The Mestizo Mind

The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization

Serge Gruzinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136697401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a personof mixed European and American Indianancestry.

Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess.

A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The MestizoMind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

PART I

MÉLANGE, CHAOS, WESTERNIZATION

1 AMAZONS

Sou um tupi tangendo um alaûde! …

(I’m a Tupi who plays the lute! …)

—Mário de Andrade “O Trovador,”
Paulicéia desvairada (1922)

ALGODOAL, AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 1997

This line by Mário de Andrade long trilled through my mind, as though it might help me unravel the feelings I had about certain regions of the Americas—such as a remote island south of the Amazonian delta, discovered in the course of an academic trip.

The tranquility of the place was conducive to reverie and reflection. Only the air seemed to be prey to constant motion: in the sky, between wind-twisted palm trees, my eye encountered scudding clouds that slowed only at dusk. But the endlessly blowing wind hardly threatened the torpor of the village of Algodoal, where I was staying. Algodoal, meaning “cotton plantation”: when uttered by natives, the name of this village carried Afro-Indian resonances that charmed me even before the boat had set me on its shore.

The village was just as I had expected—salt-eroded carcasses of boats, a few plank shacks, and scanty electricity composed a “preserved” landscape whose exoticism reminded me of my first Mexican trip long ago, back in the 1970s. Days passed in measured steps. In the morning, donkey-drawn carts carried merchandize and supplies. Sometimes bleached boats arrived to drop penniless young people on the island, attracted by the vast ocean beach.

The shore ran as far as the eye could see, beyond the great white dunes overlooking the channel. At high tide, it could only be reached by hailing a dinghy, unless you wanted to risk swimming across the muddy waters of the narrow strait. At dusk, on the village beach, groups of dark-skinned, half-naked teenagers indulged in a ritual contest called capoeira. Their movements responded to the insistent tunes of the berimbau, a simple musical instrument made from a wooden bow stretched with a metallic string that passed through a colorfully painted coconut. In the distance, pursued by the rising tide, a herd of livestock would cross the beach at a lively pace, escorted by a rider whose silhouette could barely be discerned in the pink mist of dusk. Once night fell, the constellations of the southern hemisphere lit up the sky. On land, the flickering glow of candles illumined a few patios where hammocks were swinging. Far away, the rhythms of a carimbó were stifled by the yawning wind.

This idyllic picture is only a delusion, however, since it eliminates everything startling about a village that I wished had been stranded in the nineteenth century. Every evening, a news program on the Globo TV channel spewed forth images of blood, money, scandal. Early in that month of September 1997, the death of Princess Diana stirred the islanders’ imaginations, bringing them into line with the rest of the globe. The deadly streets of Paris had followed me to Algodoal, bedecked for the islanders in an exoticism both glamorous and funereal. My mirage of powdery sand and sunny poverty had to make room for the remembrance of a princess.

Many parts of the Americas such as Algodoal continue to belong to the past—that, at any rate, is how we describe everything that appears archaic and rustic to our eyes—even while sharing global dreams on a daily basis. In order to account for these contrasts—which are blithely perceived as contradictions—people usually just see Tradition holding out against the ravages of Progress and the contaminations of Civilization.¹ How can this reflex be explained, this irresistible tendency that spurs us to seek archaism in all its forms, to the extent of overlooking—willfully or not—whatever concerns modernity in any way? It is almost as though we take malicious pleasure in creating difference.²

Despite reflecting on all that, television still struck me as out of place in Algodoal, in the same way a calculator seems out of place among the Chiapas Indians or Ray-Bans on the nose of a Siberian Yakut. Yet television was part of the island’s reality just as much as the ocean-worn colors on its worm-eaten wooden boats.

Nor was it possible simply to contrast village “timelessness” with big-city “modernity.” With two million inhabitants, Belém, the capital of the western Amazon region, is itself a mélange of eighteenth-century colonial town planning (designed by an Italian architect), of Belle-Époque Paris, and of chaotic modernity ringed by shantytown favellas. Neoclassical palaces by Bolognese architect Antonio Landi, decrepit early-twentieth-century dwellings, middle-class high-rises, and neighborhoods of shanties with open sewers all compose an ensemble as heterogeneous as it is unclassifiable. In the middle of Republic Plaza, the Teatro da Paz—an opera house every bit as fine as the one in Manaus—rises like some strange vestige of a turn-of-the-century civilization, a lavish wreck that washed up on Amazonian shores.

