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Anniversary Forum
Recentism in Environmental History on Latin America
Andrew Sluyter
| DURING THE FIRST decade of Environmental History, articles on Latin America have been numerous and diverse. While understandably far fewer than articles on North America, those on Latin America represent a proportion roughly equal to those on Europe, Asia, and Africa. Also, they span a diversity of subregions, topics, and approaches. From Patagonia to the Rio Grande, from Andean slopes to Amazonian lowlands, they cover agricultural to industrial topics. They approach these topics from several complementary perspectives: ecological, cultural, political, and economic. |
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Yet those same contributions do exhibit one notable bias: recentism. They disproportionately focus on the twentieth century, followed closely by an affinity for the nineteenth century. In fact, twice as many articles focus on those two centuries as on all others combined. |
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Rhys Jones's content analysis of the major geography journals suggests that such recentism might reflect a broader trend.1 Since the 1980s, those journals have in general shifted toward an overwhelming emphasis on the present and recent past. The content even of the Journal of Historical Geography has come to emphasize research on high modernity, with the majority of articles focusing on the early 1800s through the mid 1900s. One factor driving recentism might be the relative ease of working with recent versus older source materials. In combination with growing pressures to produce more rather than better research, that factor might be discouraging academics from taking on projects involving early modern times. |
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Even without more fully understanding the causes of recentism, though, attention to its intellectual costs will, I hope, persuade environmental historians to resist it. Generally, and quite ironically, recentism precludes understanding recent history because understanding modernity requires understanding how the salient characteristics of modern regimes emerged out of the disjunctures and continuities between premodern and early modern times. As Carl Sauer noted in reference to Mexico, "we may yet best delineate the basic traits of this land and its peoples from its prehistoric geography and from its geography of the sixteenth century."2 |
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