“Cipres, The Triumphant”. The andean patagonian forest, the science, the moral and the social health in Argentina between the late XIXth century and the ‘30s decade

Abstract

This paper, as part of history of science, researches how the scientific recognition of Andean Patagonian Forest introduces values that located the forest as part of social health, and that implied the asymmetric hierarchy of the population. It reviews the writings of the first naturalists who study the countryside since the end of the 19th Century, and It continues taking into account studies until the late 1930’s. The temporal cut covers until the establishment of conservation policies, starting with the creation of the Nahuel Huapi National Park in 1934. The analytical perspective over the science inquires into the study traditions of the different groups of specialists who write about space, and the forms that these researches were in dialogue with appropriation and intervention policies, which are not confined into the internal practices of the biology of these years, but are crossed by the organicist conceptions from which social health is designed. Along these pages the biological research traditions are characterized and it evidences that policies transfer, from social health conceptions, the principles of conservation and social use of the forest.