Abstract
Much of modern social science has been occupied by attempts to understand two major social phenomena: race/racial categories and the development of the nation-state. There have been numerous works that have attempted to uncover the histories and trends in the development of both phenomena. Loveman’s book is one that tries to tackle aspects of both intellectual endeavors as well as a number of others, and does so masterfully. Loveman’s book is premised on the question ‘[w]hy do states classify their citizens by race or ethnicity while other do not?’ (p. 4). What makes this work special is both where it goes to answer this question and how it goes about answering it. Loveman answers this question by going to Latin America and investigating the (non)use of censuses and other instruments of recording the race/ethnicity of its inhabitants across a 200-year period. What she uncovers is a transnational story of state development and racial formation that both spans the entirety of Latin America but also manifests itself in specific ways within each country.
She begins her argument by looking at the importance of ‘legibility’ to the modern nation-state. Here she argues ‘[n]ation states care about classification precisely because they are states “of and for a particular kind of people’’’ (p. 20). The census, she argues, is a tool that is wielded by the state for the purposes of making visible who belongs to the nation, especially in racial or ethnic terms. The nature of the census makes it the perfect tool by which to both track how a nation-state makes sense of itself through the counting and tracking of different racial and ethnic populations under its sovereignty. Where this book becomes truly interesting is when Loveman brings in the insight that the census’s legitimacy and use was not simply manifested on the national level but also on the international level. She argues that much of the use and disuse of the census by Latin American nations was based not only on national concerns but also the geopolitics of presenting one’s nation as ‘civilized’ and the influence of the growing global scientific community who was interested in race and societal progress. From this theoretical frame the rest of the book details us the trajectories of how racial and ethnic populations are made, counted, and manipulated across 19 countries in chapters split by time period.
Chapter 2 discusses the colonial regimes of categorization and tallying under the Spanish and Portuguese regimes. This chapter, which could be a great book all on its own, shows how the various actors within the colonial regime created and tallied racial and ethnic populations primarily for the purposes of extracting labor and resources. This chapter stands in contrast to Chapters 3, 4, and 5 where the book introduces the various international and national reasons for the creation of official censuses across Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here Loveman does a great job melding the stories of multiple national stories into a coherent regional narrative without homogenizing in a way that ignores the eccentricities of each nation.
Chapter 6 shows how the global move to conceptualize race as culture is reflected in the discontinuation of race questions in many Latin American censuses during the mid-20th century. Chapter 7 shows us the effects of another shift in global and regional racial logics where multiculturalism has renewed the need for acknowledging race and ethnicity on the census. Loveman shows how primarily African-descendent and indigenous communities used the politics of the census to help increase their visibility in Latin American societies in opposition to the previous centuries where various states tried to erase African and indigenous people from the national portrait. Loveman’s concluding chapter details how many of the current political and social problems in Latin America such as addressing racial inequality, economic development, relationships with NGOs, and the like will depend heavily on how these nations categorize and count their population as in the past.
By showing us how state formation and racial formation takes place both nationally and internationally, Loveman provides a very strong argument for thinking about both phenomena as relational transnational processes versus our standard national histories of state formation and race. Loveman also shows how powerful transnational scientific institutions and actors can be in shaping the landscape of the international order and calls us to give more attention to their place in international relations. This is a must read for scholars interested in Latin American history, race theory, state formation, or international relations and those that stand at the intersections of these intellectual spaces.