Alice, Week 3, Pagden

Though I found Pagden’s initial description of the “principle of attachment” a little confusing, over the course of Chapter One he laid out the concept well, starting with the European impulse to ‘attach’ (find commensurable, that is, familiar, aspects) New World culture to their home culture. From attachment he smoothly leads into possession: he ends section III with “the Columbine impulse to encircle, to divide, to contain and ultimately to possess,” and begins section IV with the clear statement, “Attachment led to possession” (27). Under ‘possession,’ Pagden names two sub-categories – transportation (of materials) and naming as forms of possession. He asserts that the “unimaginable, incalculable, unmapable […] which cannot be possessed or transported” (28) was terrifying to the European, and resulted in the push to familiarize and connect the New World to Europe and subsequently the drive to possess it. Overall, chapter one laid out a clear argument and upheld it in the progression down successive points.

Chapter Two – “The Autoptic Imagination” – was much more interesting to me. In his introduction, Pagden states that the purpose of his work is to examine “the possibility, and for many the impossibility, of cultural commensurability” (2). Throughout chapter one this process was clear, as explorers struggled to create common denominators that would allow them to understand, evaluate, and ‘possess’ utterly foreign Native American cultures. (As a side note, as Helen pointed out, Pagden is a little unclear in what he means by ‘possess’ – there is a mixture of literal and metaphysical possession). However, I didn’t fully understand Pagden’s attempt to tie the authorial experience into commensurability. The bulk of the chapter focused on the works of two men, Oviedo and Las Casas, and upon fleshing out the differences between their authority as eye-witnesses and historians of the New World while maintaining the common agreement that “only those who had ‘been there’ could possibly have any significant understanding of America and its inhabitants” (57). For Oviedo, this meant positioning himself as the ‘Pliny of the New World’ – the grand authority on the subject, and the most authoritative because of his direct experience in America. While a historian of the Indian peoples of America, Oviedo certainly followed Pliny’s footsteps in presenting an unflattering portrait of native customs, government, and religion, and certainly in not admiring his ‘sub-human’ subjects. On the other hand, while Las Casas also viewed his direct experience in America as the source of his own authority (and claimed that Oviedo never saw the real America), he came up with a wholly opposite opinion of the Indians. Drawing upon Christian theology, Las Casas sought to move the Indians from the category of ‘other’ into the category of fellow man, to be respected and treated with Christian brotherly love.

Since the two authors used the same rhetoric (or nearly the same; Pagden goes into the details of their discussions on eye-witness authority, but it seems a diversion from his main argument), I read the chapter wondering how Pagden was going to sum up his points into an argument about European travelers’ commensurability and incommensurability. Closing out the chapter, Pagden states that Columbus, Barchilon, and Lery “had all attempted to counter incommensurability by appealing ultimately to unmediated experience. When, by contrast, Las Casas turned instead to authorial experience, he seemed to offer a means of mediating between an authority-dependent hermeneutic culture and the presence of the ‘facts’” (81). He then leads into the issue of non-objectivity present in Oviedo and Las Casas’ histories, and the end of the age of autopsy when eclipsed by detached history. I left the chapter intrigued by Pagden’s remarks at various points, but unclear on what his overall point on autoptic imagination was as it related to commensurability.