Conrad and Demerest are, I believe, engaging with the Black Legend and that it is indirectly. Their book, in a certain sense, refutes the Black legend. However, other assumptions surrounding the Spanish conquest that helped form the Black Legend seem implicit. Conrad and Demerest fall victim to the problem of expressing the remote past in language, and this is a vague quality caused by a failure to distinguish between, and incorporate, objective fact, the goal of mechanist explanation in natural sciences, and subjective fact, the goal of interpretive explanation in the social sciences, more rigorously and genuinely. Invariably, all authors assume that the concepts they wish to express with their words are as readily apparent to the readers as they are for themselves, and that the assumed universality they attach to their words are sufficient enough to communicate their message. However, if one extracts evaluative claims (things supposed to be true through internal, logical, reasoning) from factual claims (things supposed to be true through external sense experience) they might notice the assumptions of the writer, something upon which any speculation, in all the sciences, is necessarily based. Since we are working with history, which deals with time, a distinction between what I mean by recent and remote past is necessary.
Although I do not remember the page I remember distinctly that the authors at one point seem to dismiss, or at least de-emphasize, oral sources, referencing frustrations in dealing with indigenous notions of cyclical time. The reason for the distinction implied by the authors between written and oral, most assume, is obvious, it is because oral sources are unreliable. The reason for this is that oral tradition changes fairly quickly and is tied to a subjective memory. The oral source than is most convenient for discussing the present and the recent past, and is a product reflecting a constant evolution through time. The written source is most convenient for discussing the remote past, and is a product reflecting a discrete moment in time. The authors of Religion and Empire, by dismissing oral sources, fail to recognize that discrete moments in history cannot capture everything in an evolutionary process of history, and so must fill in conceptual gaps with ideas already familiar to them, this is apparent when they begin to use the Nahua word for a warrior class and the more familiar term knight interchangeably. Oral sources, in reflecting an evolutionary historical process, will interpret the past through the concepts held during their creation. Written sources do exactly the same thing. For the sake of argument archaeological interpretation, historical interpretation and narrative interpretation are no different; indeed, all interpretations follow a specific process of reading representations in symbols (an action which takes places in real time), just as one does in understanding oral and written language.
This distinction of pasts is important. Many of the concepts I had hoped to relate to the reader are from a work By Paul Ricoeur titled Time and Narrative (particularly sections on historiography) which itself was not fully published until 1988. Philosophical works generally take some time to work their way to the attention of the public so it is safe to assume Conrad and Demerest, at the time, (and still probably even many people today) were unaware of the work from which I draw my argument. The Black Legend creeps its way into the book if only because when taken with most explicit references to Spaniards it seems to indicate that Conrad and Demerest were working within the ideological constraints of their own time. If one looks at their sources the earliest is from 1941, a time in which it was still held by many to be a fact that the European represented a superior human race. By 2011 this view is still around but has become more subliminal, Conrad and Demerest’s book, somewhere in between these two times, holds this same crude view except only by implicit assumptions.
This notion of a superior European, and the Black Legend itself, is insinuated when the authors state that the Aztec empire “perished before Cortes’ few hundred men”, and that the events afterwards were part of a “Spanish holocaust”. Even if they do not maintain the Black Legend, it is more likely that this is because its importance had fallen out of the English speaking world’s consciousness with the demise of Spain’s political fortunes, than it is Conrad and Demerest. Indeed the Black Legend as a phenomenon seems to have started weakening after the Spanish-American war of 1898 though some still referenced its concepts in describing the atrocities of the Spanish civil war in the 1930s as reflecting a Spanish culture of violence. Whether the Black Legend notion of innocent and helpless natives is dealt away with or not the authors’ work still unwittingly reflects a rationale of European superiority which underpins the contrast between helpless natives and ruthless Spaniards of the Black Legend.
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