Modern Inquisitions

Silverblatt Irene Silverblatt

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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Perú
• Cultural studies
• History of the Americas
• History of religions
• Christianity
• Peru

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 29 octobre 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822386230
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A John Hope Franklin Center book

A book in the series Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations Series editors: Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University Irene Silverblatt, Duke University Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of California at Los Angeles

odern nquisitions M I

Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Irene Silverblatt

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Durham and London 

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, which provided funds toward the production of this book.

In the spirit of Guido Delran and for Nan Woodruff, George Vickers, and Aaron, Elan, and Sarah Silverblatt-Buser

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About the Series

Acknowledgments Prologue Three Accused Heretics

Inquisition as Bureaucracy

Mysteries of State Globalization and Guinea Pigs States and Stains

New Christians and New World Fears

The Inca’s Witches

Becoming Indian Afterword Appendix: Notes on Bias and Sources Notes Bibliography Index

ix xi              

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Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad inter- play of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geo- political entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a start- ing point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, lin- guistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing pro- cess of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.Latin America Otherwise: Lan- guages, Empires, Nationsis a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, that assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and that, corre- spondingly, demands that the practices through which we produce knowl- edge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rig- orous and critical scrutiny. In this pathbreaking study, Irene Silverblatt makes a number of inter- related arguments. She takes Hannah Arendt’s insights into the origins of a modernity that allowed ‘‘civilized’’ peoples to embrace fascism and ap- plies them to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Spanish colo- nialism dominated the globe. Professor Silverblatt joins Latin American scholars like sociologist Anibal Quijano and philosopher Enrique Dussel in arguing that ‘‘modernity’’ originated with the Spanish/Christian vic- tory over the Moors, the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula, and, simultaneously, the colonization of ‘‘Indians’’ and the slave trade. This confluence of events set the stage for the development of a capitalism