“We regard the EEG as a whole just as an artist looks at a human face.”
(Davis Reference Davis1940, 714)Introduction
Electroencephalography arrived in Mexico when the Second World War was imposing economic shifts and modernization efforts were taking place in a context of dependence, inflation, and the social exclusion of most of the population. It was a time in which it was tempting to apply techno-scientific measures to social and political problems. At the same time, new disciplines were emerging as the scientific community was urged to absorb a rather large number of Spanish scientists seeking refuge from the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath (see Torres Ramírez Reference Torres Ramírez1979).
In these circumstances, the introduction of new medical technologies with somewhat uncertain diagnostic functions – as was the case with the EEG – took on political and strategic meaning. They had political meaning because they helped specific disciplines go beyond university boundaries by reinforcing links with the social environment, deploying mechanisms that would help identify “commons” – around which national interests were focused –, and involving the government and experts in their management. They also had strategic meaning because technological displays enabled and justified the colonization of scarce and much sought spaces of research that would eventually become political capital.
Instruments and technologies, however, enter not only a space of power configurations (e.g., internalized rules, institutions, and expectations oriented to management) but also a space of epistemic, symbolic, political, and material interests. Styles of reasoning have to deal with and be shaped by these local interests, which function “as nucle[i] of crystallization for further scientific evidence” (Borck Reference Borck2006, 456). They also have to adjust to the specific technological way of describing and producing the world distinctive to each technology. How do technologies mediate between styles of thinking and interests? How do they adapt to these power configurations and managerial expectations? What makes them suitable to become dispositifs around which to sort out and guide acceptable and predictable behavior?Footnote 1 This paper aims to give a partial response to these questions by exploring the early history of the EEG in Mexico.
Hacking (Reference Hacking2002) observes that some technologies are connected to specific styles of thinking. As tools for experimental observation, EEGs should have helped to consolidate an experimental style. However, this was not exactly what happened in Mexico. As in the United States – and somewhat in the United Kingdom and Germany – EEGs worked as catalysts for multidisciplinary projects and reinforced different styles of reasoning: a statistical style, model construction, experimental observation, and subsequent classification. As we shall see, the Mexican landscape of EEG uses unsurprisingly reproduced the US polarization between analytical and experimental uses and classificatory ones. The same tensions occurred in the United Kingdom because many British neurologists did not trust the EEG as a psychological or sociological tool.Footnote 2 In both cases, the classificatory style of reasoning resonated with the normative and conceptual apparatuses that shaped and controlled the established way of life. In the United States, the EEG-based classificatory enterprise of the ’40s took place during the robust institutionalization of neurology and a pressing need to define mental fitness and reliable performance in wartime, which led to a close association between normalcy, predictable behavior, and security that mirrored the factory world (Rose Reference Rose1999, 45). On the contrary, Mexican concerns about normalcy during the period hardly dealt with the same problems as in the United States, though they were shaped and defined by the same apparatus. On the one hand, it was a time marked by an incipient and simultaneous institutionalization of sociology, biology, and neurology as disciplines. On the other hand, the period was marked by attempts to inclusively define the social and legal actors in a multicultural and multiethnic state. Analyzing the role of a still controversial technology such as EEG in this context can help us to clarify the diverse dynamics that made it possible to transform them into the normative machines they currently are.
Of course, other neuro-technologies were obviously related to normative and conceptual configurations of power. Thus, the work of Oskar and Cécile Vogt on elite brains (like V. I. Lenin's) and their micro-localization of brain functions converged both with the normative expectations that supported charismatic domination and a way of life associated with it. Their increasing confidence in the processes of objectifying cerebral (and excelling) singularity reinforced the idea of an artificially bred meritocratic order (eugenics) and the typologization of extremes (Hagner Reference Hagner2001, 556). However, the complexity of their time-consuming technique, which involved the dissection of individual brains into thousands of tiny pieces to analyze their cyto-architectonics, hardly made it a suitable candidate for circulation beyond the laboratory walls as an autonomous artifact for organizing society independent of any subjectivities and impeding any possible resistance (as any dispositif requires) (Agamben Reference Agamben2006, 32–35).
Instrumental indeterminacy, the incomplete (if not lacking) understanding of the meaning of EEG recordings, allowed for the co-construction of the potential of the instrument and of the objects of local interest in a very flexible way. This is why its presence attracted and unveiled the possibility of inconspicuous synergies, some of which would eventually open the door of the laboratory.
Thus, the first part of this paper unfolds the early map of EEGs in Mexico City to explore the circumstances that led to their acquisition and construction between 1939 and 1943 as well as the clustering of the different institutions they produced. The second part, divided into three sections, explores how the classificatory and physiognomic, reifying style of interpreting the EEG coalesced with sociological and legal concerns and analyzes how the different discussions and practices around normalcy and the possibility of unitary collective brains (e.g., the Otomí brain and the Mexican brain) were connected.
Cherchez la machine: Mapping and Linking EEGs in Mexico City
Between 1940 and 1943 six EEGs were functioning in Mexico City. The first (virtual) one to arrive was Dr. Samuel Ramírez Romero's 1939 description of a EEG. He was professor and secretary general at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), the main editor of the journal Revista Mexicana de Psiquiatría, Neurología y Medicina Legal, a national pioneer of mental hygiene, and the owner and manager of a neurological clinic. After a long trip to visit electroencephalographic laboratories in North America (including Saint Elisabeth's Hospital in Washington, the famed Dr. John R. Hughes Laboratory at the Institute of Mental Hygiene in Philadelphia, the Hallowell and Pauline Davis laboratory at Harvard University, and the recently inaugurated Herbert Henry Jasper laboratory at the Neurological Institute of McGill University in Montreal), Ramírez decided to write a detailed description of the EEG because he could not afford the technology. Based on this description, his friend and disciple, Teodoro Flores Covarrubias, constructed a single-channel EEG. According to Ramírez, this was the first EEG in Latin America (Ramírez Moreno Reference Ramírez Moreno1941; Reference Ramírez Moreno1950, 57). By March 1941, the new technology had been tested in 47 already diagnosed patients in order to explore its potential uses (Ramírez Reference Ramírez Moreno1941, 11).
