scholarly journals Introduction: Viewing Animals

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Fudge
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Opening Up

AbstractThe introduction to this special issue of Worldviews goes back to the first European encounters with the New World as a way of opening up a discussion about the nature of viewing animals. I argue that, just as the Europeans transformed this New World into a recognisable one in the sixteenth century, so too do we constantly transform the natural world that we view. The process of comprehension is offered as classification followed by observation, then representation, and all of these elements of our engagements with animals take place, I argue, in particular contexts: historical, geographical, cultural, intellectual. The critic "reading" animals, and reading human observations of animals must take these factors into consideration when thinking about the act of engagement.

Racism As We Sense It Today

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1737-1742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Mignolo
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Writing System ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
The Andes ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The One ◽  
Jose De Acosta ◽  
Opening Up

The research that I reported in the darker side of the renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (1995) was driven by my desire and need to understand the opening up of the Atlantic in the sixteenth century, its historical, theoretical, and political consequences. How was it that coexisting socioeconomic organizations like the Ottoman and Mughal sultanates as well as the incanate in the Andes and the tlahtoanate in the Valley of Mexico were either inferior or almost absent in the global historical picture of the time? I became aware, for example, that people in the Valley of Mexico living in the Aztec tlahtoanate, whether in conformity or dissenting, were compared—by the Spaniards—with the Jews. The comparison was twofold: on the one hand, the Indians and the Jews were dirty and untrustworthy people; on the other hand, the Indians in the New World may have been part of the Jewish diaspora. So, the comparison got in trouble, because Indians and Jews may have been the same people. The Jesuit priest José de Acosta, in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589), asked whether the Indians descended from the Jews, addressing a question that was on everybody's mind. He dismissed the possibility of the connection, because the Jews had had a sophisticated writing system for a long time while the Indians were illiterate (in the Western sense of the word). Jews liked money, Acosta pointed out, while Indians were not even aware of it; and while Jews took circumcision seriously, Indians had no idea of it. Last but not least, if Indians were indeed of Jewish origin, they would not have forgotten the Messiah and their religion.

The Enlightenment in Spain: Influences Upon New World Policy

1985 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris H. W. Engstrand
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Equality ◽  
National Life ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Insight Into

The Enlightenment in Spain defies definition. In certain respects it was a viable force opening up new vistas of knowledge and understanding, while in others it was a mild breeze rustling some leaves of insight into the possibility of human equality. For certain of Spain's royal officials, the ideas of the eighteenth century philosophes were refreshing and undeniably sound; for others even the gathering of knowledge in the new encyclopedias was a dangerously democratic trend. In some areas of national life, reforms gained immediate acceptance, in others the old ways remained entrenched.Spain has always been a country of extremes, of absolute alternatives. Spaniards strive to achieve impossible goals or they remain incredibly inert. With the discovery of America their ambitious undertakings excelled those of England or France, but subsequent neglect brought about failures of equal magnitude. In the sixteenth century they thought to conquer the world; in the next their weakened Hapsburg monarchs squandered the wealth of the New World while the country fell into economic ruin.

The Civilian Contribution of the Spanish Royal Engineers, 1500–1800

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Buisseret
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
Santiago De Cuba ◽  
Cartagena De Indias

Rather neglected until recently, Spanish military engineers now have been studied in detail revealing that the Habsburg and Bourbon kings, from small beginnings in the sixteenth century, sustained an exceptionally large number of military engineers in the 17th and 18th centuries – over 600 in Europe and over 100 in the New World. Trained in mathematics, surveying, architecture and cartography they built a limited number of great forts, usually to defend strategic ports like Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Portobelo, and Cartagena de Indias. However, fortification was hardly necessary in the major capitals far from coastlines so their greatest, most enduring, achievements lay in cartography, road and water engineering, town planning and architecture.

scholarly journals Latin America in Global History: An Historiographic Overview

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Olstein
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
World History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Global History ◽  
The World ◽  
Last Ice Age ◽  
Great Divergence

