2 - Ethnography in South America: The First Two Hundred Years

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The arrival of Europeans on the South American continent, and the wars of conquest and journeys of exploration that soon followed, occasioned much writing of diverse kinds. This chapter concerns the development of European ideas about “Indians,” and some consequences of these ideas. Rough-hewn narratives by soldiers, fortune hunters, and explorers rub shoulders with historical works of sophistication and elegance. The Spanish crown issued administrative questionnaires about South American peoples, their religions, governments, and regional histories, and also about the continent’s geography, fauna, and flora, thereby generating volumes of responses by colonial officials. Systematic lexical and grammatical studies of Amerindian languages written for and by missionaries can be supplemented by less learned but often valuable observations of a more casual nature. In addition, there are maps and itineraries, letters and lawsuits. Beyond all that, a voluminous literature soon came into existence in Europe to rearrange and reinterpret data found in eyewitnesses’ original writings with a view to European tastes and predilections. And finally, there also exists a small but precious corpus of writings by Amerindians, recording how those who were at home on the continent perceived the destruction of much of their world and the transformation of what remained within the framework of foreign-created institutions.

Even so, however much we propose to focus on the cultures and histories of the native peoples of the Americas, it is impossible to get away from the productions of foreigners: Spaniards and Portuguese, Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen who wrote down their experiences of the newly discovered continent. Even as writing took place, writing supplanted, and as a result destroyed, alternative, indige nous methods of handling and preserving information. Writing was a tool of the invaders, an instrument to organize and control subject populations, preserving, for the most part, only those aspects of their cultures, religions, and historical memories that were meaningful in the new colonial context. But that is not the whole story. For, as a tool, writing was in some respect neutral. Just as in early medieval Europe, it had been monks and other ecclesiastics who preserved within their Christian and Latin literary culture certain fragments, and sometimes more than fragments, of the Germanic cultures that Christianity destroyed or modified, so also in the Americas.