Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Colonial Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog's Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo

1993; Duke University Press; Issue: 60 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/488669

1558-1462

Lutz Koepnick,

In his New Science (1744) Giambattista Vico invoked the dense forests of prehistory to narrate a curious myth about the origins of Western civilization. In Vico's allegory, the Tale of the Giants, civilization began when the prehistoric monsters cleared the amorphous chaos of the primeval forest and took up residence in a clearing. Since Western civilization has, in fact, from the time of the last arctic freeze literally cleared its space in the midst of the forest,' Vico's tale renders the clearing as the site from which all human institutions originated. It was only by cutting the trees that the giants could establish religious belief systems because open spaces permitted undistorted gazes at the heavens