Horsing around the Americas

Abstract

This chapter explores the programmatic role of Classical conceptions in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European assimilation of the Americas. A passing detail in a foundational text of anthropological criticism, Michel de Montaigne’s satirical Essay Of Cannibals, prompts us to re-examine the conquest idea of the New World centaur invoked by European writers to explain indigenous American responses to their first encounters with mounted Europeans. Written into the story of early conquistador rationalizations of the New World ‘Indians’, as Montaigne well knew and contemporary indigenous American voices confirm, is a lesson about cross-cultural (mis)understanding and the dangers of fallaciously generalizing from the particular.