ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to demonstrate that, insofar as cultural changes are concerned, the long-term consequences of the expansion of Europe and its encounter with other human societies require a particular kind of analysis. The new ethnological languages, crucial to the Enlightenment and to modern anthropology, did not grow out of a single philosophical tradition, even less a single debate concerning the new world. The chapter stresses the interaction between discourses in Europe and discourses outside as crucial to the development of a new ethnological language in which the problem of human unity and diversity became the central issue. Furthermore, rather than opposing the complexity of the moral and political concerns of European writers during the Renaissance to the simplicity of first-hand narratives written by prejudiced observers among non-European societies, the chapter wishes to insist on the complexity of travel literature.
