Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the ways in which thinkers of the Iberian and Latin American Enlightenment engaged with the eighteenth-century Northern European representation of America as a world of nature deprived of culture and of Amerindians as beings arrested in the earliest stages of human development.

Paper long abstract:

In the eighteenth century, Amerindians' supposed failure to overcome the state of savagery was a primary object of inquiry among many Enlightenment thinkers. Three explanations for this failure were particularly influential in both Europe and the Americas: those of Buffon, Montesquieu and De Pauw. Whereas Buffon relied on America's geological youth and Amerindians' recent migration to the continent to account for their savagery, Montesquieu attributed the savagery of Amerindian life to the richness and fruitfulness of America's nature. In contrast, De Pauw argued that the native inhabitants of America were as ancient and degenerated as their continent, whose unhealthy environment exercised an ubiquitous corruptive influence on the human body. Either fruitful or bare, young or degenerate, America, for these thinkers, was a world of nature, devoid of culture and overall unfit for civilisation. In this paper I analyse how influential Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American intellectuals of the period engaged with these three paradigmatic positions, through their interconnected representations of the Amerindian body, the Iberian conquest and colonialism in which ideas of nature, culture, civilisation and degeneration were intertwined. Ultimately, this paper aims to shed new light on the specific ways in which intellectuals of the Iberian world both challenged and reinforced the enlightened idea of Amerindians as primitive beings and of America as a continent whose history was yet to begin.