Knowledge Production in Non-European Spaces of Modernity: The Society of Jesus and the Circulation of Darwinian Ideas in Postcolonial Ecuador, 1860–1890

Abstract

This article is based on a perspective on circulation of knowledge that allows the consideration of science as the result of the encounter between diverse communities. We tell a story that constantly changes places, scales, and cultures in order to stress the importance of networks as an alternative to the centre/periphery trope, which entangles world histories of science. The result is a picture much more complex and intertwined than the one suggested by these simplifying dichotomies. We focus on a case study that illuminates the process of knowledge production in non-European spaces of modernity. The return of the Society of Jesus to the newly independent nation-states of Latin America is the point of departure to analyse the circulation of a specific scientific idea in Ecuador: Darwin’s theory of biological evolution through natural selection. The article follows the paths of three different knowledge makers whose encounters are seen as sites of knowledge production: a religious order, a Latin American nation-state, and a Western European Jesuit-scientist.

Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with a grant from the Government of Ecuador (SENESCYT, ‘The Reception of Darwin’s Ideas in Ecuador: Theodor Wolf’) and the support of two FDA grants from FLACSO Ecuador (IP 553, IP 664). In developing the ideas presented here, we have received helpful input from James McAllister and Nicolás Cuvi. We thank the Archivum Romanun Societatis Iesu for their collaboration in retrieving information on Theodor Wolf and the Polytechnic University. We also thank Ursula Range for allowing us access to the autobiography of Theodor Wolf, and Sylvia van der Made for translating it from German. We also thank Tamara Trownsell, Michael Hill, and the two unnamed referees of ISPS for their valuable comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

[1] The suppression of the Society of Jesus in the late eighteenth century was part of a series of negotiations of secularization during the Enlightenment, involving the strengthening of the Bourbon monarchies through reforms in France, and the Spanish and Portuguese empires (Venturi 1976). Under Bourbon influence in 1773, Pope Clement XIV signed an edict that dictated the suppression of the Jesuit order.

[2] By the time of its suppression in the late eighteenth century, the Society of Jesus had such a global scientific importance that it accounted for more than 30,000 members and was in charge of more than 85 professorships of mathematics and more than a dozen physical cabinets and directed 25 observatories around the world (Harris 1989, 40–41). In fact, before 1773, the Jesuit order mastered the difficult organizational and administrative tasks required to operate what John Law (1986) and Bruno Latour (1987) have called long-distance networks. Harris (1998) compares the scope of the Jesuit colonial network with that of other legally constituted corporations engaged in overseas activities, such as the East and West Indies trading companies, colonial administrative bureaus, and (eventually) the larger scientific academies capable of launching foreign expeditions. This successful expansion and mobility were largely due to two decisive strategies in the philosophical foundations of the Society in the beginning of the sixteenth century: its focus on education, and specifically, on the education of students who were not members of the Society, and its interest in the overseas missions (Harris 1996, 289).

[3] Jardine (1979); Grant (1984); Dear (1987); Feldhay (1987; 2000); Harris (1989; 1996; 1998; 2005); Gorman (2000); Giard (2005); Núñez Freile (2010); Soto Arango (2010); and Prieto (2011).

[4] The first was Roger J. Boscovich (1711–1787), professor at the Collegio Romano, elected in 1761.

[5] Wolf reflected on this episode and concluded with cynicism: ‘from their point of view, these elders were not so wrong!’, alluding to the fact that two out of the three ‘Bonn experiments’ (himself and Johannes B. Menten) resigned from the Jesuit order some years later.

[6] In 1832, the newly formed Ecuadorean State took formal possession of the Galapagos Archipelago (by initiative of General Villamil) and has exercised since then jurisdiction over the islands without interruption and in peace.