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On the Origins of Ecocide: the Thayer Expedition (1865-1866) and the Amazon River Basin's colonization

Ana Laura Malmaceda will present the next session of the medialab seminar. Her analysis will focus on the cultural origins of ethnocide and ecocide within nineteenth-century scientific practices, tracing the history of the naturalist Louis Agassiz's voyage.

Event, Research Seminar

salle Goguel, 56 rue des saint pères, 75007 Paris

Abstract

Guided by the question of the origins of life, Swiss-American Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was the most prestigious naturalist in the U.S. when he landed in Brazil in 1865. By analyzing the Amazon River Basin fish geographical distribution, he aimed to find proof against the radical propositions of Charles Darwin's species transmutation theory, a threat to his scientific legacy and white supremacist beliefs. Supported by banker Nathaniel Thayer, the U.S. government, Harvard University, and the Brazilian Empire, he gathered a fifteen-people crew–which included in its volunteers William James, and Radcliffe College's first president, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the naturalist's wife and writer of their travelogue "A Journey in Brazil" (1869). For over a year, they traveled from Rio de Janeiro to the depths of the Amazon River basin, collecting 76,000 plants and animal specimens, Indigenous artifacts, and demeaning nude photos of Indigenous, mestizo, and African subjects to be used for comparative anatomy studies about the dangers of racial mixing. Upon concluding the expedition, Agassiz received a letter from his new friend, Emperor D. Pedro II of Brazil (1825-1891), announcing the long-awaited opening of the Brazilian Amazon to international commerce—a policy that would facilitate exploitation, and potentialize Indigenous genocide inside the world's largest rainforest.

In this presentation, Ana Laura Malmaceda presents the history of the expedition, its political conflicts, and its scientific practices. In a reflection on imperial science ecologies, the presentation traces an intellectual history of the Agassiz's journey, seeking, instead of the origin of species, to think about the cultural origins of ethnocide and ecocide within nineteenth-century scientific practices. The relationships between knowledge practices, colonial ecologies, and the responses of indigenous intellectuals entering academia form the pillars of this study.

Biography

Ana Laura Malmaceda is a writer, researcher, and media artist. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Languages at Harvard University, where she studies ecological thinking and the environmental history of the Amazon River basin through the Thayer Expedition’s archives (1865–1866). At the medialab, she works on knowledge circulation between 19th-century naturalists and the relationship between gender, nature, and colonialism in their scientific practices. She is writing the first chapter of her thesis, a portrait of archaeological practices in the mid-19th century at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Ana Laura is also finishing the editing and post-production of her first documentary, VEROPA, a visual ethnography on the Ver-o-Peso market in Belém do Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon.

Practical information

This seminar will take place in person and in english, on Tuesday, March 25th, from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, in room Goguel, 56 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris.

Registration is mandatory via this link.