Five more EEGs soon appeared in Mexico City. Flores was collaborating with Clemente Robles to build a two-channel electroencephalograph for Pavilion 7 at the Department of Neurosurgery of the General Hospital (Robles, Flores Covarrubias, and Cueto Reference Robles, Covarrubias and del Cueto1941). Two researchers, Manuel Castañeda Uribe – an adjunct doctor at Pavilion 16, or the Department of Neurology of the General Hospital, which depended directly on UNAM – and Rubén Vasconcelos Aldana – a permanent neurologist at the same hospital – also brought a description of the EEG used during their stay at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital (Los Angeles, California), where they took a course on electroencephalographic techniques with Hendrikus Sjaardema, director of the Department of Electroencephalography (Castañeda Uribe and Vasconcelos Reference Castañeda Uribe and Vasconcelos1940, 465). Upon their return to Mexico, a new EEG was installed at Pavilion 16 thanks to the generous financial support of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN). This machine had also been made in Mexico, and during its first year the doctor in charge of it was Mariano Vázquez Rodríguez (Domínguez Toledano Reference Domínguez Toledano1942, 50).
A fourth EEG – a six-channel polyelectroencephalograph – was located at the Department of Neuropsychiatry at the Army's Central Hospital. Such modern equipment, which was placed on the third floor of the new premises of the hospital and inaugurated in late 1942, made the authorities flirt with the idea of implementing EEGs in every military draft station in the country, including the National Air Force and the Department of Transportation and Highway Police (Castillo Ferra Reference Ferra and Ramón1944, 51).
In early 1942, the Institute of Neuropsychiatry at the Spanish Hospital, where neurosurgeon Sixto Obrador Alcalde was appointed after fleeing Francoist repression after the Spanish Civil War, brought an EEG as good as the one in the Army's Central Hospital: a six-channel oscillographic ink recording system (Adams-Bradley type). It was personally installed by Theodore J. Case, who was part of the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University of Chicago and an expert in the electroencephalographic diagnosis of tumors and brain injury (Bucy Reference Bucy1989, 16; Obrador Reference Obrador Alcalde1943a, 19).
A sixth EEG was put to work around 1943 at the Central Insane Asylum, also known as La Castañeda. This institution, which was run by Manuel Guevara Oropeza at the time, was undergoing total modernization. As a result of this initiative, a Central Pavilion was created with new services, including a neurosurgery department, X-ray equipment, an electroshock room, and an electroencephalography laboratory equipped with a four-channel machine (Obrador, Ortiz, and Mandoki Reference Obrador Alcalde, Ortiz and Mandoki1945, 97).
We have little information about the two best-equipped electroencephalographic laboratories of the time, which were located at the Army's Central Hospital and the Institute for Neuropsychiatry. This is not only due to the scarcity of studies about the history of electroencephalography and neurology in Mexico but also due to the fact that the institutions in which they were located did not have collaborative policies with other institutions and were thus inaccessible to some degree. However, the other machines would become catalysts for negotiations and interinstitutional agreements, and they would end up becoming involved in educational and political debates. In any case, all of these instruments would be incorporated into spaces without traditions in the field of neurophysiology, a discipline that was emerging in the country. As their users came with different baggage and had been trained in very different places linked to various projects and institutional interests, the uses they supported did not necessarily converge.
Along with personal networking, EEGs enabled the emergence of institutional clusters where conceptual and epistemic interests began to coalesce around education and social programs. For example, Mariano Vázquez – who had not received specific training in neurology but was nevertheless in charge of the electroencephalographic section of the Department of Neurology (Pavilion 16) of the General Hospital – was named professor of rural medicine in 1940 at the National School of Biological Sciences (ENCB), created in 1938 at the National Polytechnic Institute. Consequently, the doors of Pavilion 16 were opened to students of this new and controversial degree in rural medicine whose applications for training at general hospitals were regularly rejected (Borboa Robles Reference Borboa Robles and López Guardado2006, 308).Footnote 3 Teaching the physiology courses for this same degree assembled a group of professors (among them Efrén Carlos del Pozo) who would eventually establish interinstitutional networks.
