The Hakluyt Society and the Heart of Darkness

I would argue that a strong parallel can be drawn between Richard Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the article written about Portuguese opinion on Christianity—specifically, how the “superior culture” develops ethnography of the “primitive culture” using the comparison of societal norms (some associated with religion.)
When Marlowe is going about his journey, he notices a group of African natives and states, “It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.” This quotation emphasizes how Marlowe stereotypes the Africans as an “inhuman” species. Only briefly does Marlowe accept the notion that the Africans might have some form of “humanity” or “kinship.” Marlowe develops the barbaric stigmatization about the natives because he compares them to the norms associated with colonialism. The “howling, leaping and horrid faces” of the natives is by no means acceptable in European culture. In many ways, Marlowe’s ethnographic technique is similar to the one used in the article The Hakluyt Society.
The author of The Hakluyt Society develops his view of Ethiopia by comparing their religious traditions to those of his own culture. His biased analysis categorizes certain customs as “strange, novel and peculiar,” and like Marlowe, he casts a negative opinion of any custom that are foreign or irreverent to Portugal. (57) In relation to the big picture, the author of The Hakluyt Society makes the purpose of religion clear. Religion holds the pieces of society together. If someone of a different culture cannot understand the religion of a particular society, they are unable to see how the pieces of society mesh, and many times revert to judging the society like Marlowe or the author of The Hakluyt Society. A true judgment of a society can only come when the observer understands (and more important does not judge) a societies religion or the norms associated with it.