This talk focuses on the Cornell-Peru Project at Vicos, a midcentury story of how a group of anthropologists and other behavioral scientists assumed control of an ailing hacienda in the Peruvian highlands and transformed it and its almost 2,500 indigenous residents into a so-termed ethnographic laboratory for the study of modernization and culture change. Following insights from science studies, analysis of the Vicos Project allows for a detailed exploration how ethnographic facts are constructed in fieldwork encounters, rather than merely discovered. Following an archival trail spanning the 10-plus years of the project, this paper focuses on the tensions between the precision of midcentury behavioral science, Cold War research agendas, and the agency of indigenous interlocutors who often upended fieldwork and shaped the course of ethnographic data collection.  .

Jason Pribilsky is Professor of Anthropology and Race and Ethnic Studies at Whitman College.