In Praise of Historical Anthropology

IN PRAISE OF HISTORICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY
PERSPECTIVES, METHODS, AND APPLICATIONS
TO THE STUDY OF POWER AND COLONIALISM
Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and

Josep Llufa Mateo Dieste
In Praise of Historical Anthropology
In Praise of Historical Anthropology is based on a fundamental con-

viction: the study of society cannot be undertaken without considering
the weight of history and separations between disciplines in academics
need to be bridged for the benefit of knowledge. Anthropology cannot
be limited to situating its object in its immediate context; rather its true
subject of study is society as a historical problem. The book describes
the complex attempts to transcend this separation, presenting perspec-
tives, methodologies and direct applications for the study of power rela-
tions and systems of social classification, paying special attention to the
reconstruction of colonial situations. Following the maxim expounded
by John and Jean Comaroff, this book will help us understand that his-
torical anthropology is not a matter of merging the two disciplines of
anthropology and history, but rather considering societies in their his-
torically situated dimension and applying the tools of the social and hu-
man sciences to the analysis. In this vein, the book reviews the complex
attempts to bridge disciplinary separations and theoretical proposals
coming from very different traditions. The text, consequently, opens up
hegemonic perspectives to include ‘other anthropologies’.
Alexandre Coello de la Rosa is Senior Professor of Asian and Latin

American Studies at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain)
and ICREA Academia researcher.
Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste is Serra Hunter Associated Professor in the

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat Autònoma
de Barcelona.
Routledge Approaches to History
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-Approaches-to-History/book-series/RSHISTHRY
In Praise of Historical
Anthropology
Perspectives, Methods, and
Applications to the Study of
Power and Colonialism
Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
and Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste
First published 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Coello de la Rosa, Alexandre, 1968– author. |
Mateo Dieste, Josep Lluís, 1968- author.
Title: In praise of historical anthropology : perspectives,
methods, and applications to the study of power and
colonialism / Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and
Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste.
Description: New York : Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2020. |
Series: Routledge approaches to history; vol 35 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019055766 (print) |
LCCN 2019055767 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367862237 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003017769 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000038552 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9781000038569 (mobi) | ISBN 9781000038576 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethnohistory. | Anthropology and history.
Classification: LCC GN345.2 .C65 2020 (print) |
LCC GN345.2 (ebook) | DDC 909/.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055766
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055767
ISBN: 978-0-367-86223-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-01776-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
To Verena, with deep admiration and gratitude
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Anthropology and History: Uncomfortable

Dance Partners 11
2 Historical-Anthropological “Masters of Thought” 54
3 Epistemologies and Methods 85
4 Colonial Systems of Power and Domination 112
5 Systems of Classification and Social Exclusion 155
Epilogue: The Dilemma of Multiculturalism 195
Bibliography 207
Index 255
Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank all those people who have offered us valuable insights
into the chapters and different sections of the book: Montserrat Clua,
Maite Ojeda, Sol Tarrés, Yolanda Aixelá, Araceli González, João Melo,
Protasio Paulo Langer and Barbara Arisi have given us continuous reflec-
tions and references to consider, as is the special case of Verena Stolcke,
always generous and inspiring in her comments and observations. We
want to dedicate this book to her. We also thank all our friends and
colleagues, especially those linked to the Department of Humanities at
the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), the Department of Social and Cul-
tural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
and the Faculdade de Ciências Humanas at the Universidade Federal da
Grande Dourados (UFGD, Brasil). Last but not the least, we thank the
Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigación Científica y Técnica
de Excelencia. Subprograma de Generación del Conocimiento, Proj-
ect HAR2013-40445-P del 2014–2016, the Ministerio de Economía y
Competitividad (MINECO), Projects PGC2018-096722-B-I00 and AEI
FFI2016-79496-P, COFRE program from the Department of Human-
ities at the UPF, Project HAR2017-86776-P, Ministerio de Ciencia, In-
novación y Universidades, from the Department of Social and Cultural
Anthropology at the UAB and the Institut Universitari d’Història Jaume
Vicens Vives (IUHJVV), in which this work is included, for financial
support in translating this manuscript into English. We thank Pamela
Lalonde for doing an excellent job.
This book was originally published by Oberta UOC Publishing and
Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza in 2016.
Introduction
As to why I appear today in this unaccustomed garb, you shall now hear,
if only you will not begrudge lending your ears to my discourse – not
those ears, to be sure, which you carry to sermons, but those which you
are accustomed to prick up for mountebanks in the marketplace, for
clowns and jesters […]1
The journey that produced this book really began some years ago. Our
own pathways crossed in the mid-1990s while working on our Mas-
ters degrees in anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona
(UAB), where we became acquainted with the work of anthropologists
like William Christian and each began our thesis work 2 under the direc-
tion of Verena Stolcke, a pioneer in the particular field that is the object
of our praise here. In the years since, we have worked with documents,
with the living and with the dead in various projects, following in the
wake of a multitude of authors, true little lights guiding us along the
way. It may be that our education in other disciplines (history and sociol-
ogy, in addition to anthropology), as well as our time spent in other aca-
demic environments, has accorded us the gaze of the outsider. Recently,
we began to talk informally about the importance of asserting a way of
practicing anthropology in accordance with the kind of research we pur-
sued during our studies on colonialism in Latin America, the Maghreb
and Asia-Pacific. And, thus, we began down the path that led to this
book, encouraged by Verena Stolcke’s vision and supported by our col-
leagues in the Anthropology and History of the Construction of Social
and Political Identities group. The first fruit of our labour, a workshop
entitled ‘In Praise of Historical Anthropology’, 3 inspired us to write this
book of the same name, which is, in short, a declaration of principles.
1 A Guidebook
This book constitutes a call for new ways to conduct research and, in
particular, to look at the world. In this context, creativity also occupies a
prominent place, a modest tool with which to examine what, to the eyes,
2 Introduction
is a given. This is not merely a matter of looking for new sources, but
of adopting a new perspective to analyse them, emulating the sociolog-
ical imagination of C. Wright Mills and the historical imagination later
claimed by Jean and John L. Comaroff from the realm of ethnography.
We have often encountered misunderstandings and suspicions regard-
ing this type of approach. This has been the case not only in the sphere
of the strictly theoretical, but also when we have directly observed the
results of academic boundaries on the ground, not so much ‘disciplinary’
per se (disciplines do not think), but in the people acting under the au-
thority of ‘their discipline’ who are unwilling to cross boundaries, label-
ling this as ‘not remotely historical’ (a Juan de la Cierva Grant selection
committee) and complaining that that ‘lacks ethnography’ (an observa-
tion made in a blind article review).
It is impossible to include everything written about historical anthro-
pology here, particularly considering that this descriptive category is
neither canonical nor clearly established. Neither is this book intended
to serve as a manual. However, we have tried to demonstrate the mul-
tiplicity of viewpoints and, especially, the diversity of focuses that are
often unknown. These are acquaintances who do not greet each other,
neighbours who are not on speaking terms. These are the aristocrats, the
nouveaux riches and the like, who want nothing to do with their poor
relatives. We do not know if we form part of this group, but it is clear
to us that more humble and less ‘ethnocentric’ approaches are required
(within the academy) that recognize and translate different traditions of
thought. It could be said that we identify with the old Sufi tale in which
it is only after comparing opinions that a group of advisers to the king is
able to conclude that what each one had touched in the dark from differ-
ent angles was, in fact, an elephant.
If we choose to immerse ourselves in this imbroglio, it is because we
believe that it is possible to learn from thinking about the past as an
ethnographic problem, a strange other, and the present as a historical
problem, dragged by the current of Heraclitus’s river. In our view, suffi-
cient material exists to learn from the past, from our ancestors. It is well
known, however, that the memory of the ancestors is selective. Surely in
this selection, we have embraced the authors who have most inspired us,
because they have taken as their starting point complex questions about
power, beyond determinisms, whether materialist or culturalist.
We have also kept our distance from postmodern grandstanding and
from other ‘posts-’ in general. Not only have they not contributed any-
thing new of ethnographic substance, but they have overlooked the fact
that quality engines already exist in the form of the classics and that they
could continue to function with a bit of oil. Given that this book devotes
a significant amount of space to the study of colonialisms, we feel it is
imperative to return to these colonial pasts in order to better understand
postcolonial landscapes. However, we place no trust in the verbiage of
Introduction 3
those approaches that talk about colonialism without studying it di-
rectly, because the study of colonialism has in no way been exhausted
nor has the study of its effects. For that reason, we believe it so import-
ant to read Georges Balandier, John L. and Jean Comaroff, Eric Wolf,
Talal Asad and other clear-sighted minds that have made substantiated
connections between colonialism and postcolonialism, connecting the
micro to the macro, seeking sober approaches to the engine of history
and going into the thickness of a document or to the word in a witness
account, to the archive and to ethnography from a critical evaluation of
the concepts and not from empty exaltation.
2 Between Methods
This book is a critical tribute to inspirational works and methodologies.
It would not be possible to synthesize them all. For that reason, the book
presents forms of research and ways to do research,4 and this selection
of works is certainly indicative of our own positions and desire to pres-
ent dialectical methodologies for the study of human relations, showing
the variants at play, trying to go beyond not so much the ambivalences
as the dualisms (nature-culture, subject-structure, tradition-modernity)
that form part of so many human phenomena, such as so-called identity,
power relations and the emergence of modernity, with its many faces.
The sociological imagination that C. Wright Mills advocated in 1959
has its place in this critical elegy. This does not mean ascribing to a
method called ‘historical anthropology’, as many might think. This does
not mean ‘being’ but ‘doing’, which, as Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J.D.
Wacquant (1992) observed, requires the researcher to adopt the method
needed to meet the challenge posed and not the other way round, adapt-
ing the challenge to the method. As we are going to explain on the fol-
lowing pages, this is not a question of choosing one method or another,
of doing ethnography or analysing documents. Instead, it means studying
societies, and the subject matter to be analysed will determine the tech-
nique or focus necessary to address the issue. If the hardest thing is asking
the question – as we have heard Verena Stolcke say so often – we can only
entreat the patient reader to ask many questions after reading this text.
In the presence of this intersection of ideas and methods, it is important
to stress that historical anthropology does not amount to joining forces
between two different disciplines, but rather to formulating the idea that
societies can only be understood if they are analysed historically:
any substantive relationship between disciplines is determined not

by the intrinsic nature of those disciplines – if any such thing exists –
but by prior theoretical considerations […] In my own view, there
ought to be no “relationship” between history and anthropology,
since there should be no division to begin with.5
4 Introduction
Applying the questions posed by the AHCISP research group6 about the
concept of transcultural and transhistorical mixing, and the idea that far
from eliminating differences, this intermingling paradoxically confirms
the existence of purities, we ask the following: should anthropology and
history be hybridized to obtain a cross like historical anthropology? Do
epistemological contiguities – what Geertz defined as ‘blurred genres’7 –
indicate the existence of disciplinary ‘purities’: anthropology and his-
tory? It is true that practice (ethnographic, documentary) has produced
ambivalent interpretations.8 Authors like John Davis (1980) have ex-
pressed their pessimism about anthropology’s contribution to history,
arguing that it would take too much time to train anthropologists as
‘true archive historians’. Anthony Pagden (1991) wrote that ‘historical
anthropology’ is really little more than conventional narrative history
written, in part, with the assistance of an anthropological language (of-
ten mimetically, with little spontaneity).9 Similarly, Pier Paolo Viazzo
(2003) argues that it has been the historians who have turned towards
anthropology.10 In any case, the labelling of boundaries has produced a
classic mistrust on both sides.
Equally important are the modi operandi implicit in methodologies
that complicate dialogue: the theoretical suspicions of many historians,
the cult of facts and the search for sources and, on the other hand, the
cult of theory of many anthropologists and the ethno- or chronocentric
projection of their concepts.11 Notable exceptions include the Marx-
ist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who defended the search for analytical
models as far back as 1972,12 and Peter Burke, who tried to organize a
course on ‘historical anthropology’ with Bob Scribner in Cambridge in
1979.13 However, academic committees detected the threat of an excess
of theorists in the calm pastures of historians.
3 Power and Colonialism

