Resumo

TEGLIA, Vanina María. The American Native in Bartolomé de las Casas: the proto-ethnology "inferred" from the controversy. Latinoamérica [online]. 2012, n.54, pp.217-247. ISSN 2448-6914.

The Historia de las Indias by Bartolome de las Casas is a constitutively polemical text. Its narrative episodes attemp to become refuting evidence particulary against Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Historia General y Natural de las Indias and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda's writings for the Valladolid Debate. From this controversy, a particular representation of the native American arises: we will carefully study the inversion strategies of the Dominican friar about certain stigmatizing images of incapacity, lack, and imperfection of the Indian: his "idleness", "bestial" character, "inferiority" and idolatry. For his adversative discourse, Las Casas makes use of certain refutation techniques y some figures of aggression: retaliation, metastasis, demystification, dissociations, injury, among others.

Palavras-chave : Conquest; Las Casas; Controversy; Representation; American Native.