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Karl Friedrich Philipp von Martius(1794 - 1868) Jens Andermann
Birkbeck College

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A Bavarian naturalist and botanist best known for his epoch-making work on Brazilian flora, Martius can also be regarded as a founding father of Brazilian historiography and literary criticism. Having studied medicine at the University of Erlangen and the Royal Bavarian Academy, Martius in 1817 travelled to Trieste to join an Austrian expedition to Brazil accompanying the future Empress Leopoldina, a Habsburg princess, on her journey to meet her future spouse, the Emperor Pedro II. Along with his compatriot and fellow naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix, Martius in that same year embarked on a three-year journey across Brazil, the result of which was a book -Reise in Brasilien (Journey in Brazil), published in Munich in 1827- and a collection of 6500 plant species, offered to the Munich herbarium in December 1820. In 1826, Martius was appointed as professor at the University of Munich, and in 1832 he became the conservator of Bavaria´s royal botanical garden (a position he had already briefly held in Brazil, as one of the founders of Rio de Janeiro´s Jardim Botânico). Among his important botanical works are the three volumes of Historia naturalis palmarum (1823-50), Die Kartoffel-Epidemie (1842), a study of the potato plague, and, most notable, his fifteen-volume opus Flora brasiliensis, published between 1840 and 1906.

However, Martius also gained a reputation as a theorist of Brazilian history and an ethno-linguist. While their Brazilian journey had already contained a number of ethnographical observations, Spix and Martius in 1867 once again collaborated in publishing some Beiträge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerikas, zumal Brasiliens (Contributions to the Ethnography and Linguistics of America, especially Brazil, Leipzig 1867), one of whose central concerns was the origin of American man - a widespread and influential debate in nineteenth-century ethnographical and archaeological writing. In a secular version of earlier disputes on the humanity or animality of the Indians, nineteenth-century scientists discussed whether to explain the `savagery´ or `barbarism´ of the indigenous communities as a result of their `primitivity´ (that is, of their living on an earlier stage of nature, still close to Rousseau´s Golden Age), or if they had not rather `degenerated´ from a former cultural bloom into a state of `secondary primitivism´, as a group of German idealist philosophers known as the Freiburg circle maintained. Martius defended the latter position, suggesting that, "savagised rather than savages", the Brazilian Indians represented the disjecta membra of extinct indigenous empires. When, in 1844, the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, an elite society of learned gentlemen chaired by the Emperor himself, proposed an essay contest on "How to write the history of Brazil", it was Martius who, in 1845, presented the winning text, one of the first attempts to theorize mestiçagem as a catalyst of Brazilian national history, the specificity of which lies in the fusion of three races: "The winning project -writes Lilia Moritz Schwarcz- proposed, then, a `formula´, a way of understanding Brazil. The idea was to correlate the country´s development with the specific strive towards perfection of the three races which composed it."


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