Review: Wonder and Exploitation in European Adventurism

Author(s): Vinay Lal

Reviewed work(s):
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World by Stephen Greenblatt
Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 29, No. 49 (Dec. 3, 1994), pp. 3088-3090
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4402098
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care to discuss all the difterent aspects of policy
including the impact ot agricultural policy
on the nutritional status of people. But some-
where along the line in approaching the
solution to the problem they have sought
simplistic ones assuming that while more food
may become available, more is consumed by
many, morecnergy may beexpended in securing
it resultinig in little anthropometric change. It
is rather suirprising that conclusions such as
the above can be drawn while it is well
known that there is no linear relation between
production and consumption.
The authors have included the aspects of
pricing policy. public distribution. food
subsidies. rations and quotas, food stamps
and couponis. but a clear picture of the policy
recommendations fails to emerge. Similarly
in the final chapter where the authors touch
upon the various nutrition intervention pro-
grammes related to health they quote widely
from the experience of various countries.
The attempt to review the situation of the
dift'erent interventions somehow do not link
up with the structural adjustment programme
and the economic liberalisation that has taken
the country by storm. The book touches on
these issues in a very superficial manner.
The authors claim that SAP is being re-
designed with potential nutritional effects in
mind, while programmes already in operation
are havingcompensatory programmes tacked
on to buft'erthe poor trom initially detrimental
impacts on well'are. If one were looking for
new and radical analysis ol'the nutiritional status
or the policy interventions, this book does not
caterto such interests. It, however. comes across
with wealth of inlormation on these issues.
Wonder and Exploitation in European
Adventurism
Vinay Lal
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonderof the New World by Stephen Greenblatt-
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991; pp 202, $ 24.95.
A LITTLE more than 50() years al'ter
Columbus' voyagethat led to his 'discoveryI
ot' the 'New World'. his legacy very much
remains a matter of contention. In the US.
October 12. the day that Columbus landed
in the West Indies, is observed as a holiday
in many states, and there is scarcely a large
or even mid-sized city where a parade in his
honour is not held. All over the country,
hundreds of nmillions of dollars have been
expended in the last few years, a good many
by the deficit-ridden US government, on
various extravaiganzas intended to
commemorate and glorify the inaugural
moment of European civilisation's
triumphant entry into the western hemisphere
of the globe. Although even Columbus's
admirers are constrained to admit that the
moment of contact was to lead to the
destruction of numerous indigenous cultures.
they often style the slaughter of indigenous
peoples ais, in the words of the cultural
anthropologist Marvin Harris, an unintended
consequence'
of the European penetration
of the Americas. Moreover, they can, and
indeed do. point to the US Capitol, the
Library of Congress, Wall Street, and other
wondrous monuments of the country about
which one observer said that 'the business
of America is business' as examples of the
great good that Columbus's landing in the
Americas wrought in its wake. From the
point of the view of the privileged, the old
adage. 'let bygones be bygones', has
considerable use and merit.
On the other hand, there are those, among
whom number this reviewer, to whom it is
indisputably clear that the legacy of
Columbus' voyage can only be read as a
record ot the miost thoroughgoing genocide
in the history of the human race, if we except
only the cruel l;ate visited upon theTasmanian
aboriginals. In his recent work, Am)1ericati
Holocaust: Coluinbus andl the Conquteest
of
lte New Worlkl(Oxford), the historian David
Stannard has captured the terrible enormity
of the crimes committed against Native
Americans in the 'New World'. In what are
today Peru and Chile, for example. the
indigenous population stood at somewhere
between nine million and 14 million before
the arrival of the Europeans: a century latcr
this population had becn reduced to 5,00.000.
Between 1519. when Hernando Cortes tirst
set his destructive gaze upon Tenochtitlan,
and the end of the 16th century, the population
of central Mexico had diminished from nearly
25 million to about one million. Everywhere
the story was the same; in Stannard's
estimation, a hundred years after the arrival
of Columbus in the Americas, nearly 60-80
million Native Americans had perished. What
the Spaniards had accomplished south of'
Mexico, other Europeans achieved with equal
success, and scarcely less brutality, in North
America. As Stannard points out, informed
estimates place the Native American
population before the arrival of English
settlers between seven million and 18 million;
by the end of the 19th century, there were
about 2,50,000 Indians, and in many places
they had been rendered completely extinct.
