Colonial South America Research Articles

The dominating self: subjectivities of government in the Jesuit-Guaraní Missions of colonial South America.

The dominating self: subjectivities of government in the Jesuit-Guaraní Missions of colonial South America.

Religion and space in colonial South America: a technology of geo-political rule and terrestrial-spatial subjectivity in the Jesuit missions of the Banda Oriental

ABSTRACT Based on a genealogical analysis of documentary evidence, this paper explores the comprehensive technology of geo-political rule that was applied in the missions established and governed by the Society of Jesus in the territories of the Banda Oriental in South America, from the early 17th century to the second half of the 18th century. The interdependent knowledges and practices of the technology – its contested logics of universal conversion, its hard and soft geo-political techniques, its terrestrial-spatial subjectivities – as well as the resistances that opposed the technology’s operation are discussed and conceptualized. These conceptualizations are presented as contributions to the studies on colonial religious governmentalities. The conclusions highlight the relevance of governmentality approaches and meta-institutional analytical perspectives for the study of religions and space and religious geo-politics in past and contemporary societies.

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt

Portuguese Studies vol. 34 no. 1 (2018), 119–32© Modern Humanities Research Association 2018 Reviews Lisa Voigt, Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 237 pages, 5 b/w photos. Print and e-book. Hardcover and paperback. Reviewed by Barbara Alge (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Public festivals have had an important function in promoting imperial expansion since the beginning of the colonization of the Americas. They were used to commemorate religious and political events, from important Catholic feast days to political acts such as the entrance of important authorities into colonial towns or weddings of the court. Spectacular Wealth, written by Lisa Voigt, complements the vast literature on festivals in eighteenth-century mining towns in colonial South America. While Voigt cites this literature, the novelty of her Spectacular Wealth lies, first, in the ‘mining’ (p. 8) of festival accounts, and, second, in the comparative approach — not only looking at festivals in Spanish and Portuguese America side-by-side, but also working out links, similarities and differences between these two regions. Drawing on archival research, Voigt examines festival accounts and the festive participation of diverse inhabitants in the silver-mining town of Potosí (viceroyalty of Peru) and in the gold-mining towns of Minas Gerais (Brazil). She not only bridges written texts and performances, but brings the festivals to life by giving a voice to different ethnic and social groups involved in the organization and performance of the festivals, as well as to those writing about the festivals in mining boomtowns, mostly for a metropolitan readership. WhilethefestivalsservedtheChurchandtheCrownforostentationinthefirst instance, they also offered an opportunity to Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans and creoles to display their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances. Festivals were used to redefine the reputation of these groups, and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual and intellectual wealth. Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days, Voigt highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance and reporting of festivals. The book is divided by theme and approach rather than geography and corpus: Part I analyses and interprets specific texts on festivals in the Villa Imperial de Potosí (Chapter 1) and on festivals in colonial Minas Gerais (Chapter 2); Part II uses those and other texts to take a closer look at the celebrants of the festivals, with a focus on the natives in Potosí (Chapter 3), and on Afro-Brazilians in Minas Gerais (Chapter 4). Each chapter finishes Reviews 120 with a helpful summary of the main points. Extensive notes, well indicated in relation to pages, complement the information given in each chapter and five figures in black-and-white reproduced from eighteenth-century paintings and manuscripts illustrate Voigt’s observations. A conclusion tops off the complex narrative. In the introduction, Voigt presents a description of the play of the Real tragicomedia del descubrimiento y conquista del Oriente, performed at a Jesuit college in Lisbon in 1619, to outline the main themes of the book, that is, ‘the festive display of mineral wealth; of the feats and fruits of evangelization; of royal authority and ethnic difference, both feigned and real; of intergroup competition and rivalry (again, both feigned and real)’ (p. 11). The description of this play by Mimoso (Lisbon, 1620) serves as an example of what Voigt calls the ‘ambiguous genre’ of festival accounts, lying between the narrative of a performed event and their own rhetorical performances, and as such derived from other texts and oral accounts as well as the performance itself. The introduction further contextualizes the silver rush in Potosí and the gold rush in Minas Gerais historically, and provides insights into the social make-up of the mining towns, composed of those who profited from the minerals, and those who suffered from exploitation working in the mines. Voigt also mentions the writers in Portuguese and Spanish America, who play a role throughout the book, such as Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa and Andre João Antonil. She turns her attention to the physical and symbolical presence of different racial and ethnic groups in the festival performances. Chapter 1 focuses on three festive occasions that Arzáns uses to showcase...

