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The Spanish contribution to the ethnology of Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
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Short Description: JP Rubiés - Renaissance Studies, 2003 - upf.eduIn his famous account of the first circumnavigation of the world led by
Magellan, which inaugurated Castilian claims to the Spice Islands, Antonio
Pigafetta described in minute detail the clove and nutmeg
Content Inside: Renaissance Studies Vol. 17 No. 3
2003 The Society for Vol. 17 No. 3 Renaissance StudiesRenaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
The Spanish contribution to the ethnology of Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Joan-Pau Rubis
In his famous account of the first circumnavigation of the world led by Magellan, which inaugurated Castilian claims to the Spice Islands, Antonio Pigafetta described in minute detail the clove and nutmeg trees for his European audience. He also asserted, amongst many details relating to the physical aspects, customs, and even languages of the native inhabitants of the Spice Islands, that the `gentiles' of Gilolo (modern Halmahera) worship each day `the first thing they see in the morning when they go out of their houses', an observation meant to describe a kind of primitive `natural' religion.1 To the modern reader Pigafetta's statement, obviously superficial and misleading, is a characteristic example of how Europeans in these early encounters projected their own religious prejudices onto native cultural realities. In other words, they were willing to accept fantastic hearsay (even if often locally generated) without critical scrutiny, content to confirm when possible, rather than challenge, European mythologies. The statement can therefore be read alongside reported stories of an island inhabited only by women who `get pregnant from the wind', and the like.2 However, Pigafetta's careful descriptions of the highly valued clove and nutmeg plants as personally observed, and his accurate compilations of native vocabularies (Malay, Bisayan, Guarani, and Patagonian), attest to something very different too, namely the empirical bent of many European narratives. In this respect, Pigafetta's account can also stand as a characteristic example of Renaissance `scientific curiosity'. This apparent contradiction within Pigafetta's narrative invites reflection on the relation between prejudices and curiosity in the early literature of encounter, much of which was generated within the Spanish Pacific opened up by Magellan's expedition. The papal bulls and further bilateral treaties which, from Tordesillas in 1494 to Zaragoza in 1529, divided the world
`Li gentili non teneno tante donne ne viveno con tante superstitioni [as the Moors], ma adorano la prima cosa che vedeno la matina quando escono fora de casa, per tuto quel giorno'. Antonio Pigafetta, La mia longa e pericolosa navigatione, ed. L. Giovannini (Milan, 1989), 170. 2 Ibid. 209. Here, as when reporting similar stories, Pigafetta specifies that his source was an `old pilot' from `Maluco' (the Moluccas), probably Malay-speaking. This is consistent with similar stories told by Marco Polo when travelling the same seas over 200 years earlier he too was reporting local sailors' tales.
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2003 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
