The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology

by Anthony Pagden

This book gives a new interpretation of the reception of the new world by the old. It is the first in-depth study of the pre-Enlightenment methods by which Europeans attempted to describe and classify the American Indian and his society. Between 1512 and 1724 a simple determinist view of human society was replaced by a more sophisticated relativist approach. Anthony Pagden uses new methods of technical analysis, already developed in philosophy and anthropology, to examine four groups of writers who analysed Indian culture: the sixteenth-century theologian, Francisco de Vitoria, and his followers; the 'champion of the Indians' Bartolomé de Las Casas; and the Jesuit historians José de Acosta and Joseph François Lafitau. Dr Pagden explains the sources for their theories and how these conditioned their observations. He also examines for the first time the key terms in each writer's vocabulary - words such as 'barbarian' and 'civil' - and the assumptions that lay beneath them.

Genres: History, Anthropology, Nonfiction, World History, Native American

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago (Chile), London, Barcelona and Oxford and holds a B.A.. M.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has been a free-lance translator and a publisher in Paris a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), Professor of History at the European University Institute (Florence), University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the West sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. His research has led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of Europe and most recently in the roots of the conflict between the ‘West’ and the (predominantly Muslim) ‘East’. He has also written on the history of law, and on the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America, and is currently completing a book on cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment . He has written or edited some fifteen books, the most recent of which are, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), Worlds at War, The 2500 year struggle between East and West (2008), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). – all of which have been translated into several European and Asian languages. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais, (Spain) and La Nueva Provincia (Argentina).

He teaches classes in the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the theory of international relations, and seminars on imperialism and nationalism and on the theory of racism and ethnicity since antiquity.

Reviews

[Josh Buermann · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a history of the origins of Western ethnology in the Jesuit enterprise of evangelizing the Americas, which the author never deigns to call cultural and linguistic genocide (Pagden gets in a "linguistic imperialism" on p.182), but the full extent of which is still being documented, e.g. the mass child graves presently being exhumed in the old Canadian Indian residential school system.

The debates among Spanish intellectuals about the nature of the Americans they found themselves ruling over sound a lot like any contemporary debate among Euro-American intellectuals about whom to bomb next. In place of spurious allegations of cannibalism you can just insert a complaint that the enemy is using 'human shields' or 'developing weapons of mass destruction'. Francisco de Vitoria even argued that the Spanish had a right to treat the Americans like serfs because the Americans violated the natural law -- 'love thy neighbor' -- by being inhospitable to their new neighbors, who were merely extending a friendly greeting when they kept forcing the existing tenants onto encomiendas. It strikes me as roughly analogous to the contemporary policy: 'They hate us for our freedom, so we'll occupy them until they love us.' But then why would I expect that logic to ever change? Who will liberate empire from the timelessness of its own inverted rationalizations?

The writing is really quite good and frequently engaging, but I'm going to dock a star for the subject matter's endless turbidity in the waves of this or that author's application of Aristotelian logic to their categorizations of slaves and barbarians. It might be a better book if those tedious and repetitive arguments had been pulled out into a separate chapter for comparison, to see what meaning can be teased out of the thinkers' (often seemingly trivial) differences.

[Alison Zoccola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again, yet another book I read for a class, but this one was interesting, as well. It basically discusses how the Europeans--specifically the Spanish--responded intellectually to the "discovery" of the Americas and their encounters with native peoples. The nuance with which various Spanish intellectuals of the 1500s thought about the native Amerindians is rather startling, especially considering their subsequent colonization of those peoples. This book is somewhat dry and academic in tone and arcane in its subject, but if you are interested in and/or want a better understanding of the Spanish conquest of the New World, I highly recommend this book.

[Dylan Groves · Rating 3 out of 5]

confronted with amerindians, spanish scholars in the 1500's reject the idea of "natural man", a barbarian separate from civilization, and opt instead for "childlike man" who was capable of civility but had been culturally conditioned toward barbarism.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic.

[Julia Chelo]

Read for class, my eyes are bleeding. Would be interesting if it weren’t written in such a pretentiously irritating way. Bookmarking pg 87