Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception of Indians

Bibliographic Data

ID3499794
AuthorsWilliam S Simmons (corresponding author)
Year1981
Volume38
Issue1
Pages56
Publication date1981-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe William and Mary Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0043-5597 • E-ISSN: 1933-7698
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1916857
OpenAlexW2313037897
LanguageEN
Citations received15

E NGLISH Puritan voyagers to New England during the seventeenth century perceived the Indians whom they met there in terms of a mythical model that originated in their Christian past and achieved sharpness in the writings of John Calvin.I They saw the world as an arena where forces of light and holiness, represented by Protestant saints, fought against armies of sin and darkness, represented by devils who motivated aristocracies and priesthoods, and infiltrated the Christian community through immoral and undisciplined persons. This mental framework for comprehending evil both within and outside themselves provided Puritan colonists with a theory for interpreting cultural differences between themselves and the native people whom they encountered in the New World. The Puritans who settled in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island believed that the Indian inhabitants of these areas worshipped devils, that Indian religious practitioners were witches, and that the Indians themselves were bewitched. These beliefs appear as matter-of-fact assumptions in the vocabulary of all the New English who wrote about Indian culture, whether they wrote from a sympathetic or hostile perspective and whether they were informed or ignorant of ethnographic facts. Unlike Indian beliefs about the supernatural qualities of Englishmen, which seem to have been temporary and situational, Puritan commitment to the devil-andwitchcraft theory of Indian culture intensified rather than diminished with experience. My purposes are to identify some of the sources within the Puritans

Cultural bias · New england · Perception · Political science · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Law · Psychology · Psychology of Social Influence

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