reviews
The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. ANTHONY PAGDEN. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. xi1 256 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $39.50 (cloth).
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SABIN€ G . MACCORMACK Stanford University The discovery of America by Columbus inaugurated a long debate among European intellectuals and others about the nature of the newly found lands and their people. The book under review, a work of much reflection and erudition, traces the early stages of this debate, especially as it occurred in Spain. The author discusses not only what was said, but also why it was said, and what the philosophical and theological requirements were that had t o be satisfied before any theory about America and the Indians could become viable The ”natural man” of the title describes those humans without society or culture who were postulated t o exist beyond the frontiers of Europe before any nowEuropean civilizations had been studied firsthand. This postulate was made concrete in the 16th century by reference t o the natural slaves of Aristotle’s Politics. Pagden shows how the concept of the natural slave could not be maintained, both because it led t o an unacceptable theory of the nature of mankind and because it was incompatible with the evidence about Indians that was collected in the course of the 16th century. The latter half of the book discusses two men who played a crucial role in the collection and presentation of this evidence, Bartolorn6 de las Casas, and the Jesuit Josede Acosta. These men were, as Pagden shows, the first t o view non-European civilizations on a comparative basis, rather than exclusively with reference t o some preconceived model. The book thus documents one of those shifts in early modern European thought without which contemporary anthropology would be inconceivable. However, the extent of this shift in the categories that Europeans employed to study alien cultures during the 16th century can be deceptive (this is stressed by M. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23:519-538, 1981). For example, the components Acosta used in the late 16th century t o formulate his view of Indians were almost the same components used at the beginning of the century t o argue that the Indians were natural slaves. It is thus not inappropriate that Acosta himself, when writing about the history of Mexico, echoed Ecclesiastes: “That which has been now is, and that which shall be i s what has been.” The change in thought that Pagden documents
leads from the study and understanding of the isolated individual (the very undertaking was liable t o breed notions such as the ”natural man”), to the study and understanding of the individual as conditioned by the society in which he finds himself, and thus of society in its own right. It was indeed a notable change; yet, beneath the surface, much remained the same. This was because the broadly accepted view of the individual remained Aristotelian, that is, reason was considered t o be not only the highest, but also the most archetypically human faculty. To place reason at the head of a hierarchy of human faculties amounts t o excluding from serious consideration those creations of mankind-both spiritual and material-in which reason does not play a dominant part Here lies one of the very severe limitations of 16th-century ethnography; for even observers favorable to the Indians expected them to he innately able t o learn t o think and argue like Europeans Accordingly, the models that even men such as las Casas and Acosta formulated so as t o understand the Indians were ultimately determined less by the ”New World” that faced them than by the preexisting exigencies of European scholarly debate (for a most revealing example see p, 167). There is a conceptual problem here that remains as obdurate now as it was then. To understand anything we need a framework within which to understand it; nothing is intelligible in a vacuum The student of cultures other than his own must therefore begin by formulating a model of inquiry from within his own culture. Having done so, however, he has inevitably excluded much of what is to be studied and at best can only gradually adjust his hypothesis in order to retrieve what might otherwise be lost to sight. What Pagden documents is one step in this adjustment of theory to observed reality. If Indians as viewed either by themselves during the early colonial period (e.g., Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, E l Primer Nueva Corbnica y Buen Gobierno, edited by John V . Murra and Rolena Adorno, 1980). or as understood by contemporary scholars (e.g, J . V . Murra and N. Wachtel, Anthropologie Historique des Societies Andines, Annales 33, 56, 1978; and G . Urton. At the Crossroads of the Earth and Sky, 1982) are nonetheless absent from this book, it i s because they were also absent from the European intellectual world studied by Pagden. However, this world has i t s own fascination. We watch, in Pagden’s pages, not only a shift from the deployment of a certain set of concepts, which themselves did not change very much, t o circumstances that did change, but we also see a change in the sociology of knowledge, the transition, that is, from discussion in the lecture halls o f universities t o discussion in the much broader and more open forum made available by printed
