Week 3, Aysha Bagchi, Pagden

The two issues I found most interesting from the reading this week were Pagden’s discussion of cultural commensurability and his discussion of attempts to give “true” accounts of the New World.

Pagden suggests that the incommensurability of European and native cultures was “inescapable” for immigrants to the New World. They had to “remain and yet resist the lure of the native”. (37) According to Pagden, visitors to the New World who knew they would return back to Europe recorded what they had seen and came to understand themselves better from their experiences, but failed to penetrate into a genuine understanding of native cultures. (36) For both immigrants and visitors, Pagden argues that these Europeans discovered the incommensurability of native cultures with their own.

I thought this discussion was in tension with precisely what figures like Oviedo and Las Casas were claiming to do. As Pagden describes, each attempted to make himself into a recognized authority on the New World. (83) Las Casas, in particular, insisted that natives were human and capable of becoming Christians. By claiming that the fundamental nature of Europeans and natives was the same, Las Casas seems to suggest that European and native cultures were commensurable, that there was a common platform for mutual understanding and comparison. They were all capable of salvation and therefore creatures existing under a common moral platform (albeit, ultimately a European, Christian one in Las Casas’s book).

Indeed, even attempts to claim authority in describing the natives seems to imply, though to a more limited extent, commensurability between the cultures. Figures like Oviedo, Las Casas, Columbus, and even those who had never visited the Americas such as Sepulveda, would claim to understand the nature of natives. They claimed to have penetrated into native minds and cultures, to have grasped the truth. These claims seem to be in tension with labeling natives as sub-human. The autoptic eye would not be able to penetrate without commensurability just as a human being cannot penetrate into the mind of a mouse, cannot know what the world seems like from that vantage point. Thus, it seems incompatible for Europeans to claim that natives were non-human (with different fundamental natures and moral platforms), and thus that native and European cultures were incommensurable, and also claim that they had used the autoptic eye and grasped a native’s fundamental nature. To grasp is to be able to empathize, which seems to require a shared basic platform.

In light of the ultimate fact that cultural integration of the societies did not occur (albeit with pluralism in the integrated society), it may be tempting to think that history has proven the incommensurability of European and native cultures. But I think this would be a mistake. The ultimate failure of Europeans to transform the natives into cultural Europeans did not illustrate that the cultures were incommensurable. That failure was partly the product of believing that the European culture was superior. This belief led Europeans to assume that native progress meant native westernization and that Europeans – while they could learn more about themselves by interacting with populations that seemed so different – could learn little about who they might rather be. Commensurability is illustrated when openness and a sympathetic dialogue and exchange occur, resulting in growth for all parties involved and an increasingly shared moral platform (albeit with some degree of pluralism as well). That open and sympathetic exchange did not occur, and parties stuck to their moral and religious cloisters.