LACS 30.22 Latin America and the Invention of Nature

Nature, as a concept, is often taken as a given, its meaning self-evident, its status normative and unquestioned. The reality, however, is that the ideas that define nature--what is nature and what is not; where nature begins and where it ends--are in fact historically contingent, based on past and present ideological, religious, scientific, cultural and political constellations of knowledge and power. Put another way, nature is not a “natural” category; it is a socio-political category constructed and maintained by humans, albeit unequally. Any understanding of this history--the history of ‘nature’--would be incomplete and perhaps even impossible to tell without a discussion of Latin America. It is within the cauldron of European colonization of the Americas, and specifically of Spanish colonization of Latin America and the Caribbean, that we can trace the true roots of many of our contemporary understandings of nature.
From the initial impressions of natural abundance by European colonizers, to the founding of the field of ecology by Alexander von Humboldt in Ecuador, to Darwin’s theory of natural selection in the Galapagos, to the anthropological study of the Amazon, to the complex and wide-ranging lives, livelihoods and socio-ecological practices of an immense diversity of indigenous people, we find that the “discovery” of the Americas by Europe and the subsequent processes of colonization, imperialism, genocide and extraction laid the groundwork for the what Andrea Wulf calls the ‘invention of nature’ (2013). This course delves deeply into the question of how nature has been historically constructed through the integration of Latin America, its people and its landscapes, into our collective vision of the world. The course culminates in a forward-looking prospectus, pondering the state of nature today in the context of the Anthropocene and asks: where do we go from here? And in what ways, for better or worse, is this distinctively Latin American history of nature still with us?

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.

Department-Specific Course Categories

Latin American Latino and Caribbean Studies