What else could have been their lot when,
as the Reverend Solomon Stoddard of Boston
was to urge in 1703, they were to be hunted
by large packs of dogs, "dealt withal as
wolves"? Some might squathble about the
numbers, and others might object that a good
- if not preponderant - portion of the dead
were lost due to exposure to infectious
diseases, but no sophistry or juggling of the
t'igures can alter the larger picture.'
Stephen Greenhtlatt's Marvelouis
Possessionis is at a conlsiderable remove trom
much ol the these unwholesome f;acts, more
generally from the other literature that has
accompanied the Columbus Quincentenarv.
and yet it sits rather uneasily amidst these
works. Its erudition and academic tone sets
it apart; moreover, it is not tocused solely
on Columbus, and insofar as it centres on
Columbus. it does so not from the point of
view of the 'Great Man Theory of History',
but rather by way of taking Columbus as an
iconic representation of the idea ot
exploration and travel.! and as an avenue for
linking acts of conquest and appropriation
to intellectual and aesthetic histories and
genealogies of representation. The main lorm
that European representation of Otherness
took was wonder, an ecstasy of astonishment.
a sense of the marvellous. "Wonder is,
argues Greenblatt. "the central tigure in the
initial European response to the New World.
the decisive emotional and intellectual
experience in the presence of radical
ditference" (p 14). However. wonder was
not only the main mode of representation.
but also yoked to appropriation, indeed to
imperialism's most savage thrusts and
desires. It is this that initiates Greenblatt's
own quest; as he asks, "how is it possible.
in a time of disorientation, hatred ot the
other, and possessiveness, t(o keep the
capacity for wonder from being poisoned'?"
(p ix).
Greenblatt begins with what appear. an(d
certainly promise, to be theoretical
innovations. Chronicles ol exploration tfrom
the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, he
maintains, are "rarely if ever interesting at
the level of sustained narraltive aind
teleological design, but gripping at the level
of the anecdote." While they subscribe to
an "overarching scheme", they seem
"uncertain of their bearings. disorganised,
fragmentary". The strength of these
discourses of travel lies "in the shock of the
unfamiliar, the provocation of ain intense
curiosity, the local excitement of
discontinuous wonders": the world is
presented in them as a "succcssion of brief
encounters, random experiences, isolated
anecdotes of the unanticipated" (p 2).
Greenblatt's very language suggests his
departure from the tradition of grand
narratives, for that tradition offers no
possibilities of an emancipatory history, and
a willingness to embrace petities hlistories
oranecdotal accounts. Sinceone mighteasily
object that the anecdote, by virtue of its
fragmentariness and singularity, cannot serve
as the basis of.any common history of a
people or a nation, Greenblatt stresses that
3088 Economic and Political Weekly
December 3,
1994
anlecdotes too can he i e/)ceslIntaiv(, grestures
towards somethino larger. Although he places
a premiumn on the atnecdote, going so
Ir
as
to characterise it as one of the
"princtpal
products of' a culture's representational
technology", the anecdote is left quite
untheorised.' Grecnblaitt' s justification,
almost wholly unexamined, for assiuming
that the lnecdote is especially suited to convey
wonder is that both are apparenitly
*discontinous" modesol representaition. More
significantly. he ignores the fact that the
,effcts
of anecdotes and grand narratives are
often homologous, cut aIs they are from the
samc Ifabr-ic ot discour se. Locker-room
anecdotes abouit womlen lforexaimple, betray
the sarme underlying assum1ptions ahout the
interiority of the female sex aind the
unpredictability of lemale sexuality as do the
inore gr n-aridi uratives of mledicatl, psychliatric.
and sociolomzical discouirse.
