Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the ways in which thinkers of the Iberian and Latin American Enlightenment engaged with the eighteenth-century Northern European representation of America as a world of nature deprived of culture and of Amerindians as beings arrested in the earliest stages of human development.

Paper long abstract:

In the eighteenth century, Amerindians' supposed failure to overcome the state of savagery was a primary object of inquiry among many Enlightenment thinkers. Three explanations for this failure were particularly influential in both Europe and the Americas: those of Buffon, Montesquieu and De Pauw. Whereas Buffon relied on America's geological youth and Amerindians' recent migration to the continent to account for their savagery, Montesquieu attributed the savagery of Amerindian life to the richness and fruitfulness of America's nature. In contrast, De Pauw argued that the native inhabitants of America were as ancient and degenerated as their continent, whose unhealthy environment exercised an ubiquitous corruptive influence on the human body. Either fruitful or bare, young or degenerate, America, for these thinkers, was a world of nature, devoid of culture and overall unfit for civilisation. In this paper I analyse how influential Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American intellectuals of the period engaged with these three paradigmatic positions, through their interconnected representations of the Amerindian body, the Iberian conquest and colonialism in which ideas of nature, culture, civilisation and degeneration were intertwined. Ultimately, this paper aims to shed new light on the specific ways in which intellectuals of the Iberian world both challenged and reinforced the enlightened idea of Amerindians as primitive beings and of America as a continent whose history was yet to begin.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the ways in which twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals reformulated the region's identity by reappraising nature as an essential component of modernity.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of the primitiveness of the American continent with respect to civilised Europe was fully established in the eighteenth century, as European scholars laid the ground for a theory of the inferiority of the natural world in the Americas. The philosophical peak of the debate was reached in the early nineteenth century, when G.W.F. Hegel gave his famous Lectures on the Philosophy of History placing Europe in the realm of 'history' and America in the realm of 'nature'. This paper seeks to explore the ways in which twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals reformulated the region's identity by reappraising nature as an essential component of modernity. Ultimately, this paper aims to shed new light on Latin America's original and often neglected contribution to ongoing debates about the nature/culture divide in the Western world.

Paper short abstract:

Rupert Medd is an independent scholar and was awarded a PhD (2013, Bristol University, England).

Paper long abstract:

Julio C. Tello, Latin America's first Indigenous archaeologist, ascertained that the valuable environmental knowledge gained by Peru's pre-Hispanic civilizations equally had contemporary significance for a modernizing and industrializing nation.

My presentation links with the panel's topics on how Tello used this Western science in order to respond to issues concerning human geography, natural resources as well as provoking further debates on Peruvian national identity, prevalent during the 1920s and 30s.

Tello's field notes from his 'Expedición al Marañon - 1937' structure my presentation as I focus on the importance of clean water supplies and biodiversity to Peru's pre-Hispanic civilizations. Tello's uncovering of antique water channels - acequias, led him to propose alternative environmental conclusions that were multi-functional.

Archaeology and travel writing contributed toward decolonization of both society and Nature in Peru. With this in mind, I engage with 'coloniality of power' theories developed by Aníbal Quijano and José Carlos Mariátegui, showing how Peruvian culture and history have been mainly defined by colonial, imperial and global processes. In turn, these have had environmental repercussions that were always ancient in origin.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how the idea of ‘going native’ is redefined and redeployed to counter European discourses of nature as an economic resource in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente, a 1940s novella set in the Peruvian Amazon.

Paper long abstract:

Arturo Burga Freitas's Mal de gente - which bridges the novella, folktale, and ethnographic sketch - is set in the jungles in and around the author's native Peruvian Amazon. At its centre is the story of a young European, Edmund Rice, who, like a number of protagonists of the contemporaneous Spanish American novela de la selva, travels to the region for the purposes of work and ends up falling in love with a local woman and settling permanently in the jungle. The natural world depicted in Burga Freitas's novella is a zone of exploitation, characterised by the European plundering of tropical products, chiefly rubber. Yet countering this assessment of nature is the native Amazonian view of the jungle as a complex space abounding in unseen life, capable of enchanting outsiders and, pivotally, preventing them from leaving. This paper will explore how, in this important text of the 1940s, the idea of 'going native' is redefined and redeployed to counter European discourses of nature as an economic resource. Instead, nature emerges as a powerfully animate realm, and one with which man is profoundly interconnected.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores “multi-naturism” as a philosophical concept which opens up political dispute over natural resources by tracing ontological differences within approaches to nature, focusing on Humboldt’s work on Mexico and the development of permaculture methodologies in El Salvador.

