Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the visual culture of natural history in the eighteenth century and its connection to European colonialism. In the second half of the century, Spain sponsored almost thirty scientific expeditions to its colonies, eight of which focused specifically on natural history. The almost 10,000 images produced by the Spanish expeditions, far from being mere ornamental byproducts of natural history investigation, were central to the project. Expeditions constituted visualization projects that enabled naturalists to identify, translate, transport, and appropriate nature.

Natural history, I argue, was an overwhelmingly visual discipline whose notion of sight went beyond the physiological act of seeing to involve acts of expert viewing that required training and specialized practices of observation and representation--not sight, but insight. This visual culture of science was very much a material one linking vision to images, drawn or engraved, and to specimens in collections. Furthermore, the act of viewing nature was inextricably linked to colonialism, as visual culture allowed Europeans to identify, translate, transport, and appropriate foreign natures. The visual culture of nature can not be divorced from its colonial exploitation. More than mere representations, images acted as visual avatars replacing objects that did not survive travel and would otherwise remain unseen and unknown by Europeans. Images defined nature as a series of transportable objects whose identity and importance was divorced from the environment where they grew or the culture of its inhabitants. Pictures were used to reject the local as contingent, subjective, and translatable, favoring instead the dislocated global as objective, truthful, and permanent. In the Spanish Americas, however, hybrid scientific and artistic traditions emerged, presenting alternatives that contested and reappropriated nature from this European uniforming vision.

The dissertation discusses, among other topics, the status and uses of images in eighteenth-century natural history; the importance of visual material in training the expert eyes and skilled hands of naturalists, artists, and collectors; the role of print culture in establishing a common vocabulary of scientific illustration, and the ways in which colonial naturalists and artists appropriated and transformed European models, producing hybrid, local representations.