Abstract
The original Greek conception of theory was not limited to the object of observation (theoria), but referred to the person so tasked, the theoros or theoroi. It is therefore appropriate that the Theory Section of the International Studies Association should honor with its 2023 book prize Mauro Caraccioli’s path-breaking account of the theoroi of the early Spanish empire. Caraccioli transports his readers back to the 16th century, painting a vivid picture of encounters with the Latin America of Spanish natural historians who navigated the treacherous grounds between the extractive desires of Madrid and a European public clamoring for tales of the exotic and wondrous. Caraccioli’s main characters – royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, Franciscan friar Bernadino de Sahagún, imperial doctor Francisco Hernández de Toledo, and Jesuit historian José de Acosta – were very much theoroi, tasked as they were by the Spanish crown with interpreting the New World for the Old. Telling their story thus tells us much about the narrative frames they brought with them and journeys molded while there, as well as both the cognitive background to the European Enlightenment and how it was shaped by colonial encounters in the Americas. In so doing, Caraccioli makes a major contribution not only to International Relations (IR) theory but also political theory more broadly, as well as Latin American Studies. It is my pleasure to introduce a special symposium dedicated to furthering our collective thinking with Writing the New World.
Besides a couple of well-known works like Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America and Anthony Pagden’s The Fall of Natural Man, the early Spanish empire in the Americas is largely missing from political theory – especially the sort with which scholars of IR more specifically are expected to be aware. Caraccioli sets out to help rectify this situation. Describing how monolithic accounts of the ‘Enlightenment’ as a set of ideas about reason, knowledge, freedom, and faith, shaped only by its northern European protagonists came to predominate in the 18th century, Caraccioli shows how his protagonists faded into obscurity. Well-known across intellectual circles in the 16th century, they lost status over the 17th century, known by the 18th century as charlatans and dilettantes. As Caraccioli explains, ‘Spain today is no great mystery in the minds of historians of political thought. By extension, Latin America, too, probably has very little to say to political theorists, especially about the history of empire’ (139). This, of course, is the view from the metropole, ‘a rather convenient position to hold from within the scholarly, cultural, and economic dominance of Anglophone hegemony’ (139). But from our contemporary perspective, of unfolding climate crisis and attempts to discern the boundaries of post-colonial life, it is no longer acceptable as a scholarly view on the origins of modern political and social thought. For ‘Losing the Spanish chapter in the scientific, cultural, and political development of modernity renders the entire intellectual repertoire of the Americas a derivative copy of an allegedly more original European core’ (134).
Caraccioli’s book thereby contributes ‘to the crafting of an alternative Enlightenment narrative capable of helping us think in other words and worldviews’ (139). It does so by doing nothing less than create a new genre of political theory that of natural history.
So accustomed as we are to thinking of natural history as far removed from the political, the move is jarring. How can an empirical science of nature, even if an early version of it, tell us anything about political thought? As Caraccioli informs us, however, naturalist writings from the early Spanish empire ‘were always positioned between the empirical and the normative’ (127). Returning to the practitioners of natural history in the early Spanish empire therefore forces us to let go of our more recent distinction between science, nature, biology and the environment, and human creations such as politics, society, power – and, of course, colonizing impulses. As Caraccioli notes, the activities of Oviedo, Las Casas, Sahagún, Toledo and Acosta, were never ‘just’ a matter of cataloguing America’s natural riches, they were always deep reflections on what those natural riches meant for the conquerors, and thereby a mirror to how they already saw the world. Thus, Caraccioli’s natural historians ‘were neither a precursor to contemporary conservation practices, nor merely a field composed of instrumentalist surveyors. Rather. . .natural historians envisioned the possibility of a social order based on contemplation and cultivation. There was no proper nature without society, they reasoned, just as there would be no colonial society without the proper cultivation of nature’ (127).
Also left on the cutting room floor by Caraccioli’s investigations is the – already tottering to be sure – vision of the original ‘state of nature’ made so famous by Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and other modern political theorists. If this state of nature imaginary and its import for European social and political theory is well-known, Caraccioli shows how ‘Debates over a real or imaginary state of nature coincided with worries about the proper cultivation of natural resources. As lands were plowed and rivers were dredged, so too were Christian souls meant to be tended with thoughtful intervention. Most of these debates occurred in the intellectual centers of both Spain and its American colonies’, making Oviedo et al. ‘among the first European observers to wrestle with the formative questions of a new era’ (128). These questions were at once what we now call ‘scientific’ and ‘moral’, before the two were so separated: ‘at stake for these missionary scientists was not the destructive aim of “squeezing and molding” out of nature timeless secrets for merely instrumental ends; in their search to find in nature timeless signs of God’s grace, natural historians also sought to invent the most compelling ways of explaining the moral composition of the earth itself. The success of the empire, natural historians held, could only be secured through an imaginative civilizational storyline in which nature and society could interact’ (130).
