Ontological excess and metonymy in early-modern descriptions of Brazil: an amodern para-scientific approach to nature Alessandro Zir Portuguese colonization English Brazil ontolgy para-scientific analogy figurative language words and things This essay relies on and furthers a hypothesis advanced in previous research: that the well-known eccentricities to be found in the early-modern corpus of the Portuguese colonizers of Brazil—its references to entities like monsters and demons, its bizarre descriptions, and odd classification systems—can be explained in view of a certain style of thinking, addressing a specific ontological concern. Ontology emerges here as a structural differentiating factor between radically distinct kinds of approach to reality, and the notions of excess and metonymy help us to characterize the specificity of a cognitive enterprise which, in its several manifestations, is literary-religious rather than scientific-empirical. Our perspective tends to challenge communicative models trying to address the difference between religious and scientific discourses merely on the level of the content and truth-values of their belief systems. Moreover it covers significantly visual culture, which helps us to present Brazilian colonial literature on a broad canvas. This paper is one of a collection that originated in the IAHR Special Conference “Religions, Science and Technology in Cultural Contexts:+nbsp; Dynamics of Change”, held at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology on March 1–2, 2012. For an overall introduction see the article by Ulrika Mårtensson, also published here. Philipps-Universität Marburg Marburg Deutschhausstraße 9, 35037 Marburg 2020 2020-08-18 2020-08-18 Text article urn:nbn:de:hebis:04-0004-2020-248-82976 eng 1418722-x 22 2 (2020) 1 https://journals.uni-marburg.de/0004/article/download/8297/8101 10.17192/mjr.2020.22.8297 https://journals.uni-marburg.de/0004/2020/248/8297 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0