Ancient emotions and the making of the colonial order: Aristotle, Aquinas and Vitoria on Anthropophagy

Abstract

In this paper I explore how Francisco de Vitoria interpreted the reported practice of anthropophagy by American Indians, through the mobilization of the emotional politics of disgust. I argue that by appealing to Aristotle’s arguments in Nichomachean Ethics, instead of his immediate interlocutor Aquinas, Vitoria’s underlying objective in his relection on Self-Restraint was to set the moral grounds for a legal and political order capable of justifying European (Spaniard) colonial settling. For instance, while Aquinas focuses on sin as the principle against to guide human action within a Christian telos, Vitoria places all his attention on licitness and legality as a principle to guide human behavior in the contingency of global encounter. By examining Vitoria’s analyses of anthropophagy as a vicious, unrestrained and barbaric practice, I show that the making of colonial reason was culturally regulated. Disgust as a political mechanism for producing hierarchy is an ancient emotion which was revisited by Vitoria for the crafting of a legal global order in a historical moment of European conquest. With this approach I show how the lawfulness and rightness of the colonial project depended not on the abstract formulation and application of international law, but on the emotional structure of the moral system behind it.