Writing the New World: The Politics of Natural History in the Early Spanish Empire by Mauro José Caraccioli

Author:Mauro José Caraccioli [Caraccioli, Mauro José]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, Caribbean & Latin American, political science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, science, Natural History
ISBN: 9781683401681
Google: sHt6zQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Florida Press
Published: 2021-11-15T23:34:34.260928+00:00

Once upon a Time: A Narrative History of the Conquest of Nature

Toward the end of the long sixteenth century, Acosta’s conception of natural philosophy was disseminated across Europe through English-, Italian-, and French-language translations of the Historia Natural. His work was picked up by early modern political theorists such as Francis Bacon and John Locke (in addition to chroniclers, missionaries, and naturalists from the continent such as Pierre d’Avity and Georges Louis-Leclerc, Comte de Buffon); both Bacon and Locke developed their theoretical projects in the early throes of British imperialism and used Acosta’s observations to develop a vision of the Americas as backward and undeveloped.5 As competition between European powers coincided with the emergence of national literary cultures and a complex climate of religious rivalry, the work of Spanish naturalists such as Acosta was marginalized.6 Natural history was deemed antithetical to the pursuit of unencumbered knowledge. Despite the plurality of voices emerging from this period, the rebuttal and appropriation of Spain’s New World knowledge by its European competitors left Acosta an afterthought in efforts to build a new natural philosophy.

To illustrate but one example of this trend, historians of political thought have generally regarded the question of America’s place in world history to be a matter first taken up by John Locke. While Locke is a revolutionary thinker in his own right, the assertion that it is his conceptual appropriation of America that acts as one of the foundational moments of early modern thought, and not the empirical work that Acosta (among others) successfully disseminated, ignores the influence of Acosta’s work as a natural historian and philosopher. Chiefly important for Locke and other early modern thinkers were Acosta’s accounts of American nature and its range of effects on the faculty of judgment.7 Whether it was his observations on the changes in the human faculties according to height and climate, or the ethnographic observations on the civilizational development of Amerindian peoples, Acosta was a standard reference for seventeenth-century thinkers, particularly in the British Isles.

As Barbara Arneil writes, the empirical evidence early modern thinkers such as Locke used to develop their accounts of “natural man” and “the state of nature” is clearly acknowledged as coming from Acosta. Despite Locke’s claim that knowing “how to make a judgment on the actions of men” is indispensable to gaining a useful prudence in the study of history,8 his application of Acosta’s insights serves rather paradoxical (if not altogether ulterior) motives:

Locke’s state of nature presupposes individual savages whose decision to enter into a state of war is contingent upon the protection of their individual lives and property. . . . One of the greatest flaws of the state-of-nature device, when it is used as a mirror to European civilization, is its complete obliteration of any specific characteristics of the individuals themselves. Thus natural man belongs to no nation and has no political or ethical codes associated with that collectivity. Rather he is an individual amongst an undifferentiated and ahistorical mass of non-European, non-civil savages.9

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.