La circulación del conocimiento en la creación del discurso geográfico de sierra nevada en el s. xix

Abstract

The first accurate geographical knowledge of Sierra Nevada was produced in the first half of the nineteenth century. While the history of such knowledge, as well as the genealogy of the leading figures who made it possible, have been addressed, the location of the first scientific approach to Sierra Nevada within the global framework of the geographical discourse in the nineteenth-century Europe has not been investigated yet. This article offers an approach to its conceptual, methodological and rhetorical contextualization through diverse models of representation, employing a hermeneutic methodology based on the analysis of textual and iconographic documentation. The main hypothesis of the paper suggests that the methodological procedures, scientific practices and rendering models of the high mountain, shaped by the regulation of European geographical sciences, were transmitted from chains such as the Alps and Pyrenees to the Sierra Nevada. They were applied to the Sierra, thus contributing to the definition of the first studies on the nature of the massif. However, the ideas included in those models were, at the same time, readapted to the material reality of the Sierra. Thus, the article explores the changes of the foreign paradigm of the mountain undergone in the Andalusian massif depending on their geographical particularities, belonging to the Mediterranean high mountain. In order to illustrate this transmission of the nineteenth-century geographical discourse, the paper uses the theoretical framework of the circulation and reinterpretation of knowledge, of little reception within the Spanish Geography.