"Foreignness begins at the skin's edge..."

This week we will be moving deeper into the Australian outback and farther into the creative wilderness of Chatwin's imagination. We will also be taking up two new readings: Henri Baudet's _Paradise on Earth_ and Tzvetan Todorov's _The Conquest of America_. The latter work is challenging, but should seem vaguely familiar, given that it is about the encounter of Europeans with the indigenous peoples of "the new world." It will be our task to try to re-examine the conjuncture of these cultures with an eye to understanding why the encounter turned violent. We will benefit in this context from the partial quote from Clifford Geertz cited in the title of this newest post: "Foreignness begins at the skin's edge, not the water's." Let's use the blog this week to reflect on these readings and to explore what they have in common,something that should become very apparent by the time we read Marshall Sahlins for Thursday.

Self/Other; Identity and Difference

Take sometime tomorrow and through the weekend to reflect on the dialectic of identity and difference as displayed in The Secret Sharer and Cabeza de Vaca. How does a presumption of civilization or of superiority generate tension at the point of encounter?

To this juncture, we have a grasp on the tendentiousness of the concept, that is, that civilization is an historical inventon of recent origin that carries an implicit judgmental valence and so has been used to discriminate between peoples. The judgmental valence is also evident in the manner in which the globe has been sectioned and represented accordiing to the rules of a tendentious western-bound geography. Civilization comes with a view--"things seen are things as seen"--and so it is that the geography of first, second, and third world peoples repeats the larger conceptual dialectic of "civilized" and "primitive."

A worthy question in this context of doubt is : How does civilization, as a mechanism of judgment of the other, shield us from the experience of what is different? In other words, what does civilization deny the civilized who act in its name? Another is: How does the affirmation of one's identity in the sovereignty of one's name protect us from the threat of our own inner impulses of otherness?

Albar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: Film and Narrative

Here is some background information on the protagonist of the film and the author of our narrative. This information should be of consequence in assisting your comprehension of the action and dialogue. Take a moment to write down your thoughts about the film and let's see what happens in our class discussion of the odd circumstance of what we will come to know as Cabeza de Vaca's "double exteriority."

Albar (or Alvar) Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was the treasurer on the Narvaez expedition from Spain to the "new world" that was shipwrecked off the western coast of Florida in 1528, 9 years following Cortes's arrival in Mexico.

A biography from the New Perspectives on the West has a very informative summary of the events touched on or alluded to in the film.


A Biography of Cabeza de Vaca

Cabeza de Vaca was born into the Spanish nobility in 1490. Little of his early life is known, except that he made his career in the military. In early 1527 he left Spain as a part of a royal expedition intended to occupy the mainland of North America.

After their fleet was battered by a hurricane off the shore of Cuba, the expedition secured a new boat and departed for Florida. They landed in March 1528 near what is now Tampa Bay, which the expedition leader, Pánfilo de Narváez, claimed as the lawful possession of the Spanish empire.

Despite this confident declaration, the expedition was on the verge of disaster. Narváez's decision to split his land and sea forces proved a grievous error, as the ships were never able to rendezvous with the land expedition. The party soon overstayed its welcome with the Apalachee Indians of northern Florida by taking their leader hostage. Expelled and pursued by the Indians, suffering from numerous diseases, the surviving members of the expedition were reduced to huddling in a coastal swamp and living off the flesh of their horses. In late 1528, they built several crude rafts from trees and horse hides and set sail, hoping to return to Cuba.

Storms, thirst and starvation had reduced the expedition to about eighty survivors when a hurricane dumped Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on the Gulf Coast near what is now Galveston, Texas. They were initially welcomed, but, as Cabeza de Vaca was to remember, "half the natives died from a disease of the bowels and blamed us." For the next four years he and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades lived in the complex native world of what is now East Texas, a world in which Cabeza transformed himself from a conquistador into a trader and healer.

By 1532, only three other members of the original expedition were still alive -- Alonso del Castillo Maldonando, Andrés Dorantes de Carranca, and Estevan, an African slave. Together with Cabeza de Vaca, they now headed west and south in hopes of reaching the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico, becoming the first men of the Old World to enter the American West. Their precise route is not clear, but they apparently traveled across present-day Texas, perhaps into New Mexico and Arizona and through Mexico's northern provinces. In July 1536, near Culiacán in present-day Sinaloa, they finally encountered a group of fellow Spaniards who were on a slave-taking expedition. As Cabeza de Vaca remembered, his countrymen were "dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in company with Indians. They just stood staring for a long time."

Appalled by the Spanish treatment of Indians, in 1537 Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain to publish an account of his experiences and to urge a more generous policy upon the crown. He served as a Mexican territorial governor, but was soon accused of corruption, perhaps for his enlightened conduct toward Indians. He returned to Spain and was convicted; a 1552 pardon allowed him to become a judge in Seville, Spain, a position which he occupied until his death in 1556 or 1557.


Follow up by Dr. J.

This biography is for the most part accurate for our purposes. What we also need is some testimony from him about his experiences. Here are a few exemplary quotations worth a read. Speaking of the natives he reports that "to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way." "These are the most obedient people we had found anywhere, also in general the best looking." "The people are well disposed, serving such Christians as are their friends with great good will."

In another passage in which Nunez describes in detail the details of indigenous life and spirituality, he uncertainly asserts that "We chse this course to find our more about the country, so that should G-d, our Lord please to lead any one of us to the land of the Christians, we might carry information od it with us."

Here are two other insightful comments: "it is because their method of cooking is so novel and strange, I must describe it." And when he confesses an interest or attraction to local practices he says that it is "to indulge the curiosity of human beings about each other."

By way of assuming two native postures: first peddlar anf then shaman, he is able to survive for six years running goods back and forth from the interior to the coast. In the course of this work he becomes a healer laying his hands ont he afflicted, breathing on the sick, bleeding them, and cauterizing wounds with hot coals. He is reported to have revived a dead man with the magical arts, arts that included by his tetsimony: "our method was to bless the sick, breathe upon them, recie a Pater Noster and Ave Maria, and pray earnestly to G-d our Lord for their recovery."

But the second coming of the Spanish with the natives, including Nunez in 1536 (the end of the film) in westrrn Mexico, the complex of self and other, us and them, becomes illlustratively complicated:
"We sought to ensure the freedom of the Indians and at the moment when we believed we had achieved it, the contrary occurred. They [the Christians] had in fact determined to attack the Indians whom we had sent away reassured as to their peaceful intentions."

The above quotations are taken from Nunez's Naufragios y comentarios better known to us as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. What can we learn about the relationship between the cultural being and organism that is humanity? What is the message of this film?

Civilization and the "Other"

Here in our second post for the Honors Seminar Webblog, you are to give thought to the meaning of civilization and attempting here to define it with an eye to its function in the dynamic of self and other that we have been discussing. Take advantage of your online inquiries into "alterity" and "otherness" in deepening your reflection on how civilization, much like sedentary life, is employed to define an individual or collective self against the backdrop of the other. Your readings in Gellner and Conrad will undoubtedly help here, along with your own inherited wisdom on the topic. If you do quote from sources please make sure to cite them appropriately and let us know where we can find the information so that we may add to the discussion.