Natural Histories
chapter 1 Natural Histories “The action of the first human being in this golden age—wrote Linnaeus in a paraphrase of the Biblical story of creation—was the inspection of the crea- tures and the imposition of the names of the species according to genera”.1 The naming of creatures was also very much in the mind of the eighteenth-century Jesuit historian Pedro Lozano (1697–1752). In his Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco (Madrid, 1733), while describing the animals of that land, Lozano enumerated seven species of bees: yamacuá or mongrel bee, yalamacuá or moromoro bee, aneacuá or small black bee, and so on.2 Unlike Linnaeus, whose biological systematics was indissolubly tied to Latin, Lozano classified the bees using their aboriginal names and the implicit native taxonomy.3 He took those names from the vocabulary of the tongue of the Lules written by the Jesuit Antonio Machoni (or Macioni, 1672–1753), who in 1711 founded the reduction of San Esteban de Miraflores for this people from the eastern Andean valleys. As a procurator of the province of Paraquaria in Madrid and Rome, Father Machoni published his Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Lule y Tonocoté and also saw through the press Lozano’s Chorographic Description, the earliest example of the kind of natural history written by Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria.4 1 Linnaeus, Systema naturae, 12th ed. (Stockholm: Salvius, 1766), 1:13. 2 Pedro Lozano, Descripción corográfica del Gran Chaco Gualamba, ed. Radamés Altieri (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Instituto de Antropología, 1941), 46. Unless when a translated edition is mentioned, all translations are mine.
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