The study of power is central to this work because we consider it one
of the engines of history, beyond focuses that are materialist or sym-
bolist, agential or structuralist. In all these perspectives, the dimension
of power emerges, shaping unequal relationships in the sexual division
of work, in the organization of subsistence, in redistribution and, obvi-
ously, in the forms of social organization. Power also exists in the forms
of symbolic significance found in the world, through legitimation and
the struggle to define the world itself. This is not the zero-sum power
of political science; it goes beyond the conventional political definition,
because it is present in everyday relationships, between sexes, classes
and ‘different’ people, transformed into unequal humans. Neither is this
power Foucault’s omnivorous and omnipresent force, choking off every
possibility of escape, although we recognize its tremendous effectiveness,
having permeated the moral systems (Asad, 1987a), bodies and so-called
Introduction 5
forms of ‘self-control’ that the modern world is consolidating through
new technologies. As a human product, power is human, imperfect, full
of contradictions, of dialectics between conscious and unconscious, al-
though these categories do not always have clearly delimited boundaries.
The study in this book is not restricted to colonialism. Our exam-
ples and analyses include settings and periods that are not necessarily
characterized by colonial relations, but a central part of our thinking is
certainly based on what authors like Talal Asad have termed ‘colonial
situations’. Since Asad organized a colloquium on the topic in 1973, a
series of studies have emerged on a question that is closely related to
anthropology, but which has had a veil cast over it, paradoxically from
the very field of anthropology. However, colonial situations themselves
produced vast quantities of documents, both written and visual, and in
some cases, ethnography has been able to reconstruct their movements
through oral history. In fact, anthropology was born and developed in
the midst of these colonial projects. Included amongst the paradoxes of
modernity are the Cartesian dualisms that a dynamic anthropology can
help to counteract.
Another of the common themes that runs through this book is the con-
sideration of the history of the excluded. Contributions to microhistory
from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1975), Carlo Ginzburg (1976, 1993)
and Giovanni Levi (1990, 1993) have made it possible to incorporate
plebeian (or subaltern) sectors into the historical drama,14 as suggested
by Ernesto De Martino as far back as 1948.15 Here was an emphasis on
popular culture that did not seek to analyse tradition, understood as the
persistence of traditional ways of life, but rather the cultural practices
and forms that had been actively marginalized by the dominant culture.
By the same token, this involved an anthropological interrogation of
groups that had traditionally been ignored, attributing an active role to
them that was not only political, but also cultural.16 Specialists began
to visibilize the events related to these social actors that surfaced, above
all, liminally and in open spaces, reproducing what Mikhail Bakhtin
(1895–1975) termed the spirit of the town square.17 Popular holidays
involved a participative dramaturgy that gave new value to the actions
of the participants in a specific historical context.18 In this respect, rep-
resentative practices were not immune to conceptions of monarchical
and (post-)colonial power. On the contrary, they illustrated the struc-
tures of meaning of events like public ceremonies, religious functions
and royal funerals and coronations, re-signified at local level. In an in-
teresting ethnographic analysis of the famous Oruro carnival in Bolivia,
the anthropologist Thomas Abercrombie observed that all the dances in
this festival involved a macro-narrative of the conquest and conversion.
However, at the same time, these dances also represented the history of
the Bolivian citizen’s struggle to have an identity.19 ‘Micro’, then, does
not refer to the size of the subject matter, but to an analytical focus; in
6 Introduction
other words, a broad-spectrum hypothesis can be created out of a case
study.20 In the words of Carlo Ginzburg, ‘a close analysis of a single case
study may pave the way to much larger (indeed, global) hypotheses’. 21
4 User Map
This book is the final process of doing and undoing texts, like Penelope.
Accordingly, the result could have been different, since we considered
the idea of writing additional chapters on the economy, kinship and reli-
gion. But the overwhelming number of studies forced us to limit the the-
matic organization, and it seems particularly important in this context
to provide a sort of reader’s guide to explain the logic behind how we
chose and coordinated our materials and observations.
The book opens with a chapter that reviews the emergence of various
responses – from very different theoretical and academic contexts – to
the problem of history in anthropology, not as a choice, but as a central
element in the study of social relations. 22 This is by no means a linear
history, although these responses can be seen as a dissatisfied reaction
to both the dominance of functionalism in the social sciences in the first
half of the twentieth century and to the paradigm that preceded it, an
evolutionism that, in fact, gained new currency in the middle of the cen-
tury. With the processes of decolonization and the Cold War, relativism
was progressively challenged by a new strategic view of the world that
recast neo-evolutionary paradigms that measured the world based on
material criteria related to growth (Leclerq, 1973).
In this history of historical anthropology, we have tried to include
and recognize traditions that, in most cases, have not interacted with
each other for reasons of language or power relations between the acad-
emies in the centre and the periphery. However, organizing the anal-
ysis of these different proposals in a conclusive way has proven to be
extremely complicated. Some of them, like the French mentalités and
North American ethnohistory, emerged from ‘national’ academic tradi-
tions, which is why we chose to structure our presentation using what
could be characterized as a geographic classification. At the same time,
our study of these theories led us to conclude that, in tandem with the
most influential international and hegemonic schools of thought (located
in Great Britain, France and the United States), other rich traditions have
been developing in the so-called south, as demonstrated by the cases of
Mexico, Peru and Brazil presented here. We would also like to elaborate
briefly on the presentation of the Spanish case, which was also some-
what challenging. Without the components to present a history that is
yet to be done, we have preferred to give priority to the work of two
great authors who have produced historical anthropology about and in
Spain, but neither of whom – not coincidentally – are in the academy (or
what one might call the academy in its most disciplined form). We are
Introduction 7
speaking of Julio Caro Baroja (1914–95) and William Christian Jr. (b.
1944), whose work shows the influence of Caro Baroja, as does the work
of the other researchers also presented in Chapter 2. In fact, Caro Baroja
dealt with many of the problems posed by historical anthropology avant
la lettre, from his study of the Archives of the Inquisition and other
sources related to minorities and excluded groups (Caro Baroja, 1957a,
1962, 1970) to his influential study of the operation and genesis of the
Sahrawi tribal structure (Caro Baroja, 1955b).
The second chapter synthesizes and introduces propositions for and
ways of doing historical anthropology that have struck us as particularly
outstanding. Clearly, this is also a personal selection, but we have al-
lowed ourselves to present them as ‘masters of anthropological thought’
because of the intriguing and pioneering nature of their studies. The
first, Julio Caro Baroja, despite breaking real ground in the field, is often
undervalued by the anthropological profession and unknown outside
the Spanish-speaking world. The second is Marshall Sahlins, included
because of his interesting ruminations on how to create a dynamic the-
ory of change and reproduction. Next is Eric Wolf, for having succeeded
in presenting a diachronic view of power. Jean and John L. Comaroff,
in turn, proposed a model based on doing historical anthropology more
than trying to define it in any uniform way. The central idea shared by
these authors is that the insertion of history is an unavoidable part of the
study and of all worthwhile social theory. Last but not least, William
Christian Jr. is included because of the evocative power of his modus
operandi – which has inspired us, personally – in his research into reli-
gious anthropology, both yesterday and today.
The third chapter presents the primary methodological challenges in-
volved in the analysis of archives and other sources from the past. This
does not, however, entail a mere consideration of the methods used to
analyse the past, but an examination of how to adopt a processual view
of society based on epistemological problems about the situated nature
of researchers, the concepts they work with and ideas about time in their
own societies and in the societies they analyse. This requires under-
standing what concepts about time and history each society has (without
requiring the social sciences to stop thinking about an idea of history,
as proposed by some postmodern gurus, such as Francis Fukuyama in
his 1992 work, The End of History and the Last Man). But time is a
collective representation and a measure of human action, as formulated
by various classic authors years ago. 23 Moreover, this has consequences,
not only for representations of the world, but also for human action,
as seen in the literature on millenarianisms and the political effect of
prophetism. A transcultural comparison reveals the existence of linear
and circular conceptions of time, which have produced different con-
cepts about history and even its absence (Munn, 1992). Here, various
mythological ideas come into play about the origin of the universe, its
8 Introduction
open, circular/entropic or eschatological nature and its relationship with
social relations, as synthesized by Balandier in Le désordre: Éloge du
mouvement (1988).
The fourth chapter focuses on the various applications of the complex
historical anthropology of the Comaroffs and others to the study of co-
lonial situations in their rich variety of forms. Here, we have analysed
the central role played by power relations in the colonial expansion that
began in the late fifteenth century. The colonial empires deployed differ-
ent power technologies across the length and breadth of five continents
within the framework of multiple and paradoxical modernities. These
systems of domination were not unidirectional; there was accommoda-
tion and resistance, as we analyse through the works of Jean Comaroff,
Roger M. Keesing and Jan Vansina. The anti-colonialist movements of
the mid-twentieth century and the modern ethnographic projections of
the eternal natives and their enchanted land suggest a dialectical ap-
proach to power relations. The chapter criticizes not only historians who
do not take the micro into account in their studies, but also anthropol-
ogists who do not incorporate the macro into their fieldwork and pres-
ent the role played by interrelated factors like class, gender and ‘race’. 24
To that end, we focus here on the pioneering works of Verena Stolcke
(1974), Sidney Mintz (1985) and Ann L. Stoler (1985) in the field of co-
lonialism for their work with archive documents and application of key
anthropological questions to the construction of inequalities through
essentialization and the invention of differences.
The book ends with a chapter on the role of systems of social clas-
sification as mechanisms for producing and legitimizing relations of
inequality in very different ways. These cultural classification systems
have not only been symbolic explanation mechanisms, but have broken
into social relations from their performative power. However, the great
challenge this presents for anthropology is, still, how to explain the pro-
duction and, above all, transformation of these systems of classification
and domination over the course of history. Here, we present a compara-
tive study of theological mechanisms and cultural concepts of purity and
impurity, such as the purity-of-blood statutes that appeared in medieval
Iberia and later categories of ‘race’ with all its problematic meanings.
Re-signified from the concept of ‘lineage’ to that of ‘racial group’, ‘race’
is a diffuse category in the modern world, but it is far from certain that
the meaning of this category was unambiguous either in the different
colonial contexts or in the metropoles themselves. The naturalization of
the category, which has become worn out, much as Julio Cortázar sug-
gested in his lament about what happens to certain words, 25 has meant
that ‘race’ is used to talk about purity-of-blood statutes. It is presented as
the mere expression of modern scientific thought, when in some contexts
like the Spanish colonial case, it culminated in a combination of theolog-
ical and scientific concepts and in the postcolonial context, it is used to
Introduction 9
refer to any type of discrimination. Historical anthropology becomes in-
dispensable to understand the current uses of categories of exclusion, un-
derstood from a dynamic point of view, and to contrast them with past
concepts. Finally, the epilogue contains the book’s main conclusions and
presents one last reflective exercise regarding recent categories, such as
cultural fundamentalism and multiculturalism in postcolonial contexts.
Since the 1980s, historical research done by anthropologists has been
on the rise. Although the idea of historical anthropology has not been
institutionalized or developed, considerations about the intersection be-
tween the two disciplines have appeared (Cohn, 1980). This growing
body of research is largely tied to colonial studies and an interest in the
analysis of complex societies. 26 Anthropologists were becoming aware
of the importance of considering the history of the societies where they
were doing ethnography. However, the problem was not confined to
complex societies, but can also be extended to the societies studied by
classical anthropology, erroneously excluded from history.
Notes

http://blogs.uab.cat/ahcisp/?page_id=4

10 Introduction
The work by E.P. Thompson, which was translated into Italian in 1968, had
a profound influence on Italian microhistorians.

20 As Abercrombie (2003: 176) observed, ‘folklorizing public festivals, now a
privileged arena for the gendered construal of Indianness, and for the cul-
tural construction and contestation of the parameters of citizenship’.

