valladolid controversy

is a famous dispute among conquistador spaniards about whether or not indians had souls susceptible of being saved.

Valladolid controversy,' the famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was under way, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools.3 Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls that much seemed obvious but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. The theory under which Amerindians were operating was that all entities share by default the same fundamental organization, which is basically that of humans. A licuripalm, a peccary, a piranha, a macaw: each has a soul, a language, and a family life modeled on the pattern of a human (Amerindian) village. Entities all have souls and their souls are all the same. What makes them differ is that their bodies differ, and it is bodies that give souls their contradictory perspectives: the perspective of the licuri palm, the peccary, the piranha, the macaw. Entities all have the same culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature. For the controversialist at Valladolid, the opposite was the case but they remained blissfully unaware that there was an opposite side. Indians obviously had bodies like those of Europeans, but did they have the same spirit' Each side conducted an experiment, based on its own premises and procedures: on the one side to determine whether Indians have souls, and on the other side to determine whether Europeans have bodies. The Amerindians' experiment was as scientific as the Europeans'. Conquistador prisoners were taken as guinea pigs and immersed in water to see, first, if they drowned and, second, if their flesh would eventually rot. This experiment was as crucial for the Amerindians as the Valladolid dispute was for the Iberians. If the conquerors drowned and rotted, then the question was settled... they had bodies. But if they did not drown and rot, then the conquerors had to be purely spiritual entities, perhaps similar to shamans. As Claude Le vi-Strauss summarized, somewhat ironically, the two experiments, the Spaniards' versus the Amerindians': 'the whites were invoking the social sciences while the Indians had more confidence in the natural ones.' (latour)

valladolid controversy, n.All

valladolid controversy