Uma relação conturbada: interpretações da natureza americana

Abstract

There are certain words that mediate the relations between man and the natural world. Words, concepts, meanings that appear as a consequence of successive and historical ways of interpreting nature, but that also give the symbolic tools to understand, imagine and transform what we know as “nature” Verbs such as preserve, explore, classify, aesthetic categories  such as sublime or picturesque, concepts like bio-politics or biodiversity, among   many others. In this essay we intend to analyze the perceptions of Latin American nature, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the present, trying to delineate the troublesome relationships between the elements that form the natural world and the words, that invent, define and classify the kingdom of the visible