At the same time, Rubén Vasconcelos – who coordinated the rural medicine degree program at the National School of Biological Sciences with his close collaborator and fellow professor, Vázquez (Borboa Robles Reference Borboa Robles and López Guardado2006, 309) – was also teaching at the National School of Medicine. He had undergone EEG training, as mentioned above, under Sjaardema, who had been Lee Edward Travis's assistant at the University of Southern California. Travis was a pioneer of the study of the neurologic basis of language and the use of EEGs to explore the topic. He also founded the electroencephalographic laboratory at Iowa University. Travis and Sjaardema's work on the relationship between emotions and abstract thinking and brain wave patterns probably influenced Vasconcelos's use of EEGs in the diagnosis of epilepsy and tumors, the analysis of hypnotic phenomena, and statistical methods.Footnote 4 In 1941, Vázquez and Vasconcelos assembled a sample of more than 100 electroencephalograms (70 of which were from 52 epileptic patients). Toward the end of the year, Vasconcelos presented his report on the results; it was an exercise oriented toward a classification that reinforced the diagnostic use of the EEG. In its conclusions, the author predicted a long and productive future for the new technology as an instrument for creating social order:
It binds us to a stricter criterion to classify an individual as a normal one, and it is very probable that, as a consequence of better and more abundant electroencephalographic knowledge, it will be necessary to revisit the clinical description of epilepsy. (Vasconcelos Reference Vasconcelos1941, 190–191; unless otherwise noted, translations are mine)
Vasconcelos’ report marked the emergence of a group inclined to privilege EEG classification, which they considered more rigorous than other clinical classifications. The group understood that EEGs would provide a more solid basis for the objectivation of normalcy as well as the naturalization or immediate acceptance of the process of objectivation as a suitable way to display essential normalcy, a crucial step in transforming EEGs into dispositifs.
Upon Efrén Carlos del Pozo's return from his two-year Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in Boston, he again joined the ENCB and National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) and agreed to lead and create an Institute of Physiology that also had an electroencephalography laboratory. In 1944, he was named the ENCB director. At the same time, he took charge of the Laboratory for Medical and Biological Studies at UNAM (Dosil Mancilla Reference Dosil Mancilla2007, 319), where he had, until then, been head of the Physiology and Pharmacology Department as well as of the Physiology Laboratory of the Institute of Public Health and Tropical Diseases (Castañeda López Reference Castañeda López2008). He was also a member of the Social Research Institute. This cluster of defenders of using EEGs for diagnoses and classification (i.e., the National School of Medicine, Pavilion 16, and IPN) was reinforced. As we shall see, del Pozo became an exceptional mediator amongst National Institute for Anthropology and History (INAH) anthropologists, the National School for Rural Medicine biologists, and the Institute for Social Research (IIS) sociologists.
Unlike Pavilion 16 and the IPN, the Spanish Hospital where Sixto Obrador Alcalde would conduct his work did not seek to implement interinstitutional relationships for working toward a common outcome. In 1934, Obrador worked with Sir Charles S. Sherrington at Oxford, where he studied the electrical and synaptic activity of the sympathetic ganglia with a Matthews oscillograph and met Jose Bernardo Odoriz, a pioneer of the construction and use of EEGs in Argentina (Stuart et al. Reference Stuart, Pierce, Callister, Brichta, MacDonagh, Latash and Zatsiorsky2002, 339). Between 1939 and 1940, just before Obrador went back to Mexico, he worked in the Electroencephalography Department of Hugh Cairns's Clinic with David Whitteridge, who he met during his visit to Sherrington's laboratory. There, he worked with a cathode ray oscillograph system in order to simultaneously register cortical currents. Whitteridge was interested in the potential of parasympathetic ganglia, while Obrador wrote about sympathetic ganglia.
Obrador's baggage was therefore related to the analytical rather than the clinical aspects of these technologies. In 1943, when he published his paper based on the analysis of 100 clinical EEGs—a veiled response to Vasconcelos's approach—titled “Sobre electroencefalografía clínica” [On clinical electroencephalography], he made clear the epistemic tradition he belonged to.
We shall now see up to what point analytical and experimental uses and diagnostic and classificatory uses of EEGs were polarized into different conceptions of normalcy as well as how discussions about the possibility of unitary collective brains (e.g., the Otomí brain and the Mexican brain) took place.
The EEG, Normalcy, and Social Categories
Rationale for reification of brain waves
When EEGs reached Mexico, they came with a number of interpretative strategies. Most of them came from the United States and reflected discussions and decisions from alien contexts. In addition, they were also vehicles for controversies about the possible applications they could support. However, as the above Vasconcelos quote shows, one of the most interesting features of EEGs was their ability to unveil otherwise undetectable epileptic subjects.
By 1934, EEGs had arrived in the United States from the United Kingdom. Shortly after the first public meeting at Harvard Medical School demonstrated how the new device worked and after months of experimental work in Boston, Hallowell Davis, William Lennox, and Frederic A. Gibbs published their paper, “The electro-encephalogram in epilepsy and in conditions of impaired consciousness” (1935). This was an important paper in which the authors claimed that “pathognomic signs for different types of clinical seizures could be elicited between, rather than during, epileptic seizures, and [this] initiated a long and productive research program in EEG.” (Millet Reference Millet2001, 357). This change in the expectations about the objects EEGs could help construct was substantial.
At the start of the research on brainwaves, Hans Berger, the German neurologist who invented the EEG, presupposed that “perception and other mental activity had to penetrate the subject's consciousness in order to be picked up on the EEG” (Millet Reference Millet2001, 364).Footnote 5 However, the neurologists of the ’30s soon realized that overall, contrary to Berger's intuition, the EEG enabled research on loss of consciousness by visualizing it. As a matter of fact, alpha waves were dominant during rest states of consciousness and particularly visible when the subject's eyes were closed —although it was unclear why blind people lack these waves.Footnote 6 Research established that these waves have regular frequencies between 8 and 12 waves per second (although this range was widely discussed) and an amplitude that ranged from 5 to 50 microvolts from one individual to another (i.e., the amplitude is constant in every subject but very variable from one subject to another). These parameters gave doctors relatively little information of diagnostic value. The same happened with beta waves, which are of higher frequency and lower amplitude than alpha waves. Nevertheless, brain waves increased their amplitude and decreased or increased their frequencies when subjects closed their eyes, fell asleep, or were comatose. The irruption of these rhythms made brain activity more clearly visible. Therefore, Gibbs, Davis, and Lennox included the following states of impaired consciousness, besides epilepsy: “sleep, unconsciousness from breathing nitrogen, unconsciousness from failure of the cerebral blood supply and clouding of consciousness from overventilation” (Gibbs, Davis, and Lennox Reference Gibbs, Davis and Lennox1935, 1147). Loss of consciousness became the most relevant neurological object from the EEG perspective.
