From Pliny onwards, natural history has been an inventory of the natural world carved out of language.Footnote 1 Few would contend the generally held belief that Buffon and Linnaeus, those two embodiments of eighteenth-century natural history, took to new heights what already was a language-conscious tradition of writing.Footnote 2 From this viewpoint – and I do not claim that this is the only valid line of interpretation – Linnaeus' enterprise was about names, Buffon's about style. While it may be meaningless to question whether Pliny's Naturalis Historia was literature or science, it is certainly meaningful to enquire whether what came to be called natural history during the Enlightenment was perceived at the time to be literature or science – particularly in France, where the existence of such cultural mammoths as the Académie des sciences and the Académie Française reminds us rather pointedly that it was possible in the eighteenth century to distinguish between the two fields.
In his Discours sur le style Buffon suggests an analogy between the unity he demanded from a literary work and the processes of organic development, drawing upon images taken from physics to illustrate his plea in favor of a plan guiding the gentle flow of writing (Buffon [1753] 1920). Buffon's lecture on style is a witness to the distinction of fields and at the same time a reflection on their unity anchored on the common ground of (French) language.Footnote 3 The widespread transmission of the Histoire naturelle rested upon the power of words. In turn, Linnaeus' work organizes the world's diversity in Latin. The rhetorical Linnaeus of the Philosophia botanica and The Lapland Journey coexists with the Linnaeus who sought to codify the universe in Latin characters (Chang Reference Chang and Marcello2007), but it is the latter who imprinted his seal on the imagination of the period. The phrase “[we cannot] improve a science without improving the language which belongs to it” could have been conceivably proffered by the author of the Systema naturae and not by Lavoisier, as it actually was (Lavoisier Reference Lavoisier1789, I: vi). And yet, despite their common concern for linguistic reform, the program of Linnaeus should be distinguished from the views of the French chemists of the second half of the eighteenth century. Aspiring to construct a language that could express the composition of substances known by analysis, the “école française” would have nothing to do with what they saw as Linnaeus' static and conventional labeling (Dagognet Reference Dagognet1969, 50–51).Footnote 4
“The action of the first human being in this golden age,” wrote Linnaeus in a paraphrase of the narrative of the Earthly Paradise, “was the inspection of the creatures and the imposition of the names of the species according to genera” (Linnaeus 1766, I: 13). The naming of creatures was also very much in the mind of the eighteenth-century Jesuit historian Pedro Lozano. In his Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco, while describing the animals of that land – the valley covered by tropical forest situated between the eastern slopes of the Andes and west of the Paraguay River – Lozano enumerated seven species of bees: yamacuá or mongrel bee, yalamacuá or moromoro bee, aneacuá or small black bee, and so on (Lozano [Reference Lozano1733] 1941, 46). Unlike Linnaeus whose system was indissolubly tied to Latin, Lozano classified the bees using their aboriginal names and the corresponding native taxonomy. His Chorographic Description is the earliest example of the kind of natural history written by Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria, the Jesuit ecclesiastical province in South America created in the first decade of the seventeenth century.
The first part of this paper strives toward a characterization of a peculiarly Jesuit genre of writing, i.e., the natural histories of the New World. I will explore how language is handled in these works, focusing on the frequent occurrence of lists of animal and plant names and on some questions related to the naming of the creatures. I hope that my description, which will intentionally remain close to the sources, will show to what degree these works were concerned not only with language as an instrument of reference, but also with language itself. I expect that my analysis will demonstrate that the authors of these texts, though admittedly concerned with administering some kind of order on the real creatures of the wilderness, were at the same time attentive to questions of naming and translation.Footnote 5
The cultivation of the literary genre of Jesuit natural histories spanned almost two centuries. The last ones were written during the last third of the eighteenth century, well after Buffon and Linnaeus had gained a wide readership. The late Jesuit natural histories acknowledged Buffon and Linnaeus as the learned standards of the field, while at the same time they defended the legitimacy of their own way of talking about the creatures of Paraquaria. Taking advantage of the eclectic openness of pre-Buffonian and pre-Linnean discourse on animals and plants, the natural histories of the Jesuits in the New World were a vehicle for discourse that was a blend of Early European and aboriginal culture. An entry labeled “Histoire naturelle,” in the 1771 edition of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, a contemporary Jesuit reference source, referred to a definition of the term given by John Harris in his Lexicon Technicum (Dictionnaire de Trévoux VI: 148–151; Harris Reference Harris1710 II, s.v. “Natural History”). Natural History, according to Harris, was the description of any of the natural products of the earth, water, or air, such as beasts, birds, fish, metals, minerals, and fossils. The paradigms of the genre cited in the Trévoux dictionary (Pliny, Dalechamp, Jonston, and in particular the Spanish Jesuit Eusebius Nieremberg) were truly representative of a literary genre which, enriched with a wealth of Guaraní and Guaycurú notions of flora and fauna, configured the textual matrix of the Jesuit natural histories of Paraquaria.
It has been argued convincingly that the characteristic method of thought during the Enlightenment was the systematic model. A system in any department of knowledge, be it botany, chemistry, medicine or mineralogy, implied a standard of naming (Leisch Reference Leisch, Frängsmyr, Heilbron and Rider1990). However, this was not the case for the natural histories of the Jesuits, for whom naming was not methodical classification. In their effort to come to terms with the local tongues, the natural histories of the Jesuit missionaries were more akin to a bilingual dictionary than to an encyclopaedia – in the sense that their authors were as much interested in recording the local vocabulary as in describing the creatures of the land. These authors sought neither to create nor to adopt a new language that could serve as a rational principle structuring a system of nature. On the contrary, they strove to preserve the vocabularies of the aboriginal tongues, for knowledge of aboriginal languages was intimately tied to their religious mission. Embedded in those vocabularies was a way of organizing the creatures of the natural world which was not all that different from folk notions of Early Modern taxonomy (Atran Reference Atran1987; Berlin Reference Berlin1992, 26–27; Ogilvie Reference Ogilvie2006, 216–221).
Interestingly, the body of works we are considering was put to different uses by cultural interpreters in Argentina. The second part of this paper is concerned with those appropriations. Most of the Jesuit natural histories were written as sections of historical works. As a result, a few of them were published and edited during the nineteenth century and in the end incorporated into the grand narrative of national (Argentine) history as an uninteresting prelude to the more historically rewarding Jesuit chronicles. Besides this historical appropriation, there was also a literary and a scientific one. Ricardo Rojas, who almost single-handedly established the history of Argentine literature as a subject of study, incorporated them into his intellectual program of founding a national conscience along the lines of an identity resulting from native, Creole and European roots. Guillermo Furlong Cardiff, a Jesuit historian, used them in his long-term historical project aimed at demonstrating his own notion that culture in Buenos Aires during colonial times was also concerned with “science.”
As is the case with any text, the natural histories written by the scriptores of the Society of Jesus in the New World harbor multiple possibilities of interpretation. But interpretation should be distinguished from ideological appropriation. The Argentine interpreters chose to highlight and magnify those slants which respectively served their programmatic purposes. In so doing, they seem to have developed the potential contained in the texts that might legitimize their own projects. In varying degrees, they were engaged in an ideological appropriation of history, insofar as their interpretations were the result of a construction of the past in view of its pragmatic use as an element of a particular socio-political or intellectual program (Montserrat Reference Montserrat and Marcelo1996, 21).
I will examine how the Jesuit natural histories were used as elements in the process of building a national tradition. My exploration will contribute to a more authentic reading of these texts, a reading that can better situate them within the context of their production. In Ricoeur's terms, I hope to substitute a bonne subjectivité for the mauvaise subjectivité of ideological appropriation (Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur1955, 26 and 38). Thus, in the third part of this paper I will argue that the Jesuit natural histories were an instance of a characteristic tradition of Jesuit writing on the New World, a pragmatic synthesis which, besides providing a descriptive account of the natural environment, was marked by a strong sense of the values of language. This awareness of discourse was clearly different either from the various enlightened attempts to forge an artificial language able to reflect intelligibly the composition of chemical substances (Dagognet Reference Dagognet1969; Riskin Reference Riskin1998), or from the notion of a language able to impose order and system upon the beings of the three realms of nature (Leisch Reference Leisch, Frängsmyr, Heilbron and Rider1990), or from the souplesse of Buffonian prose, which presented itself as the mimesis of a living organism. It was an attempt at blending the aboriginal modes of seeing and talking with those embodied in Early Modern works on plants and animals.
I. The Textual Organization of the Jesuit Natural Histories in Paraquaria
Paraquaria comprehended much of present-day Paraguay, southeastern Bolivia, northeastern and central Argentina, part of southern Brazil, and Uruguay.Footnote 6 The story of the Jesuit missions in that vast and geographically diverse country was long and rather complicated (Mörner Reference Mörner and Albert1953; Caraman Reference Caraman1975; Maeder Reference Maeder1996; and Ganson Reference Ganson2003). The Guaraní reductions (reducciones) were the core of the Jesuits' missionary activity in those lands.Footnote 7 By 1706–1707 they amounted to 30 towns, which hosted around 100,000 Guaraní aborigines (Mörner Reference Mörner and Albert1953, 164). In the course of the eighteenth century the Jesuits also founded the Chiquitos reductions (Bolivia), the Taruma missions (Paraguay), and missions in Tucumán, the Pampas, and among the semi-nomadic bellicose groups of the Great Chaco, the Abipones, the Mbayás, and the Mocovís (all of those belonging to the Guaycuruan language). Besides the reducciones, the Jesuits had colleges in the larger cities economically dependent on extensive rural states manned by black slaves.Footnote 8 After more than a century and a half of a struggling existence, they were expelled in 1767 by Charles III; six years later the Society of Jesus would be dissolved by Pope Clement XIV.
