A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Группа авторов

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Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda was partly educated in Bologna and Rome. He had been a tutor to Philip II, and by 1536 he was appointed imperial chronicler. He published a tract against Erasmus’s pacifism in order to defend the European warrior code and social structure (Brading, 1991: 86). In 1544 he wrote a dialogue, Democrates Secundus, in order to defend the Spanish conquest and empire in the world. He drew his information and arguments in part from Oviedo and Gómora. For him the Indians were slaves by nature for they lacked prudence, intelligence, virtue, and even humanity, all the attributes that the Renaissance thought citizens ought to have. He also defined the Indians by what they were not, especially when it came to lacking “writing.” From there he surmised that Indians also lacked history and laws, had no sense of self–consciousness, had no notion of private property and were, in general, ruled by tyrants. Sepúlveda’s challenge caused Las Casas to rethink his materials in order to demonstrate that the Indians were not different and that they could be both savage and as civilized as the Europeans (Brading, 1991: 88–9). The Dominican had to begin moving toward a comparative ethnography with the ancient world, a move not lost on Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. In the Valladolid debate, Las Casas’s job was to prove that the Indians were neither natural slaves, nor “homunculus,” as Sepulveda would have it, but rather normal human beings created by God, even if the Bible did not mention them. By and large he accomplished this task.

      The arguments that Las Casas brandished in this fight were garnished from his Historia de las Indias (1542) and his later Apologetica historia sumaria (1551). Probably the best study to date of Las Casas’s thought on the matter can be found in David Brading’s The First America (1991). In order to frame a sense of cultural evolution Las Casas turned to Cicero and his idea of stages in the natural history of humanity. For Cicero, all men in all nations are essentially the same in their nature. For Las Casas, it was not hard to show that the Aztecs and the Incas resembled the Greeks and the Romans. For instance, of Aristotle’s six requirements or marks of civilized life, all could be found in the Amerindian societies: agriculture, artisans and artists, a warrior class, rich men, organized religion, lawful government, and city life. Once again he deployed St. Augustine’s argument on natural enlightenment and the desire of all men to seek and serve God (Brading, 1991: 90). Las Casas’s approach to Amerindian religions required that he really stretch the comparative frame, and while the Greek and the Aztec pantheon could be safely compared, some of the rituals and practices of Amerindian religions simply had to be attributed to the Devil’s ability to gain hold of pagans. He made a particular point of arguing that the Incas had been very close to monotheism.

      Despite his comparative ethnology and defense of the Indian’s humanity, Las Casas still had to devise a reason that would justify the Spanish empire, as he was an advocate of royal authority. He agreed with Vitoria’s argument on the natural right to rule of the Indian monarchs. Idolatry alone did not justify deposing or killing them. He attacked Sepúlveda’s argument on the natural slavery of the Indians by saying that it was blasphemy against God to say that He had created a brutish and inferior “race” (Brading, 1991: 95). Therefore, all wars of conquest against the Indians were unjust. At this point, caught in a dilemma, Las Casas had no choice but to follow Vitoria in defining papal authority as only spiritual, not political – a claim that left the king with no right to a universal empire. The Dominican friar pulled out of his blind spot, not unlike Vitoria, by claiming that very same spiritual authority obliged the pope and the king to see to it that the Indians were Christianized, that is to say, “educated” into being better men. With this argument he restored all political authority to the crown. Indeed, “the only way out,” as he entitled one of his tracts, was peaceful conversion, which to the conquerors and colonists sounded like more of the same. It proved impossible to find a balance between the right to convert the peoples of the world and the right of the pagan rulers to preserve their independence. How to serve God in the midst of thieves? is the question that hounded Las Casas all his life, as he saw the New World fall off a precipice of evil and injustice.

It is in the horns of these irreconcilable claims, these epistemological and ethical dilemmas, that the intellectual and political project of all those who wrote about the Andes after the fall of Cajamarca in 1531 are inscribed. The polemic on the nature of the American Indian that took place, as a result of confusing the Bible with world history, reverberated through the centuries, causing all kinds of distortions and misconceptions, blocking the ability to produce new learning and even a more accurate approach to empirical realities. When Francisco Pizarro (1478–1541) decided to execute Atahualpa and march to Cuzco with his Huanca allies, the priest who accompanied him wrote a report, today considered bogus, to justify the regicide. According to the Spaniards, Atahualpa had committed blasphemy. The scene has the Spanish showing the Inca a book – the Bible – and telling him that that is the word of God, to which the Inca must submit. Atahualpa receives the book from the friar’s hands, puts it to his ear, and upon hearing nothing, shakes it. He still hears nothing. Then, angered, he throws the book on the floor, saying that it cannot be God because it does not speak to him. Tom Cummins (1998) disputes the idea that the Inca would have expected an object to mimic the word because in the Andes, speech and writing were not associated with objects, as they were in Europe. It is clear also from the lack of adequate translators at the time that the Spaniards could not have conveyed the message they claim to have given Atahualpa about “the book–the–Word–divinity.” What the fiction of Father Valderde speaks of is the power claims that the written word and the representative relation with the king of Spain allowed them to make in imperial territories. This is the brash and unreflecting power amalgam of ideas and military strength that Andeans, and even Spaniards, would have to address every time they took up the pen to tell the story of the conquest, reconstruct the history of the Incas, petition for favors or advancement, or contest the practices and justifications for the injuries wrought upon people by the colonial regime. Again, providential history was the umbrella that protected all, from those who praised the conquest and destruction of the Andean way of life, to those who, like Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca wrote to correct the Spanish imperial historians, or Guamán Poma, who hoped to tutor the Spanish king into understanding what good government really would be like.

The conquest of Peru is dominated by a fractious engagement of Spaniards and Andean peoples who saw in the arrival of the Spaniards an opportunity to rebel against Inca rule. Starting with Father Valverde, many Spaniards wrote the memory of their part in the conquest in various forms and addressed different publics. The Crónica del Peru (1553) by Pedro Cieza de Leon (1518–53), a soldier and letrado, is the closest thing to a narrative of the conquest. The second part of the Royal Commentaries (1609) by Garcilaso de Vega, Inca (1539–1616) remains the classical account of the conquest because of its ample view of events, the clear concept of history that articulates it, and the beautiful style in which it is written. The recent Conquest of the Incas (1970) by John Hemming draws fully on the corpus of reports, letters, memorials, crónicas, treatises, and narratives that the conquest of the Andes, the ensuing civil wars, and the campaign for the extirpation of idolatries produced during the sixteenth century. He especially draws on Garcilaso and Cieza. The issues that dominated Las Casas’s writings are replayed in the writing of the Andes: encomienda, just conquest, evangelization, the right to universal empire, providential history, the place of the Indians in the new scheme of things, rights to private property, rights of the Indians to selfrule, and the quality of their culture.

      One way of making sense of the proliferation of writings from Peru is to look at the authors of these texts as part of the ongoing Sepúlveda–Las Casas polemic and separate them by the perspective that they had on the Inca empire. This is more helpful than a generational or referential classification (Porras Barrenechea, 1962). Although the edges of all groupings are always blurred, and cronistas like Juan de Betanzos (–1576) are hard to place neatly on one side or the other, the separation in terms of the particulars of the polemic allows for a better understanding of the discursive forces unleashed into modernity by the conquest as well as the problematics of positionality that accompanied writing in the Andes. In general terms we can speak of two oppositional groups: (1) the Toledo Circle, a number of letrados who pushed forward, with all the resources СКАЧАТЬ