ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Music and the Manatee: Knowledge Interaction in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• In Event: Contested Conceptions of Atlantic Animals I

English Abstract

In 1759, the music theorist Caetano Melo de Jesus described the musical behaviour of the manatee in his treatise published in Salvador de Bahía. He offered theoretical explanations for the animal’s reactions to music, drawing on the European music-theory tradition that emphasized music’s power to move the beasts. This conception projected onto the American nature an idea of passive animals influenced by the power of human artifacts.

However, in discussing manatees, Melo de Jesus also collected a web of different influences, from the musical dolphins of the Peruvian rivers described by the Augustinian priest Antonio de la Calancha to the Greek myth of Arion. Of particular interest are his references to the cultural practices of interaction with manatees maintained by the Taino people of the Caribbean islands, as recorded by Fray Pedro Mártir de Anglería.

This paper examines this episode of knowledge production as a product of hybridization and unpacks the different interdisciplinary and intercultural interactions on it. In doing so, it explores how such processes contributed to the European interpretations of the behaviour of American species.

Author

• Tasio Rodrigo, Institute of History of Science, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona