Saturday, July 19, 2008
Encounters...
Welcome to the blog for our class. You should have received an email from me "inviting" you to become a contributer ("team member" in Googlespeak). Some of you will need to open Google accounts if you do not already have one in order to post to the blog. Let me know if you have any trouble. I look forward to reading your thoughts on the Columbian encounter!
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2 comments:
It was rather fascinating to read Vespucci's account of the people and life in Brazil.He seemed to be disturbed by hearing about or witnessing incidents of cannibalism.The idea of captives of war to be salted or pickled for meals seems quite stomach churning.Vespucci also mentions a man who ate about three hundred human bodies.These observations seem to create an insurmountable distance between the South Americans and the western readers of the time and introduce the idea of racial superiority.
i didn't know how to take that mention by vespucci of the man who ate 300 bodies. It seems to rank up there with the anecdote about the men's organs breaking off "through lack of attention and they remain eunuchs" (p-220). whether he takes actualities and then exaggerates them, or whether he is completely creating falsehoods here, i am not quite sure, but when he goes on to talk about their zeal "in the art of fishing" (p-221) i believe that completely. it all goes back to what we spoke of in class about ideas of who he was writing for and what his purposes of writing were: to portray truthfully what he saw; and/or to exhibit some of his supposed superiority(morally, culturally, etc.) over his subjects, etc. Also through this exhibition of his cultural superiority he is stating the racial superiority of the european as a whole. ( so i agree with you about that idea of his introduction of racial superiority, btw. )
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