The natural histories written by Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria can be identified by a unique way of writing about the geography, land, climate, animals, plants, and peoples of the lands.Footnote 9 As a rule, they consist of a series of chapters and constitute either complete treatises or, more frequently, form an integral part of a larger work. Three types can be distinguished on the basis of chronology and literary genre.
The first type, “natural and civil/ecclesiastical histories,” embraced in the same work an account of the natural world and a narrative of the political or ecclesiastical history of a region. This way of writing has been cultivated by Jesuit scholars in the New World since the end of the sixteenth century, an early example is the Natural and Moral History of the Indies, written by José de Acosta and published between 1588 and 1590.Footnote 10 Acosta's Natural and Moral History was strongly argumentative in style and Aristotelian in outlook, for its author consistently pursued his inquiries into the causes of natural phenomena (Asúa and French Reference Asúa2005, 62–85). It differs from the Natural and General History of the Indies, the first comprehensive survey of the New World, written by Fernández de Oviedo.Footnote 11 Oviedo, a high ranking officer of the Spanish crown in the West Indies and Tierra Firme, can be briefly characterized as a self-appointed “Pliny of the Indies,” who sought to enumerate and describe the lands and creatures of the Spanish empire in America and the deeds of the Castilians. The Jesuits who adopted the natural and moral history as the appropriate way of writing about the New World favored Oviedo's encyclopaedic Plinian approach over Acosta's Aristotelian viewpoint.
In the course of the 160 years of their activities in Paraquaria, nine Jesuits in succession were nominated official chroniclers of the province. Two of them wrote “natural and civil histories”: Pedro Lozano and his successor José Guevara, both active around the middle of the eighteenth century (Cardozo Reference Cardozo1959, 285–314).Footnote 12 Lozano, the most interesting and productive Jesuit historian of Paraguay and the River Plate, authored the already mentioned Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco and the History of the Conquest of Paraguay, Tucumán and Río de la Plata (Lozano Reference Lozano and Andrés1873–1875).Footnote 13 Guevara's work bears a similar title, History of Paraguay, Río de la Plata and Tucumán (Guevara Reference Guevara and Groussac1908–1910). Its first part on natural history draws heavily upon Lozano.
A second type of natural history consists of memories written by exiled Jesuits after their expulsion in 1767. Unlike the chronicles, in these works the authorial voice is modestly but clearly heard. Two of the German-speaking Jesuit missionaries who had lived in reductions among the intractable nations of the Chaco sought refuge in the lands of the Empire under Maria Theresa. In the milieu of the court, the Bohemian Martin Dobrizhoffer wrote his De Abiponibus, which tells about his life among the Abipones (Dobrizhoffer Reference Dobrizhoffer1784). In the more obscure refuge of a Cistercian monastery the Silesian Florian Paucke wrote his Hin und Her [To and Fro], a story of his sixteen years among the Mocovís in a reduction of Santa Fe (Argentina) (Paucke Reference Paucke and Wernicke1942–1944, Reference Paucke, Etta and Gustav1959–1966). Dobrizhoffer's and Paucke's are quasi-ethnographical accounts of the Guaycuruan peoples they knew, enlivened by a strong autobiographical accent. Both works include substantial sections on natural history, following the pattern which by that time was a hallmark of most of Jesuit writing on nature in the New World. The English Jesuit Thomas Falkner, a surgeon with a talent for natural history who traveled extensively and lived among the Indians of the Pampas, published his short but quite popular Description of Patagonia, in 1774 in Hereford, England. This work was mentioned with approval by Darwin and d'Orbigny (see Asúa Reference Asúa2006).Footnote 14
Finally, a third type are those works written by Spanish Jesuits exiled in Italian cities. Sánchez Labrador, who lived for two decades in the Chaco among the Mbayás, spent thirty years in Ravenna writing an ambitious encyclopaedia that consists of eleven manuscript volumes divided into three parts, devoted to the conversion of the Indians, to the natural history, and to the agriculture of the land, respectively. This work, which has been published only in fragments, can be seen as an instance of the trend toward encyclopaedic writing that took hold among Jesuits after suppression of the Society. The section on natural history, Natural Paraguay, is mostly derivative, drawing on encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and works on the natural history of the New World (see the published sections on fish and birds in Sánchez Labrador Reference Sánchez Labrador and Castex1968). But in the ten chapters that open the account of the Eyiguayegui (Mbayá) Indians in the third part of Catholic Paraguay, we find vivid first-hand accounts on the wild life in the Chaco (Sánchez Labrador [Reference Sánchez Labrador1770] 1910, I: 130–244). Another book within this group is the Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia del Gran Chaco [Essay on the Natural History of the Province of the Gran Chaco] by José Jolís, published in Faenza in Reference Jolís1789 as the first part of a four-volume work, which was never written (Jolís Reference Jolís1789). A third late work of this kind was the barely known José María Termeyer's Intorno ad alcuni osservazioni di Storia naturale Americana [On some observations of American Natural History] published in 1810 in Milan, in the fifth volume of his Opuscoli Scientifici.Footnote 15
The works of Jolís and Termeyer were the modest relatives of a prominent family of books on the different regions of Iberian America written by exiled Jesuits in the course of the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth century. These authors followed what was by then the usual pattern of combining natural history with a more properly historical account. But they introduced a significant difference. These late works were written with the explicit purpose of arguing against the thesis of the inferiority of the nature of the New World set forth by Buffon and expanded by Cornelius de Pauw in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, first published in Berlin between 1768 and 1769 (Church Reference Church1936; Browning Reference Browning1978). Among the rebuttals to these critiques by Iberian American Jesuits, we should recall the famous Storia antica del Messico by Francisco Xavier Clavigero (Reference Clavigero1780–1781) and Juan de Velasco's Historia del Reino de Quito, a three-volume manuscript dated 1788, the first part of which is devoted to natural history (Velasco Reference Velasco1841–44). Also to this group belong Gómez de Vidaurre's Historia geográfica, natural y civil del Reino de Chile (Gómez de Vidaurre Reference Gómez de Vidaurre1865) and Juan Ignacio Molina's Saggio sulla Storia naturale and Saggio sulla Storia civile del Chili (Molina Reference Molina1782–1787), which had been preceded by Molina's Compendio della storia geografica, naturale e civile del Regno del Chile, published anonymously (Molina 1776; see Hanisch Reference Hanisch1974). All these works asserted pride in the diversity of the creatures and the richness of the nature of each author's homeland, in the context of proto-nationalistic feelings (Browning Reference Browning1978) and argued new ways of judging evidence while challenging the current criterion of authority in philosophical writings on the New World – what has been called “patriotic epistemology” (Cañizares-Esguerra Reference Cañizares-Esguerra2001, 234–254). Other eighteenth-century works of the type written by Jesuits embraced broad surveys of nature but were not particularly concerned with this exaltation of the American countries, such as José Gumilla's El Orinoco Ilustrado y defendido. Historia natural, civil y geográfica de este gran río (Reference Gumilla1741) and the four-volume Saggio di storia Americana, o sia storia naturale, civile e sacra de' Regni e delle provincie spagnole di terra-ferma dell'America meridionale by the Jesuit missionary Filippo Salvatore Gilii (Reference Gilii1780–1784).
Summing up, the “natural and civil histories” of Lozano and Guevara, the autobiographical accounts of Dobrizhoffer and Paucke, and the apologetic essays on the nature of the New World by Sánchez Labrador, Jolís, and Termeyer, share a common kind of writing called by these authors “natural history.” Since its inception, this genre of writing has been concerned with the classification and description of the natural world. Organizing, listing, and naming can be said to be the factors common to the ways of writing that from Pliny up to Buffon passed under the rubric of “natural history.” In what follows, we will discuss the specific ways in which the natural histories of the New World organize the natural world through the use of names and lists.
