From subject to agent. American nature in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo

Abstract

Summary of the Natural History of the Indies (1526) by Fernández de Oviedo is not a colonialist text in the same sense as his later works, General History of the Indies and the Monserrate Manuscript. It does not contain the units of a devalorising colonial discourse that would come to govern colonial writing and cultural and political impositions upon subjugated peoples. This early «Indian» work of 1526 does not yet assume the form of a discourse that distinguishes, classifies, and orders—what Claude Lévi-Strauss termed a displaced and distanced form of knowledge, that is, non-indexical, non-proximate, and, ultimately, purely symbolic. An analysis of the rewritings across these texts demonstrates that the three works are oriented from ideologically and politically distinct positions. In the Summary, the celebration of nature, curiosity about diversity, and the recognition of agency among Indigenous men and women enable the development of rich descriptions of the natural world of the Indies and its inhabitants, as well as their interrelatedness, and their recognition as subjects of action and knowledge