This book owes a great deal to Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, a pioneer of Afro-Brazilian studies who died in Paris in 1906 at the age of forty-six during his first trip outside Brazil. Together with his colleague, the (black) psychiatrist Juliano Moreira, he was planning to visit Lombroso in Turin when the Congress of Criminal Anthropology was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Master Lombroso’s career.1 Following the then-obligatory practice for positivist scientists, Nina’s body was embalmed by colleagues in Paris (or possibly by Lacassagne himself in Lyon) before being repatriated to Salvador, Bahia. However, instead of being donated to science, as Nina had wished, his body was buried at his family’s behest. Their decision was compounded by the reluctance of his colleagues at the School of Medicine to receive the embalmed body of such an illustrious and controversial figure, the collector of fetishes and other magical objects.2 A physician, ethnographer and positivist who was both mixed race and a racist (perhaps malgré lui), he was also an ogan.3
It was my search for the correspondence that must have existed between Nina and Lombroso that sparked my interest in Lombroso, his ideas, his international network or ‘galaxy’ and his originality in rethinking the social and racial question, as well as his eclecticism. Like Lombroso, Nina was both a pioneer and a quixotic figure, as social medicine fell somewhere between social science and ‘pure’ medicine (the Brazilian saw it as being closer to the former than the latter).
So far, Nina’s correspondence has not been found, but I have seen it mentioned in two cases: in the biography of Lombroso by his daughter Gina, in which Nina – referred to as the contact in Brazil who applied new ideas from academia in prisons, mental institutions and criminal trials – is even described as a lawyer (G. Lombroso 1921: 211), and in Fernando Ortiz’s first book, the famous Los negros brujos (Black Sorcerers), originally published in Madrid in 1906. Ortiz was a regular visitor to Lombroso’s studio in Turin between 1902 and 1905. Apparently, that was where he became acquainted with L’animisme fetichiste, which Nina published in French to be read in Europe, and which he sent to Lombroso. Nina’s effort had an impact, and in the 1895 issue of the journal Archivio di Psichiatria (hereafter AP), Scienze Penali ed Antropologia Criminale (Archives of Psychiatry, Penology and Criminal Anthropology) there were even three references to his work: a summary of L’animisme fetichiste in French, a review of his book by Lombroso, and another article. There are two more references to Nina in issue no. 16 of 1896, in an article entitled ‘Les nègres criminelles au Brésil’ (Black Criminals in Brazil) and a review of Les races humaines by Lombroso himself.4
As with many fathers of a discipline or field of research, there are origin myths and numerous stories surrounding Nina. Novels have been written, such as Jorge Amado’s Jubiabá. There is speculation about a possible collaboration with the black, self-taught ethnographer Manuel Querino5 and key informants, such as the African Martiniano do Bonfim, a babalawo6 and honorary president of the Second Afro-Brazilian Congress held in Salvador in 1937 (Carneiro and Ferraz 1940). It was also said that Nina was the ‘greatest propagator of the theories of the Positivist School of criminology in Latin America’ (a phrase very much present in Koch-Ammassari’s essay [1992] and repeated by several authors).7 Mariza Corrêa (2000) has written an important intellectual biography of Nina. Furthermore, there are the narratives of what I like to call the ‘vestals of the archives’ (with whom we often associate the ‘praetorians of thought’), who for over a century have kept Nina’s memory ‘alive’ (or embalmed) in the School of Medicine in Bahia – as well as Paolo Mantegazza in Florence and Lombroso in Turin – albeit based more on imagination than concrete facts. According to Lamartine Andrade Lima, in his ‘Roteiro de Nina Rodrigues’ (Itinerary of Nina Rodrigues, 1980), Nina died soon after visiting Lacassagne in Lyon and Lombroso in Turin. However, there seems to be no trace of Nina’s correspondence,8 and we now know that Nina failed to meet Lombroso in person, something he had certainly longed to do.