22 In his first great ethnography of the Kababish Arabs in 1970, Talal Asad
wrote that history could not simply be an introductory note to a monograph,
but had to be at the core of the ethnography in his consideration of the con-
struction of tribal power structures and their relationship to colonialism
(Scott, 2006: 251).
23 Durkheim and Mauss, Primitive Classification (1903), Herbert Hubert,
‘Étude sommaire de la représentation du temps dans la religion’ (1905),
Evans-Pritchard, ‘Nuer-time reckoning’ (1939), Leach, ‘Two essays concern-
ing the symbolic representation of time’ (1961), Geertz, ‘Person, Time and
Conduct in Bali’ (1966).
24 Dube, 2007c: 610.
25 In the words of Julio Cortázar, ‘(…) words can become tired and ill, like men
and horses tire and become ill. By dint of being repeated, and often misused,
they end up wearing out. Instead of flying out of mouths or writing as they
once were, arrows of communication, birds of thought and sensitivity, we
begin to experience them like spent coins and use them like pocket handker-
chiefs, like used shoes’ (Cortazar, 1981).
26 Viazzo, 2003: 35.
1 Anthropology and History
Uncomfortable Dance
Partners
[…] research in history is based on finding data; research in anthropol-

ogy is based on creating data. Obviously, the historian has to find the
sources on which to base his research. If he cannot find them, then no
matter how good his ideas are or how well thought through the problem
is on which he wants to work […]. The anthropologist, on the other
hand, often is interested in a problem, descriptive or theoretical, and the
question is then one of deciding what types of materials he will need for
pursuing the problem.1
From the outset, the relationship between anthropology and history has
fluctuated. In the nineteenth century, the great classic thinkers of the so-
cial sciences focused, above all, on change. The emergence of the indus-
trial society, the transition to modernity and the creation of the empires
raised a number of questions for authors like Karl Marx, Max Weber and
Émile Durkheim. For most of them, like Marx and Durkheim, the foun-
dations of the philosophy of history were clearly based on linear views of
time that shared basic evolutionist concepts and the idea of progress itself.
Amongst many of these thinkers, what has been called the ‘watershed
theory’ was predominant, that is, an explanatory model for the transition
from traditional societies rooted in community ties to modern societies
grounded in concepts of the individual and new social structures.2
To understand this artificial partition between anthropology and his-
tory, it is necessary to examine not only theoretical questions and the
philosophical underpinnings of the different paradigms, but also the rel-
evant political and historical aspects. Verena Stolcke (1993), for exam-
ple, provided a detailed explanation of the impact of national academic
traditions on the formulation of theories, concepts and paradigms. The
relationship between anthropology and history as examined in this book
is no exception, and not everybody understands the concepts of history
and anthropology using the same words.3 For a review of this dialectic,
both James D. Faubion (1993) and Pier Paolo Viazzo (2003) have pro-
duced interesting historical archaeologies that start with the classics of
the nineteenth century and continue to the early 1990s, highlighting the
uncertainties that still hang over these dance partners.4
Our approach to this topic takes as its starting point an epistemolog-
ical problem that has yet to be resolved: transcultural concepts inher-
ited from history and temporality (Wolf, 1982; Mintz, 1985; Roseberry,
1989; Amodio, 2010; Altez, 2012). The way in which human beings in
their cultural diversity interpret time and divide it into ‘past’, ‘present’
and ‘future’ is one of the main concerns of the ethnographic present.5
While the academy and disciplines may be fragmented, the societies that
they analyse are not.6 In the time of the living, there is a present, past
and future, but in the appearance of a saint or possession by a spirit, time
can be suspended. We, too, greatly fear that in a historical anthropology
such as the one that we propose here, societies also speak with their dead
in dreams, without any boundaries between past, present and future.
In a lecture given in 1949 at the Sorbonne in Paris, Claude Lévi-Strauss
asserted that ‘all societies are historical in the same way, but some ac-
knowledge it candidly, while others are reluctant to do so, or prefer to
ignore the fact’.7 At that conference, entitled ‘History and Ethnology’
(1949), the French anthropologist was openly sceptical about the possi-
bility of historifying non-writing societies, but he did not deny the im-
portance of history to describe and interpret present-day societies.8 In
the study of societies, it is essential to bear in mind that history is not an
option to choose. For this reason, ethnographic research cannot be sepa-
rated from the historical context, because this ‘context’ is also the object/
subject of study. We take the same stance as John and Jean Comaroff
and Eric Wolf (although these authors resist the possibility of construct-
ing a ‘method’ in the style of Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu or Anthony
Giddens) and argue that human beings create the worlds in which they
live. We propose an analysis that definitively parts ways with the ‘water-
shed theory’, a foundational myth of modern human sciences that pits
modernity/movement against traditionalism/staticism, making the case
for an anthropology that is – and must be – a political and ethical prac-
tice.9 This question goes beyond the supposed Lévi-Straussian division
between ‘cold’ societies (in which there is no need to worry about his-
tory, basically, because it is a ‘mechanical’ time, i.e., recurring, repetitive
and non-cumulative) and ‘hot’ societies (where history matters), because
even societies that supposedly do not change require a dynamic to ‘not
change’.10 Likewise, societies that theoretically are in constant trans-
formation carry heavy burdens (dominant social groups or structures).
The challenge, then, consists of combining a structural analysis (con-
strictions, organizations, social reproductions) with an analysis of social
agency and dynamics that make it possible to read societies in motion, in
continuous reconstruction (and, at times, construction and destruction).
This chapter presents contributions from a series of substantial stud-
ies that concur with many of these perspectives. Many hold back from
specifying or canonizing approaches that are highly complex. However,
they share a collection of elements that are worth gathering, presenting
and considering.
Anthropology and History 13
1.1 Attempts at Partnering
In 1990, Clifford Geertz pointed out how anthropologists and histo-
rians were interested in each other’s work – American anthropologists
concerned about reconstructing the history of the Fiji wars and English
historians doing fieldwork related to the cults of the Roman emperors.11
In Geertz’s words, ‘everybody seems to be minding everybody else’s
business’.12 It comes as no surprise then that in 1993, Verena Stolcke
lamented the difficulty inherent in conceiving a history of anthropology,
suggesting that what was needed, above all, was a clear definition of
this so-called discipline of anthropology.13 Indeed, there are as many
definitions as anthropological views and tastes, most of which do not al-
ways overlap and are often trivial. However, one of the central elements
in Western anthropological thinking consists of understanding human
unity in its diversity. According to American anthropologist George W.
Stocking, the anthropological enterprise has always been characterized
not by the study of cultural diversity as a fact, but by the dilemma of
how to reconcile the unity of the human species with its manifest cul-
tural diversity.14 It is another matter to examine the point at which the
European sensibility began to perceive this question as problematic.15 By
the same token, one could ask at what moment anthropology perceived
the need to incorporate history into the analysis of the manifest socio-
cultural multiplicity that characterizes humanity.
What follows is an overview of the primary schools and theories of
historical anthropology that draws on a variety of geographical and in-
tellectual spheres to look at anthropology from a contextual and his-
toricist focus. This country-based approach does not presuppose that
so-called national traditions and their borders are a fundamental clas-
sification factor or that these traditions are necessarily homogenous,
but rather provides different non-linear responses to the issues raised
here, with themes that emerge, disappear and reappear in the history of
ideas. Furthermore, this debate greatly profits from the presentation of
strong contributions from some non-hegemonic anthropologies that are
often neglected in the centre, as observed by the coiners of the concepts
‘anthropology of the South’ (Krotz, 1997) and ‘world anthropologies’
(Ribeiro & Escobar, 2008).
1.1.1 Great Britain

Anthropology in the early twentieth century was characterized by a fun-
damental change: the rejection of the rigidity and oversimplification of
evolutionist frameworks that held that all societies had passed through
similar stages of development. If a supposed psychic unity of human-
ity did exist, then it was possible to find the laws that governed socie-
tal growth.16 Led by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and Alfred R.
Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), the English school of social anthropology
developed a relativist functionalist-structuralist focus as an alternative sci-
entific paradigm to the theory and method of sociocultural evolutionism.
They based their aversion to history on the impossibility of reconstructing
the past of so-called primitive societies due to the lack of documentation.
This position led them to view history and social anthropology as oppo-
sites. However, there would be dissent. At a conference in Manchester in
1961, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1990) reaffirmed what he had said in 1950
in the now famous Robert Marett Lecture at Oxford: that anthropology
is closer to history than to the natural sciences.17 This position brought a
torrent of criticism upon him, including the heated debate that began in
the journal Man after the publication of the conference (Essay in Social
Anthropology, 1962) and went on for three years, generating subsequent
responses regarding the question of whether or not anthropologists should
be historians (Schapera, 1962; Smith, 1962). The president of the Royal
Anthropological Institute, Isaac Schapera (1905–2003), responded dis-
gruntledly, citing works by anthropologists who had used historical doc-
umentation. Surely, however, he was not addressing the methodological
problem per se, given that the question at hand did not concern citing his-
torical sources, but rather – as some dynamist anthropologists suggested –
how to approach the subject to better understand processes of permanence
and change (Balandier, 1961; Evans-Pritchard, 1962). While Schapera
responded by questioning whether anthropologists should be histori-
ans, historian Keith Thomas (1933–) ridiculed this response, writing an-
other article in 1971 entitled ‘Should Historians be Anthropologists?’, in
which he invited historians to transform themselves into anthropologists.
Thomas would later publish more works on this proposition.18
After the publication of Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954),
anthropologist Edmund R. Leach (1910–89) analysed rituals and myths
not as abstract entities, but as expressions of human activity as a whole.
Although Leach defended Bronislaw Malinowski in the debate in Man
(January, 1960),19 at that time, he was also basing his structural analysis
of the highland communities of Burma – the Kachins and the Shans –
on a processual focus, although without relinquishing the structuralist
method. In this work, Leach anticipated the functionalist debates about
the concepts of change and continuity and the importance of the histori-
cal analysis of structures to determine their reproduction or transforma-
tion. 20 He argued, for instance, that:
Every real society is a process in time. The changes that result from
this process may usefully be thought of under two heads. Firstly,
there are those which are consistent with a continuity of the existing
formal order. For example, when a chief dies and is replaced by his
son, or when a lineage segments and we have two lineages where
formerly there was only one, the changes are part of the process of
continuity. There is no change in the formal structure. Secondly,
there are changes which do reflect alterations in the formal struc-
ture. If, for example, it can be shown that in a particular locality,
over a period of time, a political system composed of equalitarian
lineage segments is replaced by a ranked hierarchy of feudal type, we
can speak of a change in the formal social structure. 21
Leach presented myths as living elements of history instead of the fixed,

