Natural and Moral History of the Indies (review)

The first edition of José de Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies, in the author's native Spanish, was published in Seville in 1590. It is a compact and elegant volume, conjoining discussion of the natural history of the New World, the "works of God" in Acosta's words, with a discussion of human history, "the works of free will." The book was an immediate success, and several more Spanish editions soon followed, along with translations into Italian, Latin, French, Dutch, and English. Excerpts appeared in the ninth volume of Theodore De Bry's celebrated America (Frankfurt, 1601). Among the several early modern historians and scholars who discussed the History the best-known would seem to be the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1609), and the book remained influential until the eighteenth century and beyond. The revised version of the English translation of 1604 that was published in 1880 by the Hakluyt Society signaled the dawn of Latin American studies as we know them today, and has in its turn been reprinted several times. But despite the book's fame, the translation by Frances López-Morillas is the first modern translation into English. It is beautifully done, a felicitous combination of translating accurately and idiomatically, while also giving the reader some sense of Acosta's stylistic idiosyncrasies and of his simple, straightforward immediacy. Among the scholarly editions of the Spanish text of the Historia, the most important remains that by Edmundo O'Gorman (Mexico, 1940). O'Gorman's identifications of the biblical, Greek, Roman, patristic, and later texts that Acosta cited have therefore been incorporated into this translation as footnotes. In addition, throughout the text of the Historia Jane E. Mangan has added explanatory notes dealing with Central American and Andean history, archaeology, and anthropology, and with Acosta's own cultural world. In places, these notes amount to a full-scale commentary that even experts will find helpful. For students, the notes are likely to prove invaluable for years to come. The History is pervaded by a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, Acosta found much to love and admire in New World nature and culture. On the other hand, he thought that Amerindian religions were the work of the devil and had to be replaced by Christianity, the sooner the better. At another level, he found the strangeness and difference of the New World and its people appealing and admirable, while yet viewing the European past as the yardstick of all human achievement. Mangan regularly draws attention to these dichotomies and finds Acosta wanting in his ability to understand and appreciate American nature and culture in their own right and on their own terms (see e.g. pp. 45, 89, 133 with 221, 336, 349, etc.). This theme occupies center stage in the introduction and concluding commentary by Walter Mignolo, who encourages the reader to peruse Acosta's text for "what is constantly absent and silenced in the narrative, that is, Amerindians' descriptions and conceptualizations of their lives" (p. xxvii; further, pp. 467 ff.). By way of explaining what Acosta should have known and written, Mignolo refers to the work of scholars of our own time as exemplifying an "episteme" that does greater justice—as he sees it—to "Amerindian intellectuals." Perhaps. But it is difficult to get away from the conclusion that Mignolo accuses Acosta of the very sin he commits himself, that is, of imposing his own form of enquiry and understanding not only on the readers of his own time, on us, but also on the Andean and Central American indigenous peoples of the past whose cause he endeavors to defend.

Seeing that this new translation is likely to be consulted for years to come...