Bitcoin and Potosí Silver: Historical Perspectives on Cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin, the digital cryptocurrency, has been celebrated as the future of money on the Internet. Although Bitcoin does present several forward-looking innovations, it also integrates a very old concept into its digital architecture: the mining of precious metals. Even though Bitcoin explicitly invokes mining as a metaphor and gold as an example for understanding the cryptocurrency, there has been little critical work on the connections between Bitcoin and previous metalist currency regimes. The following essay proposes a historical comparison with colonial South American silver mining and the global currency regime based on the New World silver peso it created as a way to interrogate Bitcoin. The comparison with colonial South America, and specifically the silver mining economy around the Cerro Rico de Potosí, will help to develop a historical and political understanding of Bitcoin's stakes, including questions of resources, labor, energy, and ecology. Mining and the extractive apparatus that accompanies it always imply massive-scale earthworks that reshape the planet itself, a process known as terraforming. The Potosí comparison will reveal Bitcoin to form part of a similar process of digital primitive accumulation we can provisionally name cryptoforming.

Of Signatures and Status: Andrés Sánchez Gallque and Contemporary Painters in Early Colonial Quito

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

Of Signatures and Status: Andrés Sánchez Gallque and Contemporary Painters in Early Colonial Quito

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Colonial Mexico (review)

Reviewed by: Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Colonial Mexico Gauvin Alexander Bailey Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Colonial Mexico. By Eleanor Wake. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2010. Pp. xxii, 338. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-806-14033-9.) Eleanor Wake’s impressive new book on the perennially fascinating topic of the indigenous impact on the built and visual culture of early New Spain is a welcome addition to the literature in English. Its elegant, jargon-free writing; methodical overview of the secondary literature; and deft detective work based on extensive fieldwork will make this book invaluable as a primer for the subject for undergraduates, graduates, and interested members of the general public. The book takes us on a journey through time and space—both real and cosmic—beginning with overviews of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican beliefs and rituals centered on geography, the calendar, agriculture, and fertility, focusing on the role of plants and especially flowers, the leitmotif of this book. Chapters 2 and 3 explore familiar territory, telling the story of the implementation of Christianity by the conquerors on the existing sacred environment and the indigenous reappropriation of their own world through selective adaptation and interpretation of these alien forms and beliefs. We see again the ingenious systems of indoctrination used by the friar missionaries and the ways that the Nahua employed them to their own ends, as well as the cycles of tolerance and intolerance imposed by a Church that at times had little idea of what was going on. Chapter 4 rehearses the history of the [End Page 179] building of the great mission churches and the ways in which their unique structures (open chapels, posas) reflect the pre-Hispanic ritual environment and its colonial inheritor and how they represented continuity as much as novelty for the indigenous populations. Her relation of indigenous depictions of churches to representations of the altepetl (Nahua community) is particularly helpful. Much of this material is well known even to a nonscholarly audience and indebted to George Kubler, Joseph Baird, John MacAndrew, Jeanette Peterson, Samuel Edgerton, and Jaime Lara—just to name some of those writing in English. Yet there is not enough acknowledgment of the work of these pioneers and contemporaries, or even a clear statement about what is original and what is not. As a consequence, the survey of the literature in the introduction seems dated—the author’s points are well taken about the indigenous contribution to colonial culture, but she fights a battle against a Eurocentric mainstream literature that was won two decades ago. More problematic is her claim that she is using sources “hitherto not included in a study of this kind” (p. 8) such as lienzos (map documents), which are the foundation of a groundswell of recent scholarship (e.g., Barbara Mundy and Lara, both of whom she cites, but not enough). Her neglect of Lara’s work and dismissiveness toward that of Edgerton prevents her from opening up a fresh scholarly dialogue, and it is an oversight not to bring in some of the literature on colonial South America (Ramón Mujica, Adrian Locke, Thomas Cummins, Elena Phipps), which deals precisely with issues of indigenous participation in colonial architecture and visual culture and has been engaging the Mexican material directly for more than twenty years. Wake is at her most impressive in the later part of the book (chapters 5 and 6). Her meticulous and original study of the location and identification of pre-Hispanic embedded stones in colonial churches and their possible alignment with solar activity and radial sightlines with elements of sacred geography (mountains in particular) is very provocative, as is her unprecedented identification of this sacred geography in the backgrounds of Christian mural paintings. Also intriguing is her emphasis on flowers and their relationship to flower imagery in the Nahua Cantares Mexicanos (sacred songs)—although in this case the reader wishes she had gone further, reproducing some of the texts in full and going back over the material treated earlier in the book. In fact, it would have been preferable to have these splendid texts at the beginning rather than the conclusion. In sum, this is a very useful...

