Né en Ligurie, Florentino Ameghino (1853-1911), personnage majeur de la paléontologie de vertébrés – genre humain compris – de la fin du xixe siècle est, à sa mort, transformé en savant argentin par excellence. La récupération nationale d’Ameghino eut pour conséquence de mettre l’accent sur sa naissance présumée dans la ville de Luján, en territoire argentin, une controverse perpétuée pendant tout le xxe siècle et qui a eu un impact fort sur l’historiographie des sciences en Argentine. En contexte de guerre froide et dans le cadre de la politique culturelle des partis communistes argentin et soviétique, Ameghino fut associé à Lyssenko et Mitchourine, en posant la centralité de l’hérédité des caractères acquis dans les idées de ces trois scientifiques. Sa commémoration à Moscou en 1954 le présentait comme un scientifique progressiste, darwiniste et anticlérical, tant dans son travail scientifique que pédagogique et, dans ce cadre, comme un allié pour lutter contre les théories scientifiques dominantes du monde capitaliste. Despite his reputation as the most famous scientist in twentieth-century Argentina, Florentino Ameghino (1853-1911) has remained paradoxically on the margins of international historiography. This article analyses the transformation of this major figure of late nineteenth-century science into an Argentinian national scholar. In the second part, we shall examine how the figure of the scholar was constructed during Cold War, specifically in light of the cultural politics of the Argentinian and Soviet Communist Parties, in which Ameghino was associated with Lyssenko and Michurin, and marshalled to counter dominant capitalist scientific theories. Setting the political instrumentalisation of the scholar in a transnational dimension, this article also discusses the major impact of the cult of Ameghino on the historiography of the sciences in Argentina.
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