How should we deal with these mixed societies? First, perhaps, by accepting them as they appear to us, instead of hastily reordering and sorting them into the various elements allegedly making up the whole. This dissection—what is called an analysis—not only has the drawback of shattering reality, but most of the time it also introduces filters, criteria, and obsessions that exist only to our Western eyes. Archaism is often, if not always, an illusion. Many features typical of native societies in Latin America come from the Iberian peninsula rather than some distant pre-Hispanic past to which nostalgic ethnologists try to assign them.

“I’m a Tupi who plays the lute! …” On Algodoal, the notes of a “primitive” harp accompany the gestures of the boys dancing the capoeira on the beach. But the singer’s chant picked up on a song played over the air by Brazilian radio stations; the lyrics, referring to “Brazilian culture” and “national culture,” owed more to the spread of social-science vocabulary than to obscure Afro-Brazilian traditions—which I was forced to admit with a pang of regret.

Accepting, in its globality, the mongrel reality before one’s eyes is a first step. But this effort often leads to a realization that can produce a kind of anguished impasse: mélanges are apparently always placed under the sign of ambiguity and ambivalence. Such is the supposed curse hanging over the heads of composite worlds.

Writers have used it to fine effect. Macunaíma, the protagonist of a novel by Mário de Andrade, is “an ambivalent, indecisive character, torn between two value systems.”³ The story of this multifaceted being, an archetype of Brazilians and Latin Americans torn between antagonistic options—Brazil versus Europe—wavering between cultures yet belonging simultaneously to both of them, is exemplary of this fracture. It is hardly surprising that Macunaíma’s world is riven all the way through: “He is, in fact, a layered man who cannot manage to meld two highly diverse cultures.”⁴ In fact, the obsession with the gap between the two worlds pertains to Mário de Andrade as much as to his protagonist, Macunaíma. In every chapter of the book—on almost every line—the fissure recurs clearly and almost palpably, and “the themes are almost always organized in pairs.”⁵

The twists and turns of the plot of Macunaíma illustrate the impossibility of escaping the contradictions and dilemmas of a double heritage. The protagonist hesitates between two worlds when looking for a wife: he first chooses a Portuguese woman, then a native South American, Dona Sancha. But his choice resolves nothing. If he is finally attracted to the indigenous woman, that is only because her mother, Vei do Sol, made her look like a European—Macunaíma falls into a trap that Vei do Sol set for him.

The protagonist’s mistake conveys the complexity of situations generated by the confrontation of two worlds. Yet on closer inspection, Macunaíma’s contradictory decisions do not cancel one another out. The two successive choices, the two sequences, “nonetheless form a perfectly organic whole within the structure of the tale.”⁶ To Macunaíma, the opposing elements appear to be “two sides of the same coin.” So they cannot be separated. Like the residents of Algodoal, Macunaíma is fully exposed to the appeal of the Western world. He belongs to it just as much as they do. The line by De Andrade cited above powerfully sums up this interconnection:

I’m a Tupi who plays the lute.…

It is possible to be a Tupi—an indigenous inhabitant of Brazil—and still play a European instrument as ancient and refined as the lute. Nothing is irreconcilable, nothing is incompatible, even if the mélange can sometimes be painful, as Macunaíma shows. Just because lutes and Tupis come from two different backgrounds does not mean they cannot be brought together by a writer’s pen or within an indigenous village administered by Jesuits.⁷

In fact, just as a diagnosis of roots often leads to debatable attributions, so avowed incompatibilities lumber unusual combinations with interpretations that owe more to our ways of seeing than to reality itself. This further complicates any approach to mongrel worlds, which combine as much as they contrast the elements that go into them.

Nor is that all: the sophisticated literary techniques used by the author of Macunaíma appealed to Brazilian critics,⁸ but such techniques were not merely an expression of immense talent or a personal crisis of identity. The art of Mário de Andrade expresses not only “a terrible rift … on every level of the tale,”⁹ the forms he invented also make it possible to explore a polymorphous reality composed of multiple identities and constant metamorphoses. De Andrade manages this by playing on the indeterminacy generated by the superimposition and fusion of characters. In Macunaíma, Rainha da Floresta is by turns “Empress of the Virgin Forest,” an Amazon, and an Icamiaba Indian. There is nothing incoherent or contradictory about that. De Andrade’s writing convinces us that whatever may appear incoherent may perfectly well have a meaning and that the true continuity of things resides deep within metamorphosis and precariousness.