The polychoral tradition

Since 1988 the Fondazione Ugo e Olga Levi in Venice has organized two study seminars a year dedicated to the theme ‘Early music in Mediterranean society’. Some of the results of this work have appeared in the journal Musica e storia, or in volumes published by the Fondazione itself (see the Fondazione Levi website for more details: Author Webpage). The 34th Study Seminar, which took place at the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, 27–9 October 2005, marked an innovatory approach to and an extension of the Mediterranean perspective, being dedicated to ‘The polychoral tradition in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the New World’, a topic addressed, probably for the first time, by scholars from Europe (Italian, Spanish and British) and South America. The basic idea of the seminar, which was organized by Juan José Carreras (University of Zaragoza) and Iain Fenlon (King's College, Cambridge), was to consider the concept of polychorality, to analyze the different ways in which this was practised not only in Italy but also in geographically dispersed regions such as Spain and colonial South America (thus studying it in context), and to explore not simply a musicological viewpoint, but anthropological and more general cultural aspects as well.

Legitimacy, Honor, and Sexuality in Colonial South America

Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xi + 307 pp. including chapter references and index. $49.95 cloth, $17.9...

Illegitimacy and Racial Hierarchy in the Peruvian Priesthood: A Seventeenth-Century Dispute

ILLEGITIMACY AND RACIAL HIERARCHY IN THE PERUVIAN PRIESTHOOD: A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY DISPUTE BY Sabine Patricia Hyland* Introduction In 1624 Francisco Verdugo, newly appointed bishop of Huamanga in Peru, stunned his diocese by declaring that most of the Catholic priests in the rural regions of Huamanga had not been validly ordained and must be removed permanently from office. The priests in question were all of illegitimate birth who, Verdugo argued, could not be validly ordained, despite two previous papal bulls empowering American bishops to raise illegitimate men to the priesthood.1 For Verdugo, the removal of illegitimately born men from the priesthood in his diocese was to be his final measure in a long struggle to ensure the racial purity of the priesthood in Peru. In Peru at this time, illegitimacy was commonly equated with mestizos—children born to European (or creóle) fathers and native mothers. Debate about the role of illegitimate men within the priesthood was stated explicitly to concern the place of mestizos in the Church.After 1588, when the Spanish Crown repealed legislation barring American bishops from ordaining mestizos, those opposed to mestizo ordination tried to use the canonical prohibitions against ordaining illegitimate men to keep mestizos from the priesthood. After years of bitter debate, the matter was finally resolved in 1628. In that year the Council of the Indies decided in favor of allowing bishops to grant dispensations for the ordination of illegitimate men, as had been provided for by two earlier papal bulls. In addition , the Council declared that all previous ordinations of illegitimate men by American bishops had been valid, reversing Verdugo's attempts *Dr. Hyland is an assistant professor of anthropology in Columbus State University, Columbus, Georgia. 'See Pedro de Reina Maldonado, El norte claro del perfecto prelado (Madrid, 1653), pp. 372-375. 