On the Body of the Conquistador

This is a great contribution to the scholarship on the history of science and race in colonial Latin America. Earle argues that food was fundamental to not just surviving but to maintaining the self in the Spanish colonies. This sounds obvious, but the argument is actually quite complex, so I’ll take a moment to unpack it here.

In late late medieval period and the first centuries of the early modern period, Spanish thinkers—like those throughout Europe—believed that health was defined by Galen’s theory of humors. According to Galen, the human body had four fluids (“humors”): blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. In order to remain healthy, these four humors had to be equally balanced—an excess or deficit of any one of them would bring about disease or ill-health. Humors were maintained primarily by food and drink: each food offered a different balance of humors and, as a result, it was necessary to be careful about food intake.

When Christopher Columbus arrived on Hispaniola in 1492, he left nearly forty Spaniards there to maintain the settlement until he returned. When he did return in November 1493, he found that every single settler had died, and he attributed it to the food of the land. The Spanish were familiar with the food of Europe and it was necessary to maintain their health. The food of the Americas, on the other hand, were out of humoral balance, and eating it would make Europeans ill. What’s more, the shift in food could actually, physically, change the human body. To Columbus and other early thinkers, the differences between indigenous peoples and Europeans were not innate, but a result of their food. To Columbus, Spaniards were “choleric” and Amerindians were “phlegmatic” because of the foods they ate, but Spaniards could hypothetically become Amerindians and Amerindians could become Europeans if they ate the opposite kind of food. To Europeans, this appeared to be disastrous, and they became obsessed with eating exclusively European foods.

And yet… Spaniards came to eat many kinds of indigenous foods. Maize, various tubers, tomatoes, and potatoes all became prominent parts of the Spanish American diet. This raised serious questions about the consumption of food: How much could be eaten without deleterious effects? Can maize be substituted for wheat in bread when taking communion, or must it be wheat? These questions were (mostly) left unsettled, although there was a general consensus that bread, to represent the body of Christ, must be made from wheat.

Earle also offers a really interesting discussion of race here. Traditionally, historians have pointed to the late 18th and 19th centuries for the critical years for the construction of race. However, some recent historical scholarship has been pointing to the early modern period as being the formative years, especially with the spread of the limpieza de sangre to Latin America and the expansion of ideas taken up from Moors that sub-Saharan Africans are descendants of the Biblical Ham. The challenge here is that conceptions of race based on the limpieza de sangre and the “curse of Ham” require a biologized conception of descent and more rigid categories than appear to exist here. Earle pushes back on these more recent scholars for expanding ideas of “race” too much, effectively making it an anachronism. This is such a complicated issue, and my own two cents are that there was a rigid conception of some categories—“Jews,” “Muslims,” and “Africans” (interestingly, one is an ethno-religious group; one simply a religious group; and the third we would classify today as “race,” but would not have necessary been seen as such at the time). This conceptualization existed in parallel to the idea that bodies were mutable according to humoral theories for groups that did not fit those three (here, namely indigenous people and Europeans).

I learned a ton from this, Earle has a great eye for detail and offers a history that I would have otherwise completely overlooked. Highly recommend.