Otherness distinctions and divergent societies

I feel like a really effective way to tie the debate about the bestowal or denial of humanness to other cultures (particularly to the native American cultures by the Spaniard conquistadores) is to go back and look at the enormous differences between the societies themselves. We can nitpick all we want about degrees of otherness, and to whom should or should not otherness be assigned, but in analyzing this particular case, it really is EXCEPTIONALLY easy to understand why the native American societies were grouped into that category by the Europeans and were thus denied an egalitarian conception of being "Human".

Todorov mentions it repeatedly. The very modes of thinking were inherently different between these two societies. Ways of conceptualizing, not only one's surroundings, but time itself were worlds apart. The cyclical understanding of time, omens and signs held by the Aztecs presented an enormous disconnect for the Europeans, one which would be almost completely insurmountable even by our own much more tolerant and "culturally relativistic" standards. Imagine trying to communicate something as simple as going to work and having to deal with a bunch of different problems -- that you didn't have to deal with the day before -- to someone for whom every single action is both a repetition of the past and an omen for the future... for indeed the terms "past" and "future" have no meaning. There is only "now", "now then" and "now later". Even after the Europeans were able to devise a way of communicating with the native Americans, they were presented with such a huge cultural impasse, likely like none ever before encountered, that truly and honestly coceiving as this race of people as "the same" seems immediately challenging. Even we, modern liberals, might be able to conceive intellectually of a certain sameness still existing between ourselves and such a culture, but I feel that in practice the barriers presented would almost necessarily give way to an "Other" assignment.

So this social divergence worked to the double disadvantage of the native Americans -- it both cemented their inferiority in the eyes of the conquistadores (for difference is, of course, tantamount to inferiority) and thus the justification for their slaughter; and the cyclical time conceptualization made the improvisation that would have been necessary for effective warfare against the Europeans impossible.

I guess what it all comes down to is that, simply by being fundamentally different in an unfortunate way (imagine if the Indians had had both technology and worldview which were strategically SUPERIOR to those of the Europeans... the world would be quite a different place), the native Americans were kind of screwed from the beginning. Upsetting at times.