Scientific mobilities in the twentieth century: Gustaf Bolinder's photographs of indigenous women in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta

In this chapter, an analysis will be made of a series of photographs of Arhuaco women taken during the beginning of the 20th century by the anthropologist Gustaf Bolinder at Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta. The images were observed and interpreted together with the Arhuaco community of Gámake, based on their ways of seeing. This analysis allows reflecting upon the political, economic, cultural and military aims of the scientific trips to America since modernity, gathering a compilation of information from images, statistical data, objects belonging to the material culture and nature of the colonized territories, and leaving testimony of these migrations. Thus, Bolinder’s visual corpus offers an interesting framework for interpreting and identifying differential categories for otherness, gender and racialization in contexts regarding migration and science. The methodology combines ethnographic work, derived from the collaborative methodologies proceeding from social museology and visual sociology, which include iconological analyses and other approaches for resignifying images, and is supported on the memory processes of Arhuaco women and men in contemporaneity.