This essay provides an interpretation of Antonio León Pinelo's ideas on natural history and anthropogenic environmental change. It is centered on Pinelo's El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo, a midseventeenth-century work that combines narratives regarding the geographical location of the Garden of Eden with theories on the natural history of the Indies. Building on studies that examine narratives on environmental change in the context of European expansion, this article intervenes in a growing academic literature that explores how societies have debated the political imbalances of climate change since the early modern period. In doing so, it highlights the importance of recognizing how discourses on climate and environmental change are forged through evolving conceptions of historical agency. Thus, the article examines Pinelo's work as part of a broader corpus of narratives identifying humaninitiated socio-ecological change linked to European colonial expansion. It reveals how writing about anthropogenic environmental-making processes implies generating the historical agent that has the authority to discipline and transform the environment. Here, it shows how Pinelo's work minimizes Indigenous capacities to master the environment by subordinating their historical agency to the history of Nature. Ultimately, the article argues that writing about anthropogenic environmental-making processes reflects specific dynamics of domination that historians grappled with as they negotiated the political terms of Western ecological imperialism.
drawn from oral reports, accounts written originally in Spanish, and translations from Portuguese and Chinese sources. The codex contains seventy-five color drawings of the inhabitants of the Ladrones (the present-day Mariana Islands), the Philippines, Java, the Moluccas, and China; eighty-eight smaller drawings of birds, animals, and mythological creatures; and a double-fold drawing depicting a Spanish ship surrounded by the small canoes of the native inhabitants of the Ladrones Islands. As observed by George Souza and Jeffrey Turley in their edition of the codex, the manuscript volume is quarto in size, employs Chinese paper, and is written in a simplified Procesal-style script with italic humanist influences. 2 Although the majority of the twentytwo sections in the codex are anonymous, five are of known authorship, one of these being Martín de Rada's account of his voyage to China in 1575. Apart from a Chinese bestiary and sections with blank pages, the volume's drawings precede their associated texts. In four instances, the text refers explicitly to the illustrations, which suggests that one of the anonymous authors may have been responsible for the compilation of materials and that the images were commissioned to accompany the text. 3 Because of the objective nature of descriptions and the lack of any apparent missionary zeal in their content, Boxer and subsequent examiners of the codex concluded that the author of the first account describing the Ladrones Islands was not a member of a religious order, but most likely a layperson. Boxer further argued that the codex was likely commissioned by Gomez Perez Dasmarinas, governor of the Philippines from about 1590 to 1593, and his son and successor, Luis Pérez Dasmariñas, who governed between 1593 and 1603. In their 2016 edition of the codex, Souza and Turley proposed another possible patron: Antonio de Morga, a Spanish lawyer and highranking official in the Philippines from 1594 to 1604 as well as the author of the Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609), one of the most important works on the early history of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines. 4
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.