“Are they human?” From first contact, this anthropological question has driven the exploration, colonization, religious controversy and social upheaval that paralleled the emergence of Cartesian science, anthropology, technology, politics and finance. In the so-called Age of Discovery, Europeans answered the question in intellectually and religiously confused ways that continue to this day. Explorers and exploiters followed an ethnocentric logic: indigenous peoples lacked culture. They had no religion, no kings, no laws and no money. Such was the institutional, objectivated rationale for both European political and religious anthropology and the colonialism it engendered.

Ironically, the same observers held that “American” indigenous peoples had achieved such a startling social harmony without European-style institutions that they surely lived the life of the Golden Age, when humans and “beast” were one and the same. The problem was to explain how uncivilized, irrational “savages” could also be socially and morally discerning (K. M. Morrison 1984). Utopian dreams constituted a romantic impulse to “spiritualize” both nature and indigenous peoples, and might be dismissed, as animism has been, as unreal fantasy. But, romantic, theological, idealization and Cartesian rationalism are not different things. The concepts are in fact a dualism that holds objectivity and subjectivity as diametrically opposed, when the concepts are actually mutually constituting. In what follows, I call this confusion “categorical slippage” to identify apparently discrete phenomena that cannot be explained only as oppositions (objectivity/subjectivity, for example).