Modern Inquisitions: Peru And The Colonial Origins Of The Civilized World

Description

Trying to understand how “civilized” people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt’s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics of the modern state are evident in the workings of the Inquisition. Her analysis of the tribunal’s persecution of women and men in colonial Peru illuminates modernity’s intricate “dance of bureaucracy and race.” Drawing on extensive research in Peruvian and Spanish archives, Silverblatt uses church records, evangelizing sermons, and missionary guides to explore how the emerging modern world was built, experienced, and understood by colonists, native peoples, and Inquisition officials: Early missionaries preached about world history and about the races and nations that inhabited the globe; Inquisitors, able bureaucrats, defined who was a legitimate Spaniard as they executed heretics for “reasons of state”; the “stained blood” of Indians, blacks, and descendants of Jews and Moors was said to cause their deficient character; and native Peruvians began to call themselves Indian. In dialogue with Arendt and other theorists of modernity, Silverblatt shows that the modern world’s underside is tied to its origins in colonialism and to its capacity to rationalize violence. Modern Inquisitions forces the reader to confront the idea that the Inquisition was not only a product of the modern world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but party to the creation of the civilized world we know today. COPYRIGHT PAGE......Page 3 Contents......Page 6 ABOUT THE SERIES......Page 10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 12 PROLOGUE......Page 20 The Modern Inquisition......Page 23 Bureaucracy and Modern Life......Page 27 The “State,” Illusion, and History......Page 31 Violence and Civilization......Page 35 Race thinking, Bureaucracy, and Nationalist Spirit......Page 38 Spain, Spaniard, Spanishness......Page 42 The Setting......Page 44 Coming to Terms......Page 47 THREE ACCUSED HERETICS......Page 54 Doña Mencia de Luna......Page 60 Manuel Henríquez......Page 67 Manuel Bautista Pérez......Page 75 INQUISITION AS BUREAUCRACY......Page 83 Standards and Procedures......Page 86 Paper Trails......Page 88 Bureaucratic Combat......Page 90 Verdicts Foretold......Page 95 Torture and Truth......Page 102 MYSTERIES OF STATE......Page 109 The Disappearing State......Page 112 Making State Subjects: Gods and Statistics......Page 115 Fallibility and the Bureaucratic Paradox......Page 119 The Knife and the Sheep......Page 121 Mystery and Legitimacy......Page 125 A View from the Indian Elite......Page 128 Insinuations of Bureaucracy......Page 131 State Illusions......Page 135 GLOBALIZATION AND GUINEA PIGS......Page 137 Preaching Hierarchy......Page 140 Common Origins......Page 142 The Problem of Color......Page 144 A World Historical View: Moors, Jews, and Indians......Page 146 Stained Blood......Page 150 Global Lessons......Page 156 A Colored Globe......Page 159 Magical Race Thinking......Page 160 STATES AND STAINS......Page 161 Just What Is “Casta y Generación......Page 165 Were All New Christians Alike?......Page 166 Colonial Stains and Colonial Possibilities......Page 168 A Theory of Race Fractions......Page 171 Calculating Practices......Page 173 Alternative Understandings and Basic Agreements......Page 175 Guaman Poma’s Global Design: Andean Race Thinking......Page 177 More Race Thinking......Page 181 Limited Critiques......Page 185 Español and the Two Racial Designs......Page 187 NEW CHRISTIANS AND NEW WORED FEARS......Page 191 Modern Imaginations and Economic Threats......Page 194 Colonial Conspiracies......Page 200 The Promised Land......Page 206 What Is a Spaniard?......Page 212 THE INCA’S WITCHES......Page 215 Witch Hunts: The Early Years......Page 219 More Indian Brews and the Infamous Tapadas......Page 222 More Witches and More Indians......Page 226 Incas and Indianness......Page 237 Accomplices and Conspiracies......Page 241 Cultural Branding and Cultural Critiques......Page 244 BECOMING INDIAN......Page 246 Inca Histories......Page 249 Intimations of Indianness......Page 251 Becoming “Indian”: Social and Political Practices......Page 254 Becoming “Indian”: Taking the Spanish at Their Categorical Word......Page 256 Relations with Inca Masters in the Colonial Present......Page 258 Compromising Rituals......Page 261 Native Views of Purity......Page 266 The Spanish in Indians......Page 270 The Meanings of “Indian”......Page 274 AFTERWORD......Page 280 The West’s Subterranean Stream......Page 281 Modern Inquisitions......Page 287 APPENDIX NOTES ON BIAS AND SOURCES......Page 293 NOTES......Page 301 Prologue......Page 302 Three Accused Heretics......Page 312 Inquisition as Bureaucracy......Page 324 Mysteries of State......Page 338 Globalization and Guinea Pigs......Page 347 States and Stains......Page 354 New Christians and New World Fears......Page 367 The Inca’s Witches......Page 379 Becoming Indian......Page 393 Afterword......Page 404 Appendix......Page 407 BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 410