inert schemas depicted in many classic works of anthropology. As sys-
tems of representation, they were also subject to power issues, despite
the fact that they were presented as ahistorical.
The crisis in British anthropology, especially regarding the functional-
ism of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism, was
not unrelated to the approximation to history. In the face of a welter of
factors, both intellectual (the challenge of Lévi-Straussian antihuman-
ism) and sociopolitical (the collapse of the colonial empire), in 1968 a
volume was published with the significant title History and Social An-
thropology, edited by I.W. Lewis, the product of the annual meeting of
the Association of Social Anthropologists, the majority of whom were
Africanists. This work set the precedent for future projects like the work
of Talal Asad (1973, 1993) that were more critical of enlightened mo-
dernity and European colonialism. Another important conference in
1968 brought together highly important authors to update and promote
historical anthropology. At King’s College, Cambridge, historians and
anthropologists held a meeting to discuss accusations and confessions of
witchcraft in response to Evans-Pritchard’s challenge to ask their sources
the questions that anthropologists had learned to put to their informants
in the field. 22 It was also in this context that Alan Macfarlane began
his career in the study of Tudor era witchcraft (Macfarlane, 1970). He
would later go on to produce a large body of work on historical anthro-
pology in a wide range of fields, including the emergence of individu-
alism, capitalism and the forms of love and marriage in England and
Western Europe (Macfarlane, 1978, 1986, 1987).
Drawing, in jest, on the phrase used by some explorers in Oceania,
we could be talking about a ‘first contact’. In fact, contacts between
historians and anthropologists also took place in the world of journals
that shared Marxist-based social analysis methods, one example being
the prestigious history journal Past and Present, which published Pe-
ter Worsley, Jack Goody, Max Gluckman and Edmund Leach, amongst
others. Similar cases occurred in the journal Comparative Studies in
Society and History. In its first issue in 1958, Sylvia Thrupp defended
concepts like the importance of the comparative method to counteract
ethnocentrism, the civilizing mission of the white race, and the theology
that characterized the historiography of the nineteenth century, reinforc-
ing the consideration of a shared humanity (Eric Wolf would become
coeditor of the journal in 1970).
Along with these efforts, there was a notable interest in social his-
tory and new methodologies and focuses, as seen in the works of one
of the pioneers of British historical anthropology Edward P. Thomp-
son (1924–93). In his book The Making of the English Working Class
(London, 1963), the British historian analysed the consciousness and
self-perception of the English working class and ‘popular culture’, in par-
ticular (‘those from below’, ‘plebeians’) in eighteenth-century Great Brit-
ain. The protests of a heterogeneous group of workers and small artisans
during a period of nearly one hundred years could not be explained as
a simple (materialist) reaction to their precarious living conditions, but
rather it was their perception of these conditions that made them mean-
ingful. In Thompson’s words, ‘religious and moral imperatives remain
inextricably interwoven with economic needs’.23 These categories were
presented as tied to tradition and custom as a sort of ‘moral economy’
as opposed to the market economy of ‘modern’ capitalism, which paved
the way for an ‘honest dialogue’ between the founders of the New Left
movement – Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, amongst
others – and anthropologists. 24
Peter Laslett (1915–2001) and Anthony Wrigley undertook another
project at Cambridge University that focused on the history of popula-
tions (1964, Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social
Structure). The first great work that Laslett published, The World We
Have Lost (1965), ushered in a new focus on the history of the family.
His thesis argued that the nuclear family had been the dominant family
type in northeast Europe, at least since medieval times.25 The group
then devoted itself to major projects based on mathematical and quan-
titative analyses of demographic data that would later be disputed by
other more qualitative focuses, such as those found in Carlo Ginzburg’s
The Cheese and the Worms (1976). The aim was to reconstruct the his-
tory of the English people between the sixteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries, a task that involved a large group of local historians who worked in
400 parish archives.
1.1.2 United States

