Native-American Studies, Dissertation – Discussion Example

The respective historical documents of the letters of Hernan Cortes and an unidentified Spanish Jurist’s account of Spanish expansion and colonialization in the Americas assists in the elucidation of how the Spanish viewed the native Indian population. The Spanish encounter with this new civilization is above all defined by the feeling of a cultural and almost metaphysical superiority. The Indians are viewed as the barbarized Other by the Spanish – the Spanish possess a cultural superiority over the “barbarians”, as the jurist describes the Indians; moreover, the Christian religion is construed in the jurist’s correspondence as giving them a metaphysical religious superiority over the population. In other words, the Spanish view the ideology of colonialization and expansion as justified by their particular construal of God. Whereas Cortes’ letter can be considered less explicit than that of the jurist’s, insofar as he provides an account that resembles a certain anthropological-empirical description of the Indians, there is nevertheless a feeling of Orientalism that informs his text. There is no attempt to understand the Indians’ from their own perspective, but rather such descriptions underscore the underlying approach to the Indians as barbarians. Amidst such portrayals, what is immediately striking is the absolute inability of these two sources to understand a form of life that is different than their own. Such a different form of life is posited in terms of a value judgment that inevitably stresses the inferiority of the Indian populace. Accordingly, what is most disturbing about these texts is the extent to which a particular ideology completely determines their content.

These two texts that detail European encounters with autochtonic peoples in Africa and South America respectively, in my view, stress the feeling of novelty that was experienced by all those involved in the phenomenon of the intra-cultural encounter. Whereas in our contemporary time, the globalized world has, to a certain extent, familiarized cultural difference, both documents highlight from an almost phenomenological perspective the initial shock that comes with encountering a completely new culture. These accounts can be said to differ from traditional textbook accounts, precisely because they emphasize individual feelings to such encounters. One is given an immediately immanent viewpoint on intra-civilizational communication and dialogue. Accordingly, what is immediately striking about these texts is the newness they convey, but from both perspectives: there is a certain wonder to encountering a new culture, a wonder that arguably shapes the content of these accounts. Hence, both accounts bring to light the intimate feelings of those involved in this historical period and the phenomenon of intra-cultural contact.

The life of the indentured servant Thomas Hellier can be summarized as a tragic one, insofar as the murder of his masters suggests his attempt to emancipate himself from the bonds of servitude. What is present in Hellier’s narrative is precisely the injustice of a class system that engenders slavery and servitude, and moreover, how the victims of this rigid class system approach their fate. Hellier’s act demonstrates both a dissatisfaction with and a critique of the social structure of the time. Furthermore, it can be said to anticipate future discourses on the universality of human rights: the notions of slavery and servitude seem to belong to an archaic past. Whereas the life of an indentured servant is perhaps superior to the life of a slave, there is nevertheless a fundamental restriction of liberty that is present in both cases. That such slavery and servitude existed demonstrates the omnipresence of racial and class segregation in this time period: the social structures of such time periods could arguably be said to be entirely constructed around a notion of a “value” to life, in which some lives were valued and others devalued, because of ideologies based on race and class. Accordingly, there is a certain ubiquity of racial and class informed ideologies that seem to constitute the viewpoints of people of this era.

The memoirs of John Edwards can be interpreted as a recapitulation of the importance of religious based ideology to the time period. In other words, Edwards’ text demonstrates how religion functions as an ideology that creates the worldview of the subject. In Edwards’ particular case, it is the specific tenets of Calvinism that inform his outlook – Edwards’ description of his conversion to Calvinism presents a lucid example of how a subject can be interpellated into a particular ideology. The text therefore underscores and repeats a motif found in other texts studied in class: there is a certain power that a given social construct, be it informed by class, religion, or race, exercises over an individual. Whereas Edwards’ text seems to demonstrate the individual’s autonomy to partake in a particular ideology according to his “independent” conversion, the document can be read from another perspective, in which the individual subject feels a need to belong to a certain ideology and discourse. Accordingly, what this document and others imply is the extent to which particular figures in history are influenced by particular ideologies. However, this is not to say such ideology is no longer present today – rather, reading such texts makes one think about the precise ideological structures that are operative in today’s society and which we are unaware of.