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Naming Difference: The Politics of Naming in Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2003

Jesús Carrillo Castillo
Jesús Carrillo Castillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
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Abstract

Argument

This paper addresses the complex process of inscribing the names of the American natural world – both the natural species and the territories – in the records of the Spanish Empire as undertaken by its official chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557). Fernandez de Oviedo's ambitious attempt to identify all natural phenomena in the Historia general y natural de las Indias provides a very clear instance of the parallel developments of science and imperial discourse in the Early Modern period. As we shall see, however, Fernández de Oviedo's point of view in this regard was by no means the same as the point of view developed in Spain by the imperial administration; on the contrary, Fernandez de Oviedo's criteria for identifying and naming reveal an effort to displace any external assumption and prejudice and call for a distinctly local view of American reality. In Fernández de Oviedo's text, the traditional notions of identity and difference as well as the relative positions of center and periphery were put into question in order to propose new ways to frame and control reality in an expanding world.

Type
Articles
Information
Science in Context , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 489 - 504
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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