The Domestication of Difference: Knowledge, Utility, and the Early Modern Other

This paper explores how early modern Europe constructed the "Other" through scientific inquiry and visual representation. We analyze works by Ulisse Aldrovandi, a naturalist, and Ferdinand van Kessel, an artist, to reveal a shared process of instrumentalizing alterity. Aldrovandi's Ornithologiae (1599) exemplifies "intellectual domestication". He admired Indigenous American featherwork, yet his scientific method reduced these cultural artifacts to specimens. Their utility lay in revealing natural processes and human ingenuity within a classificatory framework. Similarly, Van Kessel's Allegory of America (1691) visualizes a nascent global economy. Human alterity, particularly the African slave, is reduced to an economic function for production. This figure is reconfigured for European utility, defined by its activity within a broader system of profit. Through distinct mediums, both artists contributed to a codified perception of otherness. They integrated the unfamiliar into European frameworks by reducing complex realities to specific functions or classified activities. This demonstrates how knowledge and utility converged to shape the perception of the "Other".