An analysis of the parallel trajectory of so-called American cultural
anthropology (related to archaeology, physical anthropology and lin-
guistics) reveals some similarities, although the Jewish German anthro-
pologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) was much more interested in history
(i.e. Race, Language and Culture). 26 However, one of Boas’s disciples,
Alfred L. Kroeber, was critical of his teacher, whose movement he accused
of being anti-historical in tendency. 27 According to Kroeber, the histor-
ical method did not consist of studying time sequences, but of pursuing
a descriptive integrative attitude that would form an independent evolu-
tionary totality or, in other words, identifying geographic-cultural areas
that would make it possible to establish certain historical- chronological
relations between human groups. Boas replied with a criticism of the ex-
cessive simplicity of classical evolutionism. 28 In truth, all these debates
were rather unsubstantiated, both the criticisms and the responses, and
cannot be interpreted as the opposition between proponents of either
the positivist or interpretive method. Kroeber, for example, believed that
many scientific disciplines, like biology, could also be considered histor-
ical or historicist sciences, because they sustain diachronic and temporal
reconstructions.
Another branch of thinking that developed after the Second World
War in the United States initially focused particularly on the study of
Native Americans with regard to the concept of ethnohistory. 29 Al-
though any possibility of historical reconstruction for primitive so-
cieties was rejected in the early 1900s, the American Clark Wissler
(1870–1947) was the first to use the term ethnohistory in its adjectival
form: ‘ethno-historical’. He was also one of the first anthropologists to
become interested in taking a new approach to time in anthropological
studies.30 For this anthropologist (from 1902 to 1907, the curator of
the American Museum of Natural History in New York), ethnologists
could use archaeological remains and archive documents to identify im-
portant ‘ethno-historical data’. American anthropologists were able to
move easily from one discipline to another, combining archaeological
remains and written sources with fieldwork. Thus, he availed himself of
documentary information resulting from the contact between the indig-
enous cultures in the New York region and government authorities, mis-
sionary orders and mercantile companies (The Indians of Greater New
York and the Lower Hudson, 1909). Wissler’s preliminary proposition
was put into practice by other anthropologists like John R. Swanton
(1873–1958) and Frank G. Speck (1881–1950), who combined their eth-
nographic fieldwork with historical-archival materials. In this respect,
the title of a tribute to Swanton, Essays in Historical Anthropology of
North America (1940), is significant.
The sociopolitical conditions that shaped this initial interest in 1946
were important. These included the effect of the ratification of the In-
dian Claims Act by the US Congress, which drove anthropologists with
ties to indigenous groups who needed to demonstrate their territorial
rights to the archives. This gave birth to an American ethnohistory
focused on unearthing and interpreting old documents to resolve the
agrarian claims of indigenous communities.31 In 1954, these anthropol-
ogists came together at the American Indian Ethnohistoric Conference
to found the journal Ethnohistory. The creation of a position in ethno-
history at the Sorbonne, held by Hubert Deschamps (1900–79), also led
anthropologists and historians to combine methods to tackle the study
of the indigenous population. In 1966, emphasis was placed on the fact
that these methods were not exclusive to Native American societies, but
could be applied to any human group, leading to the creation of the
generically titled American Society of Ethnohistory. Pier Paolo Viazzo
argues that this effort was somewhat late in coming, after 20 years of
struggles for emancipation and the expression of autonomy by societies
and groups.
The study of Andean societies, in turn, developed significantly, thanks
to the work of anthropologists and ethnohistorians like John H. Rowe
(1918–2004), a disciple of the Boasian school at Berkeley, whose classic
essay ‘Inca Culture at the Time of the Spanish Conquest’ (1946) com-
bined his study of the chronicles of the Indies with his passion for art
history, anthropology and ethnohistory.32 In his dissertation ‘The Eco-
nomic Organization of the Inca State’ (1955), John V. Murra (1916–
2006) argued that ethnohistory was not only a technique (the study of
non-European societies through archive documents), but rather an in-
vitation extended to ethnography to pay attention to the written docu-
ment.33 Although he began by studying the peasants of Otavalo, Murra
ended up combining other disciplines, like history and geography, to
analyse the influence of the vertical archipelago of ecozones on the cul-
ture of the Andean peoples. In Formaciones económicas y políticas del
mundo andino (1975), he analysed the adaptation of ethnic groups to
the geographical constraints of their environment, controlling the pro-
duction and distribution of products between the different ecozones.
In 1968, Bernard S. Cohn narrowed down the definition of ethno-
history in an article published in the International Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, highlighting not so much the study of the indigenous
testimonies, histories and memories recorded to that time, as the im-
portance of establishing a comparative method to analyse the endog-
enous and exogenous factors that generate social and cultural change
(see also Krech, 1991). The ethnohistorical practice then began to study
cultures that had disappeared due to extinction or acculturation – that
is, indigenous societies – using written sources, engaging historians and
anthropologists like the Mexican Miguel León-Portilla (1959, 1961)
and French historian Nathan Wachtel (1971, 1973). The two authors
are paradigmatic of the attempt to write from the indigenous point of
view.34 Wachtel’s The Vision of the Vanquished, which was heavily in-
fluenced by structuralism, not only attempted to break with a colonial
historiographic tradition characterized by Eurocentrism, but also tried
to explain the history of preliterate societies, ‘without history’. In this
context, the French thinker argued that the conquest was not met by
passive acceptance on the part of the Andean peoples, but gave rise to
indigenous resistance movements against colonial domination.35
From a methodological point of view, parallel processes occurred in
African studies, especially with anthropologists like the Belgian Jan
Vansina. In 1960, he created the Journal of African History, on grounds
quite different to the historical vacuum of the colonial era. In the first
issue, P. H. Curtin considered the potential of using colonial archives,36
although for Curtin these archives were more useful for studying Euro-
pean interests in Africa than African history itself (an observation that
is interesting to retrieve). However, other authors reacted by trying to
show that it was, indeed, possible to work with these sources to recon-
struct the institutions and systems of thought of local populations.
Another response from African studies stemmed from the interest in
so-called oral history. In the first issue of the Journal of African History,
Vansina presented the method that he used to study the oral history of
the Babuka in the Belgian Congo.37 In his article, the Belgian anthropol-
ogist argued that the history of a population could also be reconstructed
using oral tradition. To be able to use these sources, they had to be
subjected to a procedure, like other archival sources: classifying the type
of evidence and showing the causes of the distortion. Vansina, however,
was not remotely happy about his methodology being branded as eth-
nohistorical. This history was not special or different from that of peo-
ples with alphabetic writing, in other words a ‘history of ethnic groups’,
which is to say, a ‘history of the Indians’, as expressed later by Charles
Gibson (1964), 38 but a historical anthropology or, simply put, history.39
It was not that the ‘savages’ or ‘illiterate primitives’ required different
approaches to preserve their memory or historical self-awareness, as
Marco Curatola rightfully noted40; rather, it was inadmissible to classify
humanity in these terms. However, William Sturtevant did just that in
1966, when he referred to ‘the peoples studied by anthropologists’ in an
article in Ethnohistory. Did speaking of ‘ethnohistory’ mean speaking of
a special or different ‘history’ for certain populations: the excluded, col-
onized or minorities in the ‘West’?41 Was this not the implicit acceptance
of the ‘colonial project’, that is, the study of the peoples colonized by the
European invasion? In his work on the Kasai Kuba Kingdom (Congo),
Vansina asserted quite the opposite, contrasting colonial sources with
African sources.42 History was the same for all peoples; there was no
history of ‘the others’ that can only be reconstructed through oral tradi-
tion and material culture.43
In 1966, Henri Brunschwig rejected the distinction between peoples
with or without history. This distinction was the heir to earlier dis-
tinctions between civilized peoples with history and primitive peoples
without history, whose cultural systems were characterized by having
different ‘guidelines’ than the western ones (in other terms, Philippe
Descola and, more recently, Ana María Lorandi, also questioned the
abusive use of ‘ethno-’ to refer to ‘other aborigines’ as if they required
special sciences44). It is currently accepted that there are no societies
without history.
Anthropologists like Bernard S. Cohn, who introduced this chapter,
were also pioneers in thinking about historical anthropology from the
United States. From his dissertation (1954) on the Chamars of Senapur,
a village in northern colonial India, Cohn analysed the problem of using
archival sources, criticizing the concept of a timeless ‘ethnographic pres-
ent’ and defending the need for a diachronic focus in the anthropological
study of societies. He proposed to work with the materials of history,
documents, in much the same way that anthropologists use their field
notes. Some of his disciples, like Nicholas Dirks, developed this idea of
the ethnography of the archive (Dirks, 2002). One of the main problems
identified even then continued to concern the way in which to read colo-
nial documents, just like statistics (Asad, 2002), given that they are the
product of hegemonic power relations. At the same time, however, they
made it possible to understand the complex relationships between agents
and the efforts made by states to control populations or construct legiti-
mate representations of the moment. As Talal Asad himself concluded in
his afterword to the volume History of Anthropology, edited by George
W. Stocking, Jr.: ‘until we understand precisely how the social domain
has been restructured (constituted), our accounts of the dynamic con-
nections between power and knowledge during the colonial period will
remain limited’.45
Finally, Pier Paolo Viazzo, somewhat surprisingly, includes Clifford
Geertz in this chronicle of proposals to analyse society as a historical en-
tity. Clearly, before the canonization of Geertz’s interpretive paradigm,
he produced his study of agriculture in Java and the transformations re-
sulting from colonialism and the establishment of the plantation system
(Geertz, 1963). However, it is not as clear that this is an ethnohistory,
as Viazzo writes,46 although it can be considered a historical study of
ecological and agricultural systems linked to political and demographic
factors; the work shows the impact of Dutch colonialism (1619–1942),
which inserted Java into the global economy.
However, Geertz’s role in methodological debates was not due to his
book on Java, but to the success of his acclaimed The Interpretation of
Cultures (1973). His method of interpreting and reading culture like
a text not only extended to anthropology, but also had repercussions
amongst cultural historians (Darnton, 1984) and postmodern anthro-
pologists (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) in the United States. The applica-
tion of both ‘thick description’ (what the sources say happened and what
really happened) by historians like Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Mas-
sacre, 1985), Natalie Zemon-Davis (The Rites of Violence, 1973; The
Return of Martin Guerre, 1973), David Sabean (Power in the Blood,
1984) and the ‘history of the present’ and memory by Pierre Nora (Les
lieux de la mémoire, 1984–92), amongst others, came into contrast with
the positivism embraced by many historians in the 1970s, when quanti-
tative data became the star tool to elucidate meanings.
Despite the notable contributions of these interpretive focuses, var-
ious authors, particularly in Italy, accused Geertz and Darnton (both
working at Princeton University) of magnifying the dichotomy between
explanation and interpretation, between positivism and hermeneutics,
between quantitative and qualitative works. Darnton never considered
British empiricism positivist, or that facts were a faithful reflection of
reality. His book The Great Cat Massacre (1985) owes much to the
symbolic and interpretive anthropology of Mary Douglas and Victor
Turner and to Geertz’s semiotic conceptions of culture.47 His work par-
ticularly focuses on the attitudes of European urban popular sectors,
although unlike Thompson, he never sought to demonstrate how the
working-class culture was created.48
Despite the clear ties that link the microhistory that followed the pub-
lication of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg (1976) and Geertz’s thick, that is,
interpretive description, historians like Giovanni Levi, who tried to
analyse what has come to be called ‘history from below’ (Inheriting
Power: The Story of an Exorcist, 1990), cautioned about the improper
use of microanalysis from the pages of the journal Quaderni storici.49
For Levi, the danger does not lie in microanalysis per se, which makes
it possible to describe large systems without losing sight of ‘real people’,
but in the theoretical tools used.50 Here, Levi appealed to social anthro-
pology, in contrast to the hermeneutical and interpretive perspective of
Clifford Geertz, who he criticized for not having adequately understood
that meanings vary historically and socially. He also criticized his drift
