sirenko

The best part of this book for me was the discussion of tropicality, and the way that wonder at nature was interwoven with a fear of it as contaminating or otherwise dangerous. It’s interesting that these attitudes exhibited a shift between the 18th and 19th-20th centuries. Also interesting was the discussion of the frontier juxtaposed with a discussion of the difference that indigenous peoples made to Latin American vs. North American history in terms of the perception of the frontier. In North America, Indian removal preceded colonization and contributed to the perception of the West as empty and primordial. In Latin America, Spanish colonialism relied on a spatially dispersed colonial hierarchy that kept many indigenous peoples in place (and left alone some that were the hardest to reach), meaning that the primordialist vision of the frontier (a la Frederick Jackson Turner) never really took hold there.

2022-11-14 14:09