Changing Depths in Latin America

Extract

One hundred years ago Alexander von Humboldt died at the age of 90, loaded with honors earned by his breadth and brilliance as an explorer, a scientist, a writer, and a liberal thinker about certain aspects of human relations. But it was 55 years before, in 1804, that he returned from his famed five-year “Voyage to the Equinoxial Regions of the New Continent”. In the last 155 years many changes have taken place in Latin America as a whole and in those parts of it which he visited. This paper will mention a few of them which pose problems for presentday students of human affairs in the area, and will also offer a small selection of facts that seem to bear on these problems.

Humboldt represented an era of ambidextrous or multidextrous natural scientists who visited Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and who were able to collect reliable data and to make more than casual travellers’ observations on a broad range of phenomena that are now divided among a series of more or less mutually-exclusive disciplines. Despite the breadth of his interests, however, Humboldt added little to the systematic store of knowledge concerning the ethnography or ethnology of the living native peoples of the regions through which he travelled.