From this interpretative framework, neurologists began to explore EEGs in search of patterns that would help establish not only diagnoses but also situations of potential risk. Thus, the groups of waves scattered in the record of a patient showing a similar pattern to those waves seen at the beginning of a seizure but “not associated to loss of consciousness” (Gibbs, Davis and Lennox Reference Gibbs, Davis and Lennox1935, 1140) were considered a sign of larval epilepsy. This way of reading the waves reinforced the impression that patients were at risk more often than supposed and required steady supervision. The method had further implications. In 1937, Gibbs and Lennox published another groundbreaking paper titled “Epilepsy: a paroxysmal cerebral dysrhythmia” in which they included emotional anxiety among the triggers of seizures, as it altered the normal cortical rhythm and impedes the mechanisms of neuronal regulation in epileptic patients (Gibbs, Gibbs and Lennox [1937] Reference Gibbs, Gibbs and Lennox2002, 397).
As these processes took place without objective or subjective clinical manifestation, their new visibility reinforced the idea of the unpredictability of the epileptic subject; i.e., subjects who were apparently normal, unaware of their condition or its full extent, or subject to intrinsic instability. Looking for this instability in the EEG was pivotal to giving medical meaning to the graphic record, since apparently normal people could have abnormal EEGs and diagnosed patients could have normal EEGs. In a paper that introduced the discipline to many Mexican students, Pacella and Barrera quoted Pauline A. Davis: “although the electroencephalograms of patients in a mental hospital cannot be distinguished from ‘normal’ ones, they nevertheless reveal less ‘stability’ in the pattern, with an increase in the irregularity and a synchronization of waves in general” (Pacella and Barrera Reference Pacella and Barrera1941, 429–30). Normalcy became tightly linked to stability. Subtly, then, the discussion moved toward defining the “normal” EEG as a standard proof of therapeutic success.
However, EEG records, particularly those of children, were ambiguous and difficult to interpret because “unlike some laboratory tests, brain waves are a fluid characteristic and, even more than electrocardiographic abnormalities, their degree may vary from day to day and may change with alteration in brain activity, and in the chemistry of the blood flowing through it” (Lennox Reference Lennox1950, 2–3). Despite this, EEGs became key to evaluating the positive or negative evolution of a patient. Even if a treatment could eliminate all clinical symptoms, the EEG graph was the evidence that the patient was truly rehabilitated on the basis of recovery or reconstruction of the wave pattern (see Lennox Reference Lennox1950, 7; Reference Lennox1941, 151).
The work of Pauline Davis (Reference Davis1941) strongly influenced Vasconcelos's expectations of the social uses of the EEG, as the American physiologist had established a correlation between groups of people sorted into five levels of normalcy – selected normal, presumably normal, unknown, abnormal outside hospital, abnormal in mental hospital – and groups of encephalograms. The group of normal EEGs corresponded to people already classified as normal, and only occasionally did normal EEGs correspond to subjects already classified as abnormal.
Despite the notorious influence of Davis's classifications in the United States and United Kingdom, not everybody interpreted these correlations as causal. As stated above, for many neurologists the EEG only represented cortical activity, and only with extensive empirical work could a robust correlation be established between the record and the normal or pathological performance of the subject. At the time, such a level of robustness was only possible in the case of petit mal, a type of epilepsy in which consciousness is lost for a short period of time, generally seconds, which leaves a very recognizable pattern in the record (spike-dome; spike-plateau).
The approach taken by Gibbs, Davis, and Lennox is the kind of approach to electroencephalograms that Borck (Reference Borck2005a) calls physiognomic. Based on the analysis of patterns and the statistical dominance of different waves, this approach disregarded the physiological basis of neuro-electrical activity, which led to the objectification of social and culturally dependent classificatory categories and their transformation into ontological categories (Borck Reference Borck2005a, 89–90). It also naturalized the contingent, technical limits of the EEG by reducing the significance of evoked potentials to the narrow recordable spectrum. This was clear to Theodore Holmes Bullock, who had been introduced to EEG recording of evoked potentials by Warren McCulloch of Yale:
Fluctuating brain potentials of real significance probably occupy a continuous frequency spectrum from virtually zero to more than 500 per sec. Yet our knowledge almost exclusively concerns the band from 1 to 50 per sec. An important effect of the great amount of experience accumulated with brain waves studied for clinical purposes has been the freezing of our concept of these waves in a certain pattern largely defined by the arbitrary limits imposed by the conventional technic (sic) of recording. . . . We have come to think of brain waves in the form of these records and it is inevitable that this should mean an emphasis on certain features of the phenomenon and certain parts of the frequency spectrum at the expense of others because these features and frequencies are selected by the recording device used or are favorably shown at the paper speeds used. (Bullock Reference Bullock1945, 662)
At the end of the Second World War, besides an increase in the number of EEGs, many private clinics dedicated to neuropsychiatry were established in Mexico that contributed to spreading this physiognomic approach. Efrén del Pozo (Reference del Pozo1949) recognized that the technology had become popular in clinics and that its diagnostic value was undoubtable, especially in terms of the localization of cerebral tumors and epilepsy. He also recognized the extremely difficult, specialized, and delicate nature of its interpretation:
Even in the case of well controlled experiments with animals, when analysis would appear to be simpler, because the registering electrodes are placed directly on the cerebral cortex, the multiplicity and variety of cells and tissues, and their differing orientation, as well as their spontaneous and continuous activity, are almost unassailable obstacles in the discernment of the constitution of such electroencephalograms. (del Pozo Reference del Pozo1949, 209)
Before del Pozo aligned himself with the physiognomic approach, he cautioned that “greater complications are added at the clinic,” where the register from the scalp made physiological interpretation even more difficult:
However, thanks to the participation of the many researchers working in this field, some elementary knowledge with clinical value has been derived; the frequencies, voltages, groupings, and electric wave variations of the brain have been analyzed setting the electrodes on different regions of the cortex; on localized cortical destruction; in different physiological conditions: hyperventilation, hypercapnia, glycemic variations, sleep, eye opening or closing, prolonged sleeplessness, intellectual work, emotive states, circulatory variations, etc.; or in pathological states: epilepsy, schizophrenia, alcoholism, etc. The statistical results have shown to be of great clinical use. (Ibid.)
