#  Becoming Data. Bodies, Personal Information and Technology in Modern Peru 

 



    ![Poster_Muro de Sacsayhuamán](/sites/g/files/omnuum12451/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-03/Poster_Muro%20de%20Sacsayhuam%C3%A1n%20%28foto%20por%20Mack%20FitzPatrick%29.jpeg?itok=Ez170mEt) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 18, 2025** 

 04:00PM - 05:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South, Room S216**  



 

 



 

In this presentation, José Ragas will explore the transition of bodies into manageable pieces of information that took place in Peru between the Wars of Independence and the Great Depression. Over a century, policy makers, private agents, and individuals of the new republic managed to generate, store, and protect an enormous trove of personal information that emerged as the result of new demands and technologies engineered to scrutinize people’s bodies and turn them into legible units. A new kind of experts emerged, trained according to the most recent techniques of classification of human bodies (i.e. the Vucetich method, anthropometry, phrenology, etc.). New spaces and rooms were rapidly filled with instruments designed to measure the physical components of people (fingers, nose, arms, heads), and budgets included infrastructure, foreign police missions, and laboratories. In just a few decades, every major public institution was engineered to demand and process personal data from individuals. A new wave of scholarship, influenced by the 2008 economic crisis and the aggressive expansion of “platform capitalism” sustained by personal data has been particularly relevant to develop my current arguments and expand my own analysis on how people’s bodies served as the techno-social foundations of the nascent post-imperial nation-states.

Speaker: **José Ragas**, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

**José Ragas** is an Assistant Professor at Instituto de Historia in Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he teaches courses related to STS and global history. Dr. Ragas holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. Previously to his appointment in Chile, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and Lecturer in the Program in the History of Science and History of Medicine at Yale. His current book manuscript examines the emergence of a techno-social system engineered to capture and store personal data in Peru between 1820 and 1930.

Moderated by the **Harvard Andean Working Group**

*This event is presented in collaboration with the Harvard Andean Working Group, the Department of History, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.*



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Cambridge ](/locations/cambridge-office)
- [ Andes & Southern Cone ](/programs-initiatives/andes-southern-cone)
 
 

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