Organizing
The thematic organization of the short section on natural history in Lozano's Chorographic History of the Great Chaco can be taken as a condensed version of the rest of the works. Its first seven chapters deal with geographic generalities, rivers, the land and the plants, animals and serpents, population, and customs of the natives. Then come ten chapters with accounts of the several native nations of the Chaco. Lozano's History of the Conquest of Paraguay considers natural history more extensively. Its first book deals with geography, with particular attention paid to the great rivers (Paraná, Uruguay, and Río de la Plata) and the land down to the Strait of Magellan, the yerba mate, trees, animals, serpents, birds, and fish. This is followed by a discussion of the origin of the population of the New World before the Flood, two chapters on the Indians and a last chapter on St. Thomas, who was believed to have preached Christianity in the New World in apostolic times. In History of the Conquest Lozano introduces each of the chapters on natural history with phrases evocative of the imagery of the Biblical narrative of creation, emphasizing the usefulness for human beings of the different creatures of the country. The trees are beneficial for they embellish the land; their fruits support the life of the dwellers, their wood help human needs; and their virtues help restore health (Lozano Reference Lozano and Andrés1873 I: 215). When he talks about animals, he first introduces the cattle.Footnote 16
Guevara's natural history occupies the first two parts of the first book of his Historia del Paraguay, Río de la Plata and Tucumán. The first part is on geography and aboriginal nations; the second part opens with trees and plants and goes on to an “Historical-medical Alphabetic Index” of 85 healing herbs, which according to Guevara was written by Sánchez Labrador (actually, practically all the names were taken from the Jesuit lay brother Pedro Montenegro's Materia medica, a Jesuit pharmacopoeia) (Guevara Reference Guevara and Groussac1908, 92). The herbs are listed in alphabetical order according to their Spanish names, with their equivalents in Guaraní. After discussing the petrifying properties of the water in the Paraná and Uruguay rivers and enumerating the lagoons, Guevara proceeds to mention the aquatic animals, commencing with the whales, and followed by the sea lions, sea dogs, mermaids and mermen, two species of river monsters, the capybara and the caiman, many river fish, turtles, and ducks. Then appear the birds, the quadrupeds, serpents, and insects. In the paragraphs on flora and fauna, Guevara's transcription from Lozano is usually literal (Guevara Reference Guevara and Groussac1908 [prologue by the editor], lx), but the organization of the material is different and Guevara's sequence of creatures is closer to the story in Genesis.
The first part of Dobrizhoffer's De abiponibus, which occupies the whole first volume of its English translation, deals with geography, history, and the aboriginal peoples, continuing with cattle, quadrupeds, amphibians, fish, birds, medicinal plants, fruit trees, and hot springs (Dobrizhoffer Reference Dobrizhoffer and Sarah1822). As to the beasts, Dobrizhoffer assigns a substantial quantity of space to his chapters on domestic animals (including much information on veterinary medicine) and to the quadrupeds. Birds he treats perfunctorily as well as fish. Unlike Dobrizhoffer, who opens his On the Abipones with the natural history, Paucke uses it to close his Hin und Her. Paucke's organization is perhaps the most idiosyncratic of all, a result of the almost naïve atmosphere of the work, better expressed in the charming pictures drawn by himself.Footnote 17 Falkner's Description is not organized in chapters dealing with geography, plants, animals, and peoples. The material on natural history is contained for the most in the first chapter of the work in the form of a broad historical-geographical account of the region. Falkner's is perhaps the most authentically chorographic of all these works.
Sánchez Labrador's Natural Paraguay is obviously the most ambitious of all the natural histories, for he conceived his work as the encyclopaedia of Paraguay. It consists of six manuscript books amounting to 1852 pages, with the following canonical sections: (1) earth, waters, and air, (2) plants, (3) quadrupeds, (4) birds, (5) fish, (6) amphibians, reptiles, and insects (Furlong Reference Furlong1931, 287). Jolís' Saggio, which was intended as the introduction to a larger work, adopts a very similar distribution of its subject matter. Almost half of Termeyer's Osservazioni on natural history consists of accounts of the several aboriginal nations. This section ends with four large tables summarizing the “barbarous” peoples of the gobernaciones of Rio de la Plata, Paraguay, Tucumán, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Termeyer provides the reader with a hierarchy of Indian nations living between latitudes 16° S and 20° S, which begin with the Chiquitos and end with the anthropophagous Guayaquí. In a passage that reveals his acquaintance with Buffon's notion of a continuous chain of being, he insists on the necessity of spelling out “the links of that chain that unites human being with the beasts, without any violent breach” (Termeyer Reference Termeyer1810, 455). But, against Buffon, Termeyer argues that this diversity of peoples is met without modification of the climate – the gist of Buffon's argument on the inferiority of nature in the New World consisted in his claim that in America the climate was hotter and more humid, which resulted in the degeneration of the species. In the second part of his work, Termeyer begins with the quadrupeds, and proceeds to treat the birds, the reptiles, fish, insects, and plants. The latter he divides into eight groups (tuberous, herbaceous, medicinal, fruit trees, those with wood useful for construction, balsamic, reeds, and palms), which he admits are not properly botanical (ibid., 575).
As can easily be seen from this brief survey, the plans of the natural histories bear a close resemblance to one another but are by no means exactly alike. The historians Lozano and Guevara refer, with more or less fidelity, to the Biblical story of creation. The rest of the authors follow a patterned sequence of geography, peoples, plants, and animals, with slight variations. As a rule, all the works have prominent sections on matters of economic and practical importance: the cultivation of yerba mate (a kind of tea which constituted the main export of the Guaraní reductions), cattle, venomous serpents, etc. The description of the native peoples is also one of the main concerns of these works (see Huffine Reference Huffine2005). Animals were ordered according to the groups usually found in the Early Modern literature on the subject (quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and insects) and there is no suggestion of any familiarity with Aristotle's works on animals on the part of the authors (although Jolís says that he uses Aristotle's grouping of plants). After all, Early Modern classification has been considered a kind of folk taxonomy, a combination of local knowledge amalgamated with some ancient schemes of classification and Materia medica (Ogilvie Reference Ogilvie2006, 221). The classification of plants used by Termeyer and Jolís was based on a criterion of use, featuring for example medicinal herbs, dyewoods, edible plants, and crops of economic value. As a whole, the general layout of these natural histories seems to have been guided by the sequence of creation of the living beings in the book of Genesis, some Western folk ideas about plants and animals, and utilitarian concerns. It is a kind of order consistent with the worldview of persons familiar with the Sacred Scripture, trained to systematize, and with a pragmatic cast of mind. There are few traces of native lore at this level of organization of the text.
Listing
The basic principle of textual organization within each of the sections of these natural histories, either on plants or animals, is listing – not necessarily as a bare enumeration of creatures, but as a sequence of paragraphs or short chapters, each of them dealing with an animal or plant. Most works on natural history, but by no means all of them, are organized as a collection of paragraphs or short chapters, each devoted to a natural being. A picture might be attached to each of the chapters. Pliny's Naturalis Historia does not fit this scheme. Buffon's does, if one accepts that the chapters are rather long. Bestiaries fit eminently within this frame, as well as the sections on plants, stones, and animals of the encyclopaedias of the thirteenth century. Renaissance works on animals, like the encyclopaedias of Gesner and Aldrovandi, can only be said to enter upon this scheme by a stretch of the imagination. A neat sequence of short chapters is the overall plan of Fernández de Oviedo's Historia natural y general de las Indias, but not of Acosta's Historia Natural y Moral. (As has been pointed out, while Acosta's was the first of the Jesuit natural histories, those by subsequent writers of the Society of Jesus were more akin to Oviedo's work.)Footnote 18
Lozano's History of the Great Chaco assigns only two short chapters to plants and animals. We find in them several lists, e.g., the seven names of species of bees in the language of the Lules (Lozano [Reference Lozano1773] 1941, 46), the four species of wasps, also in the tongue of the Lules (ibid., 54), or the 22 Spanish names of fish in the Bermejo River (ibid., 24–25). Perhaps the longest lists are those of the different groups of the native peoples of Chaco. Drawing upon an unpublished relación (an official report or census) by Luis de Vega, Lozano enumerates 183 for the Tainos, 46 for the Teutas, 50 for the Mataguayos, 8 for the Agoyas, 18 for the Xolotas, 19 for the Tobas, and 25 for the Mocobís and Yapitalaguas (ibid., 80–82). But his most intriguing catalog is that which amounts to a New World version of Augustine's famous elenchus of the monstrous races of the world in book XVI of De civitate Dei.Footnote 19
The sources mentioned by Lozano in the History of the Conquest of Paraguay reveal that he wrote as a historian, with the knowledge of the natural environment that could have been available to a missionary without any particular taste for the study of nature.Footnote 20 All the trees and plants mentioned in the History of the Conquest are taken from the Materia medica by Pedro Montenegro (Montenegro Reference Montenegro1945). There is a list of differentiae of fish in Guaraní, made short, says Lozano, for their names are “so twisted, that it would take too long to mention them all” (Lozano Reference Lozano and Andrés1873, 325), and another list with the Guaraní names of 16 parrots and popinjays (ibid., 333). Serpents occupy an important place in the natural histories we are considering. Lozano gives a more or less imaginative account of nine serpents, besides listing the native names of 16 species of them “in the gobernación del Paraguay” (this complementary list might have been taken from a regional relación) (ibid., 317). Ruiz de Montoya's Conquista Espiritual, an early narrative of the Jesuits full of miracles and religious wonders, has a chapter devoted to animals and in particular to snakes (Ruiz de Montoya [Reference Ruíz de Montoya1639] Reference Ruíz de Montoya1989).Footnote 21 While Montoya allows us a glimpse into the perturbing side of the Guaraní Eden, Lozano opens the chapter on snakes with a reference to divine justice which condemned these noxious creatures to slithering since the beginning of the world (Lozano Reference Lozano and Andrés1873, I: 309). All in all, while reading the pages of Lozano's historical works on natural history, one is struck by a sense of cumulative enumeration, made particularly manifest in the History of the Conquest, where he names and in some cases gives short characterizations of about 70 birds (ibid., 326–344).
