America in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus

National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by Wilcomb E. Washburn

DID COLUMBUS destroy an idyllic world of primitive virtue by introducing the corruptions of Western civilization? Were the "naked people Columbus saw in 1492," as N. Scott Momaday puts it in the first chapter of America in 1492, "members of a society altogether worthy and well made, a people of the everlasting earth, possessed of honor and dignity and generosity of spirit unsurpassed," or were they members of Sick Societies, as Robert B. Edgerton puts it in his book?

Edgerton's book focuses on warfare, witchcraft, divination, torture, human sacrifice, child abuse, female genital mutilation, male dominance, disease, poor health practices, bad nutrition, taboos, footbinding, suttee, blood feuds, and other traits of small (and sometimes large) traditional societies. Such practices, in the spirit of cultural relativism, are rarely criticized by anthropologists and are often interpreted as adaptive responses to the environment. The essays in America in 1492 are sparing in their consideration of these subjects, if they are mentioned at all. For example, in Miguel Leon-Portilla's thirty-page chapter on the cultures of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, only two sentences are given to Aztec human sacrifice. Leon-Portilla writes that "the ritual communion of small pieces of the victims' flesh, offered 'to deserve the god's existence'--a sacrament vividly anticipating one that would soon be preached by Christian missionaries--[was an] inseparable ingredient of a culture which, with all its contrasts, was a summing up of Mesoamerica's grandeur." Edgerton, on the other hand, writes less poetically of the practice of "Aztec cannibalism," in the course of which "sacrificed bodies were rolled down the temple stairs (probably made as steep as they were to facilitate the process) to waiting men who carved them up as adroitly and dispassionately as any butcher might deal with a side of beef before the various parts were carried away to be seasoned, cooked, eaten, and hugely enjoyed."

America in 1492 contains chapters on the different geographical regions of the Americas in 1492 and a series of topical chapters on Indian languages, religion, social organization, intertribal trade and relations, science and technology, and the arts. There is not a hint of violence or warfare in some of the chapters, and few references to war in the other descriptions of Indian life before Columbus.

Edgerton takes a less politically convenient view. An iconoclast among anthropologysts, he insists that many native practices were (and are) maladaptive rather than adaptive, and caustically chides the "adaptivists" in his profession who interpret virtually any bizarre practice in terms of its presumed positive social uses. He attacks frontally the belief that "'primitive' societies were far more harmonious than societies caught up in the modern world." He concludes reasonably that "it is likely that the ethnographic record substantially underreports the amount and kind of human suffering and discontent that has actually existed in the world's small societies, just as it underrepresents the various things that people believe and practice that do not contribute to their well-being."

Edgerton's book draws most of its examples from Africa, Papua New Guinea, Australia (particularly Tasmania), and the Arctic. Is it possible that Edgerton's strictures on the nasty, brutish lifestyles of those non-American societies are inapplicable to the American Indians cited by those who created the "myth of the noble savage"? Present-day defenders of that myth have yet to offer a reason to believe that, as primitive societies go, those native to the Americas were less primitive than the rest.

It may seem strange that after five hundred years we are still debating the nature of native cultures and whether the European cultures that were superimposed upon them were a force for good or evil. The difficulty in assessing the consequences of the discovery of America is that we have to examine the entire five hundred years between 1492 and 1992. That this is true is illustrated by the aftermath of another historical event: the expulsion of the Jews and Arabs from Spain, and the imposition of the Inquisition in the years following. The intellectual life of both Portugal and Spain in the medieval period owed much to Jewish and Muslim scholars. The loss of these elements was a self-inflicted wound upon Spain, from which the country is only now-recovering. And yet it has taken five hundred years for the Spanish government formally to acknowledge its mistake. How much more momentous must be the discovery of America, which the Spanish historian Francisco Lopez de Gomara, in his General History of the Indies (1552), called "the greatest event since the creation of the world (excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it)"?

Acknowledging the importance of the discovery, was it a blessing or a curse? Did good supplant evil, or evil good? And does our current preference for a democratic society and egalitarian ideals render us incapable of judging the merits of autocratic and hierarchical societies, such as those of the Aztec and the Inca?