Greenhl att's coinern withl the aniecdote
stems from hiis attemrpt to understand(l the
"representational technology" that European
travellehrs aind conlq.uistadors
brought to bear
in thilr endeavouL- to assimilate and
appropriate the Other. a problem linked to
what he calls "M1e
irelothUctionl
atitl
cir'culatit}on of '/I' o lcaital" (p 6: italics
in orioinab). Grcenbllatt argues that there are
three- reasonso why 'cal)tal' shiould be invoked
here: 1'irist, it is capital
that allows for mienesis
or thle SpCctCU1ila "prolit'eration and
circulation ofI
replresentations'
on a
,global
scale: secondly. capital conveys the image
of' a stockpile or accumulation of
representation.s; and, finally, miimesis is, "as
Marx said of capital", a "sociail relation of
plroduction", wlicih
is
ainotlihe- wiay
ot
saying
that "representations aire niot only prodticts
biut prodUcers, capable
of decisively altering
the very lorces that brought thein into being"
(p 6). Thc deploymicnt
of' these ideias ts to
be lotind in Greenblatt's analysis of how
maio vel and wvonder- (lo the wor-k ol
representlltion inl ELrope;an nalrr-ativess of'travel
and conquest. Altliough Greeblait uses lofty
words to (describe hiis enterprise, he in elfect
says whalt Edwairdl Said hald pointcd out in
Orietal(ismn ( 1978), naimnely, that European
discour.se of the Other has relied lairgely on
ilie'citioii. The East m-ay not have been
stagnant. and iits natives might niot have been
constitutionailly lazy. but once this had been
said, it wats repeated parrot-like by a great
many more travellers and scholar-
administrators. and in consequence became
'true'. T"his imia-e theni produced other
representations, inclu(linig numiierous
imitations of itself.
Mm-t'eloi.s Posssessioiis is nionetheless ani
engaiging
work, and we canl now follow its
areuments in relationi Co the author's
ethnogrraphic miaterial rather more closely.
Greenblatt closes his introductory chapter
with the observation that "thhe marvelous"
waws a centrail feature in the "whole complex
tsysitem of represientation. verball alnd visual,
philosophical and aesthetic, intellectual and
emotional", through which Europeans in the
later Middle Ages and the Renaissanice
"apprehended, and thence possessed or
discarded. the unfamiliar, the alien, the
terrible, the desirable, and the hateful" (pp
22-23). This apprel,iension of woncder antd the
marvellous took essentially two trajcctories.
oine which is represented by the figures of
Collumbus and Bernial Diaz del Catstillo. who
served under Cortes and later wrote the
Conquest of Newt Spain., and the othel- ol
which the spokesmen are Herodotus, John
Mandeville, and Montaigne. If Columbus
and Diaz are embletnatic o lthe murderous
appr-opriation of wonder in the service of
empire. Montaigne was to show that "wonder
remains available for decency as well as
domination" (p 25). Greenblatt finds some
of this decenicy even in Mandeville. the first
principal figureof hisethnography. Whothiis
John Mandeville was remaslins uncertain, but
as Greenblat't pointsi out, lor "sevcrall
centuries" Mandieville "was regarcled
throughout Europe as one of the greatest
travellers in histoiy
and the most intiluentlial
witiness to the custoimis of the atlien peoples
beyond the Holy Land", though it is qutite
probable thait he never lelt his native Europe
(pp 30, 33). It is in the narraitive of his travels
to the Middle East and Asia. purportedly
uinider-taikeni in the 14th century, that wvondler
and Inarivelou.s first emerge as sigifiiticaiit
tropes ol appreihendinig the Other. "For there
are many diverse kingdooms antd countries
and isles toward the east pairt of the world".
Maindeville was to write, "wherein are mainy
divers folk and divers kinds of beasts aind
many other mnarvellous things" (p 29). On
his journey homeward, he made his way
throuth Rome. for he wished, as hie says, to
tell the Pope abooLt "thle marvels which
[he]
had seen in divers countries" (p 34).
