Session Abstract

Following the conference’s theme on the stories of people’s lives in unique places, this panel brings together historians working on different regions of Latin America during the late colonial and early national periods, where individuals struggled to cope with natural phenomena, from weather to disease.  To understand these environmental conditions better, some people inquired into indigenous knowledge about the environment, while others sought explanations from the new enlightenment sciences.  These inquiries were made for differing purposes, such as needing to remain in places wracked by hurricanes, wanting to expand agricultural production, or wishing to treat patients suffering from tropical diseases.  At issue for these scholars is how human actors perceived their surroundings and what meanings they gave to natural conditions in order to manage them successfully.  Taken together, these disparate examples shed light on the varied ways people, at the individual and state levels, responded to the challenges of their natural environments and how their actions related to broader political and economic goals.  Latin America covers a vast geographic area, with uniquely diverse habitats, but it is nonetheless conceived as a distinct region, joined by social and cultural similarities and a common colonial history.  The session, overall, explores these commonalities through a kind of ecological lens, focusing on people’s interactions with their environment.