In the late eighteenth century, as almost three-hundred years of Spanish-rule in the Americas neared collapse, the Colombian scholar Francisco José de Caldas wrote that the key to understanding human variety lay in the different environments that human societies inhabited. For Caldas, nowhere was this more evident that in the Andes, where within close proximity a variety of temperature ranges and degrees of atmospheric pressure clearly influenced the character and customs of people. From the depths of the Amazon to the highest peaks of the Andes and the semi-arid lowlands of the Gran Chaco, the Latin American environment has continually inspired chroniclers, scientists, state-planners, and environmental activists, all seeking to unravel its workings in the service of their economic, political, social, and religious ideals. This class investigates the range of technologies and genres that scholars, administrators, local experts, and communities across Latin America have used to make the region's varied geographic spaces intelligible from the fifteenth century until the present day. It explores tensions between material and theoretical influences on the spatial imaginary and examines how environments were made and remade to serve imperial, colonial, national, and global projects. Important themes include Indigenous cosmologies and natural knowledge, the establishment of colonial extractive economies, the export-led growth of the nascent Latin American nations, the developmentalist projects of the late twentieth century, and recent efforts to contest the exploitation of nature by endowing natural bodies, like rivers and mountain ranges, with legal rights. |