Friday, 19 February 2016 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Seth Garfield, UT

“Major Silva Coutinho’s Plant: Guarana and Louis Agassiz’s Amazon Expedition of 1865–66”

The history of guarana, a caffeine rich plant native to the Amazon and the namesake of Brazil’s “national” soda, is one of the least chronicled among those of the world’s major stimulants. To date, we have yet to understand the plant’s journey from obscure regional indigenous cultivar to high-profile ingredient in a multibillion dollar industry. This paper explores the role of scientists in orchestrating guarana’s broader dissemination in global research and commercial networks.

João Martins da Silva Coutinho was a Brazilian military engineer who served as the Amazonian guide for Harvard’s Thayer Expedition of 1865-66, led by zoologist Louis Agassiz. The latter’s creationist and racist objectives in surveying the natural history of the Amazon have been amply documented, but scholars have not focused on Silva Coutinho’s agenda to advance Brazil’s export diversification and regional integration. An analysis of Silva Coutinho’s promotion of the guarana trade reveals not only how the Brazilian engineer’s instrumentalization of science placed him both in line and at odds with foreign scientists and native peoples. It also demonstrates how the focus on foodways can offer new angles to understand questions of race, geopolitics, and national identity in (Latin American) history.

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Seth Garfield received his Ph.D. in Latin American history from Yale University in 1996 and has taught at the University of Texas since 2001. He currently serves as undergraduate faculty adviser at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and as the director of the Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History.

He is the author of Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988, and In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region, both published by Duke University Press. His research has been funded by the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Friday, 12 February 2016 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Jeannette Vaught, UT

“Feet not Fat: Eugenic Beef and Anxious Husbandmen, 1940-1945”

Shortly before 1940, a well-established veterinary surgeon from Colorado State University was hired as the first Head Veterinarian at the Wyoming Hereford Ranch just outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The surgeon, Dr. Harry Kingman, was charged with revolutionizing this famous beef herd’s breeding program through a combination of eugenic selection and a new technology: artificial insemination. This talk will use Kingman’s daily record of his work as a window into the myriad biological and cultural difficulties of this process between 1940 and 1945. Kingman is a transitional figure—a man poised between evaluating bodies by sight, as cattlemen habitually did, and by an animal’s ability to carry fat, and later by statistics. By focusing on genetics over nutrition, Kingman’s work on the Wyoming Hereford Ranch destabilized the conventions of animal expertise. This instability is especially apparent through his conflicts with the ranch’s husbandmen, who often flummoxed—intentionally or not—his efforts to “scientize” the herd. Considering Kingman’s mixed legacy at the Wyoming Hereford Ranch helps us understand broader shifts in human-animal knowledge and American understandings of nature and the natural that accompanied a postwar transition into an industrial agricultural system.

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Jeannette Vaught received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas in 2015. She is the author of Rationalizing the Rodeo: Animal Agriculture and Taming the American Environment, forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts Press, and “Materia Medica: Technology, Vaccination, and Antivivisection in Jazz Age Philadelphia,” which appeared in the September 2013 issue of American Quarterly.  Her work addresses the messy relationships between animals, science, and American culture.