Conflating and Racializing Culture in the Sixteenth-Century Habsburg Empire

In the early sixteenth century, the Mexican (Aztec) and Ottoman empires captivated Habsburg Europe: the Mexicans were first encountered and conquered, while the Ottomans were expanding into Hungary and the Mediterranean.  As Mexican and Turkish people and cultural goods first circulated in the Habsburg Empire, pre-existing European ideas of cultural similitude and natural religion allowed these societies to be understood both conceptually and in practice as relatively equivalent to those of Christian Europe.  By the end of the sixteenth century, hierarchy had replaced similitude and the idea of European cultural superiority was firmly established.  While European cultural superiority was not a given in 1492, strategies of exclusion, enacted in text, image, and practice, would produce a conflated exotic by the end of sixteenth century. 

 This exotic would be represented visually as a dark-complexioned, mostly-unclothed, feather-bearing man, a conflation of Amerindian, African, and classical Roman soldier.  This icon often appeared in the company of a female companion, who would become the seventeenth-century allegory of the continent of America.    This paper traces the processes by which the ethnographically specific became the conflated exotic in material and visual contexts, in configurations revealed in collections and in print visual representations.  The paper concludes with a consideration of how these hierarchized and conflated representations of culture helped form concepts of race and of imperial community.  Benedict Anderson’s discussion of  the “imagined community” of nations emphasized the role of print culture and the emergence of what he considered a new type of modern community, in contrast to their anti-spacialized and atemporal predecessors.  The sixteenth-century imperial Habsburg example offers a case study of the earliest of early modern assays into empire, racial formation, and transformations in visual culture wrought by the printing press.