NATIVE MISUNDERSTANDINGS:
Birds of a Feather Flock Together
by Miriam Meijer
Cultural misunderstandings today are nothing compared to those of the initial contact between the Europeans and the aboriginals in seventeenth-century "New France." Mutual incomprehensibility occurred between the two peoples because their cultures were almost diametrically opposed. The American Indian was intimately dependent on nature, lived in harmony with his environment and saw himself as having a contractual relationship with the forces of nature. In contrast, the Frenchman saw himself as superior to nature and intervened in nature to bend its forces to his own objectives.
The American Indians, who assumed stoicism to be an universal human value, thought that Frenchmen acted like women because they were "excited in their movements" and often "speak all together and interrupt one another." The Jesuits interpreted what appeared to be a native lack of leadership as anarchy or as license. French insistence on commands, class, hierarchies and estates puzzled the Indians. French contractual relations were to various authorities: God, King, the seigneur, the religious superior, the monopolist. An administrative pyramid determined French codes of conduct and justice. While the Indians compensated the injured party, French justice focused on punishment of the guilty with rigid impersonality. Europeans observed formalities in declaring, conducting and ceasing hostilities. They found aboriginal warfare inexplicable because, since it was generally non-economic and non-political in motive, it appeared spontaneous in its outbreak, unregulated in its conduct, and unrelenting in its ferocity. Any recognition of its religious character or masculine courage was obliterated by the emotional impact the effects had on French observers. They never compared the cruelty of Indian platform torture and scalping with the cruelty of French judicial practices or military abuses.
In the beginning of contact, when voyagers described everything in the negative because the absence of European institutions meant "ni roi, ni loi, ni foi," ("neither king, law, or faith" was a play on words of King Louis XIV's motto: "un roi, une loi, une foi" meaning one king, one law, one faith only) it was thought that no religion existed in the New World to oppose Catholic conversion. Over time, intimate living with the Indians acquainted the Jesuits with some of their spiritual beliefs, but the aspects of Indian culture that were the most troublesome to the French were those that were spiritually based. Scalping, for instance, probably evolved from a pre-contact practice of headhunting; spiritual connotations of a cult of the skull are not absent in Catholicism (saint relics)—as the Huguenots noted. While both the French and Indian believed in spirit possession, the former saw it as undesirable whereas the latter sought it out. Except in crisis of war—such as the famous but ill-fated conversion of the sedentary Hurons—or by promise of trade privileges, the Jesuits never succeeded in converting the population. Seeing religious assimilation as the means of raising the Indians to equal status with them, French policy-makers could not understand why these people failed to be brought to "right reason."
French desire to reshape Indian customs along Christian or mercantilist lines was blind to the reality that native religion, culture, and psychological well being were as mutually interdependent as in European civilization. Conversion to Catholicism was as much a deviation from accepted forms of behavior and as much a threat to group cohesion among the Hurons as Huguenotism was a threat to national unity in Catholic France. The age of Louis XIV, sickened by the extremely bloody Religious Wars of the preceding century, sought to control human passion through rational means. The achievements of the French mathematician, René Descartes, indicated a methodology towards order. Thinking about items in terms of measurement and classification were often correlated in the imagination by the unity of origin. Europeans understood that the present state of their civilization was the result of a genealogy, presented in the inspired book of Genesis. They were thus more interested in the past than in the present of the non-Europeans they encountered.
Noahide ancestors were sought for the American Indians but it was the discovery of the Chinese imperial annals that excited the Europeans. These records were impressive in the era of Sir Isaac Newton because the Chinese historians had marked important events with astronomical observations. Seven Chinese emperors were described as having reigned before the generally accepted date for the Flood. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European scholars tried to reconcile the sacred and profane chronologies. The most extreme in identifying the Chinese emperors with Old Testament patriarchs were the "Figurists," who hoped to confirm the common origin of Christianity and Confucianism by interpreting Chinese history figuratively rather than literally. A more immediate solution to the problem was to adopt chronological calculations from the Greek Septuagint text instead of the commonly used Hebrew Masoretic version. The Jesuits in China resorted to this after 1658.
