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(In)Human Nature: Discourses over the Distinctions between Man and Beast in the Indigenous-Language Christian Pedagogies of New Spain
Tania Bride
By the eve of the Spanish invasion, Mesoamerican societies had developed distinctive frameworks of religious thought that intimately connected human beings to nonhuman animals and the natural world. For the Nahuas of central Mexico or the bènizàa (commonly known as Zapotecs) of Oaxaca, boundaries between humans and other animal species, as well as between the temporal and divine, were porous. Humanity was merely one form of sentient actor within a broadly animate world where deities, spirits, and cosmic forces interacted dynamically with human beings, as well as animals, plants, and other natural phenomena (Basset 2015: 13–14; Carrasco 1990; López-Austin 1988). In turn, animals acted as messengers and conduits between (sub)terrestrial and celestial planes, deities materialized in human and animal forms, and certain human beings could even adopt different animal figures (Clendinnen 2014; Jansen 1997; Lind 2015: 22–3; Martínez González 2011). The missionaries who followed swiftly on the tail of Spanish military conquests brought their own theological perspectives, which distinguished humanity from other creatures by their uniquely immaterial, eternal, and rational soul. Indigenous ideas that animals could share similar spiritual potency, agency, and even mutability with humans, were not only fantastical to the colonial priesthood, but affronts to the Christian order of nature. In response, the churchmen of New Spain sought to sever Indigenous identifications with nonhuman animals, which they classed as idolatry, superstition, and witchcraft, and impose Catholic divisions between man and beast.
A crucial method for instructing Indigenous populations in proper Christian faith and behavior was the translation of catechisms, confessionaries, and other Christian teaching materials into Native languages. In 1567 the Dominican friar Pedro de Fería made an exemplary contribution to this project with his bilingual Spanish-Zapotec catechism, the Doctrina christiana en lengua castellana y çapoteca. As historian Nancy Farris highlights, Fería devoted special attention to where “the ideas and concepts of the Indians diverged most radically and outrageously from Christian teachings,” which he explained in the elevated metaphoric language of a libana-sermon (2014: 76). Opening with a libana on “the formation of man” from two distinct parts – the body and the soul – Fería immediately identifies humans’ corporeal form with nonhuman animals, describing the body as “dirty, ill inclined” and susceptible to vices such as gluttony, lasciviousness, drunkenness, and “sleeping like a beast” (1567: fol. 2). To compound this association between the human body and inferior animality, he exhorts that this is “the way of the flesh, which is no more or less than a horse, because it desires to follow and keep the same laws and rules as the horse and other beasts” (fol. 4). What distinguished humankind from the lowly beast, the sermon explains, was our uniquely conscious spirit: the rational soul. In a pointed address to Zapotec catechumen, he admonished that “there have been and are at present many men in this world who did not know nor know [now] the greatness and excellence of the rational soul; but rather, they thought the spirit of man to be like that of the brute animals” (fols. 5v–6). Aware that his intended audience would not make such sharp distinctions between human and animal spirits, Fería attempted to enforce what he himself recognized as a foreign dichotomy upon the bènizàa; between the material, the animal, and their unthinking proclivity for corruption, in opposition to the spiritual, the human, and their propensity for rational thought and moral action.
Pedro de Fería’s Doctrina joins a wealth of these religious pedagogies produced in New Spain throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This chapter examines representations of animal life and discourses over human-animal relations within such doctrinal manuals in Nahuatl, Zapotec, Chinantec, and more Native tongues, to reveal the fraught discussions between colonial evangelizers and Indigenous congregants concerning the sacred and natural worlds. Through these texts, the mendicants and priests of Viceregal Mexico endeavored to bolster the boundaries between humans and other animals, in order to uphold the hierarchy of “rational” men over “brute” beasts established in Scripture and elaborated in early modern Spanish theology. Notwithstanding their Humanistic inspirations, linguist Cristian Cámara Outes characterizes New Spanish clerical translations as an “instrument of the politico-cultural project of colonization” that demanded “unrestricted obedience” to the hegemonic culture (2018: 808–27). However, in their efforts to effectively convey Catholic doctrine, the clergy-turned-linguists were often inadvertently drawn into Indigenous symbolic networks. Native-language religious pedagogies therefore became sites of complex cross-cultural interactions, where translation and rhetorical choices could produce multiple and often unintended meanings, incorporating Christian content into Mesoamerican cosmovisions or even reinforcing rather than undermining Indigenous sacred beliefs (Burkhart 1989; Farris 2014; Sigal 2011). What is more, multiple voices were necessarily written into the manuscripts themselves. The Spanish and creole clergy who undertook such writing projects did not usually work alone, but with the aid of Indigenous informants, translators, and scribes. The question-and-answer format of catechisms and confessionaries also indicate what behaviors the clerical authors had seen and expected to find among their congregants. As such, what the friar or priest says and the Nahua, Zapotec, or Chinantec interlocutors say back, present the multivalent conversations in which, despite evangelizers’ best efforts to dominate and suppress Indigenous perspectives, they could not always control the meanings they engendered together.
The intercultural dialogues over human-animal relations that emerge can therefore best be illuminated under the lens of entanglement formulated by Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton, which understands the process of “sustained ecological and cultural integration of western and eastern hemispheres” through “the multiplicity of sources, agencies, directions of influence, and modalities of intercultural connectedness” that shaped the early modern world (Bauer & Norton 2017: 2–3). Suitably for these religious pedagogies, this framework recognizes the “negotiations of power in colonial relations,” where subaltern populations were constrained by imperial exploitation of their bodies and attempted assimilation of their minds, but also actively contributed to the shifting patterns in which cultures intertwined (3). Pertinent to the discourses over animal life, Bauer and Norton also emphasize how interconnections were co-produced not only amongst human populations, but between human beings and their surrounding ecologies, challenging both assumptions of European cultural supremacy and the separation of human “culture” from nonhuman “nature” within the modern Western “naturalist” ontology (Descola 2013; Harraway 2020). Indeed, as Marcy Norton argues, “there is good reason to take seriously the possibility that the West’s engagement with the ‘rest’ played a role in the emergence of naturalism” (2017: 24). That is, as they encountered and sometimes appropriated Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and technologies that intermixed human and nonhuman nature, Europeans simultaneously distinguished themselves from the natural world and the Indigenous peoples they classed as proximate with it. This paradox is evident within the doctrinal manuals of Viceregal Mexico, which aimed to reinforce the hierarchy of Spanish “civilization” over Indigenous “savagery” and the human over the animal, while contending with the peoples they considered lesser-but-still-human and their understandings of an integrated human-natural world.