Enlightenment

The Enlightenment has typically been defined as a period of European thought, a broad intellectual movement, or the Age of Reason that took place in Europe approximately from the years 1685 to 1815 and that emphasized experience, reason, and mistrust of religion and traditional authority.

Definitions such as this one seem to confine the Enlightenment to a universal, static, and singular movement that existed within specific European countries. Such definitions also imply that it was understood and expressed similarly in all countries despite differences in languages, politics, economics, and religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment as a discourse and as a process was far more complex than what was originally envisioned, reaching more than one continent and being constructed in discrete and multiple forms around the globe. Scholars should not speak of the Enlightenment as a unitary phenomenon but rather as a process that was manifested in a variety of ways pending its locus of enunciation and reception. In this sense, the Enlightenment should be perceived, as Charles Withers notes, as a dynamic phenomenon characterized by a variety of local and temporal factors. Following Withers's suggestion, we should then think about the Enlightenment in the plural—the Enlightenments—understanding it as a dynamic transnational phenomenon. The Enlightenment ought to be considered as a series of processes, discourses, and lines of thought manifested in multiple ways in areas as diverse as religion, politics, science, literature, art, education, economy, and philosophy, to name a few.

The Enlightenment also implied a time in which the production of knowledge traveled at a global scale through printed books, maps, scientific expeditions, and economic trading. Political, economic, religious, and cultural transactions reflected many of the main premises of the Enlightenment with their emphasis on critical reason, progress, utility, and order. Within this context, space constituted an important element in the discourses produced during this time. Not only the locus of enunciation determined the nature of the Enlightenment as a process, but the space where it was read represented in itself another relevant factor when understanding the multiple layers of the Enlightenment. The famous ideological precepts of the Enlightenment, such as order, utility, progress, and reason, were articulated in different ways in countries such as France, Britain, Spain, Mexico, and Peru, to name a few. To this extent, as Livingstone and Withers suggest, the European Enlightenment was substantially molded through engagement with other parts of the world, notably with the Americas as a whole and with the Pacific. Furthermore, the Americas as well as the Pacific produced their own Enlightenments. To this extent, we can envision the Enlightenment as geographical in nature.

Livingstone and Withers have contributed greatly to our understanding of the Enlightenment as a geographical phenomenon. They both call attention to the centrality of space in the discourses belonging to this period. For them, geography encompasses the sites and practices in which the Enlightenment as a process took place. Also, according to them, the Enlightenment as a series of ideas was produced, debated, and consumed in multiple places and spaces. Exploring, traveling, mapping, and naming became key activities in such processes. Nature itself became a commodity, while traveling, mapping, and naming served as critical vehicles to inquire, survey, categorize, and give order to the world.

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