4
thousand agreeable effects.”
7
The temporal distance between Indians and Europeans, previously
bridgeable only by the activities of the missionary, could now be understood within an “abstract
and philosophical” scheme that locates the American Indian at the very beginnings of human
society.
8
The differences suggested by the Indians are rendered benign as superceded ways of
life.
But the past need not appear so agreeably relinquished. Smith was well aware of
Rousseau’s treatment of “savagery” as a source of critical reflection on the emerging commercial
society.
9
Thus, ‘cognitive travel’ could involve serious reflection on the meanings and purposes
constitutive of contemporary societies. “The past,” as Ashis Nandy suggests, is available as “an
open-ended record of the predicaments of our time.” What is required, and perhaps exemplified
by Rousseau’s civic humanist critique, is “an attempt to read the past as an essay on human
prospects, and . . . the ability to live with one’s constructions of the past and deploy them
creatively.”
10
“[T]ime-travel,” thus, potentially “reshapes the past and the future” by holding
“them up as mirrors to the present.”
11
Smith drew much of his knowledge of the Amerindians from Father Joseph François
Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians. Ronald Meek notes that Lafitau’s work was given a
“special role” by Smith and others because it was seen to have “provided a convincing
demonstration of the fact that contemporary American society could be regarded as a living
6
See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976),
chapters 3 and 4.
7
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis, IN:
Liberty Fund, 1976), p. 316.
8
Ibid.
9
See Smith, “A Letter to the Authors of the Edinburgh Review,” Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W. P.
D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1980), pp, 250-4.
10
Ashis Nandy, Time Warps: Silent and Evasive Pasts in Indian Politics and Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2002), p. 1.
11
Ibid., p. 5.
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