The Garden and Its Multiple Contexts in Canada, the United States, and Latin America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By evoking the democratization of the right to property in the Americas, this essay analyzes the Americas' relationship to territory, which ceases to be based only on the Adamic myth of the garden, or on roots and nationalism. The essay concludes that liberalism gives access to different habitats of meaning linked to cultural encounters. ********** In the context of the tradition that led to comparing the cultures of the Americas with the ones of the founding nations of Europe, it can seem difficult to establish trans-American relationships (Durante and Imbert 51). If comparisons cannot always be linked to common cultural features, some bases for comparison can be extracted from similar problems and deadlocks as well as from similarities in perspectives dealing with the transformation of space into a territory (Imbert, Trajectoires 88). From one pole to the other, the ideology of progress based upon the antithesis barbarity/civilisation, which has been so thoroughly developed by the Argentinean writer Domingo Sarmiento, is used as a basis for organizing space and dominating it so as to fit it in a rationalist and practical agenda (Area and Morana 5). This transformation entails a number of tensions and contradictions with regard to alterity, mostly that of indigenous populations within the continent, and also in the relationship of the new nations of the Americas with former colonial powers. This is why the garden and its discursive transformations are of considerable importance to an exploration of the dynamics of the bases of possible comparisons within the Americas. To dream of the garden is to work with three elements simultaneously: the body, the text, and the territory. This is clearly evinced by the most popular stories of origin, which deal with passages: the passing from nothingness to life, then from life to death; that is, the gain or loss of an existence located in a group, a space, and a culture. This notion is most notably present in the Bible, where Man and animals spring from the earth, as indicated by Adam's name and by the narrative of Genesis 2, which explains that Yahweh created man from clay, and blew life into his nostrils. What remains to be explored is not this Genesis text, but its consequences in the Americas, following the modalities of textual coherence that will permit us to extend its signifying productivity to other discourses. To discover a continent is an enthralling experience, especially to new immigrants of European and Catholic descent, who, by following the Augustinian taboo, viewed as heretical any text which would dream of a culture existing alongside their own in a yet undiscovered space. However, when discovered, this continent fascinates people by its vastness and freshness. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a large number of texts, most of them written by Jesuits, describe nature with constant reference to the Garden of Eden and terrestrial paradise. Tropical, multicoloured flowers mix with rhetoric and aesthetics and together they propose a return to Eden, often alluding to the pagan celebration of the fruits of the earth. Like the transgression of the Augustinian taboo, these celebrations are also close to heretical, because paradise can be accessed only in the afterlife. Yet, such textual florescence has its purpose. Thanks to the luxurious and immense space, the textual florescence makes it possible to ignore that the continent is already inhabited. At an aesthetic level, such florescence works in the same modality as the Augustinian taboo, and declares the space empty. From the narrative of the Garden of Eden, two thematic and metaphorical successions can be developed, both of which mean to create new nations. One theme focuses on the desire to remain close to the land through the reactivation of the biblical narrative that claims that Man was made of and from the earth. The other theme would allow geographical and symbolic expansion, retaining from this space an immense territory with ethereal qualities, open to the frontier conceived of in the United States as an infinite space but in need of civilization and economic development. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".