"About my love for Paraguay and the guarani race": The ideas and projects of the naturalist and botanist moisés Santiago bertoni (1857-1929)

Abstract

This article depicts the trajectory of the Swiss naturalist and botanist Moisés Santiago Bertoni, who, unlike the classic travelers and naturalists, traveled to the Americas to found an agricultural colony (first in Argentina, and later in Paraguay). In addition to corresponding with intellectuals and international research centers, he devoted himself to the study of flora and the native populations, as well as writing articles and texts such as La civilización guarani. In his struggle to contradict the ideas held by intellectuals who supported positivist evolutionism and nineteenth-century liberalism, Bertoni made a solitary effort defending the superiority of the indigenous Guaraní people, and above all their hygiene and medicine, as both his biographers and critics attest.