Paucke described his orchard, his vegetable garden, and the crops in his mission town. His is a local, almost private natural history which at times reads almost like a Paraguayan Gilbert White: “Since my youth I have had a great contentment and pleasure in such essays and experiences as those concerning the cultivation of seeds, as in the metamorphosis of insects, vermin and other such curiosities” (Paucke Reference Paucke and Wernicke1942–1944, IV: 215). His voice has the ring of an expatriate, melancholic and almost elegiac in the description of his orchard: “I had 68 trunks of such trees as I had myself planted as Allé [poplar grove]”; “I also had a beautiful walnut and all the other fruit trees that were within [the orchard]” (ibid., IV: 22 and 232). The number of medicinal herbs described by Paucke (25 of them) is poor in comparison with other natural histories, for he named only those he grew. Paucke assigned five chapters to cultivated plants and trees, which all in all resemble more a text on agriculture and horticulture than one on natural history. But he does mention 37 kinds of wild trees and, though fish and serpents are poorly represented, he names and describes 41 species of birds, besides those he considered European. Distinctive of Paucke's work are his pictures, and particularly his drawings of birds.Footnote 22 If he gives so minute a description of fowl it is because he had a “proper knowledge” of the “great quantity and variety of duck-like birds that live near my reduction in the waters of the surrounding regions” (ibid., IV: 297).
Dobrizhoffer was a great storyteller. His prose is often detached but at times he waxes lyrical, as when he tells us about Don Pedro, the little parrot he had as a companion in his reduction, or about his pet roebuck, which had a collar of bells and ate scraps of paper (Dobrizhoffer Reference Dobrizhoffer and Sarah1822, I: 320–322 and 281). He admits that he is no naturalist and that anyone wishing to know the creatures should consult “the celebrated Linnaeus and the Dutch savant Willem Piso, who has lived for a long time in Brazil, and even others who have described everything with minute detail in its order.” But he thinks that he is capable of “entertaining the readers” with notable things so far never heard. With respect to plants, he says that he will talk of them “in the order they come to my mind,” i.e., without following a systematic order. He concedes that the botanists have written more soundly on the subject, but doubts that they have been more faithful than he in their descriptions (ibid., I: 349). Dobrizhoffer opens his account of animals with those brought from Europe to the New World – horses and cattle. Then he goes on with quadrupeds and amphibians. He mentions and summarily describes around 40 birds and 20 kinds of “fish” (actually, animals that live in water). Dobrizhoffer includes about 100 plants (ibid., I: 349–435). A distinctive quality of De abiponibus is that its author assigns to each of his creatures a single chapter, and these are neatly divided. The other natural histories tend to group several animals within a kind or class into collective chapters.
In the second book of his Saggio, José Jolís enumerates and describes around 100 plants distributed among the following categories: delicate domestic plants and edible herbs, edible plants and trees, medicinal plants, noxious plants and trees, dyewoods, and “peculiar” plants. He devotes many pages to birds, with a prose inflamed by his irate tirades against Buffon, against whom Jolís strenuously hurls his arguments in defense of the variety and magnificence of the fowl of the New World. In his third book Jolís discusses around 50 fissiparous birds and 10 species of ducks. In his turn, Termeyer's more accomplished section is that on “insects” (including worms), of which he discusses 12 kinds. At the opening of his natural history he says that he is going to describe 38 quadrupeds, 34 birds, and around 20 reptiles (Termeyer Reference Termeyer1810, 20); actually, he deals with no more than 20 quadrupeds, 30 birds, and about 13 reptiles. Unlike most of the other authors, Termeyer does mention his sources.Footnote 23 It should also be pointed out here that the type of sources used by Sánchez Labrador in his Natural Paraguay consisted mostly of dictionaries and what we today call reference works.Footnote 24
Two long chapters of Lozano's History of the Conquest, devoted to trees and medicinal plants, have as a recognized source Pedro Montenegro's Materia médica, the single most significant and original extant work on the subject of medicine that was written during colonial times in Paraquaria and the River Plate (Furlong Reference Furlong1945a; Gicklorn Reference Gicklhorn1973; Anagnostou Reference Anagnostou2000). This is a genre patterned after Dioscorides' Materia medica, which consisted of a series of short chapters, each devoted to the healing properties of a given plant (or animal part, or mineral) and the different medicaments that could be obtained from it, including directions for how to prepare them. One of the highest achievements of the sixteenth-century Spanish medical Renaissance was the commentary on Dioscorides by Andrés Laguna, which came to be known as “Laguna's Dioscorides” (Antwerp, 1555). Drawing heavily on this and other authors, such as Matthiolus, and on the treatises of Piso and Markgraft on tropical medicine and Brazilian natural history, Montenegro wrote a work which, very much like those of Francisco Hernández and the Dominican Francisco Ximénez in New Spain, was a blend of native lore and the Early Modern European tradition on the healing properties of plants (Asúa and French Reference Asúa2005, 91–109).
At that time, Pharmaceutical Botany depended heavily on local and traditional knowledge. Montenegro's work was not altogether original, but he achieved an articulated synthesis of native lore on plants seen through the concepts of Galenic humoralist medicine and seasoned by his own long experience as a healer, first in Madrid and then in the mission towns and the Jesuit colleges of the River Plate. As has been pointed out already, Lozano was not the only writer of natural histories who used Montenegro's list of trees and herbs as a basis for their own. Most of the authors followed suit. Sánchez Labrador increased the basic pharmacopoeia. His own list, which amounts to 262 vegetable species, seems to have been mostly derivative and taken from medical dictionaries and other pharmacopoeias.Footnote 25 It is said that Thomas Falkner wrote an extensive treatise named American Distempers Cured by American Drugs, but the manuscript has been lost (Asúa Reference Asúa2006).
Montenegro's Materia medica was an expedient solution for Lozano, who was not particularly interested in the natural world, but confronted the task of having to write a natural history. Montenegro's is a highly organized kind of text. At least in one of the extant manuscripts, each plant or herb is illustrated by a drawing and given a separate chapter (Montenegro Reference Montenegro1945). The treatment of each plant is similar in all cases, including name (in Spanish, in Guaraní, and on occasion other native tongues), description, affections that can be cured or alleviated with the plant or its parts, and the different preparations obtained from it. The codex includes an index of Guaraní and Spanish names and another of diseases. In most of these natural histories, the sections on plants are more structured, better balanced and written in a more uniform register than the sections on animals. This may be attributed to the fact that the authors of the natural histories used codices of Materia medica as a source for their chapters on the vegetable world.
In contrast, the sources upon which they drew for writing on animals were very different and were more haphazard and irregular. In any case, we are in the presence of a case of articulation of medical and natural historical discourses.Footnote 26 This was not the result of any programmatic theoretical intention. Faced with the task of having to provide an orderly account of the creatures of the country in which they were living (or had lived), the Jesuit authors tried to do it in the most efficient way. If they had at hand a work on native plants, e.g., Montenegro's herbal, they made good use of it. Besides, this procedure agreed with the utilitarian outlook of the Jesuit natural histories, which at every point stress the usefulness of things – antidotes for snake-bites, the best trees to use for building, better ways to cook fish, and so on – so much so that at times the Jesuit natural histories read as a sort of field guide for future missionaries.Footnote 27
Browsing through an archive of eighteenth-century Iberian American Jesuitica, one is struck by the omnipresence of documents containing lists of every kind. The daily chores of the Fathers in the reductions and colleges carried out in the efficient style of Jesuit bureaucracy, involved many lists: lists of the Indians baptized, of Jesuits in the reductions, of students in the colleges, of books, of goods, of all the innumerable commercial transactions and administrative proceedings, and so on. Listing was something connatural to a Jesuit. In their natural histories, the Jesuits set themselves the task of providing a complete inventory, of sedulously enumerating all the plants, animals, and nations of the land. Prominent in these texts are the lists of native peoples, a central concern of the missionaries who, in the end, were more interested in bringing the Indians to their own religion than in writing natural histories. At times they used lists in the current sense of the word, i.e., strings of Indian names of birds, or fish, or native nations. These were “lexical” lists, in the sense that they conveyed questions of classification and helped to organize experience (Goody Reference Goody1977, 94). They were obviously taken from the oral reports of native informers. Ruiz de Montoya collected his marvelous stories of serpents from a mixture of native tales and printed sources. Besides, we already saw that most of the material that went into the chapters on trees and plants of the natural histories was actually taken from lists of materia medica.
Guevara and Sánchez Labrador arranged the sections of medical botany of their works alphabetically, which might have been related to the fact that these pages were intended to be consulted and used. The practice of writing dictionaries and lexica of the native languages (discussed in the following section) involved an alphabetical arrangement of a series of words. In some cases, for instance in Dobrizhoffer, we find that the quadrupeds are ordered beginning with the largest or most impressive of them (the tiger, i.e., the jaguar) while the birds begin with the smallest and perhaps the most attractive, i.e. the hummingbird. But this author declined to use any criterion of order with the plants. Certainly, alphabetical listing was not a universal criterion and most of the time the ordering of names within a given category of beings is haphazard.
