1 Notes
Montaigne writes this in 1580. Europeans have been exploring (and invading) the Americas for a few decades, and they have found people quite unlike any they have known before doing things they find strange. One of those things is eating human flesh.
I think it’s important to have in mind that reports of this sort serve not only to make the aboriginal people of the Americas seem strange but also to question their moral or even biological standing, and it is just this that Montaigne is questioning.
Consider the main claim on pp. 231–232.
The passage on p. 232 is remarkable for bringing to the surface two operative ‘myths’ of the Europe of the sixteenth century. One is that aboriginal Americans live not only in a different place but at a different ‘time’, so to speak, in the progress of humanity ‘out of’ nature. Another, which is related, is that Montaigne’s putatively ‘European’ predecessors (he mentions Lycurgus and Plato here) are in possession of some, say, greater capacity for philosophical insight. The past, in so many words, is better, and all that has been ‘achieved’ in the way of ‘modernity’ has been a departure from that better state. See the top of p. 233. They live a simpler, and therefore better, life. (The description here reminiscent of Plato’s ‘city of necessity’.)
After describing an act of killing and eating a prisoner, Montaigne immediately sets into qualifying it and contrasting it with European customs. See pp. 235–236. Note Montaigne’s argument: not that aboriginal Americans are free from blame for certain of their practices, but that Europeans deserve greater blame for theirs.
2 Lessons
This essay is a nice snapshot of the European self-conception and perhaps even sense of crisis distinctive of the early modern era. The relatively sudden confrontation with people of the Americas challenged not only popular senses of the size and extent of the world but of the range and reach of human possibility. Indigenous Americans lived in radically different ways, ways that were both scorned and praised by Europeans of the sixteenth and later centuries.
At the same time, America serves as a sort of mirror of European morality and internal moral conflict. It’s worth bearing in mind that Europe of the time produces both a Christopher Columbus, who enslaved thousands of indigenous Americans, and De Las Casas, who protested the inhumanity of their enslavement. The encounter with the Americas serves as a protracted lesson in the internal contradictions of European culture.