Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

by Irene Silverblatt

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 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.

Genres: History, Anthropology, Latin American History

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Irene Silverblatt is a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University. Her work revolves mainly around race and religion in Peru during the Spanish Inquisition. Silverblatt earned her PhD at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

[aerialxav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prologue, chapter 1-4, 8, Afterword; wonderful book shedding light on how the state has always been an imperial and racializing project, w the Spanish Inquisition as the prototype of modernity instead of its barbaric other.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found that I appreciated the book's theoretical point while I found the archival research supporting the argument uneven and disjointed.

The idea that the "modern" world began--not in the colonial practices of the late nineteenth century--in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries feels accurate. The idea that the British and French and "advanced" colonizers did the work of the modern world ignores the contributions of supposed "backward" colonizers like the Spanish and Portuguese. Her point that we, as people looking back on the history of colonization, have our own prejudices and stereotypes that are not necessarily borne out by careful study or archival fact (and which are also creations of the struggles especially between the English and the Spanish--the Black Legend and all of that). So I'm on board with her point that, depending on a definition of "modernity," we could definitely locate that in the Spanish colonial project. Her definition of modernity seems to center on bureaucracy, which I might not necessarily foreground in my own definition of it. But that doesn't mean she's wrong. Obviously, it's also more complicated than that: the bureaucracy of the Inquisition had specific rules, regulations, hierarchy, and practices for dealing with and creating evidence.

But she moves from these interesting theoretical points about knowledge as produced by and producing power (Foucault, Bourdieu) to an only uneven proof of that on the ground in seventeenth-century Peru. Same thing for the last chapter on "Becoming Indian". Yes, there were no "Indians" in the Andean region before the Spanish came. And that process clearly took awhile. But she's not really clear on the practitioners/creators of "Indianism." She's got Inquisition records, but she doesn't clarify how these are related--just that a bunch of indians were practicing a variety of religious rituals and calling themselves indians or using a pan-indigenous idea that, while challenged the colonial order and hierarchy, ultimately reproduced it by using its very categories for their critiques. And what of HER categories? Were there such things as "Andeans" before the Spanish were there and mapmakers called the mountain range the same thing throughout the territory? Her point to analyze the creation of categories and definitions is well taken, but she should also practice what she preaches.

And she uses the same bits of evidence--especially three Inquisition trials from the 1630s--to demonstrate different pieces of her claim. Maybe the trials DO show a variety of points and deserve to be analyzed in a variety of ways, but the overall effect is repetitious and not particularly enlightening with multiple iterations.

Ideas good, execution less good. Which means: the ideas don't have the tangible proof, just interpretation and suggestion.

[Boone Ayala]

Read intro and conclusion, the rest I skimmed.

Silverblatt follows other social theorists of modernity, particularly Arendt, in describing the “subterranean stream” of the western cultural legacy that forged the modern world. She highlights two features of supreme importance, race thinking and bureaucracy, and identifies both of them in the Spanish colonial project in America.

The inquisition, she argues, was a modern bureaucracy - guided by supposedly modern principles of rationality, staffed with meritorious office holders, subject to review and administration. The bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state was to some extent first tested out in this context.

This rational bureaucracy was then instrumental in defining the social relations of the modern state along “racial” lines. The inquisition’s systematic targeting of Jewish, Portuguese, Indigenous, and African subjects of the colonial state helped to bind race and “blood stains” to religion, nationality, and social status. The colonial enterprise defined the three major categories of personhood in America (Spanish, African, or Indian) in racial terms that corresponded to their caste.

In this way the state institution of the inquisition helped generalize the particular interpersonal social relations that had formerly defined the colonial world. The state created categories of being that became all-pervading, used even by opposition groups as organizing banners. Abstract categories such as “Indian”, “African”, or “Spaniard” were invented and institutionalized as tools of domination to help ground myths of Spanish exceptionalism. The colonialist tools of bureaucracy and race thinking, introduced early on by the Spanish, would then be used to great effect by the English and French.

There are of course other features of modernity of signal importance that are not discussed in this work - I’m thinking of secularism, which is most certainly not a characteristic of the inquisitions - but perhaps Silverblatt would say that this is not part of the “subterranean stream” of western legacy. Whether one agrees with her or not hinges in great part on what one considers as the foundations of modernity. I also wonder about the progression of the twin harbingers of modernity - bureaucracy and race thinking - through the Atlantic World. Did they begin in Europe, and blossom in America? Or did they dominate America first and then work backwards?

In conversation with: Arendt “Origins of Totalitarianism”, Foucault “Discipline and Punish”

[Natalie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good