Modern Inquisitions : Peru and the colonial origins of the civilized world

Bibliographic Information

Modern Inquisitions : Peru and the colonial origins of the civilized world

Irene Silverblatt

(Latin America otherwise)(A John Hope Franklin Center book)

Duke University Press, 2004

  • : hardcover
  • : pbk

Available at  / 6 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. [283]-292) and index

Description and Table of Contents

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.

Table of Contents

About the Series ix Acknowledgments xi Prologue 3 Three Accused Heretics 29 Inquisition as Bureaucracy 55 Mysteries of State 77 Globalization and Guinea Pigs 99 States and Stains 117 New Christians and New World Fears 141 The Inca's Witches 161 Becoming Indian 187 Afterword 217 Appendix: Notes on Bias and Sources 227 Notes 235 Bibliography 283 Index 293

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