Scientific findings of Alexander von Humboldt's expedition into the Spanish-American Tropics (1799-1804) from a geographical point of view

Abstract

Alexander von Humboldt's expedition from 1799 till 1804 to the "equinoctial regions of the new world" led through Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico. In Europe an increased knowledge of the "New World" was connected with the privately funded journey, which served purely scientific purposes and had nothing to do with the exploration and exploitation of natural resources. Besides the research results, which were based on new measuring methods and the quantitative ascertainment of scientific basics, the journey also made possible detailed descriptions in matters of regional studies including social, socio-economic, political, and economic-geographic circumstances, which were based on empirical field studies. The expedition took place shortly before the political change in Latin America. Humboldt, who still experienced the feudal character of global economy based on slave labor in the colonies, vehemently criticized this economic structure -although he was a noble -and its unbearable social conditions. This is the reason why Humboldt is still admired in Latin America till this day. In Europe the scientific insights of his journey to the tropics and his innovative impulses in geog raphy as well as in many other disciplines brought him fame and lasting recognition as a universal scholar, who had crucial influence on the development of the sciences during the first half of the 19 th century.

Influence of biological and social‐historical variables on the time taken to describe an angiosperm

“…In chronological order, with numbers of species types or oldest syntypes in parentheses, these were Alexander von Humboldt (9), Carl Friederich von Martius (15), Joseph Emmanuel Pohl (9), Friederich Sellow (16), Ludwig Riedel (8), William Burchell (7), Georg Blanchet (4), George Gardner (10), Richard Spruce (4), Ernst Heinrich Georg Ule (7), Antoine Marie François Glaziou (4), Gerdt Hatschbach (4), and Howard Irwin (16). Th ree collectors (Humboldt, Blanchet, and Spruce) never set foot within the Cerrado biodiversity hotspot ( Kohlhepp, 2005 ;von Martius et al, 1904 ) but collected species that occur within its boundaries; only one collector (Hatschbach) was born in Brazil.…”

A Geografia De Alexander Von Humboldt: Diálogos Entre Arte E Complexidade

“…Nos estudos ambientais, Humboldt foi um dos primeiros cientistas a pensar o ritmo das variações climáticas e, sobretudo quanto à alteração desse ritmo em função da escala de observação (micro ou macroescala) e da ação antrópica, como foi o caso do estudo dos Páramos, um tipo peculiar de vegetação que ocorre numa faixa entre a Venezuela e o Equador (ROMARIZ, 1996). E tudo isso municiado de ferramentas e conceitos que ele próprio construiu como a utilização das isolinhas e da teoria da variação têmporo-espacial do clima nas quatro dimensões (latitude, longitude, altitude, tempo), e não apenas nas três dimensões espaciais como disse recentemente o pesquisador alemão Kohlhepp (2005).…”

French Tropical Geographies: Editors' Introduction

“…Tropicality has been viewed as a potent example of the Western propensity to demean and dominate the other by arrogating to itself the power to define what counts as right, normal and true (and what does not). For when it came to pronouncing on the nature of the tropical world -on its superfluity, or insalubrity, or pathogenicity, or elegiac pathos, as Alexander von Humboldt (see Kohlhepp, 2005), Pierre Gourou (1947a), Patrick Manson (see Arnold, 1996b) and Claude Levi-Strauss (1955) famously did -it was the Western explorer/scientist/scholar creating and deploying the knowledge categories, and doing so on the presumption that the Westerner had every right to speak and write ex cathedra on behalf of "tropical" peoples (who, it was further assumed, could not adequately represent themselves or solve their own "problems"). As Clifford Geertz (1988:48) comments, on Levi-Strauss's famous tropical travelogue Tristes Tropiques, an alien environment is captured in a "self-sealing" discourse, with the novelty, variety, patterns and rhythms of the tropics rendered as "oppositions, inversions, and isomorphisms" through a process of "abstracted selfcontainment" -or, what Said (2003:50), with reference to Orientalism, described as "a complex process of knowledgeable manipulation".…”