK.
Aaron Gillette is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Houston-Downtown, USA.
Review :
This is a valuable contribution to the conceptual and practical history of the international eugenics movement ... Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette should be commended for providing a rich transnational history that avoids ‘glossing over’ the specific national contexts, in Europe and the Americas
Turda and Gillette have done an excellent job of showing just how vibrant the Latin eugenic community was. Indeed, they have written an exceptionally researched and well-documented comparative work about Latin eugenics as practised in Europe.
Considering this complexity, Turda and Gillette’s task was difficult to execute. I wondered, at the outset, whether they would be able to update and strengthen Nancy Stepan’s The Hour of Eugenics, arguably the best-known synthesis of Latin American eugenics. They were. With this lucid book, Turda and Gillette demonstrate the strength and vitality of a concept whose very name usually elicits concerned eye squinting among readers.
As the only comprehensive work on Latin eugenics, Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective is a valuable resource for understanding both individual national eugenic programmes and the international linkages between them ... [A] laudatory effort ... This book should be of interest to intellectual historians, scholars of science, medicine and public health, and anyone interested in the mobility of ideas across world regions.
The authors’ detailed account of Latin Europe’s eugenic intellectuals is a fascinating addition to present knowledge. The research raises new questions.
[A] comprehensive comparative picture that carefully takes apart, re-contextualizes, and brings to light conceptual similarities and discrepancies between biological theories, state politics, and modernist theories of national degeneracy.
This work systematizes some essential information on the origins of Latin eugenics during the turn of the twentieth century, helps us understand the development of the official goal of modernization in Latin American societies during the interwar period, and presents a suggestive idea for how to comprehend the persistence of eugenics and racism in Latin America after World War II.
This volume can be considered the first reconstruction of Latin eugenics in comparative perspective, and [of] its transactional character that influenced, and in many ways, continues to influence the management of population and the issues surrounding reproduction in various parts of the world.
This book fortuitously combines detailed research with a synthesis of Latin eugenics in all its nuances, including themes and periods which are most controversial.
Latin Eugenics in Comparative Perspective is an important book for researchers interested in the history of various proposals to intervene in modern societies based on biological theories, aiming to bring about the supposed progress of humanity.
[This book provides] a rigorous analysis of a series of national case studies as well as international eugenic institutions ... In this sense, [this book] is a great contribution to the current scholarship in different Latin countries ... where, however, there is still need to understand both the connections between them and the tensions that characterised each local context when attempting to apply the same eugenic measures ... To present all these case-studies is a difficult task, and here lies the greatest merit of Turda and Gillette's book.
This volume will transform the history of eugenics. It is the first to focus on the contested category of Latin eugenics, and as such its comparative perspective illuminates local, national and transnational debates on what eugenics meant in several countries of Western and Eastern Europe and the Americas. By not taking Latin eugenics as read, the volume provides an exceptionally detailed and wide-ranging understanding of how this scientific-social movement was constructed in each locale, in contrast and contradistinction to other expressions of eugenics that existed contemporaneously.
Marius Turda and Aaron Gillete have written an immensely intelligent and informed study of the concept and history of ‘Latin’ eugenics. Drawing upon an impressive array of sources, they demonstrate how strong ethnic, cultural, and religious ties of affinity shaped a distinct ‘Latin’ identity which eventually found expression in the shared biopolitical aspirations of many eugenicists in Europe and North and South America. Focusing upon a dozen different nations, spread over three continents, Turda and Gillette have produced a major trans-national and comparative study which will, no doubt, attract a wide readership and inspire further research for years to come.
This book constitutes a much-needed, comprehensive, and up-to-date analysis of eugenics in those countries that rejected the Mendelian-based, hereditarian, and deterministic view of human improvement. By examining what French, Italian, Romanian, Mexican, Brazilian and Argentine eugenics had in common, this book renders their due place to alternative yet influential ideas of race betterment beyond the well-known Anglo-American and Nordic-German frame. Moreover, while acknowledging national specificities it shows the extent to which in many countries of Europe and the Americas eugenics was largely conceived in terms of modern social and family welfare policies.
In a field which is quantitatively immense and widely covered by scholars, this book analyses a fundamental and still neglected topic, that of Latin eugenics, by providing an inspiring reinterpretation of the scientific and politico-institutional foundations of eugenics. Based on a vast bibliography and on original archival investigations, the book explores a new dimension of the internationalisation of eugenics in Europe and Latin America, which opens a window on a number of research issues, including the relevance of biotypology and the complex reformulation of eugenics in the post-war period.
The tasks undertaken in these two books are remarkably ambitious and are executed with much sophistication and erudition ... The growing literature on eugenics will be significantly enriched by these two publications.