However, through a bit of intuition and a great deal of serendipity, when following Nina’s trail, I unearthed fragments and numerous details of what I would call a galaxy: an international network whose centre was Lombroso’s studio, but which soon created some sub-centres, headed by Lombroso’s followers or epigones. It was a strong network in many European countries (mainly France, Germany and the Netherlands, but also Portugal, Spain, Russia, the United Kingdom and others), reaching as far as Australia, India, the United States and, more strongly, throughout most of South America. Only some, perhaps very few of these people had met Lombroso in person or visited his studio and his famous museum-laboratory. Others knew much less about him, but used him in their own battles, perhaps reinterpreting or even creolizing his ideas in different contexts. In fact, Lombroso was demonstrably the most cited Italian author in Latin America, at least until the rediscovery of Gramsci in the 1970s. We would have to wait until the 1980s for other Italians to be abundantly cited again in Latin America: Carlo Ginzburg, Umberto Eco, Toni Negri, Gianni Vattimo and Giovanni Arrighi – no anthropologists among them. As we shall see later on, until the 1970s in Latin America, a good number of awards, primarily in the area of jurisprudence and ‘police-ology’, were dedicated to Lombroso; even in 2002, during one of my lectures at the master’s degree course in human rights for magistrates in Rio de Janeiro, to my great surprise one of them called Lombroso ‘maestro’!
If there is one part of the world where the term ‘Lombrosian’ is still widely used today, it is Latin America, despite the importance of DNA and the rise of genetics that replaced anthropometry, which was popular during Lombroso’s time. In fact, ‘Lombrosian’ is a term whose use is reminiscent of the term ‘Kafkaesque’: it does not seem to be necessary to read or be familiar with Kafka to use it; something like ‘Gramscian’ and ‘Fellinian’, which are themselves used imprecisely. We can say that Lombroso belongs to that small circle of authors who are important to the study of racial and racist thought, including Darwin, Gobineau and Spencer, who are also widely quoted and cited, even inappropriately, but little read. Moreover, Lombroso is not only one of the most cited Italian intellectuals outside his home country – certainly the most cited of his time – but also an exemplary case of a certain Italian intellectual and political climate. I am not trying to make an apology or engage in historical revisionism here: Lombroso was and remains a highly controversial figure. I am simply attempting to present a detailed history of ideas about race in Lombroso’s work, and the repercussions of those ideas in Latin America, emphasizing two aspects: first, how they can and must change as they evolve across space and time, even in the life of a single scholar; secondly, how networks of contacts (national and otherwise), intertwined histories (Seigel 2009) and interpersonal relationships play an important role in the construction and maintenance of a scientific paradigm (Kuper, in Patricia Mattos 2013).
Ideas, projects, people, images, and objects (skulls, knives and other weapons, amulets, bones, pieces of human skin – possibly tattooed – musical instruments, masks, mummies, police, prison, and asylum ID cards, works of ‘prison art’ and so on) circulated through the channels opened up by what I call the ‘Lombroso Galaxy’ – a constellation of international conferences, lectures, magazines, journals, newspapers, books, museums, travel, correspondence, and posted parcels. This network enabled an exchange, not among equals, given the disparity in academic institutionalization between Brazil and Italy, but one driven by scholars seeking mutual benefit. Sometimes they listened; sometimes it was an exchange between the blind and the deaf. More than discovering new things, it was important to corroborate hypotheses. Latin America was looking for something in Southern Europe, which in turn was looking for something else in Latin America. The reception was therefore characterized by complexity and, at times, ambiguity. Latin American intellectuals never just assimilated everything that came from Italy. It was an international circulation in which the icons were global but the meanings were often local. This book will attempt to illustrate the complexity of this relationship, which is central to understanding how the social sciences developed in Latin America.