Tlhe more precise significance of
Macndeville f'orGreenblatt lies in tlhe tct that
this erranit knight abjured possession. The
sultanii of Egypt olfered him a rich prince's
daughter. bult Mandeville wo uld not have
her; and when, at another moment, gold.
silver and precious stones were to be his for
the ;asking. he similarly relfuscd to lay his
hand on theseallurements (p27). "Mandeville
takes possessioil of nothing" (p 26). ;and
perhaps mlore significantly, he is not
possessive about his own laitll or culture.
Mandeville does not locate the centre of the
world within the geographical entity called
Europe, or within the cosmological univcrse
of Christendom, for he recognises tlat "Maniy
ways come all to one end" (p 41). He
represents the passage, as Greenblattexplains,
"from the dream of possession to a
dispossessed wandering" (p 45). To
understand that "dream of possession', that
infernal desire lor conquest which raged in
the heart of many a European, one
milust
tuin
to ColumbuIs. Thalt "dream of po.sses.sion" is
present, alnd present a.s mo3re than ju.sta
dream, in his accOUllt, in a letter to a patron.
of his landing at Bahamna.ls on October 12,
1492.: "As I know thait you
will he pleased
at the great victory with whlich OuLr Lo-rd has
crownedc my voyage, I write this to
yOU..
I passed trom the Ca(nalry Islandcis to thc
Indies... And ther-e I found very inany islands
filled with people innumierable, and of them
all I have taken possession lor their
higihnesses... To the first islald whicll I ifounl,
I gave the name Stn Salvador. in
remembrance of the Divine Ma<jesty, Who
has marvelously bestowed alt this; thc Indians
call it 'Guanahani'. To the second, I gave
the name Isla de Santa Maria de Concepcion...
and so to each I gave at new name" (p 52).
Greenblatt ottersi an extenided aind complex
analysis of this passage. and particuilarly of
thosediscursiveand lecal strattegies by which
Columbus in inimical cavalier fashion takes
possession of lan(ds aibout which he Could
halve known nothing. Ignorance never
deterred Columbuis f'rom stakino claims to
possCss.ionI: arrivingatTortuga on December
18, 1492, he proceedls to 'parley' with the
naitives, and tinds that the naitive chief- is very
pleased with the goods that Columbus gifts
to himi, so pleased indlced -that it was a
mlarvel." The chief land his 'counsellors',
Columbus adnmits, "weire very troubled
becatise they dlid not uniderstaind me nor I
themn." "Nevertheless" - and let us mar-k this
- "I lathered". Coltinties Colilmbus, "that he
told me that it somiething from this place
pleased me that the whole islanl(d was at my
commanadtld tp 13).
As Greenblatt remar-ks with great lorce.
here it is not the imalgination at play, as in
Renaissance authors, but the imagination at
work (p 23). The point is particularly well
taken. lor though it is common to consider
reason as anl instirLmenltality of exploitation.
we have a great (leal rmor-e to leatrni of how
imagination riather than reason generaitedf
representations. It. is a consideriible
imlaginative stroke that enables ColUmbus to
describe his landing as a 'great victory'. and
then proceed to crown his victory with the
baptismal acts of takinig possession. as one
does of converts to the new faith. of the lands
of' those encouniter-ed in an inmaglinatry def'eat.
kidnappinig the languaige of the indligenIouLS
people, anld finally giving the islands a new
identity a.s possessions of the Crown by re-
namning themil. The power of naming,
Greenblatt reminllds us. is associated in
European anid Christian thiinking with
"superior knowledge, the knowledge of the
truth": This was the power that God gave
to Adaim (Geniesis 2:19), and ias Baconl put
it, when man "shall be able tocall thecreatures
by their true namles he shall again commanid
them'" (p 82). Let us recall again the lirst
instance of re-naming: "I gave the name San
Satlvadtler, in remembrance of the Divine
Maljesty, Who has marvelously bestowed all1
this..."' (p 52). A.s lifle is a malrvellous gitt
of godl and must be suitably matrked, so the
EConoiTic and Political Weekly Decemiber 3. 1994
3049
marvellous bestowal ot these lands too must
be commemorated. 'The founding action of
Christian imperialism", writes Greenblatt,
"is a christening" (p 83).