towards relativism, which considered a multiplicity of interpretations,
reducing history to a mere interpretation of interpretations (a criticism,
of course, of ‘narrativists’ like Paul Veyne51 and Hayden White52 for
whom history was little more than a ‘true story’ that always depends on
an interpretative context) or even worse, a merely hermeneutic matter.53
1.1.3 France
Without a doubt, one of the earliest exercises in understanding the im-
portance of reflecting on societies beyond disciplinary partitions was the
so-called French school associated with the journal Annales d’histoire
économique et sociale and, above all, the French medievalist Jacques Le
Goff (1924–2014), André Bruguière (1938–) and the founding fathers
Lucien Febvre (Combats pour l’histoire, 1952) and Marc Bloch (Apolo-
gie pour l’histoire ou metier d’historien, 1954). The roots of the school’s
efforts lay in two research lines that later branched off: socioeconomic
history and the history of mentalities (mentalités). The Annales group
criticized the erudite history inherited from the previous century, char-
acterized by a tedious reconstruction of dates and data that supposedly
provided an ‘objective’ view of the past.54 One of its first prominent
works was the classic book by Marc Bloch (1886–1944) about the belief
in the curative power of the hands of French kings, Les Rois thauma-
turges (1924, usually translated into English as The Royal Touch: Sacred
Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France). This political history
entertained issues and questions raised by the anthropology done with
‘primitive’ contemporary societies. However, Bloch’s exercise was almost
completely overlooked during this time.55 Another no less classic work
is George Lefebvre’s The Great Fear of 1789 (1932), an excellent study
of popular group mentalities and, more specifically, the mechanisms of
imagination that led to the rural great fear of 1789.
Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) wrote a work that would also receive
praise from Claude Lévi-Strauss, dedicated to the religion of Rabelais
and the problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century (1946). Accord-
ing to this influential French historian, unbelief was unthinkable and,
of course, inexpressible until the end of the eighteenth century. Mere
doubt was considered heresy.56 Febvre sought to situate the human be-
ing in the ‘cultural’ context (or mentalité collective)57 of the era, which
opened history up to other disciplines like psychology and anthropol-
ogy.58 With The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the
Age of Philip II (1947–55), Fernand Braudel (1902–85) reopened the
debate about history and historical time. To some extent, his questions
mirror future debates between Marshall Sahlins and others (which will
be analysed in another section of this book), with their distinction be-
tween event and structure. As opposed to traditional narrative, based on
what François Simiand and Paul Lacombe pejoratively called ‘histoire
événementielle’ – that is, the history of superficial, itemized and singu-
larly sterile events – Braudel’s ‘material life’ endeavoured to find other
‘mentalities’ in structural continuities of longue durée (the long term),
which define human beings in their relationships with the environment
that surrounds them.59
In 1949, Claude Lévi-Strauss made his contribution to all of these
epistemological and methodological problems with his essay ‘History
and Ethnology’, published in Issue 54 of Revue de métaphysique et de
morale and included in his collection Structural Anthropology (1958),
in which he cites Lucien Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Six-
teenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais (1942) as a work of ethnology.
On the one hand, he rejects the evolutionism, historicism and function-
alism that had failed to explain the common elements that characterize
different ethnic groups since the nineteenth century.60 On the other,
he recognizes that history and ethnology are concerned with the same
question, namely social life.61 Neither did Lévi-Strauss believe that the
difference lay in the method or the sources (written and oral), but rather
in the perspective: history organizes its data on the basis of conscious
expressions and ethnology on the basis of the unconscious conditions
of social life.62 In truth, Lévi-Strauss did not develop a finished the-
ory regarding these questions, but by examining his general theoretical
model, it is clear that he used analytical reasoning as a foundation, in
that he worked with the rules of the intellect and not with categories of
dialectical-Hegelian reasoning. Local societies are historical manifesta-
tions of universal structures that are ‘deep’ and operate unconsciously.
This geological and structuralist view reduced dialectic to a merely
auxiliary role. For this reason, Lévi-Strauss’s theory also attracted the
French historians of his time from the Annales school, who were not
as interested in recounting changeable events (the conscious) as in dis-
covering permanent and structural factors (the unconscious).63 In the
inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1960, Lévi-Strauss again
defended the role of history at a time when his own method was being
adapted by the Annales historians.
In contrast to the static, synchronic conception of Lévi-Straussian
structuralism, dynamic anthropology (practiced by Georges Baland-
ier,64 René Girard65 and Max Gluckman66) emphasized processual
analysis,67 recapitulating the debates of the 1960s in some sociological
currents, such as developmentalism (Robert Nisbet) and structuralism
(Louis Pierre Althusser, Etienne Balibar) and the debates on conflict
as a driver of social change.68 After the Bandung Conference in 1955,
anthropologists and historians became interested in the independence
movements in Asia and Africa, the national liberation struggles of op-
pressed peoples, ‘black communities’, ‘popular cultures’, ‘indigenous
peoples’, in short, all the social movements that criticized capitalist
exploitation.69
From a Marxist critique of Western imperialism, Frantz Fanon
(1925–61), a French psychiatrist and essayist born in Martinique, ad-
dressed the need to incorporate colonized people into history, recovering
concepts like race, class, body and culture. To overcome their condition,
the dominated (blacks) adopted the cultural baggage of the dominators
(whites), absorbing the racist norms that justified their discrimination
(Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952).70 In this respect, as opposed to the
theses that defined underdevelopment as a socioeconomic state, Baland-
ier situated relations between global societies as an element of transfor-
mation (cf. acculturation theories of Georges Bastide, et al.). Balandier
considered it an error to separate social aspects from cultural aspects in
the relations between unequal societies, emphasizing their internal dy-
namism as well as the social problems created by modernization in the
new postcolonial states.71
Within the general framework of Lévi-Straussian structuralism, Mi-
chel Foucault (1926–84) was also classified as an openly anti-humanist
intellectual, especially after the publication of The Archaeology of
Knowledge (Paris, 1969).72 Both thinkers affirmed the existence of a
‘deep’ or ‘archaeological’ unconscious mental level (Foucault defined
this as discourses, discursive formations or épistémè), to which his-
torical praxis was subordinated (The Order of Things: An Archaeol-
ogy of the Human Sciences, 1966; The Archaeology of Knowledge,
1969). Subsequently, he developed a genealogical method to analyse
what he defined as the microphysics of power.73 These discourses
constituted referred objects and, ultimately, culture or society in its
entirety. Thus, the main concern of the modern state was ‘the art of
government’ (political arithmetic or statistics). To mould the ‘social
body’, it was necessary to discipline the ‘individual body’. His theory
of biopower represented not only a categorization of the human be-
ing as species, but as an ‘object’ that had to be manipulated and con-
trolled through disciplinary technologies (schools, prisons, hospitals,
workshops, factories).74 These technologies were related to the rise of
modern capitalism: delimitation, fixation and control of the physical
space (Discipline and Punish, 1975). Biopower thus acted as a regime
responsible for identifying pathologies (homosexuality, insanity) and
isolating them using the ‘technologies’ of normalization, applying cor-
rective or therapeutic procedures (psychiatry, medicine) (The History
of Sexuality, Vol. I, 1976). This process of subjectivation (discourses
on sexuality, medicine, criminal justice, etc.) would underpin postmod-
ernist deconstructivism.
1.1.4 Mexico
The arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexico in 1519 ushered in not only
a process of agricultural transformation in the indigenous world, but
also profound changes in land tenure and exploitation.75 Beginning in
the eighteenth century, as the caciques – or natural lords – disappeared
as ethnic categories,76 land tenure became decoupled from the old sys-
tem of indigenous values and passed into the hands of the community.
Studies by Cheryl E. Martin (1985) in Cuernavaca and David Brading
(1975, 1978) in the Mexican Bajio (lowlands) attest to changes in the
ethnic composition of their peoples.77 The loss of their lands invigo-
rated private initiative, transforming the natives into day labourers and
tenants. At the same time, as a consequence of the movement of the
indigenous population to the most important urban centres like Mexico
City, Puebla and Zacatecas, mestizaje increased, widening social differ-
entiation within communities and weakening ethnic-community ties.78
In the nineteenth century, a process of confiscating indigenous corporate
property and liberalizing the property took place in connection with the
construction of the national state, which intensified with independence.
As historian Margarita Menegus has shown, reconstructing this process
is an arduous task that requires studying the documentation held in mu-
nicipal archives.79
The formation of the nation was in the hands of the criollos, who
declared the legal equality of all Mexicans and preserved communal
property and indigenous governance.80 With Benito Juárez (1806–72)
and La Reforma, the formation of the state passed into the hands of the
mestizos.81 By abolishing communal property, the Constitution of 1857
destroyed the economic foundations on which indigenous culture was
based. In practice, the situation of the Mexican Indians did not change
much from that of the colonial period. During the ‘order and progress’
dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911), they lived crowded together
like farmhands in shacks located on the hacienda and latifundio estates
established for intensive agriculture. Similarly, the indigenista policies of
the Porfiriato transformed indigenous rituals and customs into part of a
folkloric nationalism that was opposed to local particularisms. The In-
dians became peasants, subservient to the mestizos/ladinos and criollos
because of their ethnic and class status.
In an illuminating article, Claudio Lomnitz argued that mestizophilia
was not, as is sometimes believed, exclusively a state-directed project
to form the Mexican citizen. Instead, ‘mestizaje was also a lived expe-
rience, which later became a state project shaped by experiences on the
border’.82 What was the relationship between ‘race’ and Mexican na-
tional identity? What role did ‘racialization’ play in forming the national
subject? Unlike Brazil, the north-American country shares a long border
with the United States, which certainly made difficult the formation of
a national race. The racially and culturally disparate Mexican society
‘challenged the idea of “the Mexican” as a common or universal type
at a national level’.83 However, in the early twentieth century, economic
dynamism generated waves of migration, both inside Mexico and to the
United States, that consolidated the racialization of the national subject.
As Prisciliano G. Silva, a Mexican general wrote in 1911 after his cap-
ture of an arsenal in Guadalupe, Chihuahua: ‘With these arms we will
avenge the humiliation our race has suffered’.84
The official post-revolutionary ideology (1911–20) reflected on the
identity of the ‘Indian’ and the incorporation of the group into the
national community. The great modern indigenistas such as Manuel
Gamio (1883–1960),85 Alfonso Caso (1896–1970) and Gonzalo Agu-
irre Beltrán (1908–96) activated an assimilationist rhetoric that neutral-
ized racial and cultural pluralism. However, according to historian Alan
Knight, these intellectual indigenistas appropriated the indigenous con-
sciousness, reproducing a good deal of the Western racist discourse. In
his opinion, the Indians were the objects, not the authors, of so-called
indigenismo.86 In 1916, the anthropologist Manuel Gamio published
Forjando Patria. Pro-nacionalismo (Forging a Nation) in a context of
political idealism and optimism. Unlike the prevailing positivism, Ga-
mio’s ethnographic project consisted of reconstructing the soul of the
indigenous peoples, who he considered ‘pure’ and ‘traditional’.87 In the
words of this Mexican anthropologist, ‘We do not know how the Indian
thinks, and we ignore his true aspirations. We prejudge him with our
own sensibilities, when we should familiarize ourselves with his sensibil-
ities to comprehend him and make him comprehend us. We must forge
for ourselves – even if temporarily – an Indian soul’.88
Despite this desire to achieve a national brotherhood, Gamio wanted
nothing more than to eliminate the biological, geographical and his-
torical antecedents that made the Indians a ‘race’ incapable of attain-
ing the moral standards of Western civilization. The Aztecs, once
colonizers themselves, were first and foremost Indians colonized by
the Spanish Empire and then civilizing icons of the new Mexican na-
tion.89 Thus, while Gamio judged the Mexican Indians negatively, he
glorified Aztec society, elevating it to the level of ancient Greece and
Rome. As Jesuit Father Francisco Javier Clavijero (1731–87), one of
the precursors of enlightened indigenism, noted in Historia Antigua de
México (1780), the Aztecs became the classical heroes of the Mexican
elites, who in turn reduced the contemporary Indians to mere folkloric
representations.
In parallel, ethnic heterogeneity gave way to the symbol of cultural
integration: the mestizo. In Gamio’s words:
There is a mixing of blood, ideas, and industries, of virtues and