Two years later, he would publish as first author, with Armando Torres Michúa and G. Strecker, a preliminary note on a project with the eloquent title: “Estudio electroencefalográfico de un grupo indígena de Mexico” [Electroencephalographic study on a Mexican indigenous group]. The first two paragraphs related the marked individual character of the EEG: the extreme variability of the cortical activity shown from one individual to another, the impossibility of correlating such variations to intellectual capacity and physiological phenomena, and the stability of an individual's EEG once the subject reached maturity: “the electroencephalogram—Del Pozo affirmed, repeating an opinion solidly established in the literature—can be considered an individual characteristic” (del Pozo, Strecker, and Torres Michua Reference del Pozo, Strecher and Michúa1951, 78). He immediately added, “The registers of identical twins are so similar that they can be confused,” probably bearing in mind Lennox and Gibbs's works on this point (ibid.). This last thought seemed to justify the use of the EEG on a community of Otomí Indians, which was done to show the similarities of EEGs between individuals of “anthropologically homogeneous groups.” As the Otomí people were considered a “relatively pure group (sic),” such a project would allow for the study of the variability of registers in normal (i.e., non-pathological) uniform groups in order to determine whether the EEG might be of use to physical anthropology (see Del Pozo et al. Reference del Pozo, Strecher and Michúa1951, 78). Nevertheless, the idea of anthropological homogeneity as del Pozo used it requires some explanation.
Sociology and the Normalization of Objectivation
During the 1940s, sociology in Mexico became more competitive with (perhaps at the expenses of) anthropology and criminology. The 1939 appointment of Lucio Mendieta Nuñez as sole director of the Institute for Social Research (IIS) after a decade of scarce activity and barely any academic professionals in charge started a struggle for resources, a monopoly of projects, and institutional visibility.
Mendieta started consolidating the research core of the IIS by focusing on the study of indigenous and peasant communities. Over the next six years, the First American Ethnographic Exhibition project would become his main objective, as he saw it as an opportunity to strengthen the institute as a center specializing in the economic realities of the indigenous population (and in doing so engaging in a direct competition with the Indigenist Institute directed by Manuel Gamio, his former teacher).Footnote 7 As part of this project, Mendieta recruited the forensic psychiatrist José Gómez Robleda – who also taught biostatistics at the Faculty of Science of the National University – and the criminologist Alfonso Quiroz Cuarón, who had up to then been director and secretary of the Statistical Research Institute. The institute's first publication, and apparently its last, was a book titled Tendencia y ritmo de la criminalidad en México DF [Tendencies and rhythms in Mexico City's criminality] (1939). The study was in clear continuity with the National Psychopedagogical Institute's project, which was created in 1936 by the neurologist Samuel Ramírez and the institution that developed the first Mexican biotypology project,Footnote 8 as reflected in a collective book titled Características biológicas de los escolares proletarios [Biological characteristics of proletarian schoolchildren] (1937) edited by Gómez Robleda. Both Quiroz and Robleda supported the use of the EEG as a biotypological tool. In 1942, Robleda's disciple Alfonso Domínguez Toledano defended his thesis on the mathematical treatment of electroencephalographic waves to determine their abnormal proportions. Quiroz and Robleda's appointment reflected the drift of biostatistics toward the social and human sciences through criminology.
After 1940, the majority of the work produced by the Institute of Social Research (guided by a biotypological perspective) focused on Tarascan, Zapotec, and Otomí populations (Urías Horcasitas Reference Urías Horcasitas2005). The project's initial results were published in 1943, but later results would appear slowly, and the study on the Otomí of the Valle del Mezquital that continued until 1961 would become one of the most complete biotypological analyses.
Meanwhile, the INAH –directed at the time by Alfonso Caso, a founder of the IIS – signed an agreement with the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in order to regulate the teaching of anthropology. The idea was to unify collections and rationalize the use of resources. Physical anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and ancient history classes would be taught at the INAH in order to profit from the collections and laboratories, whereas general classes or those that required biological sciences laboratories would take place at the ENCB.
Prior to this restructuring, the bachelor's degree in anthropology candidates in the Anthropology Department of the ENCB had to take for two years the same courses as biology students (Fauhaber Reference Fauhaber and Barahona1993; López Aguilar Reference López Aguilar2006, 157–158). Now, the profile for anthropology became more clearly distinct, and during the first and second year, students had to take general ethnography, Mexican ethnography, cultural history, and indigenous cultures courses. Of the thirty-eight courses that made up the program, thirteen were dedicated to physical anthropology.Footnote 9 The only course that all specialties shared was a seminar titled “Indigenous problems in American republics today,” which was taught by Miguel Othón de Mendizábal. The convergence between the orientation that was being given to anthropology and the sociological project of the IIS was strong.
