Europe’s discovery of other civilizations forced recognition of irremediable human pluralism.
Evidence
In the course of the sixteenth century, Europe’s ‘discovery’ of grandiose civilizations hitherto only dimly rumoured – in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent – or completely unknown – Aztec Mexico and Incan Peru – suggested an irremediable human pluralism. Most of these civilizations had developed quite separate from the known history of Europe, Christendom, Antiquity, indeed man: their genealogies lay outside of and were unassimilable to Eden. (Only homogeneous, empty time would offer them accommodation.) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 288
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces the crucial ‘homogeneous, empty time’ concept that Anderson will deploy centrally later — a must-keep definitional term.
- XREF: ‘Homogeneous, empty time’ is the temporal scaffold underlying genealogies and biopolitics — connects to the module’s genealogy/necropolitics goal. — connects to: Encountering non-European peoples strained Europe’s Christian idea of human unity; Europe described the New World using its own preexisting categories and frameworks