Naming
The Biblical story of Adam naming the animals, mentioned by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae, is a vivid representation of the human being's awareness of the diversity of the animal world. The book of Genesis tells how Adam “gave names to all the cattle, all the birds of heaven and all the wild animals” (Gn 2: 20). Our Jesuits were also concerned with naming the creatures of what later authors imagined as a Guaraní Paradise. Certainly, the eighteenth-century Jesuit missions of Paraquaria have evoked in writers of different ages a vision of Edenic bliss. At the beginning of his engaging romanticized history of the missions A Vanished Arcadia, Cunninghame Graham recalls his visit to Paraguay in 1871, where “old men kept the illusion that the missions in the Jesuits' times had been a paradise” (Cunninghame Graham Reference Cunninghame Graham1901, xx). In his 1825 Tale of Paraguay, a poem in Spenserian stanzas inspired by an episode told by Dobrizhoffer, Robert Southey imagined Paraguay as a “woodlands waste” which, despite being “all unlike to Paradise,” causes him to believe, rather inconsequentially, that “Something of what in Eden might have been / Was shadow'd there imperfectly” (Southey Reference Southey1827, 54). “A spectacle worthy of the eyes of Paradise” was the truly Baroque simile employed by Abate Francesco Muratori to describe the Guaraní missions in his Reference Muratori1734Happy Christianity [Il cristianesimo felice] (Muratori [Reference Muratori1734] Reference Muratori1985, 112). Muratori's little work interpreted the Jesuit experience in Paraguay as a recreation of the communities of early Christianity by the “new Christians,” i.e., the natives, whom he saw as “these wolves, these bears, turned into tame lambs, into innocent doves” (ibid., 112). The comparison of the Guaraní to wild animals is a topos that opens a view into the contradictions in the accounts of actors and historians alike. Human beings are animals and animals could be dangerous creatures that required taming. Ruíz de Montoya, who in 1631 led the great migration of 10,000 Guaranís from the Guairá down the Paraná River and across the Iguazú Falls, claimed that he lived “in the Province of Paraguay like in a desert, looking for fierce beasts, barbarous Indians. . . to be brought into the fold of the Church.” He is said to have baptized 100,000 Indians (Ruíz de Montoya [Reference Ruíz de Montoya1639] 1989, 46–47).
That snakes play so prominently a role in these Jesuit natural histories is attributable not only to the fact that they were a real danger for anybody living in Paraquaria, but also to the symbolic certainty that serpents constitute the dangerous dimension of every Paradise worthy of that name. Of the many religious autos and colorful pageants regularly performed by the Guaranís in Paraguay, only the text of a short theatrical piece has survived. Written in Guaraní, with some phrases in Spanish and Latin, the short representation tells the story of “Man's first disobedience.” One of the devils, Maldito [Accursed] at one point says “I have learned that in Paradise there is a fruit of Knowledge. I will turn into a serpent.” Actually, the one who eventually addresses Eva is Lucifer (Rela Reference Rela1988, 174).
In his History of Brazil (1810–1819) Southey passed harsh judgment on the Jesuits, but in the Tale of Paraguay he has kind words for Dobrizhoffer, “A faithful chronicler in handing down / Names which he loved, and things well worthy to be known” (Southey Reference Southey1827, 89; my emphasis). It is not surprising that the Jesuit writers of natural histories always used the native names for the creatures of the land, for the animals and plants of the tropical forest had no names in the European tongues. Sánchez Labrador was obsessively bent on using the Indian names. In his encyclopaedia he used them in the first place, even in the chapters that deal with the general anatomy and physiology of the great groups of animals. Paucke used German words for designating the creatures, but added the Mocoví names. Dobrizhoffer provided the Abipón and Guaraní names of animals and plants. Jolís took care to give the names of animals and plants in several native tongues, like those of the Lules, the Vilelas, the Tobas, and the Chiriguanos. The singular exotic atmosphere common to all these works is due in no small measure to the richness of aboriginal names.
Missionaries all over the world have contributed to the knowledge of languages that would otherwise have been lost. The Jesuits in Paraguay and Rio de la Plata did this with a view to gaining converts to their faith. The first Guaraní grammar was that of Joseph de Anchieta (Coimbra, 1595), a famous Jesuit missionary in Brazil. Ruiz de Montoya wrote a Grammar, a Dictionary (Spanish-Guaraní), a Thesaurus of Guaraní terms and phrases, and a Catechism in Guaraní. (All of them were published between 1639 and 1640, while he was in Madrid trying to wrangle from Philip IV tax-exemptions for the Guaranís in the reductions and their right to be free from the enforced-labor system of encomienda.) The vocabulary and grammar was later edited and published in the presses of the missions by Father Paulo Restivo (Santa María la Mayor, 1722, 1724) with the Cathecism and Sermons by the Guaraní cacique Nicolás Yapuguay (1724, 1727) (Schuller Reference Schuller1913). The Arte y vocabulario de la lengua lule y tonocote written by the Jesuit Antonio Machoni appeared in Madrid in 1732. In 1606 Luis de Valdivia published a grammar of Mapuche and a year later he published a grammar, short vocabularies, and catechisms for Millcayak and Alentiak (Lima, 1607), two languages spoken by the Huarpes in Cuyo, the Central Western region of present-day Argentina. Andrés Febrés wrote an Art of the Araucano language: Arte de la lengua general del Reyno de Chile (Lima, 1765). Thomas Falkner, in his Description of Patagonia, included a short vocabulary of Tehuelhet. Father Brigniel and Dobrizhoffer left notes on Abipón, which ethnographer Lafone Quevedo used for his reconstruction of the grammar of the language (Lafone Quevedo Reference Lafone Quevedo1896). Alonso de Barzana [Bárcena] wrote a grammar of the Toba, which remained in manuscript form until modern times and was also edited by Lafone Quevedo (Bárcena Reference Bárcena and Quevedo1893). The Jesuit Joaquín Caamaño wrote a Chiquito grammar, of which only fragments remain. And, of course, we have the Quechua grammars and vocabularies of Diego González Holguín (Lima, 1607, 1608) and Diego Torres Rubio (Lima, 1608) and the five books on Aymara of Ludovico Bertoni (grammar, vocabulary, thesaurus, confessionary, and a life of Jesus published between 1603 and 1612).
All these linguistic instruments were not molded upon Nebrija's Spanish grammar, but upon Latin grammars, for Latin was the lingua franca of the Society of Jesus (Zwartjes Reference Zwartjes and Otto2000, 238–240). Sánchez Labrador carried out with the Mbayá the patient work of lexicography that Ruíz de Montoya did for the Guaraní. He left a grammar and an extensive vocabulary Spanish-Mbayá (Sánchez Labrador Reference Sánchez Labrador1971a, Reference Sánchez Labrador1971b, Reference Sánchez Labrador1972). Unger Elke (Reference Elke1972, 9–28) has categorized the terms of this vocabulary: 132 pertain to the field of flora (cultivated and wild), 154 to wild fauna, and 56 to domestic animals. The collective Jesuit enterprise of studying native languages in South America was synthesized in the work of the Spanish Jesuit linguist Hervás y Panduro, based in Rome, who received an uninterrupted stream of correspondence from Jesuit missionaries from all over the world (Upson Clark Reference Upson Clark1937). When as a belated reaction against the publication of the Encyclopédie the Jesuits turned to the writing of encyclopaedic works of all kinds, Hervás published in Cesena between 1778 and 1787 a 21-volume encyclopaedia in Italian under the common title of Idea dell'universo. The last five volumes of this work are devoted to languages. Hervás rewrote the Catalogo delle lingue conosciute (1784, vol. 17) in Spanish and published it in Madrid between 1800 and 1805 as Catálogo de las lenguas in six volumes, the first of which is a survey of the languages of the Americas, going from south to north (chap. 1 deals with the languages of Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, and Chile; chap. 2 with those of Paraguay and Brazil, and so on). In the last volume of his encyclopaedia, the Saggio pratico delle lingue, Hervás provided a summarized catalog of the world languages, mentioning 32 South American Indian tongues (Hervás y Panduro [Reference Hervás y Panduro1787] 1990, 59–80).
The use of native names in works of natural history was not exclusive to Jesuit authors, but it seems that they dealt with them in a recognizable manner. As was acknowledged by Dobrizhoffer, the work that set the standard for scholarly research on the nature of the New World was Piso's and Markgraf's Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Piso and Markgraf Reference Piso and Markgraf1648). This volume summarized the work of the German naturalist Georg Markgraf and the Dutch physician Willem Piso in Dutch Brazil, during the years of the rule of Prince Johan Maurits. Edited and financed by Johannes de Laet, a president of the Dutch West India Company, this was a lavish production published in 1648, with more than 400 pictures in an ambitious survey of Brazilian nature.
