This rich volume about objects, sites, and materials presents itself as a cabinet of curiosities and its contributors as collectors. This definition helps to explain the eclectic array of short essays in a book spanning the sixteenth through twentieth centuries and covering a huge part of the globe. Indeed, one can imagine some of the materials discussed in the entries sitting on display in a crowded early modern studiolo or Wunderkammer. The publication grows out of an active international research network entitled Latin America and the Global History of Knowledge (LAGLOBAL), which aims to promote interdisciplinary scholarship focused on Latin America’s contributions to the history of knowledge. The forty entries here each focus on one good, object, object type, or place from or in what we now call Latin America. The book is fittingly divided into two sections: part 1 examines “Artificalia,” or materials made by human hands, while...
University of California Press