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

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?

Because Columbus has been seized upon by the Left to serve as whipping-boy for all the problems with Western civilization, many conservative institutions decided to play it safe in their activities for 1992. Columbus has been largely invisible at the Seville World's Fair, in the great "1492" exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, and in many other events that were scheduled to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of his voyage. This insecurity comes ironically at a time when the non-Western world is seeking to emulate the West, to emigrate to the West, and in every other way to indicate that Western values have triumphed over their own in economics, politics, science, and culture. The real discovery (unacknowledged though it is) is of the world Columbus left, by the inhabitants of the worlds he discovered, even as their self-appointed intellectual spokesmen continue ritually to denounce the West.

Perhaps the most controversial subject in discussions of the "encounter" (now the politically correct way to refer to what used to be called the "discovery") is the role of Christianity. In the nineteenth century there was even a move to canonize Columbus. Today it seems that, measured by the sincerity and commitment of its followers, Christianity has emerged as a stronger force in America than in Europe; but whether the Church has been a force for good or evil in the New World continues to be the subject of vigorous and often bitter debate. The Pope has seen the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's "arrival" (another politically correct alternative to the word "discovery") in the New World as "giving a new thrust to evangelization." On the other hand, many of the mainline Protestant churches (and a few of the Catholic clergy) have declared Columbus's arrival "a historic tragedy" (as the National Council of Churches put it) and called on the West to repent rather than celebrate the event. This is a strange response from people who, at least in theory, believe that Christianity constitutes the ultimate revelation of God's will before the people of the world. Anyone committed to the idea that Christianity offers a universal doctrine of salvation cannot coherently maintain that its arrival in the Americas was anything but an event for the good--to put it mildly.

The Christian vision of the world also shaped the debate over the nature of the American Indian. Reports from many of the early explorers, from Columbus on, shocked Europe with news of the existence of men living naked, in a state of nature, or, to put it in Christian terms, in a state of innocence, like that preceding the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. (On his third voyage, Columbus was convinced that he had approached the actual Garden of Eden, in South America.) Reports of the first explorers that the natives acted with unfeigned generosity, lack of shame, and lack of individualistic greed caused some intellectuals to speculate that corrupt Europe had found a society morally superior to its own. The writings of some sober first-hand observers, reporting actual experiences with individual Indians, should caution us against rejecting the myth in its entirety. It contained some truth. Equally, however, some individual Indians acted deceptively, treacherously, or cruelly and were the subject of bitter invectives questioning their humanity and comparing them, not to Greeks-and Romans, but to savage animals. Given what we have learned about the warlike nature of life in pre-Columbian Central and South America, no one ought to wish to defend the proposition that the Indians were universally pacific. Indeed, recent archaeological discoveries in Guatemala suggest that massive warfare among Mayan city-states was the cause of the decline and collapse of the Mayan empire between the seventh and tenth centuries. Rightly, the abstraction of the "noble savage" is disparaged in both the Edgerton book and the Josephy book.

In part, the noble-savage myth has lost its earlier attractiveness to disinterested scholars because, through the tendency of left-wing scholarship to simplify and vulgarize complex phenomena, it has been carried to absurd extremes. In the radical perspective, all "Native Americans" (always referred to as if they formed a unified whole) had been living peacefully until their lands were seized and they were brutalized by "Europeans" (seen also as an abstract entity). This pose has been embraced as it has only because Western society is so self-critical and guilt-ridden that it makes no objection to being pummeled from the outside as well as from the inside. Blacks demand reparations from descendants of whites who bought them but not from descendants of blacks who sold them into slavery. Indians demand reparations from the descendants of whites who dispossessed them but do not propose to pay reparations to the descendants of those Indians they earlier dispossessed. While professing to exalt Indian values, these critics fail to realize that they are appealing to uniquely Western values.

