SOURCE: Whitehead, Neil L. “The Discoverie as Ethnological Text.” In The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana by Sir Walter Ralegh, edited by Neil L. Whitehead, pp. 60-116. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Whitehead examines Walter Raleigh's Discoverie as an anthropological work that provides ethnographic information on the native peoples of Guiana, and he analyzes the “symbolic convergence of native and non-native traditions” regarding El Dorado.

(i) Capitaynes, Cassiques and Incan Imperialists

Recent work in the anthropology of colonial contact and the texts it generates has emphasised the way in which political, economic and social assumptions are implicit within categories of explanation (see Dirks 1992, Hulme and Whitehead 1992, Schwartz 1994 and Chapter 1 (iii) above). At the same time texts, such as Ralegh's, may be quite overtly concerned to deliver a certain kind of impression of the political, economic and social capacities of...