Summary
Claude Levi-Strauss: Race and History / Race and Culture
In the Greater Antilles, a few years after the discovery of America, while the Spanish were sending explorers whose task it was to determine whether the natives possessed souls or not, the natives practiced drowning and strangling captured whites in order to test whether their corpses were susceptible to putrefaction or not.
To the same extent that we tend to establish discrimination between cultures and customs, we identify most fully with those we try to deny. By denying human nature to those who appear to be "the most savage" or "the most barbarous," we are doing nothing more than adopting one of their typical attitudes. A barbarian is first of all a man who believes in barbarism.
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