Inca and Spaniard: A Battle of Two Cultures
Inca and Spaniard: A Battle of Two Cultures
It is rare to find one people placidly submitting to the will of another. Rarer still, is to meet with a people who gleefully welcome their conquerors, embrace their culture, way-of-life, and worldview. Yet, it is all too common to discover that those conquerors believe, or want to believe, that they have been welcomed with open arms. How many times in the course of history has one nation justified its aggression by claiming that it has brought civilization to another? How many more times have the victors transformed themselves into saviors... in their own minds? Call it what you will: the White Man's Burden, the mission to the heathen, ...
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himself on the back for having brought the light of Christianity into another dark corner of the New World. No doubt many Spaniards believed that their success in crushing the Inca Empire was indeed God's Will, and something for which every Indian, in his heart, was grateful. Yet did it not occur to these proud lords of the Earth that, behind the complacent smiles, the downcast glances, and the pious expressions of Christianity, the Inca wore on his very soul the emblems of defiance, of perseverance, and of true belief... in himself and his people?
Certainly there was another reality that lay beneath the veneer of Inca submission. In the Sixteenth century, the Inca People had witnessed the unimaginable. They had seen their entire world turned upside down, their most cherished traditions banned and cast aside, their leaders persecuted as heretics or devils while their rights as a people were simply taken away by an alien race that must itself had seemed like a race of ...
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the forbidding mountainsides to make them suitable for agriculture, and had built roads, bridges and fortresses from huge, perfectly-fitted blocks of stone. And then of course, there was the gold. The Inca ruler, Atahualpa, was ransomed for what was calculated in the Twentieth Century to be six million dollars worth of the precious metal. [3] Clearly, this was no race of savages patiently waiting to be civilized. From the first, the Inca government attempted rationally to understand the newcomers. Using their own considerable knowledge and beliefs, they made every attempt to understand the Spaniards in terms of Inca society and religion. As tales of Spanish might filtered inland ...
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"Inca and Spaniard: A Battle of Two Cultures." Essayworld.com. April 2, 2017. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Inca-and-Spaniard-Battle-Two-Cultures/106193.
"Inca and Spaniard: A Battle of Two Cultures." Essayworld.com. April 2, 2017. Accessed December 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Inca-and-Spaniard-Battle-Two-Cultures/106193.
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