Paper long abstract:

The science of "ecology" has a long history. However practices and expertise for harmonising social practices with the more-than-human world are arguably much longer. In this paper I focus on two moments where Central American plant life became enrolled in globalising networks, one historical and one contemporary, to explore the politics which inheres to the difference between these two ecologies. To do this I draw on the concept of "multi-naturism" as it has been developed by the anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, highlighting the specific ontology which has underpinned "modern" accounts of nature, and strategies for destabilising its monopolisation of spatial design and the language of environmental sustainability.

Both Humboldt, writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, and permaculture, a set of design techniques for "working with nature" to grow food, can be characterised by colonial tendencies in these terms. Extending their reach through globalising techniques, Humboldt's project of science and today's multiplying centres of permaculture design can be seen to appropriate "local" knowledges for distant consumption, and to over-write indigenous understandings with a specifically western account of nature. However, neither are easily reduced to this narrative. Permaculture practices in El Salvador have been adapted for the campesino a campesino movement of Meso-America primarily for developing critical responses to export-oriented agri-commerce, led by small-scale farmer practitioners. Meanwhile Humboldt was among the first to critique colonial resource extraction. In this paper I draw out key tensions in the production of ecological knowledge for sustainability and conclude by laying out a politics which ultimately addresses the broader ethos of sustainable development.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses the positivist-oriented measures enacted by the State to create a homogenous Honduras in the 19th and 20th centuries. I focus on the socio-scientific reasoning for the strategies carried out to correct the racial and cultural make-up of its Indian and Black populations.

Paper long abstract:

Honduras during the 19th and early 20th centuries was a space controlled by disparate and conflicting powers. Hondurans, Americans, British and others explored and inhabited different regions of this country as well as created a series of representations of the Honduran natural and built environments and the populations they encountered. During this period we see the production and circulation of works that utilized behavioral and physical characteristics - skin color, hair, facial features - as well as tropes of blood to define the cultural and racial composition of the Honduran people. In this presentation, I discuss the relationship between the geographical descriptions and demographic assessments that both foreign and national writers make, and the theories pertaining to natural history and the science of race prevalent in the Americas and Europe. I explain how ideas and assumptions on race were utilized to justify positivist measures aimed at improving the racial and cultural composition of its Amerindian and Black populations, to define Honduran identity in opposition to the Caribbean coastline, and to deny its strong African heritage.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the representation of nature in novels by Northeastern writers Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos in response to the modernization process of the 1930s.

Paper long abstract:

With the re-positioning of the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, numerous European-led, scientific expeditions into Brazil's "undiscovered" territory were encouraged by the Portuguese crown. Travel reports from these expeditions, inheriting the deeply fantastical quality of medieval Europe perpetuated by centuries of European colonization, highlight a generalized view of Brazilian nature as both awe-inspiring and tameable; its indigenous inhabitants garnered respect for their ability to traverse seemingly impassable forests, yet were unequivocally labelled as inferior to the European.

While a complex of inferiority - founded upon the supposedly inferior status of Brazil's indigenous past and its mixed-race present - divided the New World from the Old, another division lay within Brazil: between the economically-booming South and the impoverished North. In light of this division, the current paper looks at the re-appropriation of the awe-inspiring quality of Brazilian nature by left-wing Northeastern novelists in response to the top-down process of modernization that took place during the 1930s under Getúlio Vargas' populist regime. In particular, it explores the juxtaposition of contrasting forces of nature - the sea in Jorge Amado's Mar Morto (1936) and drought in Graciliano Ramos' Vidas Secas (1938) - against the backdrop of the lives of the marginalized poor in Brazil's Northeastern towns and sertão.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I analyze the controversy about the dogs rescued after being used as laboratory animals in a research institute in Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

Recently in Brazil animal rights activists broke into a research institute and rescued several dogs that were used in scientific experiments. In this paper I analyze the controversy that arouse from such rescue, tracing the arguments used by the intruders and by the spokesperson of the Institute and public notes released by other scientific research centers. Those agents presented conflicting definitions of what should be understood as an animal, a scientific experiment, suffering, ill-treatment and even life itself. Through this discussion, it will be possible to understand the conflicting conceptions constructed about what would be the nature and what are the ideal ways to interact with it.