Storylines are, indeed, the main focus of Writing the New World. What narratives could early Spanish natural historians tell that could not only ‘make sense of the biological origins of flora, fauna, and people’, but also be ‘compelling to imperial authorities’ (132). Caraccioli traces three narratives nested within one broad metanarrative: that of La Reconquista, the 700-year campaign against the Moorish Caliphates of Southern Iberia, which created the moral reference points that justified continued expansion beyond the Iberian Peninsula, and the violence that necessarily accompanied it: (1) a ‘narrative of conquest’ brought with it a chance to project Spain’s glory on the New World’s blank canvas (as seen in Oviedo, 27), and to reflect in the New World’s mirror on how far Spain has strayed from its professed faith (as espoused by Las Casas, 27); (2) a narrative of ‘demonology as anthropology’ in Sahagún viewed indigenous Americans as worthy of study and pastoral care, in the hopes of recruiting them to Spain’s cosmic project; and finally (3) a narrative of ‘naturalist dissonance’ in Hernandez and De Acosta, for whom the New World represented a ‘Great Book’ from which Imperial Spain could learn (34). These narratives overlapped and developed gradually over the late 15th and 16th centuries, as the natural historians encountered the New World.
Beyond its import for an alternative genealogy of Enlightenment political theory, Writing the New World raises and engages questions of how to think with and about nature, with profound implications for contemporary debates about the natural environment. Caraccioli finds in the work of Oviedo et al. traces of the contemporary binary between a line of environmental thought that sees humanity as doomed in the face of extractive capitalism and potentially saved by a return to the wonder of nature. ‘By retelling the story of natural history’, Caraccioli singles out ‘a narrative construction of nature’s autonomy and indigenous ethnology that retains a curious reproduction in contemporary environmental politics. Natural disasters and crises are often portrayed as betrayals and affronts by this one thing called “nature” against this second thing called “society”; the latter is somehow supposed to live and develop apart from the first, and the first remains (and is increasingly portrayed as) an entity that human beings should constantly be afraid of’ (132).
Turning to the narratives of the New World is not, therefore, a route to easy alternatives, of overturning capitalism before it is too late, ‘Such a portrait echoes the millenarian urgency to colonize the New World’s environments in order to save humanity’ (133). Rather, recovering the narrative arcs of natural history in early colonial America keeps the door open to the wonder of a nature not separate from society, and capable neither of saving nor destroying it. Tracing ‘a recurring demonology [that] continues to keep societies conceptually divorced from nature, to the benefit of imperialistic capitalist interests’, Caraccioli notes how ‘For sixteenth century naturalists, the newness and pleasure of nature always pointed to both greater sources and objects of contemplation’, leading him to exhort we, ‘as contemporary chroniclers, missionaries, and examiners of progress, [rediscover] the difference that nature makes in our own acts of everyday contemplation, and the difference that makes nature valuable’ (142).
As ever, questions of disciplinary identity and boundaries emerge when reading a book like Writing the New World. Is it really a work of IR? Is it political theory, or Latin American Studies? Caraccioli himself asks the question, answering ‘[t]he verdicts seem everywhere and nowhere, particularly as the burden of proof lies in demonstrating that political thinking on the margins of the European metropole can and does take place, positioned such as it is against an established canon’ (3). It is to IR’s strength, and perhaps especially the strength of this journal, that few will likely dismiss the work for its spanning of these disciplines. We all have much to learn.
And there is more to be done. As Caraccioli notes, an admirably concise work, Writing the New World is better understood as an early rather than the last word on the subject: ‘The present effort. . .points toward new directions in studying the relationship between European power and still-vibrant indigenous American traditions. . .a small part of a much larger tapestry that needs reconstruction’. Putting natural history and Spanish Colonial America, not to mention ‘the histories of indigenous peoples, women, Africans, and animals themselves need greater documentation in the history of political thought. What better way to begin documenting these histories is there than the critical examination of the men who chose to include and exclude them from the narrative of civilization altogether?’ (138).
Together, the following contributions begin the task of extending and expanding on Caraccioli’s first moves, praising Writing the New World to be sure but offering serious challenges its author at the same time. Elif Kalaycioglu opens by asking bluntly on our collective behalf for more help in navigating the multiple ‘interlingualities’ Caraccioli brings to the fore, both those in his subjects’ time and our own: How, they ask, can we traverse the space between faith and science, wonder and extraction, European and non-European thought (including IR)? While applauding Caraccioli’s effort to counteract the political theory canon’s various exclusions, Pinar Kemerli takes him to task for his own exclusions, namely of the impact of Spain’s Muslim and Jewish heritage on the thinkers he examines. Einar Wigen, finally, asks whether Caraccioli truly lets in Spivak’s (1988) words, ‘the subaltern speak’. Having earned the right, Caraccioli closes the symposium with some responses to his critics and not-so-final responses.