This imaginative force that Columbus
commands is backed by an elaborate legal
ritual for "the taking of possession of the
lands" so that this possession appears to have
emanated from the choice of the inhabitants
(p 56). The exercise is purely formalistic,
because of course these lands appear to
Columbus - and other like-minded
conquistadors in his wake - as previously
unclaimned,4 but by no means meaningless.
for it "has its full meaning then in relation
to other European powers when they come
to hear of the discovery" (p 60). In all this,
Columbus cannot nonetheless hide his sense
of wonder. It is a wonder to Columbus that
"everything they [the Indians] are ordered
to do they will do without any opposition;
so far are the Indians from contestinig his
possession of their lands that they bring the
Europeans food and drink. "which they gave
with extralordinary affection", and everything
else too they give "so bigheartedly and so
happily that it was", exclaims Columbus, "a
wonder" (pp 82-83). Wonder is, then, not
only what is
aVI)used
within Columbus, the
etfect of the encounter, but a "calculated
rhetorical strategy": if the natives marvel at
everything, and we marvel that they can
marvel at such trifles as shoes and beads, the
violence
- "the sudden arrival of armed and
armored strangers, kidnapping, and expro-
priation of lands" - in which the entire trans-
action is etched can easily be forgotten (p 73).
In Greenblatt's arresting but problematic
tormulation of the place of wonder in this dis-
course. 'Columbus does not use the discourse
ol the marvelous in order to create a momen-
tary amnesia about his actions; he induces
a momentary amnesia about his actions in
order to create the discourse of the marvelous"
(p 73). That the hackneyed metaphor of the
chicken and the egg should have inspired,
as it seems to have, this formulation is rather
unfortunate, for that very question seems to
belong to a pre-Foucauldian historiography.
This formulation is rendered necessary
hecause agency, in Greenblatt's reading,
helongs not to the "discourse of the marve-
lou.s hut to the creator of the discourse, a
lx)sition
not consistent with his view that
"representations are not only products but
producers" (p 6). I f this di scourse can do evi l,
it can also be bound to the power of the good,
and what Greenblatt seeks to do, as he had
set out in the very first pages of this book,
is recuperate wonder for a discourse that
attempts a fruitful and non-exploitative
understanding of how one system of repre-
sentation can establish contact with another
system of representation. Searching for some
mode of communication with the Indians in
Trinidad, Columbus thinks of "displaying an
art fonn, staging acultural event. represenlltng
a fiesta". The effect is not quite whalt he hald
in mind: the Indians interpret the plalying aInd
dancing as an "unambiguous declaration of
war" (p 91). Must two or more systems of
representation always clash? Is there some
form of contact which is not inherently
unequal, inherently open to misunderstanding?
These difticulties in communication were
sought to be ameliorated by the use of a 'Go-
Between'. Dona Marina interpreted for
Cortes. but as iGreenblatt suggests, there are
many other kinds ot cultural mediators.
Herodotus was one such mediator: a traveller
to distant lands, he was very much an explorer
of the imagination too, and where others
were inclined to see an ineradicabledifference
between the Greeks and numerous
insignificant 'Others', heintuited similarities
between them. The Athenians' strategy of
abandoning their city to the Persian invaders
and taking to the ships was pretigured in "the
Scythians' strategic nomadism against
Darius" (p 127); this realisation perhaps gave
Herodotus a new-found respect for the
erstwhile barbaric Scythians. Closer to
Columbus' time, Martin Frobisher, who
explored the Northwest Passage, observed
certain similarities between the Eskimos and
the English. 'Savage' though the Eskimos
may have been, they used their dogs to pull
sleds much as the English used their horses
to pull coaches (p 1 13). The congruences
between European and 'native' practices
could, of course, be denied or repudiated.
Greenblatt notes that Bernal Diaz' "Thze
Conquest of New Spain depends
upon,
a
radical distinction between Spanish practices
and Aztec practices that are disturbingly
homologous" (p 130). If the Aztecs were an
nilitaintly "aggressive and expansionary"
people. so were the Spaniards; and if the
lormer had their "Idol houses", so did the
Christians have their "holy churches and
parish clhulrches and hermitages and wayside
chapels".
