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Exotic science and domestic exoticism: Theodore Roosevelt and J. A. Leite Moraes in Amazonia

2009; UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA CATARINA; Issue: 57 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5007/2175-8026.2009n57p59

2175-8026

Renata Wasserman,

History of Science and Natural History

This is a tale of two accounts of Amazonia, one by an American ex-president and one by the appointed governor of a Brazilian province.How do they confront one of the great "exotic" spaces in the world?How do they tell their tales?How do their accounts work?In 1912, after losing his third-party bid for reelection as President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt found himself co-directing the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, whose aim was to gather specimens of Amazonian fauna for the Museum of Natural History in New York and explore the River of Doubt, whose headwaters Cândido Rondon, a Brazilian army engineer, had discovered on an earlier expedition.Every day, even under the most trying circumstances, Roosevelt wrote up an account of events, which he was to publish at Scribner's, and which he eventually published as Through the Brazilian Wilderness, in 1914.The book documents diverging and intersecting ideological assumptions of the American and Brazilian members of the expedition, organizational shortcomings and triumphs, marvels of will power and endurance as well as of baseness, and the complex