Practicing Population in Latin America Elizabeth F. S. Roberts University of Michigan Population involves the counting of a group in a place. To count is to know. To know is to intervene. Knowing and intervening are complicated practices. Assigning groups to places is complicated as well. This set of essays, that examine how scientists make Latin American groups into “objects of inquiry and intervention” (Suárez-Díaz 2017a [this volume]) allows for a fundamental examination of how practicing population can involve seemingly disparate accounts of the relationship of groups to places. North American scientists tend to constitute the populations described in these papers as biologically essential groups located in timeless landscapes or as malleably cultural groups within national territories, while Latin American scientists tend to constitute populations through the examination of groups formed in relation to land. Debating the nature or culture of groups of people is a relatively recent activity. While nature became identifiable as “a thing” in early Enlighten- ment thought, until the mid-nineteenth century humans were understood as shaped in continuous relation to the material world around them, not through x percentages of nature or culture (Keller 2010). The German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is often credited with providing us with culture, coming from volkgeist, the genius of a people. But it was only later that culture came to emphasize ephemerality and non-materiality as opposed to the hard reality of nature. Herder, instead, linked culture to cultivation (as in agriculture), signifying specific groups of people embedded within a particular climate, geography and language over time. Culture was made through the constant back and forth of land and bodies, both subject to continuous change. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century in the industrialized northern world that nature “hardened,” becoming less relational and more internal Perspectives on Science 2017, vol. 25, no. 5 © 2017 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00261 704