Description:

At the start of the Cold War, a group of anthropologists and psychotherapists related to the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos (1952-1966) went into the Andean highlands to collect the dreams and waking thoughts of indigenous people. Through psychoanalysis, dream interpretation, and the employment of a battery of projective tests (from Rorschach to thematic apperception) researchers worked to make indigenous inner thoughts scientifically serviceable to the various concerns of midcentury social science: culture change, modernization, and the threat of communist persuasion. This talk highlights their fieldwork encounters – their entangled transactions, ethnographic refusals, and fraught exchanges, to understand the politics of creating scientific value in Cold War social science, as well as to explore the legacy of this work in adjacent endeavors such development economics and human-centered design.

Jason Pribilsky is Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies at Whitman College in Washington State, specializing in medical anthropology, migration, indigenous movements, and the history of anthropology. He is the author of La Chulla Vida: Gender, Migration and the Family in Andean Ecuador and New York City and finishing a new book titled Contagious Experiments: Midcentury Modern Anthropology and Indian Problems in the Peruvian Andes.

*Lunch will be provided