Irene Silverblatt

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America

In colonial Latin America, social identity did not correlate neatly with fixed categories of race and ethnicity. As Imperial Subjects demonstrates, from the early years of Spanish and Portuguese rule, understandings of race and ethnicity were fluid. In this collection, historians offer nuanced interpretations of identity as they investigate how Iberian settlers, African slaves, Native Americans, and their multi-ethnic progeny understood who they were as individuals, as members of various communities, and as imperial subjects. The contributors’ explorations of the relationship between colonial ideologies of difference and the identities historical actors presented span the entire colonial period and beyond: from early contact to the legacy of colonial identities in the new republics of the nineteenth century. The volume includes essays on the major colonial centers of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as well as the Caribbean basin and the imperial borderlands. Whether analyzing cases in which the Inquisition found that the individuals before it were “legally” Indians and thus exempt from prosecution, or considering late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century petitions for declarations of whiteness that entitled the mixed-race recipients to the legal and social benefits enjoyed by whites, the book’s contributors approach the question of identity by examining interactions between imperial subjects and colonial institutions. Colonial mandates, rulings, and legislation worked in conjunction with the exercise and negotiation of power between individual officials and an array of social actors engaged in countless brief interactions. Identities emerged out of the interplay between internalized understandings of self and group association and externalized social norms and categories. Contributors . Karen D. Caplan, R. Douglas Cope, Mariana L. R. Dantas, Maria Elena Diaz, Andrew B. Fisher, Jane Mangan, Jeremy Ravi Mumford, Matthew D. O’Hara, Cynthia Radding, Sergio Serulnikov, Irene Silverblatt, David Tavarez, Ann Twinam

The evolution of witchcraft and the meaning of healing in colonial Andean society.

This paper explores the ways in which traditional beliefs of Andean peoples regarding health and sickness were transformed by the process of Spanish colonization. It also examines how the colonial context devolved new meanings and powers on native curers. The analysis of these transformations in Andean systems of meanings and role structures relating to healing depends on an examination of the European witchcraze of the 16th–17th centuries. The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire in the mid-1500s coincided with the European witch hunts; it is argued that the latter formed the cultural lens through which the Spanish evaluated native religion — the matrix through which Andean concepts of disease and health were expressed — as well as native curers. Andean religion was condemned as heresy and curers were condemned as witches.Traditional Andean cosmology was antithetical to 16th century European beliefs in the struggle between god and the devil, between loyal Christians and the Satans followers. Consequently, European concepts of disease and health based on the power of witches, Satans adherents, to cause harm and cure were alien to pre-Columbian Andean thought. Ironically European concepts of Satan and the supposed powers of witches began to graft themselves onto the world view of Andean peoples. The ensuing dialectic of ideas as well as the creation of new healers/witches forged during the imposition of colonial rule form the crux of this analysis.

Jewish identification and critical theory: The political significance of conceptual categories

This symposium examines how various discursive frameworks inform Jewish and non-Jewish interpretations of Jewishness. Although the specific characteristics of these frameworks are context-dependent, the underlying themes remain the same: Jewish identification entails identifying “difference,” and this process of drawing distinctions between Jews and non-Jews gets developed in discursive frameworks of temporality, “race thinking,” nationalism, and genetics, among others. In the broader contexts within which Jewish identification is formulated, these frameworks serve to: (i) delineate categories of people on the basis of socially salient qualities associated with human and other bodies; (ii) evaluate these categorical “types” in regard to their determined “desirable” and “undesirable” qualities; (iii) implement institutionally sanctioned measures that facilitate the privileging of the people who apparently embody desired qualities; and (iv) enforce structural constraints within which people may choose to contest, re-inscribe, re-appropriate, and/or attempt to transform components of the other three networks mentioned above. It also emphasizes the significance of who mobilizes these discourses, with what objectives in mind, and how both factors instantiate discursive and discursively informed concretized outcomes.

The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Stereotypes about gender relations in late Colonial Mexico — whether expressed as academic assumptions or in popular culture — are the targets of Steve J. Sterns important book, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico . Stern unravels these mythologies through a careful analysis of patriarchy, both the patriarchy of daily life and the patriarchal practices of governance. A central plank of the study is to gage the links between them, and Stern probes the interplay between gendered relations in the household and in the broader sweep of colonial power.