Da paisagem ao corpo : raça, civilização e medicina psicossomática em narrativas de viagens

Abstract

Since comparison of the travel books by Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius (1794-1868), we propose to analyze a transformation in the conceptual patterns of analysis of the body and society. The concept of breed translated a phenomenon of human variety to both naturalists. However, there is a scission in the way of getting significance to the body that separates the work of Martius from the narrative of travelling by the Prussian naturalist. In the anthropological riddle of Blumenbach and Humboldt, medical and physiological knowledge coexisted with cultural, intellectual and behavioural descriptions; but they were always maintained in different fields of knowledge. By effect, breed didn‘t explained human behavior and the political, social and cultural variety from a point to another in the globe. The rhetoric of European superiority was precisely in the idea of an Ocidental civilization, inheritor of the Classic Antiquity; but, accessible to all humanity. Martius has connected body and spirit through psychosomatic medicine theory and animal magnetism. It is possible to see in Martius a breed characteristic based in a physiological principle. In this principle, organic specificities interweave of depth of breed instincts to the surface of ―cultural‖, ―psychological‖ and social phenomenon described by naturalist in his works and essays of anthropological profile. The concept of breed from the Bavarian naturalist has a physiological element to the comprehension of the human behavior which is nonexistent in the works of the author of Essay on the Geography of Plants (1805).