Porous territories: natural heritage and cultural heritage, perspectives from travel literature and the Latin American essay

Abstract

This article studies the issue of borders between natural patrimony and cultural patrimony by reading the Amazonian writings of Euclides da Cunha. During 1904 and 1905, when the world economy experienced a rubber boom, da Cunha was commissioned by Baron of Rio Branco—Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs—to make a report due to the territorial dispute between Brazil and Peru over the Amazonian region. Da Cunha’s travel chronicles express a hybrid type of speech where, along a scientific interest, emerges a biopolitical agenda that includes considerations on the Amazonian population and an inventory of species observed as commodities. Da Cunha’s texts let us recognize the traffic between neighboring conceptual territories: nature and culture, literature and governmentality.