They had little choice. In China, rejection of the ancient emperors led to a penalty of death. The Jesuits moreover were trying to convert the Chinese literati by presenting their Bible as a historic aid to them! Their presence in the xenophobic Celestial Kingdom, where all non-Chinese were viewed as barbarians, was thanks only to their mathematical and astronomical skills. Jesuit willingness to accommodate with Chinese customs for the sake of conversion went so far as to wearing mandarin robes, saying the Mass in Chinese, and turning a blind eye to ancestor worship. China entered French consciousness thereafter in a form heavily edited by the Jesuits. The doctrine of Confucius, the sixth-century B. C. "Sage," became a Jesuit specialty. They interpreted his cult as a secular conduct of ethics so that it would not conflict with conversion. By ignoring Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, contemporary revisions of Confucianism, and popular superstitions, the Jesuits created an image that was readily assimilated to European patterns. Rationalistic Confucianism became synonymous with China for a century.
For one group of people the French never entertained any question of assimilation or conversion: the Africans. Acquainted with Africans from Biblical and ancient accounts, Europeans saw them as tainted by Islam, their ancient enemy. Circumstances afforded the American Indians a certain protection from complete exploitation in the New World. If colonists occasionally enslaved hostile Indians, as the natives themselves did, their trade and survival ultimately depended on friendly relationships. Indian slavery required witnessing the violence of the act, making it difficult to maintain the classical justification of enslavement for crime. Indian slaves could escape on their home territory.
Conditions for the Africans were otherwise. Originally the West African kingdoms had been able to deal on nearly equal terms with the European traders, but, as in the New World, the intrusion of European goods unbalanced native societies. While tribal power grew increasingly dependent on guns, slaves remained the only commodity in great demand by the Europeans. European investments in the Caribbean sugar economies greatly encouraged the slave trade. The remoteness of the African continent and the fact that captives were generally derived from the hinterland made it easier for Europeans to deny the true violence of enslavement. They preferred to imagine interior Africa as a hostile world and that the removal of her inhabitants was a form of blessing for them. African slaves had no place to escape to once they were shipped to the New World. The colonists who demanded more and more slaves at the same time feared the disproportionate growth between the latter and themselves.
The reign of reason under Louis XIV had its limitations. Cartesian thought was as conducive to cartographical exactness, technological precision, and economic theories as it was not open to anthropological conceptualizations and evaluations. The colonial policy that failed in New France failed because cultural reality was not understood as a phenomenon in itself. The seventeenth-century mind translated reality through mathematics, taxonomy, and genealogy. Mercantilism thus designated the Africans as slaves, paganism proclaimed that the Indians could be assimilated, and antiquity endowed the Chinese libraries with veneration.
European dilution of alien otherness was due to the fact that it was they who physically explored the rest of the world. This psychological ownership forced all anthropological data to serve home interests. The further the material got from its scene of origin, the more distorted the image of the non-European became from reality. Preconceived dreams or grievances were hung on a skeleton proclaimed to be a Noble Savage or Chinaman. While this literary trend became a characteristic specialty in the eighteenth century, the change of mental climate had less to do with Voltaire or Defoe than an epistemological dissatisfaction with order and mechanism. Analysis in the nature of biology—rather than botany—provided organic insights into cultural interpretations, but it also introduced grounds for theories of physical races instead of the traditional "human variety."
Historians of anthropology reflect this very history. There is a wide practice of pointing out that seventeenth-century travel literature failed to notice skin color or other racial characteristics.
"Indeed, it was not until roughly about 1750, that writers began
to notice what are for us obvious differences [our italics],
so as to think them worthy of mention." *
This articulation comments as much about our era as the following report, so frequently cited in the seventeenth-century voyages, reflected the France full of pain from the Religious Wars:
"These people are contented and have plenty. They have neither
churches, priests, nor any ceremonies of religion." ‡
E N D N O T E S
* Basil Guy, The French Image of China Before and After Voltaire (Geneva: Delices, 1963): 165.
‡ Geoffroy Atkinson, The Extraordinary Voyage in French Literature from 1700 to 1720 (Paris: Champion, 1922): 18.
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