Christine Beaule and John G. Douglass (eds.), The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism ed. by Christine Beaule and John G. Douglass Damián V. Solano Escolano (bio) Christine Beaule and John G. Douglass, eds., The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism. University of Arizona Press, 2020. Pp. 306. This collaborative work offers an overview of the Spanish empire as a global and pluralistic territory that, due to massive migrations and varied intermarriage practices, had multiple manifestations of place making. This theoretical concept does not have a univocal meaning in the book, since it includes both the deliberate creation of a physical space and its ritual practices, as happens in a mission, and the constant evolution of material traditions that affect, for instance, the forms of social climbing and cultural persistence (4–6). Other theoretical terms that appear intermittently are the dichotomy between place (physical markers such as buildings) and space (the totality of the landscape) (152), and ethnogenesis, usually understood as the creative responses of conquered groups to perpetuate their culture (216). As the editors explain in the introduction, this theoretical approach aims to overcome the particularities of the Spanish empire and to serve as an analogy for other forms of colonialism, whether European, non-European, or a combination of both, as in this case (8). The method used in The Global Spanish Empire, which is part of the current trend in theories of materiality, constitutes a useful contribution to colonial studies from an anthropological view. Besides examining new cases of specific [End Page 272] settings in disparate geographical points, each chapter extracts general principles related to these theoretical foci. To support their arguments, the authors use not only archival sources but also a wide variety of archaeological findings, artifacts, anthropological analyses, and oral sources. Considering the coloniality of power from a material point of view sheds light on the circumstances in which relations among pluralistic groups developed. For example, the presence of beads of various materials throughout the empire shows that, in addition to being proselytizing tools for Spanish priests, they were also signs of identification with Christian values for those Indigenous groups who wanted to distinguish themselves from others who rejected acculturation (259–61). To illustrate these material aspects, all chapters contain visual aids such as maps, drawings, and photographs. In this sense, a consistent use of place names from context (New Spain instead of Mexico, for example) both in the text and in the maps would have added historical rigor to the work. The Global Spanish Empire contains eleven chapters that analyze various cases, ranging from concrete contextual approaches to broader scopes. The structure does not seem to follow any thematic, geographical, or methodological order. Chapter 1 (Christopher R. DeCorse) explores the Iberian intersections in West Africa, in particular the life around Castelo São Jorge da Mina (today known as Elmina Castle, in Ghana). Chapter 2 (Corinne L. Hofman, Roberto Valcárcel Rojas, and Jorge Ulloa Hung) examines the latent Indigenous cultural persistence in the Caribbean Sea through case studies in Cuba and Hispaniola that focus on architecture and pottery. Chapter 3 (Christopher B. Rodning, Michelle M. Pigott, and Hannah G. Hoover) looks at the encounters between Spaniards and Mississippian chiefdoms throughout what was known as La Florida. The presence of Spanish forts and missions created divisions and clusters between the newcomers and the natives, and among the natives. Chapter 4 (Stacie M. King) travels to the current Sierra Sur de Oaxaca, Mexico. The arrival of Spaniards, mestizos, African slaves, and Indians (both allies and enslaved) transfigured the social reality of this region, which was a multiethnic landscape of conquest and migrations from pre-Hispanic times. Chapter 5 (Laura Matthew and William R. Fowler) examines the tense multiethnic coexistence in the first Spanish settlements in Central America, Santiago en Almolonga in Guatemala and San Salvador in El Salvador. Both were urban projects with an ephemeral life that highlighted the contradictions between the idealizations of the imperial mission, embodied in the layout in traza, and its complicated implementation. In a similar manner, chapter 6 (Kevin Lane) focuses on the domination of the Christian place over the Indigenous space through the construction...