La construcción de estereotipos en las crónicas de Indias

In describing the New World, its inhabitants and their cultures, the authors of the chronicles of America embraced a task which could only be fulfilled from the authors’ own cultural viewpoint: in the first place, they could only understand the New World they were exposed to by reference to the world they already knew; on the other hand, in order to attain their communicative goal, these authors had to describe every fact, object or cultural feature by reference to the common knowledge framework shared by them and their eventual readers. This process of cultural contextualization (or cross‑cultural description) decisively determined the emergence, contents and development of the “European” vision of the New World. This paper focuses upon some of the most outstanding features which built up the stereotypical, European image of the American Indians and their culture, claims that the core of this stereotype may be traced back to the most ancient chronicles and the process of cultural contextualization here outlined, and puts forward a methodological approach to analyze the cultural process by which this stereotype arose and developed.