Presenter: Valeria López Fadul (Wesleyan University)
Discussant: Seth Kimmel (Columbia University)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)
In Search of the Ancients: Etymology between Spain and the New World
This paper reconstructs the tools through which sixteenth-century Spanish scholars, missionaries, and officials under the patronage of the royal court sought to extract knowledge about the empire’s American territories by researching local languages. It argues that etymologies, combined with interrogation and oral testimony, served as the foundation for numerous studies to reconstruct the ancient history of the Americas and its inhabitants’ knowledge of nature. Direct experiences of the natural or human world of the Americas did not displace the search for authoritative local knowledge encoded in language about the region’s landscapes and its past and present inhabitants. Instead, this linguistic search was an essential part of experiencing the Americas.