Natural and Moral History of the Indies (review)

"And my desire is that all I have written may serve to make known which of his treasures God Our Lord divided and deposited in those realms; may the peoples there be all the more aided and favored by the people of Spain, to whose charge divine and lofty Providence has entrusted them." With these words in the dedication to Philip II, José de Acosta summed up the spirit of his Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (1590), for the celebrated Jesuit was interested in both explaining the conquest as a preordained Providential event and identifying signs of intelligent design in the many natural wonders of the American continent. Acosta was a man of omnivorous curiosity who had an uncanny ability to find divine order in contingency, chaos, and probability. But Acosta was not simply a Christian philosopher: As the citation above makes clear, he was also a pragmatist interested in learning how things work and how colonial peoples thought, so as to use and manipulate the former and to convert and govern the latter.

The views of Acosta have been available to English-speaking audiences for centuries. Unlike the writings of scores of other sixteenth-century Spanish, Creole, mestizo, and Amerindian authors whose treatises on the natural wonders of the Indies and the past of local indigenous peoples commanded little attention until recently, Acosta's History was immediately translated into several European languages, including English. In the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, when all sources produced in the early Spanish empire came to be seen as untrustworthy and useless, only Acosta's treatise was deemed worth reading. Despite Acosta's reputation, however, since 1604 the average English-speaking reader interested in the Jesuit has had to plow through Edward Grimeston's translation. Grimeston's prose in The natvrall and morall historie of the West Indies might have sounded fine to Elizabethan audiences, but today it reads as stodgy and distant. Fortunately students can turn now to Frances L�pez-Morillas' crisp new rendition.

This new translation forms part of a much larger editorial effort that also includes an annotated edition by Jane E. Mangan, an Andeanist, and a study by Walter D. Mignolo, a literary critic. Both the annotations and the study help put Acosta in a larger cultural and ideological context, but Mangan and Mignolo's approach to Acosta betrays a bias that is typical of most contemporary scholarship.

In 1604 Grimeston and his Tudor and Stuart audiences considered Acosta to be a great natural philosopher, not only a keen observer of things Amerindian. Yet by the late seventeenth century, Acosta began to be read only for his contributions to anthropology and ethnography. Students and scholars today do not turn to Acosta for answers on the nature of the stars and heavens in Americas but to reconstruct the lives of Amerindian peoples and the nature of colonial power. What is left out, however, are the questions that most captivated Acosta: why tides and winds in the southern and northern hemispheres have different timings and directions; why the Torrid zone of Peru, instead of scorching heat, enjoys temperate climate year round; why seasons of rain and drought follow exactly opposite patterns in Europe and Peru; why mercury attracts silver; and so on. Three out of every five pages in Acosta's Historia are devoted to accounting for the seemingly puzzling behavior of the cosmos in the Indies. Acosta sets out to prove that nature in America, just as much as in Eurasia, is a docile servant of God, following predictable laws. For all their contributions, Mangan and Mignolo deal only tangentially with this essential facet of Acosta's world. A full-fledged historicist study of Acosta has yet...