Natural and Moral History of the Indies (review)

In Madrid in 1590, Spanish Jesuit historian José de Acosta (1539–1600) published his Natural and Moral History of the Indies, seven volumes concerning the location, origins, natural surroundings and history of the indigenous civilizations of Peru and Mexico. Acosta based this work on a variety of sources besides his own observations as a missionary in Peru and Mexico between 1572 and 1582, using the writings of military, religious, and administrative contemporaries, and interviews with indigenous sources that he neither credited nor identified. This translation ambitiously but powerfully reintroduces this text with the tools gained from today’s considerations of historical geography and Amerindian historical sources to better understand the intellectual crossroads of Acosta’s time. Using this model, scholars will also be able to better understand the costs of the discursive systems that arose out of colonialism to form the European intellectual paradigms, sans the subaltern perspective, that characterized modern intellectual thought.

As Mignolo recounts in the Introduction, Acosta’s ultimate purpose for writing the Natural and Moral History of the Indies was to enable future generations to understand indigenous societies and customs for purposes of conversion. The scholastic traditions that Acosta had been trained in as a Jesuit, which utilized classical Greek, Roman, and Christian authoritative sources, worked within a closed, geocentric system of geographical knowledge, that accounted only for the continents of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The task then, for Acosta, was to not only describe the New World, but to situate it within this conceptualization of the Earth that came from sources in Christian theology and Greek and Roman philosophy such as Saint John of Chrysostom, Saint Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.

The first four books constitute the “Natural” History of the Indies, that is, the origins of the Americas and their inhabitants, and copious descriptions of the physical environment in climate, mineral resources, plant and animal life. Within Books I through IV, Acosta organized his work into systems of classification with which to identify mineral, animal, and vegetative matter comprising the New World. This project, as demonstrated by its wide-ranging publication afterward in Spanish, English, Dutch, Italian, French, and Latin, was crucial to establishing a system with which to evaluate difference, and the establishment of such a system eventually developed into a system of a colonial, discursive, nature.

The same nature of inquiry took place in his Books V through VII on the political, social, and cultural organization of the people of Tawantinsuyu (Peru) and Anahuac (Central Mexico). In the case of his “Moral” History however, Acosta’s conclusions weighed heavily on the side of conversion. For example, the Mexica in Anahuac and the Inca in Tawantinsuyu had rituals and systems of social organization so similar to certain Christian rites and administration that Acosta concluded that they were parodies mocking Christianity that Satan had introduced prior to the arrival of the missionaries. The text is well annotated to indicate the variety of sources Acosta used to augment his testimony, at times indicating where Acosta most likely gained his information from native informants. He made his conclusions, however, without giving authority to any testimony that came from the subjects of his Natural and Moral History.

It is this exclusion of indigenous knowledge that provides the point of inquiry for Mignolo’s Commentary, in which he situates Acosta and his method of inquiry as preceding the shift to an intellectual paradigm that was heliocentric, Protestant, and northern European in origin. Mignolo maps out several intellectual trajectories from Western thinkers such as Copernicus, Bacon, Kant, and Hegel, to demonstrate how the circulation of knowledge about “the Other” between Europe and the Americas was crucial to various geographical, scientific, and historical organizations of the world associated with modernity, such as the linear conception of history, the Orient and Occident, and the historical understanding of colonialism that became crucial to national ideologies after the eighteenth century. This same comprehension of difference eventually led to a dismissal of the works...