Asymmetric ecologies in Europe and South America around 1800 / edited by Rolando M. Carrasco and Susanne Schlünder.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Carrasco, Rolando M, editor.

Schlünder, Susanne, editor.

Series:

Culture & conflict ; Volume 21.

Culture & conflict ; Volume 21

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ethnoscience.

Human ecology.

Europe.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (VIII, 324 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berlin, Germany : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This volume proposes new ways of understanding the historical semantics of the relationship between humans and nature in South America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The authors in this volume use the notion of asymmetry to discuss the representations of and forms of knowledge about nature circulating in, and about, colonial and postcolonial South America. They argue that the production of knowledge about the American natural space widened the power gap between the Europeans colonizers and the local population. This gap, therefore, rests on what we call 'asymmetric ecologies': Eurocentric epistemic orders excluded forms of indigenous, mestizo, and Creole knowledge about nature. By looking at literary as well as non-literary sources, such as natural histories, travel narratives, encyclopaedias or medical writing, the essays in this volume trace the origins of new theoretical paradigms (ecocriticism, biopolitics, transarea studies, etc.), and examine the regional cultural, identity, and epistemic conflicts that undercut the Eurocentric narrative of enlightened modernity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Asymmetric Ecologies in Europe and South America around 1800: Introduction

I Epistemic Asymmetries

Humboldt and Epistemological Colonialism: Alexandra Wulf’s The Invention of Nature

Climate, Man, and Culture in Eighteenth- Century Spain: From Feijoo (1728) to Masdeu (1783)

Andrés Cavo Franco’s Historia de México (1797): Hydrology, Regeneration, and the Superiority of Nature

Narrative, Writing about “Indians,” and Creole Epistemes in the Historias Naturales by Three Jesuits Banished from America (1767)

II Asymmetric Identities

Race and Reform in Late Colonial Santo Domingo

The Asymmetries of American Ingenium: Echoes of the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo

III Asymmetries in Governmentality and Economy

Between Agriculture and Culture: The Role of Nature in Jovellanos’s Memoria para el arreglo de la policía de los espectáculos y diversiones públicas and Informe de Ley Agraria

Andean Metallic Abundance in Republican Times: Mariano de Rivero and his Civic Endeavor

The Spanish Enlightenment and the Comprehension of the New World: Botany, Medicine, and the Search for New Remedies for the Old Empire

IV Asymmetric Taxonomies

The New World of Noah’s Ark

Hierarchy and Continuity: The Order of the Natural World in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man and Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature

V Asymmetries in Human-Environment Relations

Lima 1746: Configurations of Catastrophe and Asymmetric Ecologies

Island Texts and Archipelagic Writing: Alexander von Humboldt’s Isle de Cube: Antilles en général

Transatlantic Approaches to Nature: Humboldt and his Environmental Concerns

List of Contributors

Name Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Includes index.

ISBN:

3-11-073321-8