The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization.

Walter Mignolo's The Darker Side of the Renaissance chronicles what may be labeled the "cognitive imperialism" which accompanied the territorial conquests of the Spanish Monarchy in the New World. More than just the lands of Native American peoples were taken by the Spaniards, he argues, their intellectual constructions also were pushed aside and replaced by those of Spain's emergent nationalistic intelligentsia. Mignolo is fascinated with the fabrication of information, with the cognitive processes involved in breaking up and repackaging human observations - "memories" as he calls them - into commodities for intellectual retention and consumption. His case is that at the moment of cultural contact Native American intelligentsias had cognitive procedures for the commodification of memories more than adequate for their needs. The replacement of those procedures by the procedures favored by the Spanish conquerors had nothing to do with "progress," and everything to do with domination.

The title of the book reflects Mignolo's contention that much of the European awareness of difference between self and other which since Derrida has been recognized as an outcome of the Enlightenment, is more correctly seen as the outcome of the Renaissance. For European intellectuals it was the book, not the Maxim gun, which made victory in the contest with indigenous opposition a foregone conclusion. And since the book, in its modern incarnation, can be traced back to the Renaissance, it is since the Renaissance that a sense of arrogance toward those designated as "the other" is discernible in the attitudes of European intellectuals.

Tracing the development of this arrogance as it evolved in the minds of early modern Spanish authorities is Mignolo's special concern. Looking back to the writings of the Spanish philologist Antonio de Nebrija, who after ten years of humanistic study in Italy, came to occupy an influential position at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, Mignolo argues that it was Nebrija's successful promotion of alphabetic literacy as superior to all other modes of communication which created in Spanish intellectuals the perception of discontinuity between their own achievements and those of their Native American counterparts. Through information systems based upon pictographs in one instance, woven "texts" in another, indigenous bureaucracies had maintained control of empires. Spanish colonial bureaucrats were well aware of the power of these systems, and as Mignolo demonstrates, gradually assimilated (translated) the information they had accumulated into the bureaucrats' own preferred idiom. But this latter development took place only after Native American systems had been delegitimized through invidious comparison with alphabet-based systems of information storage.

Mignolo identifies four what might be labeled "venues" where this development occurred both simultaneously and cumulatively. First was the mode of communication for official correspondence. Here a priority was granted to European languages (grammars), initially Latin, eventually Castilian. Second was the area of record-keeping, of bureaucratic archives. By state fiat certain types of "information" were created and privileged to the detriment of others. Third were the various literary forms - letters, histories, etc. - through with this information was transmuted into knowledge. On this topic Mignolo offers, inter alia, an interesting discussion of the intellectual development in the Western tradition of the idea of the encyclopedia. Fourth was the re-presentation of this new knowledge in graphic form in the context of maps.

Mignolo takes a semiotics approach to his subject matter. Here, on the other side of the rise and decline of "deconstructionism," many social historians may lack the patience to decipher his confessional, yet still discursive prose style. Those who do may find particularly worthwhile his sixth chapter on "Putting the Americas on the Map: Cartography and the Colonization of Space" which offers the application of his ideas perhaps most pertinent to historians.

As for an assessment of Mignolo's ideas, a good starting point is one of the early works of Jack Goody (The Domestication of the Savage Mind), where Goody spends a chapter offering a tentatively affirmative answer to the question of whether pre-literate societies maintained a class of individuals who might be called intellectuals. Mignolo's work does more than just illustrate that yes, preliterate intelligentsias did exist, it reveals the cultural blinders behind the way Goody framed the question in the first place. In Western scholarship there has been too narrow an association of literacy with the alphabet, the cost being an incapacity to appreciate non-alphabetic systems of communication and how they empowered the elites in control of them. Mignolo's work is a major step forward in the scholarly understanding of what was out there before the Europeans arrived.

Ironically, it is not as useful for providing an introduction to what the Europeans brought with them. At one point in his study Mignolo observes that one of the reasons it is now possible to perceive the cognitive constraints imposed by the book is that that format is now being abandoned as (computer) technology provides new ways to organize information. If only he had applied that insight to his analysis of the adoption of the book. The essential thrust of Mignolo's argument is a presentation of an epistemology as a technology, i.e., of alphabetic literacy as a tool of domination. Mignolo never came to grips with the implications of this construction. The test of any tool is its efficiency, and that test is always comparative, never absolute. Looked at from Mignolo's chosen perspective, the question was not whether indigenous forms of information processing worked, but whether they worked as efficiently as the one introduced by the Spaniards. Mignolo never addresses this question, an oversight which takes away a good deal of the possible force behind his argument.

Andrew E. Barnes Arizona State University