English privateer and amateur ethnographer William Dampier’s work abounds with admiring descriptions of the knowledge and skills of the indigenous societies he encountered on his global voyages. These positive descriptions of indigenous culture make a surprising juxtaposition against the tenor of ethnography little more than a century later, when biological theories of race grounded disparaging attitudes toward indigenous cultures. This article explores the conditions of possibility of a historical moment during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Anglophone world, in which it was possible to acknowledge some of the merits of indigenous knowledge. I argue that it was the framework of Baconian natural history, with its focus on useful knowledge, and its methodological emphasis on empirical data rather than theorizing, which made it possible for Dampier to treat indigenous societies not only as the objects of knowledge, but more importantly, as sources of knowledge.

中文翻译：

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“印第安人的智慧”：威廉·丹皮尔对土著知识的惊人尊重

英国私掠者和业余民族志学家威廉·丹皮尔 (William Dampier) 的作品充满了对他在全球航行中遇到的土著社会的知识和技能的令人钦佩的描述。一个多世纪后，当种族的生物学理论建立在对土著文化的贬低态度之上时，这些对土著文化的积极描述与民族志的基调形成了令人惊讶的对比。本文探讨了 17 世纪末和 18 世纪初英语世界历史时刻的可能性条件，在这个时刻，承认土著知识的一些优点是可能的。我认为这是培根自然史的框架，它关注有用的知识，方法论强调经验数据而不是理论化，