Abstract

LEPE-CARRION, Patricio. Civilization and barbarism: The establishment of a 'colonial difference' during the debates of the sixteenth century, and its cover up as 'cultural difference'. Andamios [online]. 2012, vol.9, n.20, pp.63-88. ISSN 2594-1917.

This paper analyzes the concepts of 'civilization' and 'barbarism' underlying 'Valladolid debate' in the sixteenth century, in the light of critical thinking in Latin America (modernity / coloniality). Reviewing and summarizing of the literature, demonstrate that the arguments of Bartolome de Las Casas, and those who openly defended the dignity of the natives, were a 'cover up' of the 'colonial difference' as a 'cultural difference'. This 'cover up', not only serve as a strategy or mechanism of justification and legitimation of the 'conquest', and its consequent domination and exploitation of the indigenous, but also as a platform on which to record the idea of 'civilizing the other' (or idea of ' progress') during the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Keywords : Civilization and barbarism; colonial difference; cultural difference; Bartolomé de Las Casas; modernity/coloniality.

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