Chagas disease: Historic perspective.

This review is a perspective on the history of Chagas disease, and it adopts a novel approach from literary studies, historical documents and the science and epidemiology of the nature of the disease. From this analysis, comes the review's working definition of the Contact Zone (CZ): "the space in which geographically and historically separated people come into contact with each other and establish long-lasting relationships, which usually involve coercive conditions, radical inequality and intolerable conflict." In the Patient-Physician CZ, we verified the triple transition phenomena: the American trypanosomiasis shifted from a rural, acute, and vectorial transmitted disease to an urban, chronic and non-vectorial disease. In the Academic CZ, we describe the original disagreements which denied the existence of the disease and the current controversies about pathogenic mechanisms and etiological treatment. From the News from Latin America, and in the Original CZ, we will review the evolution of different forms of transmission. As in any good story, research across broad disciplines is necessary to reveal historical perspectives, scientific approaches, and the epidemiology of the disease, which has a prequel of 9000 years and an open ending: thus, we explore across the Global CZ, with its multiple and unexpected actors.

The missing, the martyred and the disappeared: Global networks, technical intensification and the end of human rights genetics.

In 1984, a group of Argentine students, trained by US academics, formed the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to apply the latest scientific techniques to the excavation of mass graves and identification of the dead, and to work toward transitional justice. This inaugurated a new era in global forensic science, as groups of scientists in the Global South worked outside of and often against local governments to document war crimes in post-conflict settings. After 2001, however, with the inauguration of the war on terror following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, global forensic science was again remade through US and European investment to increase preparedness in the face of potential terrorist attacks. In this paper, I trace this shift from human rights to humanitarian forensics through a focus on three moments in the history of post-conflict identification science. Through a close attention to the material semiotic networks of forensic science in post-conflict settings, I examine the shifting ground between non-governmental human rights forensics and an emerging security- and disaster-focused identification grounded in global law enforcement. I argue that these transformations are aligned with a scientific shift towards mechanized, routinized, and corporate-owned DNA identification and a legal privileging of the right to truth circumscribed by narrow articulations of kinship and the body.

Cuerpo, biopolítica y control social: América Latina y Europa en los siglos XIX y XX / Body, biopolitics and social control: Latin America and Europe in the XIX and XX centuries

Este texto indaga diversas ideologías de control social en torno a las cuales se organizaron en Latinoamérica y Europa occidental, durante los siglos XIX y XX, variadas expresiones biopolíticas tendientes a normalizar al individuo y a la sociedad. En efecto, sabido es que desde las pretensas legitimaciones otorgadas por la teoría de la degeneración, el darwinismo y la eugenesia se instrumentó un abanico de políticas del cuerpo cuya característica dominante fue la búsqueda insaciable de la homogeneidad y la correlativa exclusión sistematizada del 'otro'. La evidente funcionalidadde los inovadores paradigmas provenientes de las Ciencias Naturales decimónicas para con las estrategias de poder diseñadas desde regímenes de sesgo autoritario permite exhumar una circunstancia que, inicialmente, parece asomar como paradojal: aquellas tesis victorianas, originadas y sustentadas en un esquema de pensamiento ultra-liberal, aportaron luego insumos fundamentales para la instrumentación de políticas públicas caracterizadas por una marcada intolerancia a la diversidad. Así, los conceptos de 'struggle for life y de survical of the fittest' se acoplaron durante el siglo XX a una propuesta de selección artificial pretendidamente predictiva de los resultados de aquella lucha, la eugenesia. La multiplicidad de facetas desde donde merita abordarse la compleja cuestión de las imbricaciones entre ciencia -o pseudociencia- y poder, invita a encuadrarla en torno a diversos marcos epistemológicos, metodológicos y conceptuales. Sin embargo, esa primacia de lo pluridisciplinar que observa en la presente compilación, nutrida de enfoques provenientes de la historia, la sociología criminal, la antroplogía criminal, el dereho y la medicina, no obstacualizó empero una adecuada confluencia temática sobre el denominador común de la normalización de grupos e individuos o, mejor aún, de la cuestión de desigualdad.