Chapter Ⅱ: Transatlantic Views of Nature

摘要

The European encounter with America led to an intellectual confrontation within the field of both the natural history and the ethnography of the New World ; the task was to incorporate the new information into history and into the established schemes of knowledge, as well as to define its links with the old continent2. At a time when American colonists were starting to search for self-identification, a process that was to lead to political independence, this also had implications for their views of and attitudes towards nature. Thus the scientific study of nature and man's relation to it on both sides of the Atlantic was also influenced by interests and factors other than purely scientific ones, such as political or religious convictions, Eurocentric beliefs or nationalist considerations. It also depended on the type and reliability of the information to which one had access, and finally on whether nature was seen from an Old or New World perspective.