The Invention of Humboldt is a game-changing volume of essays by leading scholars of the Hispanic world that explodes many myths about Alexander von Humboldt and his world.
Rather than ‘follow in Humboldt’s footsteps,’ this book outlines the new critical horizon of post-Humboldtian Humboldt studies: the archaeology of all that lies buried under the Baron’s epistemological footprint. Contrary to the popular image of Humboldt as a solitary ‘adventurer’ and ‘hero of science’ surrounded by New World nature, The Invention of Humboldt demonstrates that the Baron’s opus and practice was largely derivative of the knowledge communities and archives of the Hispanic world. Although Humboldtian writing has invented a powerful cult that has served to erase the sources of his knowledge and practice, in truth Humboldt did not ‘invent nature,’ nor did he pioneer global science: he was the beneficiary of Iberian natural science and globalization. Nor was Humboldt a pioneering, ‘postcolonial’ cultural relativist. Instead, his anthropological views of the Americas were Orientalist and historicist and, in most ways, were less enlightened than those of his Creole contemporaries.
This book will reshape the landscape of Humboldt scholarship. It is essential reading for all those interested in Alexander von Humboldt, the Hispanic American enlightenment, and the global history of science and knowledge.
Author(s): Mark Thurner, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Series: Routledge Studies in Global Latin America
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 341
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Introduction
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Under Humboldt’s Footsteps
Chapter Synopses
Notes
Chapter 1: The Apotheosis of Humboldt during the Nineteenth Century
Building a Transatlantic Scientific Network
A Sage for All Tastes
Notes
Chapter 2: A Sense of Place: Early Modern Roots of Humboldt’s Natural History Practices
Plants and Rocks
Fieldwork and a Sense of Place
Early Modern Fieldwork
Sites of Knowledge
Humboldt’s Personal Links with the Early Modern Scientific Tradition
Humboldt’s Style of Doing Science
Notes
Chapter 3: Six Days on Tenerife: The Making of Humboldt’s Tropical Antique
The Pico del Teide and the Dragon Tree
Alexander von Humboldt: Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Artist
The Shaping of Humboldt’s Aesthetic Sensibility
The Tropical Antique
Invention and Publication
Notes
Chapter 4: Caldas and Humboldt in the Andes: Who Invented Biogeography?
Imbabura: A Formal Scenario for Caldas’s Biogeography
Chimborazo: A Formal Scenario for Humboldt’s Andean Biogeography
Synchronicities and Asymmetries
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter 5: An Archaeology of Mutis’s Disappearing Gift to Humboldt
The Unlikely Encounter
The Exchanges
Mutis and His Flora de Bogotá in the Works of Humboldt and Bonpland
Because Words Always Contain Truths
Final Considerations and New Challenges
Notes
Chapter 6: Incas, Pyramids, and Amazons: Notes on Humboldt’s Equatorial Encounters
Notes
Chapter 7: Humboldt’s Magic Mountain
The Fame of the Mountains
Sublime Images
A Magical Place
Notes
Chapter 8: Peruvian Desencuentro : Humboldt’s Fog, Unanue’s Light
The ‘Second Columbus’ Belatedly Discovers America
Humboldt’s Dark and Melancholy Peru
Unanue’s Brilliant and Ingenious Peru
Humboldt’s Face
Burying the Baron’s Footprints
Notes
Chapter 9: Air in a Flask: The Mexican Making of Humboldt’s Objects of Knowledge
Erythronium: The (Un)making of a Metal
Cochineal: ‘The dye which exists as long as Indians tend to it’
Xochicalco: Fragments for a Universal History of Civilisation
Concluding Reflections
Notes
Chapter 10: Humboldt’s Misreading of the Mercantilist Face of New Spain
Harmony of Interests and Government Intervention
Society, Demography, and Economy in Broad Perspective
The Economic Valuation of Goods
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 11: Bonpland’s Cactus, Or Trafficking in Exotics and Ignorance
The Cactaceae in Europe
Inventing the Cactus
Josephine’s Heated Gardens and a Rose-Flowered Fig of the Indies
The Voyage and the Cacti
Notes
Chapter 12: Humboldt’s Columbus, Or the Iberian Worlds that Humboldt Ignored
On Things Forgotten.
Global Physics and the Two ‘Planets’ of the Hispanic Monarchy
Archives and Knowledge or Ignorance of the New World
In the Footsteps of Humboldtian Ignorance
Notes
Index