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books. Books could and can be acquired in a way in which access t o a university cannot. Some of Pagden’s most illuminating pages bear on the difference between a man such as Francisco Vitoria. the Salamanca theologian who formulated the question of the humanity of the Indians in a way crucial t o later writers on the topic, but whose work was only published posthumously from his students’ lecture notes; and Jose de Acosta, a missionary and man of action, whose printed works reached an audience scattered throughout Europe and America. A central theme in Pagden’s work is therefore the ways that this transition from lecture t o printed book accompanied and perhaps facilitated the shift in ideas about Indians. Pagden conveys much of the claustrophobia of 16thcentury academic arguments. He also evokes the drama of these arguments as well as the wideopen spaces of that New World which most Europeans greeted as new with such reluctance, consistently preferring to find in America whatever they had already known and understood in Europe. It was for this reason that, for instance, the Incas were regularly compared to the Romans, and missionaries who found Indians slow t o adopt Christian ideas and a Spanish lifestyle compared them t o the uneducated countryfolk of Europe (pp. 140ff.. 161). Such conceptual strategies were indeed an attempt to comprise the Indians in their own right within the human community, but they were also a method of closing one’s eyes t o whatever the Indians could and sometimes did say about themselves. Sixteenth-century society was, as everyone knows, repressive and closed, and the reason usually cited for this state of affairs i s the economic and political necessities of conquest and colonization. Pagden shows that this i s not the whole story. As this book makes clear, the cultural horizons of even the most enlightened advocates of the Indians, such as las Casas, were set in Europe and presupposed European criteria of political and cultural achievement. In this way, Europe remained dominant in the minds of those who, during the period considered by Pagden, thought about the New World This reviewer has learned a great deal from reading and thinking about this difficult and important book about a dlfficult and important subject It i s hard to put the book down without being haunted by an idea the author perhaps did not intend to convey, the idea that an opportunity was lost in the 16th century Perhaps a conceptual universe might have been created in which Indian and European cultures could have been viewed in a continuum That may be a utopia; if so, Pagden shows us why
The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. VICTORIA REIFLER BRICKER. Austin: 368 University of Texas Press, 1981. xlv
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arnerican ethnologist
pp., notes, glossary, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth). ROBERT WASSERSTROM Columbia University
In recent years it has been fashionable among anthropologists t o write about native theories of time and space, of history, myth, and the cosmos. As we know, some of these fanciful creatures [e.g., the work of Carlos Castaneda) are pure inventions; others are more cautious and scholarly. What they all seem t o have in common, however, i s that their authors adhere to a queer distinction between anthropology and history formulated [but not devised) by Claude LCvi-Strauss in both The Savage Mind and Structural Anthropology. According t o this view, native theory does not merely record historical events, it interprets them, fits them into vast cosmological cycles, or breaks them down into thematic elements that may be rearranged according t o the dictates of traditional epistemology. As Levi-Strauss put it, history (what really might have happened) is just another variety of myth, t o be analyzed like more conventional forms of anthropological di5course. Apparently, Victoria Bricker has taken this injunction very much t o heart, for she has chosen to produce an extensive volume on “the history and folklore of ethnic conflict” among Maya Indians in southern Mesoameiica. Her purpose, as she explains it, is t o put the ideas of Levi-Strauss t o the test of both field and archive. ”By systematically comparing a body of myth with the historical data from which it is derived,” she writes (p 4). i t i s possible t o determine how native paradigms are constructed from the stuff of real events. the conquest, evangelization, and subsequent suppression of native people in Yucatan, Chiapas, and western Guatemala. In particular, she i s convinced that such people adopted the symbols of Spanish Catholicism and colonial rule (the Indian Christ, the Indian king); these symbols were then woven into a cyclical vision of time in which animosities between Indians and their antagonists may be perpetually reenacted with a happier outcome. The main problem with this argument i s that systematic comparison between historlcal evidence and native tradition never takes place O n the contrary, it gets derailed even before we are out of the introduction. Invoking a textbook description of Spanish conduct i n the New World, she concludes that ladinos (non-Indians) also had a distorted view of time which tended t o transform their written accounts into myth. What she sets out t o do, then, is t o compare one cyclical vision of time with another-the Indian king triumphant versus the Indian as Son of Ham. In fact, the source of this confusion constitutes the book’s major defect: there is very little history in i t at all. Rather, D r Bricker has produced a detailed and extensive summary of what might be called the ”primary secondary sources,” that is, regional histories composed during the 19th and early 20th centuries by provincial scholars in large measure to justify the continued suppres-
