Dr. Karl W. Butzer: Recipient of 2002 Preston E

Dr. Karl W. Butzer: Recipient of 2002 Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award

Karl H. Offen

Journal of Latin American Geography, Volume 2, Number 1, 2003, pp. 125-127 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lag.2004.0011

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/174025

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] 125 Dr. Karl W. Butzer: Recipient of 2002 Preston E. James Eminent Latin Americanist Career Award

Karl Offen

with the life and career of Professor Butzer.2 The rise of Nazism coincided with Karl’s birth in Rhineland, Germany in 1934, and inspired his Catholic family to flee the country. The trauma of mi- gration, family separation, persecution in England, incidents of prejudice in Canada, and an uncertain fate of family members left behind, are all experiences that have influenced Karl’s outlook on life as well as his contemporary teaching and research agenda. After finishing his Master’s degree in Meteorology at McGill University, Karl returned to Ger- many and completed a doctorate in Physical Geography at the University of Bonn in 1957. As if finishing a doctor- In 1984, when Karl Butzer left the ate by the age of 23 was not enough, University of Chicago to take an en- Karl celebrated his graduation by pub- dowed Chair position at the University lishing six articles in that same year. of Texas at Austin, he was one of the The pace of research has hardly slowed world’s pre-eminent historical cultural since, as some 12 monographs and 240 ecologists working in the Old World. odd articles and book chapters surely The academic move facilitated a new re- attest. search agenda: the study of the impact The multidisciplinary influence of of Spain on Mexico. Traveling to Karl’s work can be gauged by the Mexico for the first time in the Fall of honors he has accrued over the last four 1985, Karl could see that he had made an decades. These include accolades from exciting decision. Word has it that by the the Royal Geographical Society, the time Karl saw the Cathedral and plaza in Society for American Archaeology, the Querétaro he was completely hooked. Geological Society of America, the Ar- The rest is history and, of course, a chaeological Institute of America, and whole lot of geography that runs the many others. Karl is also a Fellow of gamut from Holocene climatic change, the Guggenheim Foundation (1976), landscape reconstruction and biological American Academy of Arts and transfer, to cultural adaptation, religious Sciences (1984), the American syncretism and cross-cultural cartogra- Geographical Society (1985), and the phies. Without question Karl’s research National Academy of Sciences (1996). in Mexico over the last 18 years has and In 1997, Karl won CLAG’s Carl O. continues to influence renowned stal- Sauer award and, in 1999, the Cultural warts and fledgling students alike. Ecology Specialty Group gave Karl its By now most geographers are familiar Robert McC. Netting award.