In a context full of growing expectations regarding the social meaning and political utility of mechanical objectivity, there was intense communication between different institutions and disciplines. The conversations were dominated by the effort to give social, economic, anthropological, and biological meaning to the notion of ethnic groups. Thus, the National Museum of Anthropology, together with the Colegio de México and the Alpha-Tau chapter of the Phi-Sigma Society (i.e., UNAM), financed Efrén del Pozo's 1950 expedition for an EEG study of 100 individuals belonging to the Otomí ethnic group in the Valle del Mezquital, State of Hidalgo.
The expedition turned out to be a challenge in more than one way; the transportation and installation of the functional but obsolete three channel EEG Grass Model I to the town of Ixmiquilpan was not minor (this is also the site where Robleda and his team would carry out the medical and psychological examinations that would be the basis of the 1961 publication). The reason for this relocation was to avoid the subjects being affected by environmental changes – mainly those related to altitude – that could modify the electric functioning of the brain. After having selected a representative number (a hundred and five individuals between twenty and thirty years of age), Del Pozo and his collaborators (among whom were Javier Romero Molina, head of the physical anthropology laboratory at the museum in charge of taking anthropometric measurements, and Alfonso Vélez Orozco, of the Institute of Medical and Biological Studies of the National University, who was in charge of serological analysis), began the electroencephalographic registration. Difficulties soon arose; the subjects had trouble relaxing during the measurement – something not surprising, given that the sophisticated laboratory apparatus had been moved to the village and had been utilized together with a complete ritual full of complex and extraneous circumstances – which provoked the superimposition of muscular potencies to brain waves, making the interpretation of results difficult. This was important because the project sought to establish a typology in function of the rhythm of alpha waves, which only emerge during relaxation. However, after discarding five particularly confusing cases, they proceeded to the analysis of results. According to the percentage of alpha waves in different derivations, the dominant voltage in them, and the stability of the patterns – they established “taking as criteria the general impression of the outline” –Footnote 10 the “Otomí brain,” or the normal Otomí electroencephalogram, resulted predominantly unstable (49 percent unstable, 27 percent highly unstable).
That the Otomí were the subject of a biotype study, and that they were considered a “pure” group, is not unusual in the context of a country where hygienist and biotypological practices were powerful traditions. This classification made sense in relation to the origin of the mestizo category and the project to define specific national human characteristics.Footnote 11 In fact, this preliminary note had been the essence of the talk Del Pozo gave at the physical anthropology section of the First Mexican Scientific Congress, which took place during September 1951. The resolutions taken at the meeting had been oriented, among other things, towards the creation of a consensus among physical anthropologists on the bio-functional value of anthropometric data used regularly, with the objective of creating a standard form and submitting for approval to the International Committee [for the Standardization of Anthropological Technique] in order to unify measurements (Bernal Reference Bernal1951, 115). Moreover, at the time, physical anthropologists demanded control over all technical training of specialists related to personnel selection and vocational orientation (ibid., 116). Within this framework of interests, the choice of an indigenous group for the systematic recording of electroencephalographic features was hardly surprising.
However, del Pozo's leap from his endorsement of the individual qualities of an EEG, comparable to a fingerprint, to its use to characterize an ethnic group is somehow surprising. Obviously, the quantitative analysis of electroencephalographic registers was usually applied only to groups that presented a well-defined neurological pathology as is the case of epilepsy, which gave way to ontologies and constructions, such as the “epileptic brain.” This technique was also utilized with social groups, such as criminals and homosexuals – i.e., social groups defined by their alleged anti-social and already pathologized behavior and personality – with completely disparate results.Footnote 12 The characterization of these groups did not require resorting to etiological explanations (Schirmann Reference Schirmann2014, 4). But the question of the genetic basis of EEG and how this could justify the characterization of an entire ethnic group had not been widely studied, and it remained a controversial issue.
Later on, Grey Walter would realize that the assumed individuality of alpha rhythms and their connection to subjective experience by a specific type of visual imagery processing (Walter Reference Walter, Field, Magoun and Hall1959, 287), along with the reification of the resulting typology, its possible genetic determination, and the interactions between individuals (affinity or antagonism, and ultimately sexual selection) with their impact in the shaping of social relationships –which turned the brain into “the social organ” – demanded “correlating cultural, genetic and cerebral with ethnic origins” (Walter Reference Walter1968, 185; see also Schirmann Reference Schirmann2014).
The Otomí were obviously not selected for their deviant nature; the association with twins and the stress on their purity pointed to a genetic basis of EEG. Even if the ideas were much less elaborated than in Walter, there was also some urgency in developing some mechanism of objectivation of normal groups and explanation of the relationship between them and their elements.
Recognizing the radical individuality of the EEG and yet presupposing a typification of an entire ethic group entered into synergy with political discussions that were taking place in the field of sociology. In this regard, the journal Psiquis, produced by the Mexican Mental Hygiene League, published the justice of the Mexican Supreme Court Luis Chico Goerne's conclusions on the ongoing penal reform in 1948. Chico Goerne was a founding member and first director of the Institute for Social Research (IIS). As a premise to such reform, the question of who the subjects of justice were had to be answered. He considered that the subject of justice could never be the State, as it was not an individual. Social individuals were “two types of beings . . .: Man and the Group” (Chico Goerne Reference Chico Goerne1948, 376). Clearly, the individual, whether singularly or collectively, human or social, constituted “essentially, the coherent synthesis of a plurality of similar elements that become a unitary singularity, a personal and differentiated attitude facing the surrounding world” (Chico Goerne Reference Chico Goerne1948, 376). Thus, the elements prefigured the group.
