Missionary hydrography and the invention of early modern Amazonia

Bibliographic Data

ID12413795
AuthorsRoberto Chauca (0000-0002-0424-8578, University of Florida, Gainesville, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume27
Issue2
Pages203-225
Publication date2018-04-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueColonial Latin American Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1060-9164 • E-ISSN: 1466-1802
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10609164.2018.1481272
OpenAlexW2888723323
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

Amazonia became an important laboratory of inquiry and evangelization for Franciscans and Jesuits in the early modern Spanish Empire. The missionary endeavours depended upon knowledge friars acquired and produced about the rivers, landscapes, and societies of their new home in the tropical lowlands of South America. Friars were particularly interested in finding and naming the axis of this new territory. ‘Amazonas,’ however, became an untameable fluvial entity that defied unitary conceptualization. Whereas the sixteenth-century concept of the river revolved around the dimensions of its estuary, seventeenth-century missionaries focused on length, volume, and headwaters to define Amazonia. The attempts to define the river produced a dispute between the two religious orders and indeed within each group, as Franciscans and Jesuits sought to make their ‘Amazonas’ normative. The present study explores this debate and asserts that hydrography became a language of authority and contention among early modern missionaries of Amazonia

Amazon rainforest · Ancient history · Cartography · Conceptualization · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Hydrography · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · History of Colonial Brazil · Philosophy · Ecology

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