ABSTRACT

A striking instance of the spiritual and hence imageric power of alterity is provided by what Baron Nordenskiold relates about certain cures of snakebite that were told to him. The strategy of mimesis and alterity involved in using a powerful First World State, notably the United States, against the exactions of the local Third World State, is an important and often tragic element of modern history. Busily plying the trade with the Indians of the eastern coast of Central America in the early nineteenth century, Orlando Roberts has left people with a charming scene, forerunner of the storehouse of Western commodities in the Cuna land of the dead noted by the baron a century later. The Cuna were left to themselves, their foreign ships, and their traders. Nordenskiold was impressed by what he saw as a certain Cuna paradox in absorbing the outside and changing world in order to stay the same.