Histories naturales; rationality corpus to figure America nature’s as a political image Kurt Matías Petautschnig Arancibia1

Abstract

Nature represents a foundational milestone in the figuration, presentation, and representation of America. Throughout the conquest process, conquerors faced difficulties attempting to identify, describe and narrate what they had discovered, which translated into a lasting devaluation of the vegetation, fauna and inhabitants of the new world. In time, this matter became a place of material and symbolic struggle among the criollos, in particular through the Historias Naturales produced by the expelled Jesuits Juan Ignacio Molina y Francisco Javier Clavigero. Both works are central to convey the political use of nature in the figuration of America. The initial emancipatory gesture exhibited by these works validated nature as it faced attacks from Cornelius de Pauw, William Robertson and Hegel; these works also reveal a radical impulse in confronting Linneos’s taxonomic system as a proof of intellectual autonomy. The article presents the conceptual triad nature, politics and image in order to establish coordinates from which to trace the genealogical relevance of the imaginary character of nature for the later establishment of states and national narrations.