|
|
|
Book Review
| La Indianidad: The Indigenous World before Latin Americans. By HERNÁN HORNA.Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001. xi +179 pp. $38.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
|
|
Historians face a daunting task when they attempt to write synthetic analyses of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Even in this age of global narratives, the histories of the civilizations that inhabited the Americas before the European conquest resist broad categorizations, in part because of the incredible diversity of the region in the pre-Columbian period, and in part because of the proclivities of Latin American academics, who typically eschew broad generalizations in favor of the particular. This is the challenge that Hernán Horna faces in his effort to produce a text that explores the story of indigenous Latin Americans from the time of the first human settlement through to the end of the colonial period. |
1
|
|
Horna's clearest purpose in the text
is to provide a counternarrative to a tradition within Western scholarship
that denigrated indigenous peoples as culturally and racially inferior,
ignored the accomplishment of pre-Columbian civilizations, and,
even worse, suggested that the European conquest rescued indigenous
cultures from their own savagery. In this endeavor he provides a
catalog of the accomplishments of the Mayan, Mexican, and Incan
civilizations, and argues that it was a unique constellation of
pathogenic, technological, and strategic factors that allowed for
the conquest. He further laments the loss of cultures and practices
that dominated the region prior to the sixteenth century. Bringing
up the oft-cited argument that in Incan times there was neither
poverty nor hunger in the Andes, he decries the fact that "modern"
agriculture and economies have failed to feed Andean peoples for
several centuries.
|
. . . |
There are about 640 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
