The Pastoral City-State: A Metaphor for the Geography of Uruguay

Abstract

Metaphors are a powerful heuristic to help interpret the particularities of places. In order to familiarize readers with Uruguay and advance the value of metaphors in geography, in this article I coin the term pastoral city-state. As a historical-geographical construct, the pastoral city-state is a metaphor for the extreme primacy of Uruguay’s capital Montevideo in a territory dominated by extensive livestock raising. In the opening sections, I call on geographers to interrogate pre-existing metaphors of places for their explanatory power and, when insufficient, to create new ones. I explore the reasons that academic geography’s engagement with Uruguay has been limited, and why, despite this, a richer historical-geographical understanding of Uruguay leads to a richer understanding of Latin America that expands beyond stereotypical notions focused on Mesoamerica and the Andes. Following these contributions towards geographical inquiry and pedagogy, I analyze six features and six caveats of the pastoral city-state that I have chosen for their salience in explaining Uruguay’s most important historical-geographical patterns as I have observed them in my reading and fieldwork. The pastoral city-state metaphor can serve as a guide or reference for a variety of needs, including as a starting point for researchers conducting projects in Uruguay, a point of comparison with other countries, and a teaching tool for survey courses in Latin American geography.