The Natural History of Brazil is the common title of what are actually two works, a treatise on Brazilian medicine by Piso, and Markgraf's Eight Books on the Nature of Brazil. The latter consists of short chapters accompanied by drawings, each of them devoted to one or more animals. These are mentioned by their Tupí names, with their equivalents in Portuguese and, on occasion, other European languages. Except for the names, there is no trace of folk animal lore in Markgraf's neat morphological descriptions. The typographical arrangement adopted by de Laet, the editor of the work, functioned to keep the native names separated from the text, which bore the weight of the scientific account. Names, pictures, and descriptions functioned as distinct elements juxtaposed to each other (Asúa and French Reference Asúa2005, 115–123). Montenegro and Sánchez Labrador drew heavily on the Natural History of Brazil, but in the text of these Jesuits, and to a lesser extent in the texts of his colleagues, native names were incorporated into the fabric of the writing.Footnote 28 In his Paraguay Natural, Sánchez Labrador used neither Linnean nomenclature nor classification, either of animals or plants (Sainz Ollero et al. Reference Sainz Ollero, Ollero, Cardona and Ontañón1989, 179 and 214).
In the Jesuit works on natural history written in the Italian exile the question of names took a new and significant turn. In the prologue to his Essay on the Natural History of the Great Chaco, Jolís says that he undertook his book “by the pitiful and unflattering picture which certain authors paint of the entire continent, describing its climate as so malignant that not only the human beings degenerate there, but also animals, plants, and trees brought from Europe” (Jolis 1972, 37). Explicitly following in the steps of Clavigero, Jolís shows himself as a champion of the New World facing the onslaught launched by Buffon and De Pauw. Jolís concedes that the “modern” standards for writing natural history involve microscopic descriptions and the classification of species according to Linnaeus' taxonomy. But he argues that an old-fashioned way of writing and describing is enough for his aims, for what is ultimately important is “to know that in a given place or country grows a plant which has this or that virtue and is known there by a certain name.” As Dobrizhoffer had done before, Jolís also admits that he is “not writing for the specialists and I have never been a botanist nor a naturalist.” His grouping of the plants (see above), which he says is not “philosophic,” is that used by Clavigero, one of the “moderns” and “quite well-known by his History of Mexico” (ibid., 90–92). These Jesuit writers could have been described by Linnaeus as botanophili [botanical amateurs], i.e. those who, in contradistinction to botanici [botanists], “have written botanical [works], though they do not properly belong to botanical science” (Linnaeus [1751] 1783, 15). In the Osservazioni di storia naturale Americana Termeyer also claims that the reader cannot expect from him “the exactitude of a naturalist,” for he worked in his spare time, “without books, without corresponding with colleagues, and without instruments” (Termeyer Reference Termeyer1810, 248). Even in his field of expertise – he had written a good deal on entomology and was a modestly recognized expert on spiders – Termeyer presents himself as “a mere collector of insects” and recognizes that he is not “a methodical and systematic entomologist” (ibid., 552).
Besides their protestations of humility, Termeyer and Jolís were engaged in defending and preserving the aboriginal names of beasts and birds, an important component in a broader strategy on what has been called “the dispute over the New World” by Antonello Gerbi, the first who wrote extensively on this topic (see Gerbi Reference Gerbi and Jeremy1973).Footnote 29 It has already been pointed out that Clavigero criticized Buffon for his ignorance of the native languages, which resulted in his disregard of the native taxonomies and that Velasco's natural history amounted to not much more than a catalog of Quechua terms (Cañizares-Esguerra Reference Cañizares-Esguerra2001, 246–251). Jolís and Termeyer were engaged in this common battle for the defense of Indian names, which involved Indian ways of grouping the creatures. Jolís claimed that Buffon and Azara, like many European naturalists, “ignoring the true meanings of the words of the native tongues, substitute new ones, which imitate the old ones, and recast the compound terms” (Jolís Reference Jolís and Acuña1972, 114). In his turn, Termeyer was willing to forgive Buffon “for having taken corrupt names from other authors” but his condescension did not extend to Azara, who “lived for 40 years in Asunción and well could have learnt the language” (Termeyer Reference Termeyer1810, 486–487).
Félix de Azara was a Spanish military engineer and naturalist who traveled to Paraguay in 1781 as a member of an official commission in charge of a boundary dispute with the Portuguese. He remained there for two decades (not for four decades, as Termeyer said) and wrote a number of works on geography, history, and natural history of the region, notably the Notes on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata (1802) and the Essays on the History of Quadrupeds, which was first published in French in Paris, 1801 (Beddall Reference Beddall1975, Reference Beddall1983; Glick and Quinlan Reference Glick and Quinlan1975). His brother Nicolás was a high ranking diplomat who had been involved directly with the expulsion of the Jesuits. The Essai sur l'histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes de la province du Paraguay is the French translation by L. E. Moreau Saint-Méry of Azara's Spanish manuscript. In this work, the spellings of the Guarani names of animals are adapted for French pronunciation, e.g. the u is rendered as the French diphthong ou. Thus, jaguareté is translated as yagouarété, chibiguazú as chibigouazou and so on. Moreover, the translator introduced the work in a few pages indicating the correct French pronunciation of the names of all the animals, the “Pronunciation syllabique des mot guaranís” comprehending 92 animal names (Azara Reference Azara and Moreau-Saint-Méry1801, I: lx-lxiv). There is also a glossary of terms used in South America, arranged in alphabetical order, such as “Buenos-Ayres,” “Pampa,” and “toldería” (ibid., I: lxvii-lxxiii). In his Observations, Termeyer took issue with many of the names of animals and their spellings as they appeared in Azara's work, without ever considering the question of transliteration. For example, he says that Azara's name for the anteater, Yoqoui is wrong, for the true name is Yoquì, although he adds that in the end this is not important once we know that we are dealing with Myrmecophaga jubata L. (Termeyer Reference Termeyer1810, 462–465). What Azara calls Pay, Linnaeus Cavia Paca, Buffon Paca, and Lacépède Agoutì-Paca, in Guaraní is called Pag, says Termeyer (ibid., 488). And although he repeats Azara's description of four species of stags, he also recalls that its generic name is Guazù and not Gouazoù, as in Azara (ironically, Termeyer uses Italian accent marks in his Guaraní words).
In the History of Quadrupeds Azara waged his own private war against Buffon on the names of American animals. It must be said that in the Spanish edition of the work (1802) the Guaraní names were adapted to the Spanish pronunciation, thus rendering inane many of Termeyer's criticisms. As we have already discussed, the broader context of this lexicographic turmoil was Buffon's thesis of the inferiority of the New World. Azara's attitude toward Buffon oscillates between unbounded admiration and harsh criticism – he himself says in the introduction to the Apuntamientos para la historia natural de los quadrúpedos del Paraguay y Río de la Plata that Buffon's Histoire naturelle was the only book on the subject he had ever read (Azara Reference Azara1802, I: vii). Just like the Jesuits he despised so much, Azara adopted the role of defender of aboriginal names. In the History of quadrupeds he says that “when it was necessary to select the names, I have found it convenient to keep those which had been taught to me by the ancient Indians” (Azara Reference Azara and Moreau-Saint-Méry1801, I: 171). As a rule, in the first lines of the chapters on this or that animal, Azara discusses the aboriginal names and their meanings with a zoologist's perceptiveness for the problems surrounding the naming of species. But, for the most part, his prose, orderly, methodical, and bristling with careful anatomical measures, is free of aboriginal words.
Naming the plants and animals of the land, most of them unknown to Europeans, was a primary concern of the authors of the natural histories. As the frequent allusions to the literary motif of Adam naming the beasts reveal, this was done in the spirit of the human being set in Paradise among the creatures – an ambiguous Paradise, certainly. Naming involved communication and an understanding of the many aboriginal tongues. Ultimately, it was a precondition of survival in the tropical forest. The Jesuits had to write grammars, lexica, and linguistic instruments for preaching. In a sense the natural histories can be seen as complements to and prolongations of the dictionaries. First and foremost, the Jesuits used native names. This suggests that they were at least as interested in learning the languages as in providing an account of rivers, trees, and beasts. After the expulsion, the question of names took a new turn: the use of Indian names was a watershed that separated the natural histories of the Jesuits from those of the specialized naturalists like Linnaeus and Buffon. The former used local names because their intention was to write an engaging story recreating the lands from which they had been expelled. They did not claim that they were writing learned works. This fever for native names – and the worldview they implied – permeates the natural histories and exposes them as a product of a mixed culture. Like the architecture and the art of the mission towns that resulted from the interaction of European models and native artists and artisans (Bailey Reference Bailey1999, 148–182), the natural histories also attest to an articulation of native lore with European categories verified in discourse.
II. The Appropriation of the Texts: History, Science, and Literature
Since the middle of the nineteenth century the Jesuit writings on natural history have been the subject of a long, muddy, and ideologically charged polemic in Argentina. What follows is a brief survey of the different uses to which these works were put and the implicit contest over who had the authority to interpret them. First we will look at those authors who read the natural histories as historical works. Second I will discuss Furlong's interpretation, which assumed they were scientific works. Finally, we will deal with how Ricardo Rojas incorporated the works of the Jesuits into his canon of Argentine literature.
It is logical that the Jesuit chronicles were viewed as historical documents, all the more so since, as has been discussed in the previous section, a number of the authors perceived themselves to be chroniclers or writers of historia. Pedro de Angelis was a Neapolitan historian who worked under the protection of Juan Manuel de Rosas – a strong caudillo from Buenos Aires who ruled much of the territory of future Argentina from 1829 to 1852. With this official support, de Angelis amassed an impressive number of documents related to the history of the River Plate, which he published in his Collection of Works and Documents Related to the Ancient and Modern History of the Provinces of the River Plate (Angelis Reference Angelis1836–1837). Included in this three-volume work are the first two books of Guevara's Historia del Paraguay and a version of Falkner's Description of Patagonia (both texts have been grossly mutilated and “purged”).