MESTIZO PHENOMENA IN THE AMAZON

On the island of Algodoal, I used that line by de Andrade (“I’m a Tupi who plays the lute”) as an antidote to the images and fantasies I projected on both people and places. It was less a key for explaining what I saw than a kind of safeguard against employing the attractive but simplistic filter of exoticism.

Exoticism is not merely a purveyor of clichés. In the best circumstances—that is to say, when the land and indigenous population have miraculously escaped colonization, exploitation, and evangelization—it is the way the West generally sets its seal on everything: “Evidentemente, il mondo era nostro.”¹⁰ If the Amazon remains a good example of this, that is because it provides fertile soil for our mania for overlooking “proximate” in our effort to flush out the “remote,” our quest for archaism and otherness. The immense forest is one of those reservoirs that has long fed our thirst for exoticism and purity. Many people have been fooled by this, and I cannot claim to have escaped it.

Everything contributes to the illusion: at the mouth of the Amazon River, the marriage of land and sea confounds our normal landmarks and renders the terrain almost impenetrable; the stormy waves merging into the Atlantic have the freshness of river water; inland, the sea of greenery over which you can fly for hours on end inevitably evokes the virginity of nature still protected from civilization and its pollutions. Unlike Mexico and the Andes, whose populations were hybridized very early on, the Amazon seems to extend the ramparts of its gigantic forests and interminable rivers to a humanity long isolated from the rest of the continent, thought to have been exposed to white covetousness only recently.

As though that were not enough, right from the Renaissance the mysteries of the great forest have stirred Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Italian imaginations—the earliest explorers sought either the female warriors known as Amazons, or Eldorado, or the garden of the Hesperides.¹¹ To which could be added our own childhood memories every time the misfortunes of indigenous peoples revive the myth of the Noble Savage that a humanist, literary, and academic France has cultivated since the days of Jean de Léry and Michel de Montaigne. Finally, the threats now looming over this region of the globe add dramatic tension that makes it appear even more appealing. The Amazon is now becoming, or has already become, a lost paradise.

It is hard to avoid fantasizing about this timeless world. The Amazon is often invoked when couching indigenous creativity in terms of survival, when conceiving of mankind in general as “the symptom of a troubling conservatism” in a manner so abstract that it overlooks the uniqueness of specific situations.¹² Writers, poets, and filmmakers have constantly exploited these clichés to weave dreams for a public ever hungrier for primitive worlds and permanence. Hollywood and the media, displaying a timely humanism, have jumped on the bandwagon with their usual success.

Modern science has not always dismissed these fantasies and preconceptions. By understating the historic and prehistoric changes experienced by Amazonian populations, by minimizing their capacity for innovation and spread, by ignoring the federations that unite tribes into larger units, and by overlooking the impact of widespread movements that have animated the forest, anthropologists have sustained the image of societies frozen in their traditions.¹³ The stress placed on a group’s adaptation to its environment has led to oversights concerning not only interactions between peoples but also the repercussions of European presence.

Structuralist anthropology thus made the Amazon a preserve of “uncivilized mentalities,” churning out scholarly theories and monographs. No doubt these thinkers—led by Claude Lévi-Strauss—made a crucial contribution to the social sciences in the twentieth century. But their contribution has come at a cost. With overstressing of a distinction between “cold societies” supposedly resistant to historic changes and “hot societies” that thrive on change,¹⁴ a myth has been created which reinforces the clichés mentioned above, just as it discourages closer study of a prehistory now known to extend back over ten millennia. That is also the reason why “other” Amazons, more mixed and more exposed to Western influence, have remained in the background; archives show that these “contaminated” Amazons date back to the seventeenth, indeed very late sixteenth, century.¹⁵

Everything has changed down through the ages—environment, demography, social and political organization, cosmologies. As Anna Roosevelt points out, the des...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I. MÉLANGE, CHAOS, WESTERNIZATION
• PART II. MESTIZO IMAGERY
• PART III. MESTIZO CREATIVITY
• Conclusion: Happy Together
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index