Humboldt's Mexican Texts and Landscapes

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4490466
AutoresAndrew Sluyter (0000-0002-1509-0681, Louisiana State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen96
Número3
Páginas361-381
Fecha de publicación2006-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGeographical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006.tb00256.x
OpenAlexW2162547358
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas37

While in New Spain from 1803 to 1804, Alexander von Humboldt interacted with some of its landscapes and the texts that represented them. Analysis of those interactions regarding the Basin of Mexico and the Gulf lowlands demonstrates what purely text‐based studies of the production of places cannot: The contrasting landscape elements and patterns that had emerged over millennia during precolonial times in those two places, their relative degrees of depopulation during the colonial era, and the relative degrees of rigor Humboldt applied to interacting with the resulting landscapes and the texts that represented them greatly affected his representations of those places in his 1811 Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle‐Espagne. His representations of the precolonial Basin of Mexico as productively developed and of the precolonial Gulf lowlands as pristine have influenced the transformations of those places in the two centuries after New Spain became the Mexican republic through its wars of independence (1810–1821

Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · Independence (probability theory · Structural basin · Alexander von Humboldt Studies · Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond · Geology · History · Landscape and Cultural Studies · Paleontology