Paper short abstract:

Following the Napoleonic wars Scottish Romantic antiquarians contributed to the craze for Scottish tartans. This influenced the marketing of Turkey red cottons from the Vale of Leven, contributing to a transoceanic trade in cotton which was entwined with colonialism, capitalism and slavery.

Paper long abstract:

Between the French Revolution and the mid 19th century Romantic antiquarians broadened historical enquiry by studying local customs and manners and by amassing the tangible material evidence of the past--in short, by pushing history into everyday life- and by marrying a concern with primary sources with an imaginative grasp of history, involving the marriage of internal and external realities.

This was a period that saw the emergence of ethnographic museums and an increased interest in remote rural communities. Often a source of embarrassment to 20th century anthropologists, who preferred to stress the philosophical roots of anthropology, Romantic antiquarianism helped to shape the ethnographic project in ways that remain poorly acknowledged, even now.

At the same time that Romantic antiquarianism was flourishing the cotton trade had become a large part of the Scottish economy. Most cottons were made for export. Scottish firms specialising in Turkey red went to great lengths to ensure their designs would be acceptable to specific regional markets, not only in India but in remote islands in the Pacific that had become a focus of overseas missionary activity in the 19th century.

To understand the reception of imported Turkey red calicos, and their impact, we need recognise the importance of textiles across the Pacific region, the ritual use of cloth and also the importance of the colour red, which was valued across the whole Pacific. In other words, in order to achieve a more nuanced understanding we need a broader focus with a wider geographic and temporal range.

Paper short abstract:

The present paper proposes a reading of the first written accounts on the Amerindian notion of kanaima in the light of the Romantic ideals prevalent at their time.

Paper long abstract:

The very definition of literature, as we understand it, is a product of the European Romantism at the backdrop of the late eighteen century. Folklore and imagination were transgressors standing against the utilitarian society of Industrial Revolution. In this historical context, there was an impulse towards traditional peoples, their stories and knowledge. Examples of such endeavour are William Hilhouse ([1825] 2010) in Indian Notices, and Richard Schomburgk’s Travels in British Guiana, 1840-1844 (1922) – both constituting important landmarks in the colonial literature in Guyana, especially addressing Amerindian peoples, fauna, flora and geography of the region. William Hilhouse was one of the first authors to describe kanaima, followed by Richard Schomburgk, who sets the paradigm when elaborating on the Amerindian notion of kanaima – which encapsulates predation, revenge and death. The present paper proposes a reading of the first written accounts on kanaima in the light of the Romantic ideals prevalent at their time.

Paper short abstract:

From the 18th century, the Alps became the site of romantic fascination. More than two centuries later, this paper traces the persistence of competing and ambiguous romantic visions on the Alps in a Swiss touristic resort, between tourism, nature conservation and nativism.

Paper long abstract:

From the end of the 18th century, the Alps became the site of romantic fascination for the Sublime. These mountain ridges, their incontrollable wilderness and purity as well as their simple but honest inhabitants were erected as powerful symbols, revealing the afflictions of a modern, alienating world of increasing industrialization. More than two centuries later, this paper traces the persistence and ambiguity of competing romantic visions on the Alps in a touristic resort in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in the Alpine village, I show how Romanticism has shaped the valley’s relationship to the world, between past, present and future. Romantic sensibilities have contributed to the development of a flourishing, global and capitalist economy of tourism in the Alps. At the same time, Romanticism has also shaped (trans-)national understandings of nature and natural heritage, inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage list, in the Swiss legislation or mobilized by environmental NGOs. Romantic sensibilities of belonging and pluralism also have historically structured exclusionary politics of nativism in the German-speaking Alps, celebrating and giving priority to the "authentic", native inhabitants over others. Based on the everyday experiences of various village dwellers, I show how these visions cannot be seen as mere contradictions: examining the Alpine village life reveals the ambiguous nature of Romanticism itself, as both a tool for critique and a catalyzer of modernity and capitalism.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the Romantic legacy in libertarian naturism of South American expression from the turn of the 20th century, with special reference to its biopolitical critique.

Paper long abstract:

It is known that the naturist tendencies which flourished amidst international anarchist movement between the last decades of the 19th century to the 1920s sustained a dissident ecocentrism taken from the Romantic set of ideas. Indeed, libertarian naturism gave continuity to the Romantic critique to modern industrialism and urban life and, most importantly, the movement gave political expression to the edenic vision of inter-species conviviality, engaging in struggles for the rights of other species and nature at large.

This paper intends a reading of two South American authors of the turn of the 20th century – the Brazilian novelist Lima Barreto and Rafael Barrett, for Paraguayan literature - in order to highlight they shared a common ground in the anarchist ecocentrism of Romantic lineage, which is the base of their biopolitical critique of South American authoritarianism and exploitation of labour.

Paper short abstract:

This paper concerns the arrival of Gothic Science literature in Brazil, and selects a 1925 novel for analysis. As a variation on the classic The Island of doctor Moreau, the novel explores a mad zoology created by a man of science, ethical limits of scientific experiments and conceptual horror.

