‘In Abraham's Bosom’. Evolution and orientalism in the letters of a Dutch naturalist in Argentina

This article proposes an exercise in conceptual imagination. Based on the letters of the Argentine-Dutch naturalist Hendrik Weyenbergh, analysed for the first time as a whole, it attempts to reconstruct the connections between two ways of imagining American alterity: orientalism and evolutionism. Both concepts are broad and have been extensively studied from different academic traditions. This work seeks to understand them not in abstract terms, but as categories that operated in the imagination and work of a specific person, allowing him to order a world in which he acted simultaneously as a foreigner and as part of a powerful movement of Nation-State building through the institutionalization of a science ‘à l'européenne’. The Letters of a Dutchman Abroad present a series of narratives and problems through which the author reflects on American nature, the relationship between natural selection and social progress, and the various forms of degradation, physical and spiritual, that threaten Europeans and Americans, as well as animals and plants. This sui generis reconstruction concerning two of the era’s great themes invites us to explore a foreign and yet deeply situated point of view, which highlights the paradoxes of building ‘civilization’ in the south of the world.