Where Have all the Amerindians Gone? Indigenous Knowledge in Canizares-Esguerra's New History of Science

Ok – maybe it's not fair to suggest that Amerindians make no appearance in Jorge Canizares-Esguerra's collection of essays, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World. And it would be ungenerous to dismiss the historographical work that Canizares-Esquerra accomplishes in such a slim volume. But reading Nature, Empire, and Nation in close proximity with books like Nicholas Thomas' Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire, it's hard to ignore the discrete boundaries of Canizares-Esguerra's study: Europeans and their decedents in the New World populate his pages. Amerindians, at least as historical agents rather than objects of study or scientific theorizing, do not.

Published in 2006, Nature, Empire, and Nation is a revised collection of previously published essays that takes on the historiography of early modern science. Canizares-Esguerra argues that historians of science have excluded the contributions of seventeenth-century scientists in South and Central America and the Iberian peninsula. Not one to quibble or make modest claims, Canizares-Esguerra states that book's second essay “exposes the biases of Anglo-American scholarship that has reminded blind to the Iberian origins of modernity” (4).

Throughout the seven essays, Canizares-Esguerra charts the emergence and evolution of two themes in Iberian scientific thinking: the impact of the Iberian world on the larger narrative of the scientific revolution in Europe, and the making over of metropolitan scientific ideas for patriotic and nationalistic aims by those on the peninsula and in the New World. Essay topics range from the invention of the racialized body by thinkers in the Caribbean struggling to reconcile a salubrious climate with uncivilized, and perhaps unconvertible Amerindians, to landscape painters in nineteenth-century Mexico who crafted allegories for the nation into landscapes influenced by new sciences of geology and meterology.

In each of these cases, however, Canizares-Esguerrra deals exclusively with sources produced by, and apparently circulated only among, Creole elites and their European predecessors. These parameters are particularly clear in Canizares-Esguerra's discussion of Alexander von Humboldt's travels in Latin America. Humboldt is generally credited with inventing the notion of biodistribution, where species of plants correspond to discrete areas of the natural world. Canizares-Esguerra offers an alternate explanation, suggesting that when he arrived in Latin America, Humboldt

“encountered an intelligentsia obsessed with describing the rich local ecological variations. Humbolt learned to read the Andes as a natural laboratory for the study of the geography of plant communities in part because the local Spanish American scholars had for decades (if not centuries) been developing this idea.” (116)

What's striking about about Canizares-Esguerra's argument, in sharp contrast to Mary Louise Pratt's consideration of the same expedition, is that Canizares-Esguerra includes no mention of the indigenous labor that enabled the expedition, or any reference to indigenous knowledge that may have contributed to Humboldts' “discoveries.”

I'm willing to concede that because Canizares-Esguerra is intervening in the field of intellectual history, he's primarily concerned with how ideas about the natural world circulated between the metropole and and the colonies. He makes interesting arguments about how different constituencies – Creole elites and their metropolitan counterparts – put these ideas to use based on the circumstances they encountered, and, as his to-the-point introduction suggests, the analysis is all in the service of turning over a dominant narrative of the history of science that excludes the impact of the Iberian world.

But Pratt's argument about Humboldt as a European seeing man, who erases or elides the presence of indigenous people, is curiously absent in Canizares-Esguerra's longer discussion of Humboldt. The book does include a direct reference to Pratt and Imperial Eyes, but there too, Canizares-Esguerra includes no reference to Pratt's discussion of the marginalization of Amerindians.

Perhaps the historiography of science and empire needs Canizares-Esguerra and Nature, Empire, and Nation before we can talk about the contributions of indigenous knowledge to modern science. Perhaps too Canizares-Esguerra's selective focus on intellectual history results in part from the paucity of sources that would provide insight into precolonial indigenous knowledge of the natural world. But with models for scholarship like Thomas' Islanders, and even Nocholas Robins' Mercury, Mining, and Empire, which, though lacking in indigenous voices, at least takes seriously indigenous experience, it's hard to overlook the limits of Nature, Empire, and Nation.