| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
A particular cross-disciplinary approach that offers a context in which missionaries’ colonial practices can be viewed is articulated in Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America (1984). Todorov’s particular interest for the question of “them” and “us” succinctly interprets the woes of colonialism and the mind of the white missionary in the spread of Christendom and terrestrial paradise. Although his theoretical models have limitations, they intersect in the field of discourse and evidentiary analysis to show the contradictory aspects of empire in the transformation of non-European cultures.40 Todorov’s work has an important place in this study because his structuralist approach breaks down the subject matter into its component parts to help us examine different elements of the colonial environment. For instance, it presents the reader with a narrative outline of how European colonizers used “signs,” language, writings, and military symbolisms to subjugate and transform cultures, which also helps create a specific kind of colonial subject, the interlocutor, who uses his knowledge of the pre-colonial landscape to help dismantle cultural values. Writing in the context of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, Todorov argues that the Spanish commitments to report, to mediate, and to use their cultural “signs” and cultural dogmas, when necessary, to conquer the Indians for the sake of civilization were formed by their relation to the ideas of the Catholic Church and a rational understanding of the world.41 That is, the Spanish understanding of cultural “signs” and the “capacity to perceive the other” (80) stood in sharp contrast to the Aztecs’ mimicry of knowledge “without individual variations,” thus providing the basis for continuing colonization (81). “Signs” meant the deployment of cultural artifacts and a particular conception of western rationality that legitimized the right to possess, to name, and to communicate the dominant discourse (28–29). This definition seems to be a sufficiently developed feature of colonial logic and does not vary from the meaning employed by Brodie Cruickshank in Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa (1853). Cruickshank was the first collector-general of the Gold Coast colony in 1852 and became acting governor a year later.42 Cruickshank believed that “to ensure good government, there ought to be present in the minds of the governed the conviction that the government can at all times, when necessity requires it, bring ‘signs’ to bear more than sufficient to crush every opposition.”43