So, what did the instability of Otomí EEG mean? It was hard to tell. There was some skepticism about any attempt to link alpha rhythms to personality; as Santiago Castillejos Bezares pointed out seven years before: “it is doubtful that such a coarse index as is the outline of alpha activity will be enough to make [correlations between personality and the EEG] clearly apparent” (Castillejos Bezares Reference Castillejos Bezares1944, 56). The experience undoubtedly disclosed the cultural dimension of EEG technology, which required a certain readiness by the patient, an understanding of the need for its application and familiarity that allowed for complete relaxation; unveiling both the imminence of being led astray in diagnosis by an artifact, and the feedback between the EEG and the external world. It also demonstrated up to what point clinical habits and relationships that had been established in the clinic with this instrument could be reified and projected onto society. That is, how its application easily introduced some constrictions and requirements that were taken as normal and compulsory to a proper determination of normalcy, and compelled for acquiescence. Besides that, the characterization of the EEG of the Otomí people as being generally unstable – despite its apparent neutral character, since there were degrees of instability that were considered normal – was negatively tinged with affirmations such as: “The unstable person presents an unstable EEG” (Davis Reference Davis1940, 718), which made reference to individual registers, and now seemingly sanctioned negative racial characteristics. At this point, any attempt to explain the role of personal interactions and history in the creation of the group disappeared.
Hence, the crucial result of Del Pozo's experiment was not this diagnosis, but the rhetorical force it instilled in the conviction that ethnic groups could be treated as legal individuals and unitary singularities, blurring their inherent heterogeneity and historicity. Such force resided in the systematic application of the instrument on a well-defined group during a limited amount of time, and its statistical congruence, which no doubt provided an unquestionable rhetorical advantage over other clinical or analytical uses that worked with more scattered samples.
The Many, the Few, and the Models
Although, as said, some neurological researchers strongly opposed the physiognomical approach, their work lacked the rhetorical force of the Otomí case. Some of them used a different notion of model which required less homogeneous and broad samples; but in other cases, there was a lack of systematic work and scarce and methodologically weak attempts to clarify the soundness of EEG classification regarding clinical diagnosis.
In 1939 alone, the Jaspers laboratory in Montreal generated 1,000 EEGs from 500 epileptic patients (Collura Reference Collura1993, 489). This type of systematic application initiative on a group of subjects with the same neurological diagnostic was crucial in order to establish characteristic wave patterns for such conditions, and also to perfect the use of the EEG in the localization of tumors. It was important that this information came from the same laboratory, precisely for the above-mentioned reasons signaled by Bullock.
In the case of Mexico, the application seems to have never reached such levels at the time. In fact, a look at some studies and publications reveals the relative lack of systematic application during this period, even when in some cases it might have truly contributed to diagnostic or analytical improvements. One such instance was the study of an endemic illness, provoked by a parasite that calcified in the brain and caused convulsions similar to epileptic ones: cysticercosis. In 1942, Mario Fuentes suggested José Luis González Chagoyán conduct research at Pavilion 16 on this illness for his thesis. In December 1943, González indeed published a first and long article on his work (González Chagoyán Reference González Chagoyán1943a, Reference González Chagoyán1943b), which was intended to be the first in a series. Of the ten cases he explored, the electroencephalograph was utilized only twice, even when its application in the exploration of the location of the calcification might have been productive.
The doctors in charge of the Electroencephalography Department at the General Insane Asylum were Pedro Ortiz and Lourdes Escotto. Even though the hospital had around 3000 inpatients, and had a tradition for the reclusion of epileptics, only a few underwent EEG testing. The service, under the supervision of Sixto Obrador Alcalde (Calderón Narváez Reference Calderón Narváez1996, 204), was utilized mainly for experimental purposes. Obrador's research focused at the time on the functional relationships between different areas of the brain and its cortex (explored through animal vivisection),Footnote 13 and on the experimental convulsive threshold;Footnote 14 the effect of different substances on the electroencephalograph pattern of epileptic patients.
During those experiments, the epileptic patients of the Central Pavilion were off any type of anti-convulsive medication (which constituted a habitual practice at the General Hospital) and were monitored through the EEG in order to determine the effect of different drugs administered for the test. Obrador had no interest in the diagnostic value of the EEG in epilepsy, but rather in the behavior of the brain in general; in the functional interpretation of the EEG, and what he termed “the epileptic brain” (Obrador, Ortiz, and Mandoki Reference Obrador Alcalde, Ortiz and Mandoki1945; Reference Obrador Alcalde, Ortiz and Mandoki1943). In this, and in the Otomí case, the evaluation of the variation in the EEG was obtained through the frequency spectrum. Following a method similar to that of Engel et al. (Reference Engel, Romano, Ferris, Webb and Stevens1944), the number of waves per second per 100 seconds were counted and averaged in order to obtain a percentage of each frequency and a rhythm frequency. This distribution did not really create a model – in fact it was applied in individual EEGs – but was applied on an individual who was considered a model in and of himself, acting therefore as a system with which to evaluate modifications or effects in the cortex's electrical behavior due to agents, such as drugs, which could be missed during a visual examination.
