This paper takes an environmental history approach to travel writings about about tropical South America. Partly in response to modernist denunciations of the "green hell" of tropical South America, some recent scholars have argued that 19th-Century travelers to Amazonia and the costal forests were either looking for, or actually found, a "paradise" or "eden." Traveling to find a new "eden" or "paradise" are familiar travel motifs. However, these claims do not really fit the major works of 19th-century British scientific travel writing, including Charles Waterton's Wanderings in South America (1825), Charles Darwin's Beagle narratives, Alfred Russell Wallace's Travels on the Amazon & Rio Negro (1853), and Henry Walter Bates' The Naturalist on the River Amazonas (1863). My discussion places the travelers to South America in the context of the explicitly anti-edenic arguments of the biogeographers, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Lyell. Critiques of pure paradisal nature from Cultural Studies, including Donna Hawaway's critique in "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," gain indirect support from the 19th-century travelers, who argued that the Garden of Eden and Adam's naming of the species in paradise were "zoologically impossible."
This presentation will use slides.
The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and
employer.
© Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997.