431 432ILLEGITIMACY AND RACIAL HIERARCHY IN THE PERUVIAN PRIESTHOOD to remove these illegitimately born men from the priesthood.2 Thus, the final restrictions against investing mestizos with Holy Orders in the Indies were removed. Although numerous scholars have addressed the controversy over creating a native and a mestizo priesthood in colonial Spanish America, the role of the question of illegitimacy in these debates has been overlooked .3 Yet studying the debate over illegitimacy is essential to understanding the complete history of the controversy over mestizos in the Peruvian priesthood. The conflict over ordaining illegitimately born men was a crucial part in the development of the priesthood in colonial South America. Moreover, the analysis of this debate reveals that, contrary to current scholarly opinion, mestizos formed the substratum of the Peruvian clergy in the seventeenth century. In this period mestizos were customarily ordained to serve in rural Indian parishes (doctrinas) from which there was virtually no chance of promotion. Until now it generally has been believed that only Europeans and creóles were ordained as priests in seventeenth-century Peru. The fact that, as analysis of this debate shows, mestizo priests were a common feature of Indian parishes in seventeenth-century Peru, holds profound implications for our understanding of the spread of Christianity in the Andes. 2Juan de Solórzano Pereyra,Política Indiana,\o\. 2 (Madrid, 1972), pp. 306-31 1. 'For discussions on the development of mestizo and native clergy in Latin America, see Juan Alvarez Mejia, "La cuestión del Clero indígena en la época colonial," RevistaJaveriana , 44 (1955), 193-197; 45 (1956), 56-57, 209-2 19; Xavier Albó,"Jesuítas y culturas indígenas , Perú 1568-1606; América indígena, 26 (1966), 249-308, 399-449; Fernando de Armas Medina, Cristianización del Perú (1532-1600) (Seville, 1953), pp. 364-374; Constantino Bayle, "España y el clero indígena de América," Razón y Fe, 94 (February 10, 1931), 213-225; (March 25, 1931), 521-535;Guiüermo¥iguera,Laformación del clero ind ígena en la historia eclesiástica de América 1500-1818 (Caracas, 1965); Antón Hounder, Der einheimische Klerus in den Heidenländern (Freiburg, 1909); León Lopetegui,"FJ Papa Gregorio XIII y la Ordenación de mestizos hispano-incáicos" in Xenia Piaña SSmo Dno Nro Pió Papae XII . . . dicata (Rome, 1943); Juan Oleachea, "Como abordaron...

Suffering in the Cultural Construction of Others: Robert Spott and A. L. Kroeber

ELAINE SCARRY, IN The Body in Pain (1985), analyses the political use of torture as a means of deconstructing the victim by separating voice from body.* The voice, disembodied by pain, is made to speak as the torturer wishes and is thus appropriated and utilized in the ongoing construction of the torturer's self, the reality of which is continually in doubt. In the terms utilized by Robert Jaulin in his Introduction to Ethnocide, La paix blanche (1971), the torturer affirms his self through negation of the other whose very existence is perceived by the torturer as having the potential to negate him. Like Sartre, Jaulin considers the affirmation of self through negation of others the principal paradigm for self-affirmation in the West. He extends his analysis to ethnography, seeing it as a means of anthropological self-affirmation through negation of the ethnographic other. Scarry's analysis is powerful here, for it is precisely through the disembodiment and appropriation of native voices that the ethnographer is professionally affirmed. Scarry's concern is with the Western tradition, beginning with the Old Testament and extending through Marx to contemporary political terror. Jaulin takes a cross-cultural perspective and contrasts the Western (particularly, colonial) mode of self-affirmation through negation of the other with a non-Western, tribal alternative, a paradigm for affirming the other who affirms you. Regarding this alternative paradigm, the ethnohistorian Richard Drinnon writes, Jaulin's abstract formulations neatly dovetailed with all of the evidence from colonial South America,

The Renaissance in the New World: Printing in Colonial South America

The Renaissance in the New World: Printing in Colonial South America

Tales of Colonial South America

Tales of Colonial South America