Los viajes de G. G. Simpson a Sudamérica: visión científica y experiencia subjetiva

Hebe Vessuri

doi:10.48160/18517072re14.888

Authors

Hebe Vessuri IVIC

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48160/18517072re14.888

Keywords:

G. G. Simpson, palentology, biology

Abstract

Taking as a starting point a review of some aspects of the personal experience of the paleontologist and evolutionist biologist George Simpson, the present essay considers issues that are often part of the scientific interpretative process but are usually left aside from the "reified" narrative of academic research -supporting the postulate of extreme respect to "production" while obliterating the "human" aspect. I privilege, instead, some of the "subjective", "minor" or "subterranean " facets, that seem useful for understanding Simpson's intellectual production. The later even though being subordinated by intellectual activity, is enmeshed in professional commitments and conditioned by the landscape, resulting in the very personal brand of his trajectory. I try to show the weight of the landscape upon intellectual work and the perception of the difference by a "Northern" scientist -from a more developed country, from an important Northern scientific institution- who travels to the exotic, the unknown, as much cultural as geographical. In the case of Simpson one may clearly notice the contrast between his expeditions to Montana, in the United States in 1932-1935 [internal frontier] and his expeditions to the Argentine Patagonia in 1930-1931 & 1933-1934, and to the Venezuelan Plains in 1938-1939 [external frontiers]. In connection with several aspects, I rely on the volume of essays that Henrika Kuklick and Robert Kohler edited for Osiris in 1996, considering a particular research locus, the endeavours that are at least partially carried out outdoors, in uncontrolled settings. But I develop my own analytic perspective.

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