Jimmy Ruck Pagden

Cultural commensurability refers to an approach by some of the early explorers to make sense of practices foreign in nature to them. For example, Columbus was trying to understand the “initially alien pattern of behavior” of the native Indians where they were able to supposedly gather gold from the water without panning for it. No matter how foreign this concept may have initially seemed to Columbus, he tried to reconcile this practice by identifying concepts or facets of this foreign practice that he himself could identify with. Columbus observed that prior to mining for gold, the Indians would fast and also abstain from their women—these concepts of abstention and self-denial were “familiar” to the Christian faith that Columbus practiced. Thus Columbus took one unfamiliar action and attached it to a familiar action that he could understand. This principle of “attachment” helped Columbus and other early explorers translate varieties of experience from an alien world into the practices of their own. As Pagden notes, “the stark incommensurability of the two is dissolved in the supposed common recognition of the danger of sex and of the cosmic worth of gold”. Essentially, this practice of “attachment” helps commensurate or measure the foreign practices of peoples for these Europeans. Ironically, this ease of classification for the Europeans may have the unintended consequence of changing the nature of the observed foreign practice into something “unintelligible to the original actors”. So by trying to reconcile these foreign practices into a framework understandable by the Europeans, they may have unknowingly imparted their own biases and perspectives on the native practices changing the very nature of the observed practice in the first place.

“Autopsy” or the authoritative eye refers to an appeal to the authority of the eye witness. It is the “privileged understanding” which those people present at an event have over all those who have only heard about the event in a second hand fashion. This authority can be conveyed with the use of several key phrases such as “I saw” or “I found” or “this happened to me”. These rhetorical tools show command of the situation. It helps show the reader that the events “are within my understanding”. Because the author has experienced them first hand and has had visual sight of the event, then he or she can speak authoritatively on things that others may not be able to (or at least not in the same fashion). It follows then that authority can only be granted to those with the authoritative eye. “I” has seen what others may not have seen, and thus “I” alone is capable of giving credibility to the text. His or her work is more plausible because he or she has been there.