The study of the reception of European positivism has produced a veritable tradition in Latin America’s history of social sciences. The reception of what many have called ‘Lombrosianisms’ has also produced a great deal of research. Some of these works, such as Fernando de Azevedo’s study on the history of sociological thought in Brazil (1939), are somewhat dated classics, while others, more focused on ‘Lombrosianisms’, are particularly important for the reconstruction of a critical history of anthropology in Latin America. I will discuss the three most important interpreters of Lombroso’s ideas in Brazil (Nina Rodrigues), Cuba (Fernando Ortiz) and Argentina (José Ingenieros) further on. Moreover, two reference works on the transit of ideas between Italy and Latin America in the era of the positivist sciences will be cited extensively throughout this book: Barbano (1990) and Marcela Varejão (2005). My perspective is different, however, because I focus on the social conditions inherent in these exchanges rather than the exchange of ideas per se. Despite the limitations imposed by the documentation, which is relatively scarce considering the importance, duration and dimension of the relations between the Lombroso Galaxy and Latin America, I endeavour to spotlight the everyday and socio-anthropological aspects of these exchanges: how they actually took place, who paid the expenses, what was expected of those who travelled and those who invited them, what was said and kept silent on both sides, what the press of the time and canonical journals declared about them, the rules and habitus of scientific-academic practice, and what travelled besides people (artefacts, images, human or non-human finds, files and archives, research and cataloguing materials and methods, etc.). I consider this anthropological detailing useful to highlight the relationship between these exchanges and the various agendas determining the geopolitics of knowledge: the creation of a new transnational scientific field in the interaction between science and popular culture, from various points of view and actions, under the aegis of what Eric Hobsbawm called the Age of Empire. All of this produced a moral geography that identified ideal and defined places in which to conduct research and derive (strong) impressions and feelings about another type of place described as ideal not only for writing, reflecting and publishing the results of research carried out elsewhere but also for elaborating theories or schemes of interpretation of universal value. If the Lombroso Galaxy can be interpreted as a metaphor for Lombroso’s time and for Italy in the period between the Battle of Sedan (1870) and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo (1914), the construction and development of international exchanges from the Turin study in question are a clear example of how what was seen as a New Science was conceived and functioned.
We will see that Latin America, the South, or South America as it was called at the time, was very much present in the networks and purviews of many members of the Positivist School, as well as in the history of the creation of Italian anthropology. Two of the fathers of the discipline and, at the same time, instigators of its first and main paradigms, Paolo Mantegazza and Cesare Lombroso, placed Latin America within their purview and maintained important contacts with that region: first, Mantegazza, who went there in person, and then, in a much deeper way, Lombroso, although he never visited those parts. Nevertheless, he induced many to travel there and, directly or indirectly, stimulated many social engineering projects. The significance of Latin America for the School of Positivist Anthropology and Italian anthropology in general during the period between the 1880s and the late 1920s has not received the due attention of anthropological historians.9 This may be because, when the social sciences were being consolidated and institutionalized in Italy after the Second World War, the star of South America had already dimmed due to a number of factors that we will discuss later. It had gradually become yet another continent subordinate to the West – Latin America, in fact.
In recent years, and especially at the various symposia held to mark the 100th anniversary of Lombroso’s death in 2009, several books analysing the Lombroso phenomenon in Italy and the network of contacts woven by the Lombroso Galaxy have been published in various countries, European and otherwise. Silvano Montaldo, the indefatigable curator and innovator of the Lombroso Museum at the University of Turin, has edited and co-edited several important works himself. The late Delia Frigessi wrote monumental works of great quality, as did Mary Gibson (2004). There is, therefore, an important body of scholarship regarding the Lombroso phenomenon. However, with rare exceptions (especially Caimari and Varejão), Latin America, which was so important in consolidating Lombroso’s international renown and prolonging it over time, has remained on the margins of these interesting reinterpretations of Lombroso’s work. I will try to fill this gap, at least in part.
This book is organized into four parts. First, I briefly describe the context in which the ‘Lombroso Galaxy’ functioned, and then move on to the socio-cultural coordinates of the scientific debate on the so-called racial question, both in Italy and abroad. Three recurring and interconnected terms appeared in this debate: degeneration, the social question, and race. Secondly, I delve into the workings of the Lombroso Galaxy, with its hard core and the international networks that became extremely important. The third section deals with the journeys of three leading exponents of the Galaxy in Latin America: Guglielmo Ferrero, Gina Lombroso and Enrico Ferri. Their travels can be interpreted as a metaphor for the type of contact between Italy and South America. In the fourth and final part, we will see what happened to so-called Lombrosianism in Latin America after Lombroso’s death. This is followed by brief conclusions on the importance of Lombroso – or Latin American reinterpretations of his ideas – to the development of social sciences in this part of the world.