The Science of Useful Nature in Central America

Reviewed by: The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838 by Sophie Brockmann Miruna Achim (bio) The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838 By Sophie Brockmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 267. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Guatemala's administrators and elites characterized their kingdom as a "paradox": at once poor and rich, sitting on the ruins of the long-extinguished civilization of Palenque, yet unable to translate past glories into future prosperity. Geopolitically, it occupied a peripheral space between the powerful viceroyalties of New Spain and New Granada, just as its commercial and intellectual elites sought to carve out a more central and connected space in wider networks of goods and knowledge. Sophie Brockmann's The Sciences of Useful Nature in Central America, spanning the period from the first antiquarian expeditions to Palenque in the 1780s to the dismemberment of the Central American Republic in 1838, explores the production of natural knowledge as the basis of reforms that would fulfill the region's potential. Brockmann starts with the bureaucratic dispositives: the reports, inventories, and surveys articulating the investigation and writing about the ruins of Palenque at the heart of questions about the emergence and disappearance of civilizations, the origin of American peoples, and the relationship between nature and culture (people presumed Palenque was [End Page 570] destroyed by volcanic eruptions). In the 1790s, the channels for gathering, making, exchanging, and publishing knowledge about the natural and social worlds expanded considerably, beyond officially sponsored and administered conduits, in tandem with the emergence of a small public sphere. The Sociedad Económica and Gazeta de Guatemala were the main motors of these changes—in the same way periodicals and economic societies in other Spanish American viceroyalties proved instrumental in organizing information networks, including parish priests, merchants, and agriculturists (ch. 2). Knowledge-making, as Brockmann shows again and again, was not an end in itself, but had a practical purpose. It responded to a keen interest in testing universal systems of classification such as Linnaean taxonomies, confronting them with local experiments in nature. Debates on the adaptation of the plantain, indigo, and silkworms to Guatemala's specific ecologies argued for the viability of import substitution and for agricultural reform (ch. 3). Landscape, a multilayered concept encompassing human-made and natural space, was the most contested object of reform, as bureaucrats, engineers, and farmers sought to improve both nature and society (ch. 4, 5). Guatemala's reformers developed landscapes through draining and deforestation, making rivers such as the Motagua navigable, building roads, taming "unused" land belonging to indigenous communities with different property and value systems, and transforming indigenous farmers into day laborers. They also promoted settlement by European colonists, once this became possible after independence in 1821. The resulting production of geographic and cartographic materials continued to inform the reading of Guatemalan landscapes and justified large scale projects and infrastructure development well into the mid-1800s (ch. 6). Indeed, as Brockmann shows, independence and the later dissolution of the Central American Republic into various nation states did not mark an absolute break with late-colonial forms of knowledge-making: the same objects of study, archives, and sometimes even the same people ensured continuity between two periods that historiography has tended to treat as incommensurable. Brockmann's work is organized around topics that have been informing scholarship on the late colonial period in other parts of Spanish America: the tension between situated knowledge and universal systems of classification; the construction of networks for circulating objects and knowledge about them; the practical enlightenment of late-colonial Spanish America; and the asymmetric relations between colony and metropolis (see, on New Granada, M. Nieto, Remedios para el Imperio and Orden natural y orden social; on Peru, E. Berquist, The Bishop's Utopia; on Central America, M. Few, For All Humanity; on New Spain, P. Ramírez, Enlightened Immunity; as well as recent anthologies, such as D. Bleichmar, P. de Vos, and K. Huffine, Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, and M. Crawford and J. M. Gabriel, Drugs on the Page). Brockmann contributes an impressive [End Page 571] wealth

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