Andrés Lamas, a Montevideo-born politician, diplomat, and historian active on both sides of the River Plate and Brazil, who actively opposed Rosas, published the first book of Guevara's Historia del Paraguay (Buenos Aires, 1882) and the five volumes of Lozano's Historia de la Conquista del Paraguay (Buenos Aires, 1873–1875) in a series of documents, whose general title suggests that he had set out to supersede those works that had been written by his late political rival de Angelis (Furlong Cardiff Reference Furlong Cardiff1944).Footnote 30 The editions of Lamas, although not critical, were far better than those of de Angelis.
Paul Groussac was a French littérateur who left his natal city of Toulouse when little more than a teenager and, after many years of teaching in Tucumán, chose to play Gulliver among the pigmies as virtual dictator of the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires. Groussac attained a modest degree of universal fame by having been mentioned in Jorge Luis Borges' well-known “Poem of the Gifts.” Among the many valuable things Groussac did, we can count his edition of Guevara's History of Paraguay in the Anales de la Biblioteca (Guevara Reference Guevara and Groussac1908–1910). His edition is almost up to the highest scholarly standards of his time, but as a commentator he is not beyond showering abuse on Guevara.Footnote 31 Groussac played an important role in the transition towards a more critically minded edition of historical texts. However, he was in turn the target of criticism from a younger generation of historians who during the years of the First World War sought a more strict professionalization of the discipline of history (Eujanián Reference Eujanián1995). For example, Rómulo Carbia, in his classic Critical History of Argentine Historiography, projects a balanced view of the Jesuit chronicle (Carbia Reference Carbia1939, 38–53).Footnote 32 This short survey should be enough to outline the tradition of interpretation that saw in these works the expression of what is usually called “Jesuit historiography.”Footnote 33 More interesting is perhaps the early utilization by de Angelis of Falkner's Description as a propaganda argument. It was said that Falkner had been an English spy who in his book had provided strategic information and called for the invasion of the country by the British. As a result of the publication of Falkner's book, Spain sent the shipmasters Villarino, Viedma, and de la Piedra to explore the region of the Río Negro in Patagonia (Bustos Videla Reference Bustos Videla1964). The arguments against Falkner were repeated and amplified by the militarist diplomat and intellectual Nicolás Zeballos and by Minister of War General Julio A. Roca, before setting out in 1879 in his “conquest of the wilderness,” a military expedition that subdued and exterminated the remaining southern tribes and opened 86,000,000 acres of land for economic production in Patagonia (Dodds Reference Dodds1993; Asúa Reference Asúa2006, 230–235).
The Irish-Argentine Jesuit historian Guillermo Furlong Cardiff devoted much of his life, dozens of books, and hundreds of papers to argue that colonial scientific culture in the territory of future Argentina was at a level with contemporary European culture.Footnote 34 Writing in 1945, he affirmed that “since 1810 to this date, there has not been among us a more original, more encouraging, more sympathetic and more meritorious [scientific milieu]” (Furlong Reference Furlong1945b, 8). This lifelong conviction was the result of an intellectual conversion. Furlong studied at Georgetown University (Mörner Reference Mörner1975). At a lecture he gave in 1912 at the Smithsonian Institution, after he had dismissed with a few words the scientific culture of colonial South America, he was approached by the Americanist Charles Warren Currier, who urged him to look at the sources and revise his opinions, which he did (Furlong Reference Furlong1945b, 5–6). With untiring zeal he ransacked the archives, exhumed scores of documents and edited many of them. Alas, his many valuable contributions and his opening of a new field of research were somewhat clouded by his historical approach openly apologetic of the Society of Jesus to which he belonged. To a historian of science educated during the last three decades of the twentieth century, Furlong might appear as old-fashioned and naively “whiggish” in his attempt at demonstrating that eighteenth-century Río de la Plata was a lively center of scientific inquiry. But we should not lose sight of the fact that in the time he worked – broadly between the 1930s and the 1960s – the standard version of colonial science in Argentina was much distorted.
The usual handbook on the subject, José Babini's History of Science in Argentina, claims that in this period the region “does not show any sign of scientific activity” (Babini Reference Babini1966, 66). Babini, a disciple of the Italian émigré Aldo Mieli, did much for the establishment of History of Science as a discipline in the country. Babini was an engineer and a committed liberal with a strongly positivistic view of the history of science inherited from Mieli, an unlikely candidate for regarding sympathetically the Jesuit enterprise.Footnote 35 His only hero of the eighteenth century was the enlightened naturalist Félix de Azara (Ortiz and Pyenson Reference Ortiz and Pyenson1984; Asúa Reference Asúa1993, Reference Asúa1997; Hurtado de Mendoza y Asúa Reference Asúa2003). Thus, the confrontation between liberals and Jesuits was imported to the field of history of science and transformed into an implicit polemic about colonial science (implicit because Babini and Furlong, belonging to different social and intellectual spheres, respectfully kept each other at arm's length). Relevant to our argument is Furlong's view of the natural histories we have been considering so far. The title of his work on this subject, Argentine Naturalists during the Spanish Domination (Furlong Reference Furlong1948), attests not only to his appropriation of the natural histories to national history, but also to his interpretation of these works within a field of discourse he called “science.” And yet, it must be pointed out that Furlong thought of himself as a cultural historian, not as a historian of science, an academic discipline which he viewed as the province of practicing scientists. Paradoxically, his outlook on the history of science was kindred to that of Babini and he set out to refute his intellectual opponents on their own ground. Against the view that saw in the Jesuits a group of ineffectual amateurs, Furlong emphatically tried to demonstrate that they had been empirically minded scientists who did significant things and as a consequence, had gained recognition from contemporary savants.
Ricardo Rojas could be considered the single-handed constructor of that phantasmagorical entity called “History of Argentine Literature.” He wrote the first work bearing that title, he held the first chair of History of Argentine Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, and he created the first research institute on the subject (Pagés Larraya Reference Pagés Larraya1958). Rojas' History of Argentine Literature, published between 1917 and 1922, is an eight-volume work divided into four parts. Its subtitle (“Philosophical Essay on the Evolution of Culture”) indicates that this ambitious survey was conceived more as a cultural interpretation than as a work of erudition. In the section on colonial literature, Rojas included three long and substantial chapters with a lengthy discussion of most of the Jesuit works under consideration: “Books of the Spiritual Conquest,” “The Theocratic School in Córdoba,” and “The Expulsion of the Society of Jesus” (Rojas Reference Rojas1960, III: 243–289 and 334–364; IV: 365–406). This move was neither the result of scholarly interest nor of any particular enthusiasm for the Jesuits – which Rojas was far from sharing – but was rather the expression of an intellectual project that argued for a cultural nationalism of the liberal and democratic kind. Rojas' retrospective look at colonial literature searching for manifestations of a distinctive American essence should be seen as the manifestation of a vaster cognate movement in Iberian America (Reid Reference Reid1975). With the eloquent voice of a prophetic essayist, Rojas envisaged and called for the building of a “national culture” grounded on the Indian, Creole, and Spanish past but, at the same time, open to European currents of immigration and thought (Glauert Reference Glauert1963; but see also DeLaney Reference DeLaney2002).
The natural histories of the Jesuits were for Rojas an adequate example of the cultural mestizaje he envisaged as the ancestral background of a quintessential Argentine culture. In one of the chapters on Jesuit literature, Rojas even included such specialized technical works as Montenegro's Materia medica and Buenaventura Suárez's Lunario de un siglo (an astronomical calendar). He understood the natural histories as the didactic systematization by Jesuit writers of a wealth of traditional and empirical knowledge learnt from the Indians (Rojas Reference Riskin1960, IV: 373–374). Rojas grasped the significance of the Jesuit's use of native language. He wrote that these works “concur to define the Argentine environment, characterizing it through the Indian names” (ibid., III: 271; my emphasis). The resilience of a literary canon can be seen in the fact that these works are discussed at length in the chapter on colonial literature in the multi-volume History of Argentine Literature edited in 1958, a work that resumed much of the literary critique of the fifties (Caillet-Bois Reference Caillet-Bois and Rafael1958). More surprising is that they are still mentioned in the second revised edition of the History of Argentine Literature published by the Centro Editor de América Latina in the early 1980s, where it is said that it would be plausible to find in these works “pages which, exceeding the strict requirements of history or science could belong with justice to the field of literature” (Canal Feijóo Reference Canal Feijóo1980, I: 149). There are at least two versions of Groussac's comments on Rojas' History. In an early short essay on “The Art of Verbal Abuse,” Borges reported that the French-Argentine critic had said of Rojas' work that it was “a copious history of something that never existed” (Borges Reference Borges1974, 419–423). I think that the alternative conserved by oral tradition (“Rojas' History of Argentine Literature is longer than Argentine literature itself”) is more interesting, for here Groussac malgré lui would have underscored an aspect of Rojas' History that perhaps deserves attention. To be sure, Rojas wrote a literary history in which “literature” was understood not as Belletristik, but as a cultural production, and consequently incorporated all kinds of writing which, like the works of the Jesuits, could strengthen his interpretive project organized around the opposition “indigenism-exoticism.”
