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1 results

  • Chapter 7 - Humoralism and Colonial Subjugation: Indians and Medical Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

  • from Part II - Body
  • Edited by Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, Michigan State University, Amber Brian, University of Iowa
  • Book:
    Latin American Literature in Transition Pre-1492–1800
    Published online:
    25 November 2022
    Print publication:
    08 December 2022, pp 107-120

  • Summary

    From the Iberian colonization on, the American Indians were understood based on their skin color and the place where they were living. They were imputed a corporal condition and/or a complexio linked to the preponderance of the melancholic and phlegmatic ‘humor’ which expressed a kind of specific morality and behavior according to medical discourse of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This chapter analyzes how these medical assessments were transferred to the American Indians with a high degree of generalizing essentialism in order to naturalize a condition of permanent servitude. This knowledge transfer used to describe them, implied a series of strategic analogies and correspondences among the generalized significations and representations of complex melancholy on the individuals in the Old World and the observed practices and behaviors of the Natives of the New World.