ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Landscapes of Difference: Natural History and the Shaping of Colonial Stereotypes

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 2 - Making Imperial Worlds

English Abstract

Natural history discourses and representations from the 16th and 17th centuries are a unique source of knowledge on European ideas regarding the relationship between human societies and their environments. Classical and medieval scholarly traditions, which held that differences in human cultures and physical attributes were a direct product of place, resonated heavily in early modern knowledge production about nature. These perceived differences in humans, their cultures, and the surrounding natural world informed exoticized imageries of non-European spaces, which relied heavily on the inclusion of elements of nature to convey and communicate notions of alterity and extravagance. This presentation will focus on natural history knowledge produced in the context of the early modern Portuguese empire, analysing the relationship between perceptions of non-European nature and the development of stereotypical notions associated with colonized places and their peoples. In intends to demonstrate how nature was mobilised, from the earliest stages of European imperialism, to galvanise European audiences towards colonial endeavours, and, on the other hand, to legitimise colonial rule by presenting non-European spaces as lush, abundant and receptive, and their human and non-human inhabitants as radical, wild and transgressive. It also reflects on the long-term impacts of this objectified view of the non-European world.

Author

• Catarina Simões, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa