Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Latin America Otherwise)

Silverblatt, Irene

ISBN 10: 0822334178 / ISBN 13: 9780822334170

Published by Duke University Press Books, 2004

About this Item

Acceptable - This is a significantly damaged book. It should be considered a reading copy only. Please order this book only if you are interested in the content and not the condition. May be ex-library. PAPERBACK Standard-sized.

Seller Inventory # M0822334178Z4

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Latin America Otherwise)
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication Date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822334178
• ISBN 13: 9780822334170
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Irene Silverblatt is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru. She is past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory (2001–02).