The “Other” in Western Consciousness Any history of Western civilization must account for the relation of Western cultures to the other cultures with which they came into contact. The Age of Encounter, which began in the fifteenth century and ended in the seventeenth, resulted in the colonization of most of the non-Western world. Only the vast interior of Asia escaped Western domination. The effect of Western colonization was the displacement, enslavement, and large-scale death of native peoples. This last effect was at least partly unintentional, as Europeans introduced into the uncharted territories of their conquest common European diseases that the immune systems of native populations could not successfully fight. From the Western perspective, it hardly mattered. Europeans thought of these peoples as being in a state of cultural childhood, and because childhood mortality was extremely high in the Renaissance and something Europeans accepted as natural, they could absorb the deaths of these New World “children” with composure. Above all, these “innocents” were “primitive”—that is, they knew nothing of the Christian God and Western culture. At the very least, they required “civilizing.” Homi Bhaba [ho-mee bah-bah], a great student of contemporary global culture, has reminded us of the “artifactual” consequences of Western colonization in an essay exploring the connection between contemporary culture and its colonial heritage. “The great remains of the Inca or Aztec world are the debris . . . of the Culture of Discovery,” he writes. “Their presence in the museum should reflect the devastation that has turned them from being signs in a powerful cultural system to becoming the symbols of a destroyed culture.” The headdress of Motecuhzoma, presented to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V by Cortés and now in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, is a case in point. Consisting of 450 green tail feathers of the quetzal bird, blue feathers from the cotinga bird, beads, and gold, it is a treasure of extraordinary beauty and can be appreciated in purely aesthetic terms, as the museum presents it. Yet as Homi Bhaba points out, “It seems appropriate . . . [to make] present in the display of art what is so often rendered unrepresentable or left unrepresented—violence, trauma, dispossession.” In other words, Bhaba believes that the headdress’s history, the tale of Cortés and his betrayal of Motecuhzoma, should enter into the museum display. Bhaba is critiquing museum practice, but his admonition applies as well to this text. Many of the images in Chapter 18 are symbols of destroyed cultures. They were once signs of power. They were quickly consigned, in Western consciousness, to the category of the “Other.” Those classified as “Other” were thought to be incapable of utilizing their own natural resources for themselves. The West considered those whom they colonized to be weak (because unsophisticated in the uses of Western technology), uneducated (though highly trained in their own traditions), and morally bankrupt (because “bloodthirsty,” “naked,” and “uninhibited”). Remember, the Greeks called all peoples who did not speak Greek “barbarians”. And just as the Romans tried to “Romanize” their provincial holdings, so too did Western colonizers from the era of the great explorers try to “civilize” the peoples they encountered. Sayre, H. M. (2012). The humanities: culture, continuity and change, Volume 1 (2nd ed.). (2011 Custom Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 20:10:48 +0000
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