Another problem lies in the abstractions--"Indians," "Native Americans," "Europeans" that presume to characterize all those subsumed under such labels. It is one of the strengths of Edgerton's book that he recognizes the importance of the individual in determining the alternative decisions a tribe might make. Indeed, he cites policies and acts of innovative leaders who forced changes in longstanding tribal traditions. Edgerton also speaks of the qualitative differences between one small society and another. In a shocking deviation from anthropological orthodoxy, he calls for "the evaluation of other cultures."

ULTIMATELY, the test of the significance of Columbus's voyage must lie in the direction the world has taken since then. And it has, as seems clear to all, taken the direction of Western ideas and values. Few, even anthropologists, would like to see the Americas returned to the rule of the political and social institutions that prevailed in 1492.

To be sure, the Spanish culture that initially supplanted the "Native American" differed in important respects from what we mean today by "Western ideas and values." Although the Bill of Rights exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion in Seville makes every effort to credit Spain and other European countries with the emergence of such guarantees of individual rights, the achievement of democracy in the New World is more heavily dependent upon an English tradition that emerged after the establishment of Spain's hegemony in much of the New World and in many respects in opposition to it. Only now, five hundred years after Columbus, has that democratic philosophy achieved almost universal acceptance in Latin America, long dominated by the more centralized, hierarchical political structure left by an imperial Spain.

Economically, Latin America inherited the mercantilist and protectionist traditions of its Iberian founders as politically it inherited hierarchical and autocratic traditions. The influence of Adam Smith, who helped the Englishspeaking nations throw off their mercantilist shackles, is only now being strongly felt in Latin American countries. And yet it may be argued that the triumph of Western democratic values in 1992 is itself a validation of Spain's sponsorship of Columbus in 1492. It was, one might say, the arrival of Spain that introduced the European tradition in the Americas, thus allowing the later implantation of English politics and economics. Today we can find interpreters such as Hernando de Soto and Roberto Campos arguing for the ideas of Adam Smith in Peru and Brazil, if not always with success.

In asserting that the direction of history vindicates the globalization of European values, one faces the peculiar opposition of a powerful force of Western intellectuals who see Western civilization as the principal source of evil in the world and Columbus as the agent of the propagation of that evil. This view is reflected in books such as America in 1492 and Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (1990). With the collapse of Communism, anti-Western ideology rests increasingly on ecological ("green") values, feminism (with its emphasis on the important role of clan mothers in Iroquois society, for example), and animal rights. Sale even goes so far as to say that "it is not fanciful to see warring against species as Europe's preoccupation as a culture." These critics of Europe normally choose to overlook the anti-ecological, anti-feminist, anti-animal-rights, antihuman-rights (in fact, cannibal) character of most of the societies they hold up as models to be emulated.

A word needs to be said about an indirect result of Columbus's voyage, one related to what Columbus intended but did not himself achieve: the meeting of East and West. To reach Japan and China was the aim of Columbus's "great enterprise." While it is true that he continued to assert that he had reached Asia, he well knew that he had not arrived at the labled kingdoms of Japan or China. Rather, the lands he reached seemed more like the thousands of islands that Marco Polo had described as lying off Asia, and that the Catalan Atlas of 1375 had depicted as filled with naked men and even cannibals. But, in fact, although he was not to be the personal agent of the meeting of East and West, his discovery of the new world lying between Europe and Asia gave added incentive to Spain, as well as to Portugal and other European nations, to reach the desired goal. That object was achieved by the Portuguese-in the case of China, in 1517 (reopening a link that had essentially ended with the departure of Marco Polo), and, in the case of Japan (which had never been visited by Europeans), in 1542 or 1543.

