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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the ecological impacts of Louis Agassiz's polygenic ideas in the colonization of the Amazon River Basin, which opened to international navigation soon after his visit and approximation to Emperor D. Pedro II during an expedition sponsored by Harvard and banker Nathaniel Thayer.

Paper long abstract:

The Thayer Expedition was an ambitious year-and-a-half-long scientific mission organized by Harvard that collected more than eighty thousand objects from Brazil to the recently founded Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA). Led by the naturalist and scientific racist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873,) the voyage combined vital agendas for the scientist's legacy and the U.S. economic ties with Brazil.

Through analyzing the Amazon River's Ichthyological distribution, Agassiz aimed to prove Charles Darwin's recent revolutionary thesis on the origin of species wrong, forging evidence in favor of polygenism, a racist theory especially functional in the Southern United States. Soon after the expedition, which took place amid the Civil War, Agassiz's new friend, Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II, sanctioned a law authorizing the opening of the Amazon River Basin to international steamships, changing the course of the rainforest's history. Is it possible to measure the impact of Agassiz's ideas on the commodification of the Amazon River basin? How did his ideas on race and the origins of life affect the way the forest and its peoples were attacked by ecocide projects?

This paper will draw connections between Agassiz's writing of nature and the colonization of the Amazon River basin, reading his scientific production in its ontological implications to think about the political economy of nature that would unfold in the region. The assemblage (Tsing, 2019) of political actors, scientific methods, and cosmogonies mobilized by his power-knowledge will be discussed in both human and non-human impacts left by his voyage.