In conclusion, general historians and historiographers working in Argentina from de Angelis to the present have felt uneasy for having to deal with natural histories that were written by Jesuits. With the exception of Groussac, they just ignored them or mentioned them as an intractable appendix to what constituted the really interesting part of the work, i.e., the properly historical chronicle. Furlong valued them as one of the scientific highlights of the colonial past he was reconstructing. Rojas saw in them one of the many literary streams that flowed into the broad river of what he imagined as a primeval Argentina. In short, the natural histories were read as a part of a historical, a scientific, or a literary national tradition. There was no explicit process of open disciplinary negotiation or discussion on the legitimacy of interpretative authority: each interpreter used them in terms of just his own interests.
III. The Jesuit Natural Histories in Context
By the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a well-established tradition of Jesuit writing on nature in the New World, exemplified by such works as the Do clima e terra do Brasil by Fernão Cardim (London, 1625), the first two books of Alonso de Ovalle's Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1646), and Bernabé Cobo's Historia del Nuevo Mundo, written in the Colegio de San Pablo (Lima) during the first half of the seventeenth century. Why did the Jesuits in the New World adopt and cultivate the literary genre of natural and moral (or civil) histories? There are significant witnesses in Early Modern times to the division of history into natural, civil, and ecclesiastical. For instance, it was expounded by Bacon in the second book of the Advancement of Learning. Actually, he added a fourth branch, “literary” history, which he thought was not yet developed in his time (Bacon [Reference Bacon1605] 1952, 32–38). Jean Bodin, better known as a political philosopher, also divides history into natural, human and sacred in his Methodus, ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566). As to chorographic writing, there was a German tradition consolidated during the sixteenth century that depended on Italian models (Strauss Reference Strauss1958).Footnote 36 In explaining the meaning of the word “history” the already mentioned Dictionnaire de Trévoux repeats the classification by the Jesuit Claude-François Ménestrier in his Histoire civile ou Consulaire de la Ville de Lyon (Ménestrier Reference Ménestrier1696) according to which history is sacred, natural, civil, personal, and singular (Dictionnaire de Trévoux 1771, IV: 840). The account of “Natural history” with its emphasis on “singularités,” “prodiges,” and “altérations” is characteristically Early Modern (cf. Daston Reference Daston1998). The models of the genre are classical (Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Pliny), as can be expected of a Jesuit writing at the end of the seventeenth century.
But these antecedents, significant in themselves, seem far distant from the cultural circle of Spain and its Indies. In the 1570s, Juan de Ovando, the president of the Council of the Indies, developed the project of writing (a) the general and particular history of the Indies, (b) its natural and moral history. This program was implemented through a questionnaire devised by the Royal Chronicler-Cosmographer Ramírez de Velasco, which had to be filled out by the officers of the crown in all the Spanish possessions of the New World. The corresponding reports came to be known as the relaciones de Indias, an invaluable source of information on economic and social aspects of the Spanish possessions overseas and also on questions regarding the natural environment (Clive Reference Clive1964). The Spanish historian Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, in his De historia (Madrid, 1611) considered history as twofold, divine and human; in turn he divided the latter, human, into natural and moral. But theory followed practice, for as mentioned above Fernández de Oviedo had published his General and Natural History of the Indies in 1535 and Acosta his Natural and Moral History of the Indies between 1588 and 1590. Properly speaking, history was not a particularly strong point of the Jesuit curriculum. According to the ratio studiorum, which ruled Jesuit education, the contents on history and geography were taught during the year of rhetoric, as a part of the study of the classics (Dainville Reference Dainville and François1978, 447). The writing of natural and moral/civil/ecclesiastical histories was a practice born and cultivated by Jesuit missionaries and scholars in the Spanish Indies as an answer to their needs and an expression of their experience. Much of what is usually called “Jesuit science” as practiced in the lands of missions was oriented by pragmatic and religious motives – at least this can be said of the kind of astronomy practiced in the Guaraní reductions (Asúa Reference Asúa2004b). The eighteenth-century Jesuit natural histories have a strong utilitarian approach, always stressing the uses of natural products, the dangers of the wilderness, and the different ways of obtaining food, medicaments, and shelter from trees, plants, and animals. In a very real sense, they were the result of their authors' life experience in the tropical forest and as such reveal their preoccupations and interests.
These natural histories should also be conceived as forming part of a tradition of writing characteristic of the missionaries in the New World; there was nothing approaching it in the lands of mission of the Old World, like India and China. And that tradition was concerned with the newness of the New World – newness interpreted in terms of the religious goals of the Jesuits (which were always the main force in any kind of cultural enterprise they undertook) as an opportunity for preaching. The natural histories acquired different meanings depending on the immediate textual context: as a setting of the stage for historical action (Lozano, Guevara), as an expression of the writer's perception of an alien natural world filtered through reminiscences and reconstructed memories (Dobrizhoffer, Paucke), or as an apologia for the nature of the New World (Sánchez Labrador, Jolís, Termeyer). The Jesuit authors seem to have perceived themselves as historians, chroniclers, writers of memories, or amateur naturalists defending their lost homelands.
The New World was terra incognita. If one wished to tell a story set in Paraquaria or some other land with some such name, redolent of exotic mystery, it was not altogether ill advised to set the stage in advance for the action to take place. This orderly procedure – first describe the setting (natural history), then tell the plot (civil and ecclesiastical history) – would have been appealing to Jesuit writers, always careful to follow a rational orderly procedure. The strong scenic element in Baroque art and the current practice of theatrical exercises as a regular part of the curriculum in Jesuit colleges might have contributed to an intellectual atmosphere where the notion of stage was essential (Schnitzler Reference Schnitzler1952). Dobrizhoffer writes that the Spaniards consider the Chaco “the theatre of misery,” a stage where they played out their stories of greed, labors, and suffering haunted by menacing presences (Dobrizhoffer Reference Dobrizhoffer and Sarah1822, I: 124). Appropriately, he opens his account of the animals claiming “A quadripedibus feris exordiamur. Prima in scenam prodeat tigris” [We will begin with quadrupeds. The tiger appears first on the scene!] (Dobrizhoffer Reference Dobrizhoffer1784 I: 283).
Against the interpretative appropriations discussed in the preceding section, which are not archaeological relics but still enjoy a moderate degree of vitality, I hope that the first part of this paper makes a convincing case for demonstrating that these natural histories were neither “history,” nor “literature,” nor “science,” but the result of a peculiar Jesuit tradition of writing. Certainly, these works were a catalog of the living beings of the real world and as such they expressed a confidence in language's capability for reference. On the other hand, with their immediacy to the native tongues, their preoccupation with naming, and their close association to instruments of translation and interpretation, such as dictionaries and thesauri, they seem to move very much within the realm of language itself. These natural histories presupposed a created order of nature, which the authors felt they could represent and convey in words. Listing, a practice to which the Jesuit missionaries were accustomed from their commercial, administrative, and learned spheres of action, was a principle of organization of the material which served the purposes of raising an inventory of creatures and on occasion resulted from using works on materia medica as sources for the sections on plants, and from copying down orally transmitted folk classifications.
These natural histories remained faithful to a pre-Linnean, pre-Buffonian way of seeing and talking, and as such escaped what has been described as the eighteenth-century dissociation between natural history and folk taxonomy (Atran Reference Atran1990, 10). Their authors did not claim to be “professional” naturalists and only the later works written in Italy by Jesuits exiled after their expulsion from the Spanish domains in 1767, showed some signs of coming to terms with the kind of natural history written by Linnaeus and Buffon. The taxonomies they used are a blend of Indian folk classification and common notions of animal and plant groupings.
The natural histories of Paraquaria can be seen as a result of the encounter between Indians and Jesuits, a cultural artefact very much like the churches and images of saints in the Baroque style of art evolved in the Jesuit reductions of Iberian America. A significant difference is that while in the case of the artistic production the Indians re-created European patterns, the texts resulted essentially from a flow of words and ways of classifying provided by the aboriginal inhabitants of the land blended with and filtered through the modes of thought of Early Modern European written culture. These works, closely articulated with the endeavor to understand the native languages, constituted a virtual space of cultural synthesis, an expression of the symbolic interchanges transacted by Jesuits and Indians and crystallized as a frail discursive organization of the experience of the wilderness.
Acknowledgments
A major part of the research for this paper was supported by a Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the period 2006–2007. Preliminary work was supported by CONICET (Argentina) and by a Research Grant (Type A) from Universidad Nacional de San Martín. The final version was written while I enjoyed the gracious hospitality of the Section of the History of Medicine of Yale University during the Spring Term of 2007, for which I remain very much obliged to John Harley Warner. A preliminary version of the paper was delivered as the key-address at the “Meeting on Science and the Humanities” held at the University of South Florida on March 2, 2007. I wish to thank the hosts, Pablo Brescia, Alex Levine, and Adriana Novoa for their suggestions and their warm welcome. The critiques and comments of two anonymous referees and those of the editors Leo Corry and Alexandre Métraux were extremely helpful.
