From Place to Race: Medicine, Natural Philosophy, and Human Diversity in Eighteenth-Century Brazil

To the early modern imagination, Brazil was a land of natural and human wilderness. I investigate this metonym by focusing on the centrality of human beings and their bodies to Portuguese projects of imperial expansion. I trace changes between Aristotelian views of humanity ascribed to Jesuit missionaries, compare them to emergent secular ideas on the pliability of human nature, and contrast both these models to Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira’s (1756-1815) effort of applying the Linnaean grid of natural classification to Brazilian nature and its naturals. Portuguese emphasis on agricultural labor and miscegenation hinged on the body as a key to colonization. My study of the Directório dos Índios law (1758-1798) explores how after the 1750 border expansion, Amerindians were redefined as royal vassals with the aim of augmenting the population and settling the new imperial border. Stress on natural improvement drew from medical-humoral ideas positing that uncivilized Índios could harvest their new Portuguese natures by farming the land and rationally transforming their natural environment. Additionally, focus on monogamy and miscegenation redefined the female indigenous body as the epicenter of a new colonial frontier. Contrary to the Directório’s project of human transformation, Ferreira’s Amazonian journeys (1783-1792) foreshadowed the emergence of a racialized discourse. Ferreira’s focus on accommodating Brazilian nature to a Linnaean taxonomy intimated a schematic view of botanical and human nature. Bodies were no longer porous and subject to fluidity or modification because their place in the system of nature was now fixed to a set of essential, immutable corporeal characteristics.