How, then, was Diaz to mark the
dikllrenlce Heli did so by finding a "'native
practice" tlhat. not talling "in the category of
familiar European vices", allowed what
Greenblatt calls "mimetic blockage or
exclusion", or the positing of an "absolute"
and unconditional ditfference. Such a practice
was "the Mayan and Aztec practice of human
sacrilice and ritual cannibalism" (p 132).
This strategy of "mimetic blockage or
exclusion" ws1it can be argued, adopted by
European colonisers everywhere. It helps to
explain, for instance, why so much of British
historical and travel writing on India was
riveted on such "native practices" as sati,
child-marriage, hook-swinging, and so forth.
These practices allowed India's colonisers
modes of representation that made it possible
to maintain the difference between the two
cultures, a difference that there was all the
more reason to mark precisely because the
homologies were so transparent. Blockage
hadtobe"most powerfully effective" because
the transparencies suggested that the coloniser
could easily slip into the culture of the
c olonised (p I 34). This strategy of'excl usion'
suggests, on Greenblatt' s view, a fundamental
ambiguity among the colonisers and
conquistadors about 'difference': preser-
vation of the dif'terence kept alive the
"European dream" of the unequal econoonic
exchange, while its eradication appeared as
the fulfilment of the divinely ordained task
of Christianising the natives and the more
pragmatic need of finding interpreters.
It is not, however, on tl noteof "blockage",
but rather on the possibilities of a truitful
cultural contact imbued with a sense of
wonder, indeed on the possibilities of
positioning ourselves between cultures. that
Marvelous Possessions ends. Greenblatt's
meditations, which take the form of a close
reading of ethnographic and literary material,
take him at last to Montaigne. Vast as the
differences were between Europe and the
New World, Montaigne found that they were
perhaps less extreme than the differences
between the various social orders within
France and other European countries. As he
was to write in his essay 'Of the Custom of
WearingClothes' ,"Betweenmywayofdressing
and that of a peasant of my region, I find far
more distance than there is between his way,
and that of a man dressed only in his skin."
Not only that: "there is more barbarity",
Montaigneobserved in hisessay 'OfCannibals',
"in eating a man alive than in eating him dead;
and in tearing by tortures and the rack a body
still full of feeling, in roasting a man bit by
bit, in having him bitten and mangled by
dogs and swine (as we have not only read
but seen within fresh memory, not among
ancient enemies, but among neighbours and
fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the
pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting
and eating him after he is dead". The wonder
of it, on which Greenblatt might perhaps
reflect a trifle more, is that the Europe of the
Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch2es'
Hammer) could yet produce a Montaigne.
Notes
I For the politics of the demography of Native
America, see Lenore A Stiffarmn with Phil Lane
Jr, 'The Demography of Native North Aimer-
ica: A Question of American Indian Survival'
in The State of Naitive America: Genocide,
Colonisatiotn. and Resistance. M Annette
Jaimes (ed) (Boston: South End Press. 1992),
pp 23-54.
2 Marvelous Possessions bears some coinpari-
son, in this respect, with Philip Glass' opera,
Thte Voyawige. which had its world premiere at
the New York Metropolitan Opera on October
12, 1992.
3 Cf Joel Fineman, 'Fiction alnd Fiction: The
History of the Anecdiote' in 7The New
Historicism, H Aram Veeser (ed) (London and
New York: Routledge, 1989), pp 49-76.
4 These lands has to be conceived as 'waste' in
the hands of the natives before they couldl be
taken into the possession of the crown. The
idea of property is, in fact, rooted in the idea
of 'waste': see John Locke. Treatise (of Civil
Governmenit atnd A Letter Concerning Toler-
ation, Charles L Sherman (ed) (New York:
Irvington Publishers, 1965), pp 26-30. The
most pertinent passages are from the Second
Trecati.se, paras 38, 42, 45.
30()') Economic and Political Weekly December 3, 1994