The body of the conquistador
Subtitle: food, race and the colonial experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700
By: Rebecca Earle
Series: Critical perspectives on empire
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 265
ISBN-13: 9781107003422
Subjects: HISTORY / Renaissance; Race relations; Human body; Social aspects; Spaniards; Colonization; Food; Ingestion; Attitudes; Social conditions; Colonies; Imperialism; Food habits; Spain; History
Description: "This fascinating history explores the dynamic relationship between overseas colonisation and the bodily experience of eating. It reveals the importance of food to the colonial project in Spanish America and reconceptualises the role of European colonial expansion in shaping the emergence of ideas of race during the Age of Discovery. Rebecca Earle shows that anxieties about food were fundamental to Spanish understandings of the new environment they inhabited and their interactions with the native populations of the New World. Settlers wondered whether Europeans could eat New World food, whether Indians could eat European food and what would happen to each if they did. By taking seriously their ideas about food we gain a richer understanding of how settlers understood the physical experience of colonialism and of how they thought about one of the central features of the colonial project. The result is simultaneously a history of food, colonialism and race"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction: Food and the colonial experience; 1. Humoralism and the colonial body; 2. Protecting the European body; 3. Providential fertility; 4. Maize, which is their wheat; 5. You will become the same if you eat their food; 6. Mutable bodies in Spain and the Indies; Epilogue.