(RE)THINKING THE OTHER: DISCUSSIONS ON BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION IN LATIN AMERICA

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the opposition between barbarism and civilization in Spanish and Portuguese America in relation to Black and Indigenous peoples. From discovery, through conquest and colonization, to the formation of the nation-state. The Other emerges as backward and underdeveloped, in contrast to the civilized and modern self. This process is marked by racializing discursive operations whose pursuit of wealth and expansion of Christianity denied the existence of the Other as a subject. The discourse of the discoverer/colonizer is where this symbolic narrative, which acts in the semantic field, is realized and constructed. The quest for modernization represents the consolidation of racializing discourses in Latin America, in which the notion of civilized/modern and savage/backward was only in the sense of making the transition from one state to another through imposition, whose reflections in thought remain in force. Understanding the opposition between barbarism and civilization in the discourse of the discoverer of America and how racializing discursive operations are carried out is supported by documents, records, legal expressions, letters, reports, and chronicles of the time, which reveal the racist treatment of indigenous peoples and, later, Black people. The opposition between barbarism and civilization reveals the discourse of the self in relation to the Other and its function in the extralinguistic world, in addition to highlighting the relationship between language and truth practiced by the discoverer/colonizer. Concepts that sought to impose colonial thinking and culture as markers of civilization permeate the history of Latin America, as well as the construction of the nation-state.