Encountering People, Creating Texts: Cultural Studies of the Encounter and Beyond

Abstract

The historiography of the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples, subsequent conquests, and the early colonial period is an impossibly huge one. 1 There are, however, dominant interpretations within this literature, shaped by a small number of paradigms. While these paradigms (material, social, and cultural) were not wholly linear in their chronological development, they have waxed, waned, and interpenetrated. It is nonetheless the case that recent literature in this area, as exemplified by many of the works under review here, has largely turned away from the social history focus that dominated from the 1960s on, towards a cultural focus that privileges textual analysis across the variety of disciplines contributing to this area of study. 2 This cultural [End Page 262] focus represents neither a single interpretation, methodology, nor type of source. But a theme that unifies recent cultural approaches is that many of its practitioners tend to invert Clifford Geertz's culture-as-text approach, adopting a text-as-culture approach, with texts often treated as the virtual equivalent of a culture or worldview. 3