As he restricted the interpretation of EEGs to information about functional levels of the individual brain, Obrador opposed any attempt to use EEGs to differentiate between (types of) normality and abnormality (Engel et al. Reference Engel, Romano, Ferris, Webb and Stevens1944, 25), noting that “electroencephalographic alterations are not specific, nor pathognomic of different pathological processes or conditions,” on the contrary, “electroencephalograms can only give an objective picture of the level of activity, stability and functional level of the brain” (Obrador Reference Obrador Alcalde1943a, 44). But this kind of exploration of the biochemical and functional basis of singular brains were too scarce and isolated to oppose the social effects of the physiognomic approach; even eventual attempts to analyze the correlation between EEG classification and clinical diagnosis were limited and biased.
To my knowledge, the analysis of the largest electroencephalograph sample was undertaken by Ruth Castañeda Ramírez in 1945 in her thesis “Electroencefalografía. Revisión de 500 electroencefalogramas patológicos” [Encephalography. Revision of five-hundred pathological electroencephalograms]. This was not, however, original research. This analysis was based on the EEGs of patients diagnosed with heterogeneous illnesses, selected at random from the archives of Pavilion 16 at the General Hospital, and it aimed to verify the correspondence between clinical and electrical diagnoses. The largest sample corresponded to those patients diagnosed with epilepsy: 295 registers (59 percent of the total figure). The author emphasized that their main feature was their radical abnormality, but added “the pattern does not coincide with that illness, that is, the electrical and clinical classifications do not correlate” (Castañeda Ramírez Reference Castañeda Ramírez1945, 36). Even more troubling was her assertion that “the [EEGs of patients diagnosed with] personality disorders showing typical anomalies, were considered epileptics.” The work eloquently underlines the importance of “carrying out in-depth studies in order to establish the normal type of EEG for our country [i.e., Mexico], and/or not, its pathological variations” (ibid., 40).
Castañeda's observations illustrate the contradictions faced by medical classification when: a) the register of typified patterns (as those of certain epileptic manifestations), which rarely had diagnostic value without a clinical history, were considered as autonomous and superposed to clinical diagnostic in order to redefine it; and b) when the discrepancies between the clinical diagnostics and the registered patterns were interpreted as possible variations in typified illnesses. Her work also clarifies the kind of logic released by privileging EEG typologies, since such variations and redefinitions could only be consolidated as such by presupposing a typical or normal brain behavior for Mexicans, which required a definition of the Mexican community and the reduction of its non-typical (i.e., not Mestizo) normal local variations to a series of alternative models. Del Pozo's initiative was in direct response to this problem.
Coda
During the first decade after EEG arrival in Mexico, its uses were organized around two strategies: multifocal production of EEG cultures of interpretation, and interinstitutional interaction determined by personal networks, the need to share educational resources, and the production of common objects of socio-political interest. The indetermination of EEG allowed for two ways of producing ontological determination, depending on the style of thinking under which it was used.
Since the experimental and analytic style was developed by fewer people with a more specialized neurophysiological background but less involved in the interinstitutional machinery, there were fewer opportunities to produce a dialogue or strategy from this approach or to take EEG out of the lab and conflate its results into the sociological, managerial and political interests that were part of interinstitutional ecology at the time. Hence, the use of the EEG as an analytical tool had less impact in this milieu than its use for diagnosis.
On the contrary, the possibilities of generating typifications from recurrences in the register, in spite of objections, fed a thinking style within which diagnostics were oriented, due to classificatory issues, towards the consolidation of models of collective cerebral performance. Normalcy as a medical category – which in an experimental setting had a concrete and relative sense, established by comparison between electroencephalographic responses in absence/presence of chemical substances, states of excitement, etc. – became an unstable outcome since it was dependent on the production of pathological classifications correlated to alleged variants of the registered behavior of the normal cortex. Consequently, the definition of abnormality depended not only on a mechanical procedure that objectively produced the image of normal brain behavior, but regarded it as the material basis to which any notion of normalcy should be reduced. Besides, in the case of Mexico, the impossibility of elucidating discrepancies between diagnostic practices and results, or openly taking sides for a given option without actually having a model of the normal electrical activity of the brain, fed the search – or at least the firm belief – that it was necessary and possible to reify a national normal brain model.
This drift of the medical discourse towards political categories justified that “normal” ethnic groups superseded groups considered to be pathological or anti-social as references for the understanding of the normal social landscape. This move resonated with those socio-anthropological notions of group differentiation, and their inescapable individuality, around which measures of justice, guilt, responsibility, and autonomy were articulated. The coalescence of neurology, sociology, and anthropology into a single object of interest opened the doors of the laboratory to the EEG, and reinforced its sought autonomy to work as a categorical materialization and classification system. Perhaps it was this resonance that permitted the obviation of a serious consideration of the technical conditions of registers, their trustworthiness and limitations, and their unavoidable social character. In any case, during this period and in the midst of different struggles to constitute the relevance of their respective disciplines, Mexican scientists definitively contributed to the construction of the EEG as an interface that allowed for the comparison and movement between anthropological, sociological, and medical perspectives, thus moving from a restrictive notion of anomaly to one restricting normality.
Finally, regarding the consolidation of EEG as a dispositif in the sense here defined, the convergence of this technological innovation within this particular institutional network and epistemic landscape unveiled the dynamics that reinforced the rupture between politics and economy, subjective interests and statistical classifications. The attempt to reduce the definition of an ethnic group to an objectified “unitary singularity” and the dissolution of personal interaction was, despite its paradoxical intention of integrating them in a common juridical framework, a main move towards the eviction from history – that is, from being considered political subjects – of the “indigenous” peoples, which entered in the realm of the economy as “pure” anthropological objects deprived of their subjectivities.
