Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World: 1492-1640. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1997 by Richard C. Trexler

Europeans took possession of new lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through variegated rites. The English acquired possession to the New World by physical objects, that is, by building houses and fences. The theatrical French, unlike the "anti-ceremonial English," did so by elaborate gestures aimed at gaining the consent of the invaded. The Portuguese, the author continues, showed their legitimate dominion by announcing their discoveries by latitude, the Dutch by describing their lands, while the Spanish, sometimes to the amusement of contemporaries, laid their claims by reading the Requirimiento, an ultimatum threatening war. Such are the findings of this erudite book which in its progress draws on many languages and literatures, and on the skills and suggestions of many friends and colleagues.

Alas, for all the research the author has accomplished, the differences that the author espies in the ceremonies of possession appear so starkly different from one another that her story, lacking ambiguity and problematics, is quickly told. To develop a monograph out of this seemingly straightforward set of facts clearly required something more, and Seed found it by asking properly where each of these practices had come from. Answering this question led the author into the legal history of each culture, and provides some of the most interesting information in the work. For example, in a particularly rich sondage into Spanish and Islamic law, we learn that the requirimiento appears to derive from a comparable rite of the Muslim jihad.

Together, identifying the rites of possession and their roots makes up the core of the book . . . but only two-thirds its scope. It must be said that a third of this work is repetition (of the main themes of the work) and irrelevancy, couched in a passive voice so pervasive that one often cannot decipher who the agent of a transaction is. As regards irrelevancy: inter alia, the work contains a long list of the rights conquered peoples retained in Islam, "according to the Encyclopaedia of Islam," (pp. 84-87) and several pages on Portuguese navigation and on the astrolabe (109-28) that have little or nothing to do with ceremonies of possession in the New World. Perhaps most striking is the juxtaposition at the beginning and end of the work of contradictory superstructures: (a) an imposing intellectual edifice to whit: the rites of possession are different for each culture because, essentially, European cultures were pluralistic and vernacular in the high and late Middle Ages, and (b) a conclusion that dismantles this introductory matter, as the author shows just how powerful the unifying Roman/Latinate tradition in fact was for this early modern world. Thus an all too unproblematized schema for her material leaves the author armed only with a hammer rather than a jigsaw to work on an image of undue sharpness when she had to confront contradictions in her account.

But I aim less to criticize the wasted pages in this valuable and rich work than to query in two ways the unproblematic notion of possession employed by the author: by highlighting the absence of a sociological component in this work, and by noting the absence in Seed's book of exchange as a foundational element in any possession. First, it is striking, indeed in this age of historical writing amazing, that nowhere in this work does the author ask what kind of person could take possession, and even more important, what type of person had to submit to a valid possession. Could women do one or the other, or were "honorable [adult?] gentlemen" required? Were the Cholulans fit parties for the Spaniards to pact with, given that they were "merchants and two-faced men"?(1) The Spaniards entering sixteenth-century Mexico clearly did not think so, and they further "proved" the illegitimacy of the native gods (on whom alone the subordinate could swear any oath changing sovereignty) by pointing out that filthy commoners had manufactured those gods. The Spaniards thought that ritual techniques of whatever stripe were the preserve of "the solemn classes," a particular aristocratic and priestly level of culture that cut across national lines and included indigenous American "gentlemen." They further assumed that a global code of ritual comportment encompassed not just European and American aristocrats, but both continents' clergies as well. In short, in clear contradistinction to the author's view, global sociological presumptions rather than individual cultural ones informed Spanish thinking about the personages involved in the ceremonies of possession. Seed simply omits all sociological considerations from her work.

Now to the matter of exchange. From the beginning, the author has chosen as her subject matter European (not aboriginal) rites and their roots, and so, as a general rule, she is not concerned with indigenous "Ceremonies of Subordination" (my term) or with the American perception of such possession ceremonies. Fair and good; everyone gets to write his or her own book. But by generally ignoring native roles in these rites, the author is seduced into leaving exchange rites unmentioned, behaviors which from the conquerors' as well as the natives' points of view were among the most powerful parts of the ceremonies of possession. Anyone familiar with the stories of Europeans getting a foot in the New World knows just how central gifting and trading were in establishing authority in the colonies, and any work on the ceremonies of possession that ignores such exchanges puts the seriousness of his or her undertaking in question.