Alfred Russel Wallace e os mundos amazônicos: o natural e o humano no contexto das ciências naturais oitocentistas (1848-1852).

Abstract

The study which we're summing up dedicated to comprehend Alfred Russel Wallace's scientific journey, from 1848 to 1852 in the brazilian Amazon. Thus, sought to detach the construction of discourses produced about the amazonian worlds: the natural and the human, through the context of ruptures and continuities in the nineteenth-century Natural Sciences. This paper also aimed to understand how the relationship networks - scientific and sociability - were configured, in the development of the expedition, that both dedicated to study natural features and several ethnic groups and cultures in the river ways taken by the naturalist. Thinking in that way, without considering that these relations are given previously, but circumscribed in the meet of the subject in the contact zones. Wallace's insertion in the main scientific cycles was also addressed in this study, contributing to understand his Amazon journey as a fundamental stage to systematize his two theories: the biogeographic one and the evolution of species by means of natural selection.