Scarcity and Latin America Abundance

One risks overgeneralization in speaking of "pre-Hispanic" ideas as a unified entity since this covers so many cultures and geographic settings, but two themes stand out: to maintain abundance, communities engage in reciprocal exchanges with deities of particular places, set in broader spatial orders such as the four compass directions; and societies undergo great cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth. Such visions once characterized official public thought but after conquest were submerged in the rituals of indigenous communities. The Spanish had a different set of concerns. They had conquered, with great self-confidence, a region of biological abundance and human wealth. Was this "natural" richness a sign of the backward state of the Americans compared to the rational, Christian Europeans? Or was it a paradise lost to pillage and enslavement by rapacious conquerors? The 1550 debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (taking the former position) and Bartolomé de Las Casas (taking the latter) carries into the present, in which the intellectual descendents of Las Casas posit a romantic ecology and anthropology of profound indigenous cultures in lush but imperiled habitats and the inheritors of Sepúlveda see underutilized natural wealth needing rationality for its proper exploitation.