of vices. The mestizo type emerges with pristine purity, as he rep-
resents the first harmonious product of two races. One sees nubile
maidens with large dark eyes, straight and very white teeth, and tiny
hands and feet that betray their Indian heritage. Others have flowing
golden curls that proclaim their Spanish blood.90
The book La Raza Cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (The

Cosmic Race, 1925) by writer and philosopher José Vasconcelos (1881–
1959) represents another ‘integrative’ view from the cult of the mestizo.91
According to this model, all political and racial tensions will disappear,
giving way to a society socially adapted to its needs. The central thesis
consists of overcoming racial heterogeneity through the natural selection
of different human types that, upon mixing, form a new universal, or
cosmic, ‘race’. This transcultural project was essentially a myth – that is,
an idealized spiritual or aesthetic state – that flipped Darwinian meta-
language and Spencerian racism. Vasconcelos’s paradigm clearly empha-
sized a Manichean concept of the human sciences. On the one hand, he
denied positivism and social Darwinism, viewing them as purely me-
chanical and biological theories. On the other, he aspired to produce a
more humanized interpretation of racial mixing based on the spiritual
principle of the ‘law of joy’ (‘ley del gusto’).
In the face of the popularity of eugenicist principles, Vasconcelos ap-
pealed to an ‘aesthetic Darwinism’ through which beauty, conceptual-
ized as a superior Nietzschean category, would eradicate the ugliness,
poverty and moral misery of the Indians.92 Once they had been politi-
cally segregated and metaphysically dissolved into an essentialized mes-
tizo trope, Vasconcelos could construct a mono-ethnic mestizo nation,
a ‘cosmic race’ that would unify all Latin American peoples in a new
golden age.93 Other analysts, like Gilberto Freyre (1900–87), popular-
ized the concept of ‘racial democracy’ (1933) as the best way to attenuate
racial problems in Brazil. Although it became a symbol of Latin Ameri-
can identity, mestizaje was not a ‘mixing’ that dissolved differences or a
violation of hierarchies, but a hyperracial strategy for social control that
ended up consolidating a racist ideology.94
If, as it appears, the construction of this mestizo identity ran counter
to ethnic pluralism by relegating the Indians to the margins of the Mex-
ican state, it was necessary to scientifically explain the persistence of
the ethnic and cultural diversity of the ‘mestizo nation’.95 Anthropol-
ogists like Gamio, inspired by Franz Boas, referred to the isolation of
many ethnic groups that supposedly maintained pre-Hispanic features.
His treatise on La población del valle de Teotihuacán (The People of
Teotihuacan Valley, 1922) suggests the existence of indigenous commu-
nities that constituted coherent totalities that were perfectly adapted to
different ecological niches. Gamio was followed by other specialists like
Moisés Sáenz (1936) and, especially, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, with his
study of ‘intercultural regions’, which defined a paradigm for indigenist
regional research.96 The national, urban world established a social, eco-
nomic and ethnic hierarchy where Mexican ethnicities belonged to the
lowest strata of society. As Guillermo De la Peña observed, state indi-
genism tried to break down this intercultural power system, advancing
modernity, acculturation and citizen equality.97
Beginning in the 1930s, the study of new documentary sources, es-
pecially those written in Nahuatl (Ángel María Garibay K. and Walter
Lehmann), Mayan, Yucatec (Ralph Roys), Zapotec (Jiménez Moreno),
Otomi (Jacques Soustelle)98 and other Meso-American languages,
made it possible to make advances in understanding social organiza-
tion, agricultural technology and belief systems. Ethnohistorical re-
search made an effort to reconstruct indigenous history using diverse
and varied sources, like the records of the cabildo (town council) of
Tlaxcala (Celestino, Valencia, Medina, 1985), indigenous testaments
(Rojas Rabiela et al., 1999–2000) and oral tradition (Vansina, 1961,
1968; Restall, 2015).99
In the mid-1930s, the government of Lázaro Cárdenas promoted ed-
ucation and funds for rural indigenous schools to educate a new gener-
ation of bilingual Indian teachers.100 As Knight discusses, these schools
were not simple centres of education, but spaces for the dissemination
of technological advances, political mobilization and nationalist propa-
ganda. Various institutions aimed at resolving the problems of ethnic
groups and researching and preserving Mexico’s archaeological and his-
torical heritage were also created. In 1936, the autonomous Department
of Indigenous Affairs was founded. Its functions consisted of attending
to questions related to the social order that affected indigenous commu-
nities as a whole. The department was not able to fulfil its mission, as
evidenced in 1940 when the first Inter-American Conference on Indian
Life was held in Patzcuaro, Michoacan, to promote the assimilation of
native groups, integrating them into the ‘national society’. In 1946, the
autonomous department was replaced by the Direction of Indigenous
Affairs.101 Two years later, after the institutionalization of the Institu-
tional Revolutionary Party (PRI) founded by Plutarco Elías Calles in
1929 (and which replaced the Party of the Mexican Revolution, or PRM,
in 1946) in the Mexican government, the National Indigenist Institute
(INI) was founded in Mexico City. Its first director, Alfonso Caso –
who had founded the National Institute of Anthropology and History
(INAH) ten years earlier102 – once again encouraged the assimilation (or
Mexicanization) of indigenous communities, which were to renounce
their culture and traditions.103 According to Guillermo de la Peña, this
measure was based on the argument that an understanding could only
be achieved within the framework of spatial systems of domination. The
criollo and mestizo elites living in the political and economic centres
of power had an adaptive capacity superior to that of the Indians. For
this reason, they monopolized strategic Mexican resources in order to
sustain a pre-capitalist economy based on the exploitation of indigenous
manpower.104 Caso argued that the progressive integration of the indig-
enous communities into the national mestizo culture demonstrated the
official government policy regarding ‘race’ and ethnic relations.105 This
integration was seen as inevitable, something that needed to be done to
the benefit of these communities and not the country (liberate the Indian
from Mexico, not Mexico from the Indian!).106
The INI and the ENAH became indivisible, dedicating themselves
heart and soul to the education of archaeologists, historians and indig-
enous affairs teachers. Nonetheless, indigenous actions provoked resis-
tance, especially by indigenous teachers, trade unions and advocates who
began to appear on the public stage.107 The 1951 UNESCO Statement on
the Nature of Race and Race Differences connected the anti-colonialist
movements in Asia and Africa, and later statements criticized European
colonialism and the Eurocentrism of the mid-1960s.108 The works of
the indigenist historian and philosopher Miguel León Portilla reclaimed
indigenous literature by translating, interpreting and publishing several
compilations in Nahuatl (Visión de los vencidos, 1959; El reverso de la
conquista. Relaciones aztecas, mayas e incas, 1964).109 During the six-
year term of President Luis Echevarría Álvarez (1970–76), 58 Indigenous
Coordination Centres were created in addition to the 12 founded during
the two previous decades, quintupling the INI budget.110
In 1971, the first Declaration of Barbados was issued from a meeting
held on that island, promoted by independent, possibly organic, intellec-
tuals supported by the World Council of Churches. There, the earliest
criticism was levelled against the official indigenism promoted by INI
director Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and the so-called ‘ethnocide’ of the
Amerindian peoples.111 In 1973, the INAH Centre for Higher Studies
was created, which quickly became the Centre for Research and Higher
Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS). At first, the Centre’s atten-
tion shifted from ‘Indians’ to the origin of the state, social classes and
peasant exploitation. In 1974, the First Indigenous Congress was held in
Chiapas, organized by the Chiapas state government and the Diocese of
San Cristóbal de Las Casas. The congress was held under the auspices of
a sector of the church that was identified with the poor.
When José López Portillo (1976–82) became president, he promoted
the position of ‘critical anthropologist’ to promote a ‘participative indi-
genism’. According to these positions, Indians ceased to be exotic vestiges
of the past and became political subjects. These ‘second anthropologies’,
in the words of Esteban Krotz, inevitably required a new approach to
multiculturalism and ethnic citizenship. 112 However, more than pro-
moting participation, this ‘indigenous anthropology’ really sought to
incorporate and co-opt the local ethnic movement.113 For this reason,
in the 1980s, ‘critical anthropologists’ began to debate the nature and
limits of national models and indigenous autonomy.114 To become fully
incorporated into Mexican society, ethnic groups had to ‘stop being
such’, but at the same time, they had to maintain a form of identification
that reminded society of their status as ‘Indians’ exploited in dominated
regions since the colonial era in the haciendas, ranches, sawmills and
plantations that depended on a global market.115
In 1987, the INAH published a study that would become a corner-
stone in the constitution of ethnohistory as a discipline or anthropo-
logical and historical method: La etnohistoria en Mesoamérica y los
Andes (Ethnohistory in Mesoamerica and the Andes), compiled by
Juan Manuel Pérez Cevallos and José Antonio Pérez Gollán. Articles
by Carlos Martínez Marín (1987) and writings by Juan Manuel Pérez
Zevallos in this and other works (1997, 2001) defined ethnohistory as
the discipline dedicated to the study of indigenous societies suffering –
in very different, fragmented ways, according to each region – under
colonial domination.116 The use of documentary sources introduced an-
thropologists to the methods used by historians, while also allowing
historians to incorporate an anthropological viewpoint that focused on
cultural diversity.117 By recognizing the diachronic dimension, anthro-
pologists were able to illustrate the social transformations resulting from
the Spanish conquest. The historical process of the indigenous societies
was analysed using not only historical sources, but also questions that
were anthropological in nature. In other words, the historical sources
were interrogated with the intention of finding clues that would make it
possible to recompose the cultural historical past of indigenous groups
submitted to colonial power, along with other traditional groups that
claimed their ‘indigenous’ identity, from a convergence of research meth-
ods and techniques from anthropology and history.
In this respect, México profundo: Una civilización negada (Deep
Mexico: A Denied Civilization 1987) by Guillermo Bonfil gave a new
twist to the role that corresponded to Indians and peasants in the eco-
nomic modernization of the country.118 Influenced by the theses of
James Scott (1985) regarding peasant forms of resistance, Bonfil argued
for the need for Indian peasants to control their own culture, creating a
separation between two worlds: on one side, the ‘Mexican imaginary’ of
the dominant groups and on the other, the ‘deep Mexico’ of resistance
groups. He criticized the official indigenismo of the PRI, viewing it as
an imposed superstructure (a ‘public discourse’ in Scott’s words) on real
Mexico and, in its place, asserted the existence of a Meso-American
civilization that constituted a civilizing matrix – akin to the analysis
and reconstruction done by Enrique Florescano (1999) of Mexican col-
lective memory – with which the indigenous population in the country
could be integrated.119 The main challenge for anthropology, argued
Bonfil, was to write the history of indigenous peoples and the other so-
cial sectors excluded and negated by the Mexican academy. Recovering
the perspective of the indigenous actors meant not only questioning con-
ditions of inequality and difference, but also recovering the historicity of
the social subject and analysing micro-group or community actions.120
Thanks to this and other works, like those by Matthew Restall and the
‘New Philology’ promoted by the American historian James Lockhart,
the emphasis was once again placed on the systematic study of all types
of colonial sources in Meso-American languages. Because of the numer-
ous translations of colonial indigenous texts done in the late 1960s by
specialists, including Arthur Anderson, Charles Dibble, Fernando Hor-
casitas, Miguel León Portilla, Alfredo López Austin, Luis Reyes García
and Günter Zimmermann, the centre of gravity of philological studies
moved to the Valley of Mexico and other Nahuatl-speaking areas.121
At the same time, a dialogic ethnography related to the history of
the Indians, the peasantry and the evolution of rural peoples developed,
interested in the changes linked to the political, economic and social
structure, trade, tributes, (peasant) identity and topics related to kin-
ship. 122 In the 1980s, indigenismo was no longer identified with a ‘uni-
fied national culture’, but with a model that made it possible to explain
the development of peoples along different evolutionary paths.123 This
‘ethno-development’ benefitted from the multicultural turn led by the
INI in the 1990s, which emphasized the multi-ethnic character of the
Mexican nation and the right to cultural diversity amongst peoples.
The constitutional reform of 1992 opened up a new space for struggle
and negotiation over indigenous rights, allowing the INI to become a
strategic agency. This was made clear in 1994 after the Zapatista up-
rising in the southern state of Chiapas, when the INI extended and
strengthened its programs to defend indigenous autonomy and the con-
trol of indigenous resources, lands and forms of knowledge.124
1.1.5 Peru
Unlike in Mexico, mestizaje was not used as a basis for the configuration
of a common imaginary in Peru. The disparity between ‘criollos’ and
‘indígenas’ was so deeply rooted that any interpretation of ‘mestizaje’ as
a mechanism for integration was impossible. Neither was there any dis-
course or rhetoric exalting the ‘Indian’ as the foundation of the nascent
nation.125 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, many criollos still
feared the indigenous masses who rose up early on in the Rebellion of
Tupac Amaru II (1780–81). Because of this tragic memory, ‘the Inca’
were timidly resuscitated (or recreated) by the criollos, who viewed the
‘Indian’ as an ancient national relic from the distant classical past.126
In fact, the criollo elites did not establish any connection between this
‘classical’ Andean past world and the ‘Indians’, placing a veil of dehis-
toricization over these populations (in addition to dehumanizing and
inferiorizing them via semi-slavery). Thus, they inverted Benedict Ander-
son’s concept, producing, in the words of Mark Thurner, ‘unimagined
communities’.127 It is with good reason that the various republican gov-
ernments between 1824 and the twentieth century encouraged European
immigration, in part to offset the scarcity of manpower, but particularly
because ‘a Republic without Indians’ appeared to be the watchword of
progress. White immigration seemed to be the solution to the country’s
problems.128
Some Peruvian historians (Poole, 1988; Remy, 1988; Méndez, 2004,
2005) have endeavoured to respond to Jaime Urrutia’s 1985 criticism:
there is no ethnohistory for nineteenth-century Peru. In other words,
Andean rural society had not been incorporated into historical analy-
ses of the period, whether because it was considered historiographically
irrelevant or politically non-existent.129 The rural bases of the caudi-
llo state (1820–40) were virtually unexplored until Maria Isabel Remy,
Deborah Poole and Cecilia Méndez, amongst others, began to investi-
gate the military participation of peasants in the caudillo battles of the
years after independence.
Work done by French ethnologists like Paul Rivet (1876–1958) popu-
larized the application of ethnology in Andean studies. However, it was
not until the early twentieth century that the ethnological gaze turned
to contemporary ‘Indians’. The most important text is, without a doubt,
‘Our Indians’, by Manuel González Prada (1844–1918), a short article
published in 1904 that would inspire the entire indigenist current in the
country.130 The piece marked a radical change, to paraphrase Manuel
Andrés García, in that the criollo became characterized with the Span-
ish and the native with the Peruvian legacy. This led to a trend of viewing
indigenousness as the keeper of the most essential components of the
Inca period – the germ of peruanidad or Peruvian identity – despite cen-
turies of foreign domination and governmental neglect.131
However, the distinction between mestizo (or misti), criollo and Span-
iard is problematic today. This is largely because these social categories
reveal porous boundaries that not only challenge the idea of cultures
as independent, ‘pure’ systems or precious residues of an unrecoverable
past, but also require a rethinking of the objects of study in certain dis-
ciplines or sub-disciplines, established as fields or subfields of research
such as Andean anthropology and ethnohistory. The intensity of the in-
tercultural contact between the Spanish conquistadores and the Andean
peoples created new social categories – mestizos, criollos, mulattos – that
were incorporated into a system imposed by colonial domination, trans-
forming their members into a peasantry that occupied the lowest strata
of the new social structure. In contrast to the ‘classical’ historiography
(Arrom, Céspedes del Castillo, Gerbi)132 that used the dichotomy be-
tween ‘criollos’ and ‘peninsulares’ to explain how colonial society oper-
ated, other historians (Acosta, Gruzinski, Garavaglia and more recently
Pérez Vejo)133 have expressed their doubts about the workability of these
analytical categories, cautioning that if they are not fully re-examined,
they could strongly distort social analyses. What was the difference in
Peru between a criollo, a mestizo and a Spaniard? Did the criollos view
themselves that way or, on the contrary, were they invented by elites
from Lima or the Peninsula? Did these terms have the same meaning in
Madrid or in Lima as they did in the Peruvian highlands?
Part of the problem lies in the many layers of meaning accumulated
in the term criollo. To untangle this knot, it is essential to situate the
analysis in the historical context that produced it and gave it mean-
ing.134 Historians like Bernard Lavallé (1993) wrote that the ‘criollo
being’ should not be primarily understood based on a tie to a place of
birth or an ethnic identity, but through the adherence of groups of di-
verse origin to certain local interests.135 In the same vein, José Antonio