Abstract World history can be arranged into three major regional divergences: the 'Greatest Divergence' starting at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago) and isolating the Old and the New Worlds from one another till 1500; the 'Great Divergence' bifurcating the paths of Europe and Afro-Asia since 1500; and the 'American Divergence' which divided the fortunes of New World societies from 1500 onwards. Accordingly, all world regions have confronted two divergences: one disassociating the fates of the Old and New Worlds, and the other within either the Old or the New World. Latin America is in the uneasy position that in both divergences it ended up on the 'losing side.' As a result, a contentious historiography of Latin America evolved from the very moment that it was incorporated into the wider world. Three basic attitudes toward the place of Latin America in global history have since emerged and developed: admiration for the major impact that the emergence on Latin America on the world scene imprinted on global history; hostility and disdain over Latin America since it entered the world scene; direct rejection of and head on confrontation in reaction the former. This paper examines each of these three attitudes in five periods: the 'long sixteenth century' (1492-1650); the 'age of crisis' (1650-1780); 'the long nineteenth century' (1780-1914); 'the short twentieth century' (1914-1991); and 'contemporary globalization' (1991 onwards).

Alonso de Zorita: Early and Last Years

1976 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 501-513
Author(s):  
Ralph H. Vigil
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
New World ◽  
Applied Anthropology ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Las Casas ◽  
Bartolome De Las Casas ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
The Masses

Alonso De Zorita’s career as a Spanish judge in the Indies in the years 1548–1556, though not as well known as the career of Bartolomé de las Casas and other pro-Indian reformers, merits serious study. The arrival of Zorita and his subsequent actions as an administrator and legist represent one example of the serious efforts of the Crown in the 1540’s to impose royal control over a quasi-feudal class of conquerors and pobladores which had from the early sixteenth century entrenched itself in the New World. Moreover, Zorita was not only a jurist who attempted to implement the New Laws of 1542–43, but an inspired humanitarian who took an active interest in the native civilizations of the New World and questioned the relations that had evolved and created “a Hispano-Indian society characterized by the domination of the masses by a small privileged minority…” His ardent defense of the Indians against the charge that they were “barbarians” included a relativist line of argument that anticipated Michel de Montaigne’s celebrated comment that “everyone calls barbarian what is not his own usage.” In addition, his inquiries into native history, land tenure and inheritance laws may be considered “in effect exercises in applied anthropology, capable of yielding a vast amount of information about native customs and society” and is an example of what Europe saw or failed to see in the sixteenth century when confronted with a strange new world.

The First Calvinist Encounters with New World Religions

2021 ◽  
pp. 252-269
Author(s):  
Mark Valeri
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
New World ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Jean De Lery ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
Civic Virtues ◽  
Cultural Observation

European Calvinists first encountered Native Americans during three brief expeditions of French adventurers to Brazil and Florida during the mid-sixteenth century. Although short-lived and rarely noted, these expeditions produced a remarkable commentary by Huguenots on the Tupinamba people of Brazil and the Timucuan people of Florida. Informed by Calvinist understandings of human nature and humanist approaches to cultural observation, authors such as Jean de Léry produced narratives that posed European and Christian decadence against the sociability and honesty of Native Americans. They used their experiences in America to suggest that Huguenots in France, like indigenous people in America, ought to be tolerated for their civic virtues whatever their doctrinal allegiances. Huguenot travel writings indicate variations in Calvinist approaches to Native peoples from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries.

The Prospects for Scientific and Technological Development in Saudi Arabia

1979 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-372
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Szyliowicz
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
New World ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
World History ◽  
Rare Phenomenon ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific And Technological Development

Today we are witnessing a very rare phenomenon in world history: a state suddenly deluged with an apparently inexhaustible amount of wealth as occurred in sixteenth-century Spain and Portugal when the riches of the New World flowed to the Iberian peninsula. Now the ‘black gold’ under the sands of the Arabian desert has provided one of the most underpopulated and under developed regions of the world with an equivalent bonanza. The new wealth of Spain helped to ruin that country. What will be the fate of Saudi Arabia and its small neighbors?

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