Discovering nature, rediscovering the self: natural historians and the landscapes of Argentina

Focusing on a small group of natural historians working in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I argue that the relations between travellers and their fieldsites are particular, complex, and multivalent. In opposition to the suggestion that the writings of all EuroAmerican travellers during the ʹAge of Empireʹ were determined only by a single, superior, and colonising representational economy, I assert that encounters with foreign lands were as important in the formation of travellersʹ ideas as the theories and preconceptions brought with them from Europe. Although it is argued that the more bombastic rhetoric of the travel texts of European, and particularly British, travellers in Argentina were in part influenced by British financial and technological dominance in Argentina in the 19th century, the importance of other sources of inspiration are also drawn, including the landscapes and natures of Argentina themselves. Focusing particularly on the writings of William Henry Hudson, the prominent Victorian natural historian, the paper lays out the significance of the Patagonian landscape in the development and vindication of his ideas about nature and the human self -- summarised in Hudsonʹs theory of ʹanimismʹ. Hudsonʹs combination of Darwinian and eugenicist theories of evolution with Argentine-government-inspired ideas of social development are also noted. In conclusion I argue both for the need to pay attention to the sociocultural and historical processes that engender discourses on particular places and natures, as well as the importance of acknowledging dispersion and multivalence within such discursive formations.