People, Science, and Environment in Latin America

This session brings together papers that show how interactions with Latin American environments shaped scientific practices over three centuries, spanning the colonial and independent period. They discuss how a variety of scientific practices intersected with understandings of landscapes and environments (both natural and anthropogenic). They focus on a variety of practitioners, including pilots, natural historians and geographers in the early modern Spanish empire, and archaeologists and botanists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Papers show that local traditions as well as scientific practitioners, based ‘in the field’ or in scientific or political institutions far removed from this context, contributed to understandings of these environments. Concrete interactions with the landscape and imaginary environmental constructs, in turn, also came to shape scientific practices. All these papers focus on environments that have been singled out throughout history as 'extreme' in their remoteness, aridity or tropicality, and came to be part of an archetypal canon of Latin American nature in European science: the land- and sea-scapes of 18th-century Patagonia, the remote (yet strategically vital) landscape of Paraná, the often-arid environments of South America’s west coast, and the agricultural landscapes of Central America. However, they have rarely been considered a factor in the making of scientific knowledge. Instead, they have been assumed to be a passive object of scientific enquiry, rather than a key factor in the interaction between science, society and politics.