Waldram/Herring/Young/Alchon/etc?

[WHY = Waldram, Herring, Young]

The demographic impact of European colonialism in the Americas has been a matter of significant academic debate, popularized, to an extent, by Charles C. Mann’s widely-available works 1491 and 1493. These books are among several which problematize the history of colonial contact in the Americas. Suzanne Alchon, in A Pest in the Land, argues for a balanced perspective considering the impacts of both colonial violence and epidemic diseases. However, this is undermined by the structure of her book; she devotes the majority of her monograph to discussing the demographics of various regions and the impacts of several epidemics on indigenous populations of the Americas, to a degree obscuring her own argument of the importance of violent, marginalizing colonial policies.

How can historians researching issues other than pre- and post-contact demography respond to the controversy over the post-1492 decline in indigenous populations in the Americas? This is where Alchon’s appendix breaks with the traditions of either “high-counting” or “low-counting” demographic historians, arguing that the static totals are ultimately unimportant compared to the dynamics of population decline (172). While this may be suitable for studies of the Americas as a broad, intercontinental region, more specific figures would be useful for considering individual indigenous groups.

Geographical scope – Alchon’s work vs. other demographic studies. Sylvia Wargon emphasizes the importance of region in the history of demography (8), while Alchon combines regions, making her argument based on pre-contact demographics and incidences of disease in more densely populated areas of the Americas, and devoting less attention to the nuances of contact in North America.

Link with Carlson – key role of pre-contact systems; cannot see history of indigenous peoples as starting with contact

Conflation between medicine and religion; WHY indicate that academic focus is on the supernatural aspects of Aboriginal medicine (129); Alchon shows that it’s not just an indigenous thing, and that pre-contact Amerindian and European understandings of health and illness were based on similar premises.

Various overlaps in geographic and temporal scope; WHY temporally surpasses Alchon’s work.

I can't quite pull things together this week!