Paper long abstract:

The intersection of the Gothic novel and the Scientific romance played an important role in early science fiction. This paper aims to trace the arrival of the so-called Gothic Science in Brazilian literature. To this end, we focus on a work by the Brazilian novelist Gastão Cruls, A Amazonia Mysteriosa (1925), a novel that echoes H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau.

In the tradition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as a keen observer of the medical debates of his time, Cruls tackles a form of horror out of the disruptive aspects of modern science, and chooses the Amazon rainforest as his setting, thus evoking Alberto Rangel's Green Hell and Doyle's The Lost World.

The plot develops the story of a fictional German scientist who conducts secretive experiments in a fabled land of Amazon women, hidden in the unknown depths of the forest.

Far from the censorious gaze and public uproar, as a bold and ruthless man of science in a secluded environment, the villain decides to engage in a highly unethical project of his own, designed to explore the plasticity of life forms: a scientific enterprise to defy the taxonomical paradigm, using chemical, endocrine and surgical technologies to blur boundaries between species, including those between humans and animals. The end result is a kind of Linnaean nightmare in a land of mythical utopia and fabricated dystopia.

Paper short abstract:

Amazonian ethnography is often taxed with being romantic in its presentation of noble savages living peacefully untouched by capitalism. This paper proposes that a return to an earlier moment of Amazonian ethnography can offer alternative ways of making good on the romantic critique of modernity.

Paper long abstract:

Amazonian ethnography is often taxed with being romantic in its presentation of noble savages living peacefully untouched by capitalism. This paper proposes that a return to an earlier moment of Amazonian ethnography can offer alternative ways of making good on the romantic critique of modernity. Janet Siskind’s To Hunt in the Morning (1976) takes its title from a famous text by Marx and Engels describing a future communist society having overcome the social division of labour: “communist society (…) makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner” In identifying Sharanahua society with an imagined communist society, Siskind self-consciously repeated a Romantic, critique of modern society from the vantage point of “savage” societies that found one of its first expressions in Rousseau’s Origins of Inequalities (1755). Yet the quote she was using came from Marx and Engels’s German Ideology (1846), the textbook of a particularly positivistic Marxist Structural anthropology that rose to prominence in the 1970s. Against that one-sided positivistic reading of Marx and Engels’s text, Siskind emphasized its Rousseauian origins. This paper will connect these three moments of critique (1976, 1846 and 1755) the role of a self-conscious Romantic portrayal of “the savage” for a critique of modernity – and specifically of the progressive ideology of specific historical moments.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores parallels between romantic thought permeating ethnographic descriptions of the early 20th century, on the indigenous inhabitants of the Corumbiara-Apediá region, Brazil, and contemporary ethnographic sensibilities in light of experiences of ecological destruction in the Amazon.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores, on the one hand, romantic thought and influences permeating some ethnographic descriptions and scientific reports written in the early decades of the 20th century, on the indigenous inhabitants of the Corumbiara-Apediá region, south-eastern Rondônia, Brazil, and, on the other hand, attempts to establish a link with the contemporary sensibilities underlying current fieldwork experiences in the Amazon region. The paper proposes to address parallels in these sensibilities in response to an extremely unwell world witnessed by the ethnographer in both times, dominated by a world of rubber exploitation and agribusiness expansion. The troubling ecological and end-of-the-world scenarios observed by the anthropologist exhibit, it can be said, striking resemblance to the "monstrous and unintelligible Cataclysm” (Lévi-Strauss 1961, p.352), described by ethnographers almost a century ago. In a way, the profound sadness, distress and powerlessness felt by many about irreversible negative transformations of the environment and species disappearance, described through terminologies such as solastalgia and ecological grief, echoes romantic literature and social thought.

The paper argues that a "romantic subversion" and "inherent unsettlement", so characteristic of the anthropological discipline (Maskens & Banes 2013, p. 269), is necessary to counter the malaise that continues to trouble our world. It is hypothesized here that romanticism, partially responsible historically for the challenges and dangers faced today, perhaps has precisely the ability to resist the unwellness and crisis that we now encounter.

Paper short abstract:

By questioning the romantic influence on the Koch-Grunberg's thought referred to livestock farming in the Rio Branco valley, this paper discusses the cattle domestication model adopted by the Macushi, a people of Carib linguistic affiliation, as a management resource for their traditional territory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with the institution of livestock practices among the Macushi, a people of Carib linguistic affiliation in the Guianas region, whose secular experience with cattle gave rise to the establishment of diversified relationships with cattle. With the use of oral narratives and the primorous ethnographic record made by Theodor Koch-Grünberg during the expedition from Roraima to the Orinoco in the years 1911-1913, it aims to debate the recurrent practices adopted by the indigenous population in dealing with cattle herds as a priority resource for management of their traditional territory.

By focusing on the recurrence of the structural factors of the extensive livestock model, this paper aims to problematize how the humanist and liberal critique woven in ethnographic records in the early twentieth century comes to focus and anticipate the unavoidable impacts of climate change and the massive extinction of living species in the 21st century.