UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Modern Monumentality: Art, Science, and the Making of Southern Mexico DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Anthropology by Robert John Kett Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Mei Zhan, Chair Professor George Marcus Professor Bill Maurer Associate Professor Rachel O’Toole 2015 Earlier version of Chapter 1 © 2014 California Academy of Sciences Earlier version of Chapter 5 © 2015 University of California Press All other material © 2015 Robert John Kett Dedication For Sue, Dwight, and Albert and in memory of Bob and Peggy. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Ornithologists in Olman: Epistemological Ecologies in the Field and the Museum 20 CHAPTER 2 Pan-American Itineraries: Incorporating the Southern Mexican Frontier 44 CHAPTER 3 Modern Frictions: Plays for Territory at La Venta 74 CHAPTER 4 Monumentality as Method: Archaeology and Land Art in the Cold War 103 CHAPTER 5 Archiving Oil: The Practice and Politics of Information 142 BIBLIOGRAPHY 171 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation has benefitted from the kindness of many mentors, friends, family members, and collaborators. I would first like to thank my advisor, Mei Zhan, for being such a sympathetic guide during the conception and execution of this project. I am always grateful for her close and generous reading, appreciation of the practice of writing, and encouragement of crosswise thinking. George Marcus has been an invaluable provocateur, always willing to both incite and support creative thinking. Bill Maurer’s unflagging support relieved many of the uncertainties of life as a graduate student and I am consistently inspired by his appreciation of the strange and unexpected. I have learned a great deal from Rachel O’Toole’s eye for historical detail, candid advice, and openness to interdisciplinary collaboration. During my research in Mexico City, Villahermosa, La Venta, Washington, DC, and Berkeley, I was met with hospitality and generosity in too many offices, homes, and archives to thank all of my hosts here. I am particularly indebted, however, to Rebecca González Lauck, head of the Proyecto Arqueológico La Venta, whose generosity reflects a commitment to intellectual openness commonly invoked but much less frequently practiced. While researching and writing, I have benefitted from friendship, support, and advice from a remarkable group of peers at UCI, including Leksa Chmielewski, Georgia Hartman, Anna Kryczka, Janny Li, Sean Mallin, and Natali Valdez. My parents, Sue and Dwight, have been consistently supportive of my academic pursuits and have always encouraged a son prone to reading books, amassing collections, and asking questions. I am also indebted to Albert Chu for being such a calm, supportive, and understanding partner through fieldwork, writing, and many other challenges. Research for this dissertation was supported by grants, residencies, and fellowships from the Center for Ethnography (UCI), Department of Anthropology (UCI), Dumbarton Oaks, the University of California Center for Mexico and the United States, the School of Social Sciences (UCI), the Smithsonian Institution, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Versions of Chapters 1 and 4 of this dissertation have been previously published in Curator: The Museum Journal and Representations,respectively (Kett 2014 and 2015). iv CURRICULUM VITAE 2009 B.M. in Music in Global Contexts/International Studies, Northwestern University 2010 School of Social Sciences Merit Fellowship, University of California, Irvine 2009-11 Teaching Assistant, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine 2009-12 Department of Anthropology Summer Research Fellowships, University of California, Irvine 2011 Smithsonian Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology 2012 Dumbarton Oaks Short-Term Pre-Doctoral Residency in Pre-Columbian Studies 2012 Associate Dean’s Fellowship, University of California, Irvine 2012 University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, Art+California Implementation Grant 2012 University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States Dissertation Grant 2012-2014 Graduate Student Researcher, Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion 2013 Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Research Grant 2013 Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Grant 2014 Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, University of California, Irvine 2014-15 Graduate Intern, Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art, Getty Research Institute 2015-17 Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin Specializations art and science; archaeological method and visualization; histories of fieldwork, collecting, and interdisciplinary practice; modernism and modernity; anthropology of knowledge; material culture/materiality v ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Modern Monumentality: Art, Science, and the Making of Southern Mexico by Robert John Kett Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Irvine 2015 Associate Professor Mei Zhan, Chair This dissertation project began as a historical ethnography of Olmec archaeology, interested in tracing the development of a science to study what is often referred to as Mexico’s “mother culture” over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, as research for this project continued, it became clear that Olmec archaeology was bound up in a much wider modern rediscovery of the Olmec and the southern Gulf Coast region where they once built their largest settlements. A region that had resisted many previous projects of foreign colonization, the twentieth century witnessed the rapid “discovery,” documentation, and exploitation of not only the the region’s cultural past but also its natural resources, most famously the Gulf Coast’s rich oil deposits but also its biological diversity. The work of Olmec archaeology bore intimate connections to these broader transformations through the sharing of regional knowledge between experts, the exchange of methods between disciplines, and the material proximity of various projects of knowledge-making and resource development. The region was then a highly trafficked zone where the field practices of scientists, surveyors, artists, and other experts collided to unexpected ends. Through a series of case studies, this dissertation charts the dynamics of transdisciplinary knowledge on the southern Mexican resource frontier, considering vi the field as a site where disciplines are simultaneously made and unmade and where knowledge- making has palpable and unanticipated effects. Holding these various projects simultaneously in view—an approach which decenters more traditional disciplinary or developmental histories— reveals a fraught modernity marked, not by the imposition and failure of any unified or centralized plan, but by a tense ecology of numerous knowledges of and visions for the region. vii INTRODUCTION My walk through Villahermosa’s Natural History Museum ended in a small, cramped room. Outside, a bright sun and thick, humid air hung over the Laguna de las Ilusiones that sits at the city’s center and the nearby Parque Olmeca, the city’s main attraction which brings together monumental Olmec statuary and animals from across the region. My visit had so far taken me through exhibits on the region’s rainforests, its geology and hydrocarbon deposits, its ancient human inhabitants, and its other resources—from animal pelts to fish. There, inside the dark, quiet space at the end of my tour, walls and tables were covered by a hodgepodge of butterflies and insects pinned in glass cases, floridly embellished certificates issued by organizing committees of Worlds Fairs and the Mexican government, maps and charts, and illustrations of birds, insects, and plants. The room was a tribute to José N. Rovirosa, a nineteenth-century Tabascan naturalist who has become a cultural hero in Villahermosa, the capital of the small state on Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast. This collection and Rovirosa’s wide-ranging work offer a convenient point of entry into the questions of art and science, nature and culture, knowledge and development that this dissertation seeks to explore. Local mythologies about Rovirosa debate whether his birth on a ranch in rural Tabasco took place in 1848 or 1849, but they all agree that Rovirosa was a precocious scientist who showed a childhood love of botanical fieldwork, a child who would go on to become the first and most celebrated scientist to systematically explore this isolated state. Trained as an engineer in the nearby state of Campeche, Rovirosa eventually returned to Tabasco and there had a career that extended far beyond the practicalities of engineering, freely engaging topics in meteorology, hydrography, botany, entomology, geography, and cartography. In works like his famous 1 Pteridografía del Sur de México, which offers an exhaustive illustration and classification of Tabasco’s ferns, Rovirosa expresses a desire common to many of his works—to place Tabasco’s flora, fauna, and landscape within a broader, international natural historical classification and discourse; like many intellectuals and state experts, natural historians had largely neglected this corner of Mexico. In his Pteridografía, Rovirosa describes the intensive labor and discomforts of fieldwork in the Tabascan wilderness to correct this omission. The fieldworker in Tabasco must be prepared “to tour long distances on foot,