The actual "discovery" of these great nations by the Europeans was more influential in changing the culture of Europe than the discovery of America. While America was yielding its treasure and labor to the Europeans, Asia was altering Europe's mind. Not only were the natural sciences revolutionized, but the science of man (anthropology) developed as a way of attempting to explain the differences encountered by the Europeans in both America and Asia. Because the initiative for discovery came from the West and not from the East, the differences between Europe, America, and Asia were more sharply etched on the European mind than on the Asian mind and led to a rich intellectual harvest of theories such as evolution, cultural relativism, and even Marxism and economic determinism. Both America and Asia were relatively stagnant, being more wedded to their traditions than was the West, which found the novelty of other climes and other cultures stimulating. While the Western mind did not always move in directions that we would now applaud, it moved--indeed, darted here and there--as the Asian mind too often did not. The Left's current affair with "multiculturalism" derives its ultimate authority precisely from the expansion of Europe and the scholarly if not always respectful study of non-Western civilizations by Europeans.

WERE, THEN, the American societies uncovered by European explorers "sick societies," to use Edgerton's term, or were they "worthy societies," as Momaday suggests in America in 1492? Momaday and his colleagues ignore the dark side of the cultures they celebrate; Edgerton ignores the bright side, with the exception of the Yahi tribe of his native California. Edgerton is right to assert that the folkways of many small traditional societies are neither as adaptive nor as harmonious as many of his anthropological colleagues would like to believe. Scholars must be more willing to evaluate which is to say, judge--the societies they study.

We are still too much enmeshed in the debate precipitated by Columbus's voyage to be able to reach a consensus on the values of our own society or on the values of "the other." America in 1492, all too predictably, seeks to indict rather than to understand "Western European ethnocentricity," which Columbus is accused of introducing into the New World. As Alvin Josephy puts it in his introduction: "Asserting the superiority of the white aggrandizers' religious, political, and social universe over those of each of the many different indigenous peoples from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America, this ethnocentricity was an arrogant vice, backed by superior firepower and boundless gall, that never faltered or weakened." "It continues," Josephy goes on to say, "unabashedly on both continents today." The theme is even more forcefully stated by Vine Deloria Jr. Deloria, a spokesman for American Indians, reflects in his Afterword on the collapse of Communism and the apparent triumph of American values. His interpretation is, simply, bizarre. He asserts that "Nazism can be regarded as the true response of Europe to its declining role in the world: the Lebensraum of the National Socialists was simply Russian and American imperialism written in the small space of Central Europe." Deloria sees signs, as in the emergence of the animal-rights movement, that "we may be facing a future in which the basic tenets of the Indian view of life become the central themes of our society?'

What these animadversions have to do with the state of Indian society in 1492--the subject of the book in which they appear--may be questioned. The reason they are there is that, as with other ethnic groups, some American Indians have redefined their relationship with American society in terms of a continuing war, a war which, despite initial defeats, they believe they are in the process of winning. What might be the outcome of such a successful struggle? "If the universities were controlled by the Indians," Deloria writes, "we would have an entirely different explanation of the peopling of the New World, and it would be just as respectable for the scholarly establishment to support it." Deloria's remark occurs in a passage rejecting what he calls the "scholarly Bering Strait fiction." This is the theory, accepted by almost all scholars, that the ancestors of the American Indians migrated to the New World across the Bering Straits during one of the periods when it formed a land bridge to Asia. But Deloria's underlying assumption--that truth is entirely a reflection of one's ethnic loyalties--cannot be accepted by anyone who values disinterested scholarship. One shudders to think what other hypotheses would have to be revised if Indians "controlled" the universities.

So although we should welcome the renewed attention to our native past stimulated by the quincentennial, we should not ignore the ethnocentrism of native societies while belaboring that of European societies. Nor should we ignore the dark side of Indian societies while throwing a searchlight on the dark side of our European ancestors. Americans, whatever their origin, need not apologize for inheriting the past.

American in 1492: The World of the Indian Peoples Before the Arrival of Columbus, edited by Alvin J. Josephy (Knopf, 477 pp., $35).

Mr. Washburn, Director of the Office of American Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, is the author of The Indian in America.