Some few of you might know of the Valladolid debate: namely, the Catholic Church sponsored a disputatio on whether or not the Indians (i.e., the indigenous peoples of the Americas) had souls. What even less people know of is that the Indians also had their own debates on the nature of Europeans. From Latour, B. (2004), WHOSE COSMOS, WHICH COSMOPOLITICS?: Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck, Common Knowledge 10(3):450-451:
As far as the Amazonian Indians were concerned, everything has a soul - trees, rocks, aardvarks. That wasn't the controversial issue with Europeans. The issue was whether they had bodies. If not, then they were beings of pure spirit, like shamans. If they did, then they were just another type of physical entity, like a peccary or a flower.
To determine the corporeality of the conquistadors, the Indians conducted scientific experiments. They took conquistador prisoners and immersed them in water to see if they would drown, and if they drowned, if their bodies would then rot. If that happened, then obviously these outsiders had bodies and were natural creatures.
Anyway, the anecdote is a fascinating bit of historical trivia and certainly a nice counter to anyone who says the scientific method and hypothesis testing was purely a European practice. It's not clear who won the Valladolid debate, if anyone did, though obviously it was established that the Spanish weren't beings of pure spirit.
I don't really have a what if to ask per se, I just thought the people here might appreciate this bit of anthropological trivia.
tl;drA historical anecdote, retold in a major paper by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, may illustrate why Beck’s suggested approach to peacemaking is not completely up to the task. The main example that Beck gives is the “Valladolid controversy,” the famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was under way, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools. Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls—that much seemed obvious—but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. The theory under which Amerindians were operating was that all entities share by default the same fundamental organization, which is basically that of humans. A licuri, palm, a peccary, a piranha, a macaw: each has a soul, a language, and a family life modeled on the pattern of a human (Amerindian) village. Entities all have souls and their souls are all the same. What makes them differ is that their bodies differ, and it is bodies that give souls their contradictory perspectives: the perspective of the licuri palm, the peccary, the piranha, the macaw. Entities all have the same culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature. For the controversialists at Valladolid, the opposite was the case but they remained blissfully unaware that there was an opposite side. Indians obviously had bodies like those of Europeans, but did they have the same spirit? Each side conducted an experiment, based on its own premises and procedures: on the one side to determine whether Indians have souls, and on the other side to determine whether Europeans have bodies. The Amerindians’ experiment was as scientific as the Europeans’. Conquistador prisoners were taken as guinea pigs and immersed in water to see, first, if they drowned and, second, if their flesh would eventually rot. This experiment was as crucial for the Amerindians as the Valladolid dispute was for the Iberians. If the conquerors drowned and rotted, then the question was settled; they had bodies. But if they did not drown and rot, then the conquerors had to be purely spiritual entities, perhaps similar to shamans. As Claude Lévi-Strauss summarized, somewhat ironically, the two experiments, the Spaniards’ versus the Amerindians’: “the whites were invoking the social sciences while the Indians had more confidence in the natural ones.”
As far as the Amazonian Indians were concerned, everything has a soul - trees, rocks, aardvarks. That wasn't the controversial issue with Europeans. The issue was whether they had bodies. If not, then they were beings of pure spirit, like shamans. If they did, then they were just another type of physical entity, like a peccary or a flower.
To determine the corporeality of the conquistadors, the Indians conducted scientific experiments. They took conquistador prisoners and immersed them in water to see if they would drown, and if they drowned, if their bodies would then rot. If that happened, then obviously these outsiders had bodies and were natural creatures.
Anyway, the anecdote is a fascinating bit of historical trivia and certainly a nice counter to anyone who says the scientific method and hypothesis testing was purely a European practice. It's not clear who won the Valladolid debate, if anyone did, though obviously it was established that the Spanish weren't beings of pure spirit.
I don't really have a what if to ask per se, I just thought the people here might appreciate this bit of anthropological trivia.