Journal of Latin American Geography, 2(1), 2003 126 Journal of Latin American Geography Karl’s field and multidisciplinary Karl has been involved in two major research experiences outside the research projects in Mexico and innu- Americas underscore his contributions merable smaller ones throughout His- to the geography of Latin America. panic America. The smaller projects, Before turning his attention to the New some of which are known only as lec- World, Karl carried out major field tures or as manuscripts accompanying projects in Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Kenya, CLAG field trip guide books, include the South Africa, Spain, and Ethiopia— bi-cultural artistry and spatial-temporal where he was the early director of the narratives embedded in the maps of the team that discovered “Lucy.” To be sure Relaciones Geográficas, and the diffusion of Karl does not consider himself church architectural styles—particularly exclusively “a Latin Americanist,” but how churches embody old and new be- sees his work there as part of an lief systems that serve as expressions of ongoing project to examine human- ethnic identity. environmental relations, particularly in Karl’s primary research, on the other arid and semi-arid environments. Most hand, has sought to track the introduc- recently, Karl has also been working in tion and cultural adaptation of Iberian Australia, Turkey and Nova Scotia, and agrosystems to unfamiliar environments he has been lately recalled to Egypt by on the frontiers of colonial New Spain, scholars seeking his expertise. and to see how these systems interacted Thirty years of research experience in with indigenous land uses in ways that the Old World gave Karl’s work in Latin led to environmental change. By chasing America a unique scholarly and personal down the origin of Spanish immigrants temperament. These dispositions would and hence the agrosystems they brought include Karl’s insistence on ignoring dis- with them, Karl offered a fresh perspec- ciplinary boundaries; a passion for field tive on how people managed livestock in work; a penchant for synthesis; astute the Americas. By choosing to examine observational skills; a constant dialogue areas outside the Mesoamerican agricul- with comparative places and experiences; tural sphere and marginal to the colonial a preference for local knowledge; atten- enterprise, Karl was better able to recon- tion to inter and intra-regional differ- struct the regional environment before ences; and finally, a preference for and after the conquest. Working closely nuanced arguments that raise new ques- with Elisabeth in the Bajío region of tions rather than rush to closure. Still, if central Mexico, the Butzers parsed I am not mistaken, it is Karl’s research in 40,000 manuscript pages of Spanish the Sierra de Espadán of Valencia, Spain land grants and compared them with from 1980 to 1987, and the intellectual field reconnaissance to map out and contributions of his life-long partner reconstruct the who, what and where of and most important collaborator, natural and cultural landscapes of Elisabeth Butzer, that solidified the eth- Central Mexico in the 16th century. This nographic-field-archival nexus that monumental achievement in both style would become the Butzer hallmark in and method profoundly influenced Latin America. several Geography Ph.D.s completed at Karl’s collected works on Latin the University of Texas during the America have built upon but 1990s. significantly modified several research The vibrancy of Karl’s research re- traditions within Latin American quires perpetual movement and change. geography. These include concerns with Just as Karl established himself as a cul- diffusion, material culture, demography, tural and environmental historian of and environmental change. But Karl has central Mexico, he promptly directed his never been one to accept authority at research toward examining environmen- face value, and in this sense one could tal change in the late Quaternary near view his entire work in Mexico as a the border of the Durango and Coahuila challenge to conventional wisdom. states in north-central Mexico. If Awards 127 memory serves, departmental field trips students, from geomorphologists and introduced Karl to wetland deposits in archaeologists to those of art and La Laguna de Mayran, and a visit to a history. Six of the 11 Ph.D.s that Karl family friend in Bustamante, Nuevo has supervised since coming to the León, sparked Elisabeth’s interest in the University of Texas have been on Latin 17th century settlement of Tlaxcala Indi- American topics, and he has had a ans in the region. The subsequent weighty influence on numerous Latin Laguna Project involved four of Karl’s Americanist graduate students former doctoral students and set out to supervised by other UT faculty. There examine if past environments were as is little question that those of us who dry and bleak as they are today. Research took Karl’s seminars teach our courses involved reconstructing the alluvial on Latin America differently than we record in the Rio Nazas watershed, as would have otherwise. well as pollen sequences and ostracod For all these reasons and many analyses from several playa environ- more, I am proud to announce that the ments. Much of this work remains to be Conference of Latin Americanist Geog- published, but preliminary findings raphers has awarded Karl W. Butzer, spelled out at our last CLAG meeting in Raymond C. Dickson Centennial Pro- Austin and a subsequent CLAG field trip fessor of Liberal Arts in the to the region, suggest that the last 10,000 Department of Geography at The years have witnessed much greater ex- University of Texas at Austin, the 2002 tremes of wet and dry conditions than Preston E. James Eminent Latin one sees today, and that characteristic Americanist Career Award. Felicidades! gullies of the contemporary landscapes were created in the pre-Hispanic period and unrelated to human activity. Com- bined, the corpus of the Butzers’s research in Mexico forces us to view environmental change and contemporary landscapes in a much longer per- spective. Overall, their work suggests a re-evaluation of the orthodoxy of environmental devastation associated with the Columbian Exchange. Perhaps Karl’s greatest influence on Latin American geography has been ac- complished in the classroom. Always packed to capacity, and perpetually re- worked, Karl’s seminars are cerebral marathons of inspiring breadth and complexity that challenge students to understand cultural adaptation and change as a quintessentially social process of negotiation. Despite his own proclivities toward physical geography, Karl is well versed in the ebbs and flows of social theory debates. Once, after giving an impassioned account of Aztec community life, a student claimed “that Foucault had said exactly the same thing.” Barely raising an eyebrow, Karl said something to the effect of “why are you surprised?” His intellectual influences have touched a wide range of