Expansion capitalista y transformaciones regionales: Relaciones sociales y empresas agrarias en la Argentina del siglo XIX (review)
suggests, for example, that tropical medicine was not warmly received in Brazil, despite all the efforts of the distinguished local physician Carlos Chagas, because Chagas reproduced in his research the same voyeuristic taste for exotic monstrosities that had characterized North Atlantic practitioners. The Brazilian intelligentsia also questioned Agazzi’s racial typologies and saw tropical mongrelization as a boon, a source of national strength rather than degeneration. Finally, landscape architects such Roberto Burle Marx playfully and ironically manipulated European conventions of tropical flora to create gardens of great beauty. I have only one caveat with this book. Stepan overlooks nineteenth-century landscape painting in Brazil on the false premise that it was marginal and unimportant because the local intelligentsia never developed a taste for Natural Theology and thus a view of nature as sacred. Drawing on a single source, she wrongly concludes that only a handful (some 50) paintings and photographs of rural landscapes were produced in Brazil in the nineteenth century (pp. 216–17). Carlos Roberto Maciel Levy identified years ago some 600 extant landscape paintings by Antônio Parrerias (1860–1937) alone. In fact, a complete catalogue of nineteenth-century landscape painting in Brazil would most likely run into the thousands. For all its contributions, the reader will not find in Picturing the Tropics a study of how the dozens of Braizilian nineteenth-century landscape painters contested the North Atlantic representations of the “tropics.”