Mazzotti (1996) wrote that the criollo – and, by extension, criollismo as
an ideological construction of the criollo – should not be analysed from
an essentialist or monolithic perspective, but as a category consciously
created by corporative groups in order to obtain particular political and
economic objectives.136 As a concept, it had no legal validity. It was,
rather, a cultural phenomenon that characterized the discursive moulds
used by seventeenth-century Hispanic-criollo elites in monastic chron-
icles, memoirs, reports and legal-administrative treatises to put them-
selves on the same level as the Spanish and claim their sociopolitical and
economic interests. The phenomenon reached its peak between the late
eighteenth century and independence.137
Since the publication of the classic The First America: The Spanish
Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State (1991) by British his-
torian David A. Brading, the thesis of the propagation of ‘creole patrio-
tism’, in contrast to the dominant imperial discourse in Spain, has caught
the attention of historians of the colonial world. In 2001, Ecuadorian
historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) identified a ‘patriotic epis-
temology’ expressed through the works of American ‘children of the
land’.138 Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Lima intelligentsia
developed a strong feeling of group (ethnic) identity based on shared
cultural and ethnic patterns, which strictly differentiated them from the
indigenous peoples.139 These were ‘learned’ members of society, that is,
lawyers, jurists, doctors and intellectuals educated at the University of
San Marcos and the Royal College of San Felipe and San Marcos or the
Jesuit schools (especially San Martin), whose feeling of belonging to a
Hispanic elite – characterized by the idealization of a group of cultural
features common to a territory or local patria – was expressed in sym-
bolic and moral terms.140 In the Andes, however, where there were many
fewer peninsulares than in Lima and an overwhelming indigenous and
mestizo majority,141 this patriotic feeling was different in its expression
(David Garrett, Paulina Numhauser, Donato Amado).
Other literary critics and intellectuals such as Mazzotti (2000, 2009)
rejected J. Jorge Klor de Alva’s thesis about the polysemy of colonial
discourse.142 In particular, Mazzotti and García-Bedoya (2003) have
highlighted the ambiguous nature of criollismo, emphasizing the con-
tinuous negotiations, alliances and confrontations between the criollo
elites and the overseas power. In the late sixteenth century, the increase
in mestizaje and forasterismo (the migration of indigenous peoples from
their villages) transformed the territorial order imposed in Peru from
the metropole (e.g. parishes, restricted villages), making the binary op-
positions that had characterized colonial and postcolonial debates –
colonizer/colonized; American/European – a pure anachronism.143
From the capital of the viceroyalty, Lima, criollo subjectivities were con-
structed with the Spanish peninsulares, as Mazzotti argues, in an unsta-
ble negotiating area. From the Andes (Cusco, Arequipa, Charcas), the
subjects – criollos – were distinguished not only from the peninsulares,
but also from their Lima namesakes, reinforcing the ambiguity of their
status with respect to imperial geopolitics and the colonial order, as they
proclaimed themselves to be fully Spanish and loyal to the Crown, but at
the same time proud of their American origins.144
In the early 1970s, the anthropology – or ethnohistory – of the An-
des began to record the importance of ethnicity with regard to social
demands.145 In Peru, the regime of reformist Juan Velasco Alvarado
(1968–75) and its intervention into rural institutions aroused interest
in the study of the geographical, social and ethnic boundaries of the
minority ‘others’ that were fluid contact zones between the llanos and
the Andes, such as the Valles Cruceños region, the Bolivian Yungas, the
Chapare Province in Bolivia and other adjacent areas in Peru, Paraguay
and Brazil.146 Renowned specialists such as the cosmopolitan John V.
Murra,147 John H. Rowe,148 Hermann Trimborn (1901–86) and Reiner
Tom Zuidema (1927–2016)149 began to publish their work in a context
of concern about the progressive disappearance of Andean cultures as
a result of the conquest, and indeed, one outcome of the Land Reform
Act of 1969, implemented by the government of General Velasco Al-
varado (1968–75), was the replacement of the figure of the ‘Indian’, at
least nominally, by the ‘peasant’.150 Here, the use of the written sources
from the Spanish administrators – such as the secular visitas (admin-
istrative surveys) written by Garci Díez de San Miguel151 and Ortiz de
Zúñiga152 and studied by Murra, and the ecclesiastical visitas drafted
by Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo – shed some light on the sociopolitical
organization of the ‘conquered Indian’, in the words of historian and an-
thropologist Nathan Wachtel,153 creating a kind of ‘rescue’ ethnography
and an ethnographical reading of the colonial texts that clearly required
certain palaeographical and archive research skills. Other sources pro-
duced by Andean intellectuals (Guamán Poma de Ayala, Juan de Santa
Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Garcilaso de la Vega and
Cristóbal de Molina, known as ‘el Cuzqueño’) were also examined.
These contained a good deal of the oral tradition of the peoples of Peru
and required knowledge of pre-Hispanic cultures or, in other words, an
ability to unravel the logical meaning of what was transmitted.
Then came the so-called ‘modern Peruvian ethnohistory’, which drew
in historians and anthropologists interested in classification categories
for the Andean world, agropastoralism, ecology and kinship (Javier
Flores Ochoa, Enrique Mayer, Daniel Gade, Benjamin Orlove) as well
as its colonial history. Important scholars like María Rostworowski,
Luis Millones, Franklin Pease and Waldemar Espinoza Soriano focused
on the study of the Incas and indigenous peoples ‘without writing’ and
‘without history’ who inhabited the Peruvian highlands. These (ethno-)
historians took some of the tools used by Rowe, Murra and Zuidema,
like archive ethnography, adding their results from archaeological re-
search and oral history to study ethnic diversity.154
The 1980s witnessed a significant change in anthropological and his-
toriographical research related to the Andean peasantry. Scholars like
Steve J. Stern (1982, 1987), Olivia Harris (1987), Olivia Harris, Brooke
Larson and Enrique Tandeter (1987), Frank Salomon (1982, 1985,
1987), Xavier Albó (1987, 1991), Luis Miguel Glave (1988, 1989), María
Isabel Remy (1983) and Tristan Platt (1988) brought a new approach to
the study of the colonial inheritance, reconstructing the political cul-
ture of subaltern groups (Indians, peasants, cholos, serranos) and oth-
ers who had been traditionally marginalized by historiography, basing
their work on the studies of ‘moral economy’ and pre-capitalist popular
groups done by E. P. Thompson (1971, 1972, 1974), Christopher Hill
(1973), Charles Tilly (1978) and James C. Scott (1985, 1990). Institu-
tional history gave way to local communal history, putting greater em-
phasis on daily forms of rebellion and resistance to the colonial power,
as well as the multiple alliances and coexistence between the Spaniards
and the indigenous peoples, mainly at elite level. A prime example is the
compulsive millenarian movement, Taki Onqoy, literally ‘dancing sick-
ness’, which spread throughout the central Altiplano from 1560 to 1565
as wak’as (Andean spirits) began to take possession of Andean souls.155
As messengers of Pacha kamaq, the ‘Creator of the World’ and other
indigenous divinities, the leaders of what became the Taki Onqoy revolt
preached from Quito to Charcas, calling for a pan-Andean alliance that
would bring down the Christian God and kill the Spanish colonizers,
unleashing illnesses and other calamities.156
The arguments of the 1980s must be situated in context of the re-
evaluation of Andean culture and the proliferation of various mystifica-
tions, like the Inkarri myth, which gave rise to all sorts of millenarian
and nativist movements.157 This legendary myth tells of the reconstitu-
tion of the Andean world through the resurrection of the body of the
last ruler of the Incas.158 Ideología mesiánica del mundo andino (1973)
by Juan Ossio and Buscando un inca. Identidad y utopía en los Andes
(1987) by Alberto Flores Galindo (1949–90) were both written in this
context of the survival and vitality of Andean societies. In the face of
colonial oppression and daily violence, the Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu,
literally ‘the four regions’) was reconstructed in the collective imagina-
tion as a benevolent, just and recoverable civilization. The representa-
tion of the death of Atahualpa, the last Sapa Inca, in Oruro, Bolivia,
studied by Nathan Wachtel in his 1971 book, was later analysed by
Flores Galindo in Chiquian, a small town in the province of Bolognesi,
during the patron festival in honour of Saint Rose de Lima. Not only
was it interpreted as the devotion of the indigenous people to their own
traditions and cultural systems, but also as proof that messianism and
millenarianism inhabit the popular culture of modern Peru.
Other historians and anthropologists have little or no interest in
these essentialist or mythifying views of the Andean world. Karen Vie-
ira Powers (1995), Pilar Cruz Zúñiga (2011), Sergio Serulnikov (1996,
1998, 1999, 2006), Jeremy Mumford (2003), Jane E. Mangan (2005,
2009), Marisol de la Cadena (2000, 2005, 2006, 2010), Ana María
Presta (2009), Guillermo Wilde (2003, 2009), Ana María Lorandi
and Mercedes del Río (1992) and Ana María Lorandi (2012), amongst
others, have analysed the political strategies and mechanisms of Indi-
ans, mestizos and ethnic lords, rethinking the social categories of the
Hispano-American worlds (race, class, gender), not as independent vari-
ables, but as the result of numerous interactions and contacts between
ethno-social groups with blood ties and shared economic and political
interests. This social history ‘from below’ reveals the fragility of the
caste system, analysing the constructivist and processual nature of co-
lonial identities.159 In the face of ethno-racial classification categories
imposed from the metropole, like indigenous or mestizo blood, assimi-
lation in plebeian lineages, ethnic impurity and illegitimacy, the Andean
peoples sought other cultural markers that were not permanent, did not
depend exclusively on phenotype and that facilitated social mobility
such as trades, clothing, reputation or use of the native language.160
These markers constitute the central elements of ethnic limits. While the
metropolitan authorities insisted on a supposed objective classification
‘from above’, the reality of having a specific trade, dressing and speak-
ing in a certain way and living inside or outside of a city constituted the
particular perceptions that plebeian groups had about their position in
colonial society.161
But, what exactly does it mean to be ‘Indian’, ‘become Indian’ or ‘ac-
quire indigenous culture’? And ‘traditional people’? Ethnicity does not
exist as an a priori quality or attribute, but constitutes a tool for the con-
struction of an identity out of social practice. After the famous decree by
Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) that abolished the indigenous communities,
the mestizos robbed the Indians of their lands to create new haciendas.
This situation led to a series of indigenous rebellions that culminated in
the 1920s and 1930s, subsiding after the passage of the Law on Indige-
nous Communities in 1922.162
In 1970s Peru, the ethnic categories of ‘Indian’, ‘white’ and ‘mestizo’
were no longer explanatory, but rather indicated power relations.163 In
Brazil, there is evidence of what Anthony Smith defined as an ‘ethnic
revival’.164 For a number of years, indigenous or aboriginal peoples have
claimed an ‘ethnicity’ for themselves, searching for their roots, learning
their folklore as a sine qua non to gain access to the lands of their ances-
tors.165 In the Andean world, the question of ‘ethno-’, as noted by the re-
cently deceased anthropologist Thomas Abercrombie (1951–2019), was
closely related to the need to characterize ‘other’ groups that thought
differently, that is, aborigines, mestizos and mulattos marginalized by
the hegemonic society of European origin.166 However, as Ana María
Lorandi argues, if the concept of ethnic only applies to aborigines, what
is its heuristic value?167 In Brazil, the so-called ‘indigenous history’ is
reduced exclusively to the particular sphere of ‘the Indian’, incorporat-
ing a Western historicity.168 But again, if these ‘reduced Indians’ are
increasingly less exotic and more proximate, should they not simply be
incorporated into history as historical subjects?
Traditionally, Peruvian anthropology maintained an old distinction
between Amazonist anthropologists, on the one hand, and Andeanist an-
thropologists, on the other. The Andeanists have predominated in the coun-
try’s schools of anthropology in the different theoretical-methodological
perspectives (culturalism, dependency theory, ethnoecology, ecological
substantivism, economic formalism, interculturality and concepts of hu-
manity) and the topics related to them.169 In 1975, Manuel Gutiérrez
Estévez, a professor in the Department of American Anthropology and
Ethnology at the Complutense University of Madrid, did his first field-
work study on myth and ritual in Ingapirca in the Ecuadorian Andes.170
In recent years, one of his students, Gerardo Fernández Juárez, profes-
sor at the University of Castile-La Mancha, analysed the application of
intercultural health policies in Latin America, particularly in Bolivia.
His research has focused on indigenous concepts of health and illness
and their relationship with biomedical therapy and care procedures
in the Aymara world. From this perspective, his works analyse health
processes, illness and healthcare in relation to maternity, fear, embar-
rassment and hospitals as well as the problems involved in legalizing
traditional therapies.171
As Fernández Juárez has noted, ‘shadows’ or ‘souls’ are the main target
of many of the ritual strategies practiced by the peoples who live in the
Aymara Altiplano. Losing one of these psychic entities or ‘souls’ (ajayu
or spirit; kuraji or courage) poses real health problems. The seriousness
of the case depends on the nature of the soul that has gone astray (or
been ‘grabbed’), with the ajayu – an old term recorded by the Jesuit priest
Ludovico Bertonio (Vocabulario de la lengua aymará, 1612) – being the
‘shadow’ of all things.172 To keep the soul from being devoured, it is nec-
essary to visit a yatiri (‘wise man’) or ch’amakani (‘owner of darkness’),
ritual specialists able to liberate the captured soul and return it to the ill
person. Losing fat was another serious medical problem. Human fat is
desired by the ‘evil spirit’ – saxras, ñanqhas, antawalla – or even by the
kharisiri himself, a peculiar sacamantecas or ‘fat extractor’, who uses
different procedures to put his victims to sleep before stealing their body
fat.173 Quite similar to the situation when souls go astray, the victim dies
if they do not receive the correct treatment.
From a revisionist perspective, studies by Alejandro Díez Hurtado
(1997, 2013) and the recent doctoral theses by Ch’aska Eugenia Carlos
Ríos (UAB, 2016) and Teodoro Palomino Meneses (UAB, 2010) have
also made important contributions to the field, examining the concept
of a person as a continuum, arguing that there is no division between
human and non-human or between subject and object, and attributing
human behaviours or characteristics to various objects and species. As
a Quechua-speaking indigenous anthropologist, Ch’aska Eugenia Car-
los Ríos proposes the existence of a vague area where words and con-
cepts not develop independently in the Quechua language; instead, the
context, relationships and concepts must be explained. For example, a
‘parrot’ is related to a ‘radio’, because both produce sounds. Similarly,
when it is said that ‘the beer wants me to taste it’, human qualities and
sentiments are attributed to the beer, emphasizing that the constitution
of a person does not end, but is continuous.
The doctoral thesis by Teodoro Palomino Meneses examines some
key concepts in Andean social formation and the peasant communities
of Piura and northern Ayacucho, respectively, analysing them as trans-
formed continuities. Most specialists (Arguedas, 1967–68; Fuenzalida
Vollmar, 1970; Wachtel, 1973; Matos Mar, 1976) situate the origin of the
‘community’ in the first colonial political ordinances, which organized
the indigenous population into cabildos or local councils, and imposed a
reductionist system in the sixteenth century on the traditional ayllus,174
forming ‘closed, corporate communities’ in the words of Eric Wolf (The
Mexican Bajio in the 18th Century, 1955). However, some caution is
required here. The reductionist models imposed in the Peruvian viceroy-
alty were not entirely successful, producing an increase in mestizaje and
disintegration. As historian Luis Miguel Glave has noted, the myth of
the colonial creation of the ‘Andean community’ was inescapably con-
nected to the reducciones imposed by the government of Viceroy Toledo
(1569–80). These ‘Andean communities’, according to Glave, were the
result of a colonial process and the event of imposition during the early
years.175 This confusion gave rise to the myth of an ‘illusory unaltered
continuity’ in peasant community social units, which still exists.176
Later, the local republican succession community, the work of
nineteenth- century Latin American modernity, was connected to the
disintegration of unity and the appearance of divisions, largely in the
sallqa or wild spaces of the Altiplano. This position is reductionist be-
cause it considers that the ‘Andean community’ was not only Andean in
origin, based around the ayllu or jatha, but also Spanish, as the conquis-
tadores would have brought organizational experience from their rural
communities with them.177 These continuist, essentialist focuses were
the product of a sort of inertia in Peruvian indigenism,178 still present
today in Andean studies, which analyse the peasant community social
units as frozen in time, without incorporating a historical dynamic. On
the contrary, Palomino insists on discontinuities – or, perhaps, ‘transfor-
mations with continuity’ – to reconcile continuity with change.179 In the
sociohistorical formation of the Andes, change and continuity are not
exceptional moments, but occur at the same time. Change permits the
creation of conditions and elements for a new social order, while conti-
nuity inserts these elements into a historical process that goes far back
in time and strives to reorient the process according to the new social
order imposed by the Spanish. Accordingly, continuity exists between
the ‘colonial community’ and the ‘republican community’, according to
Palomino, showing that these communities were not so self-sufficient,
but were already adapted to the changes inherent in capitalist relations
of production.180
At this point, a methodological problem arises. In a world where the
‘others’ are not so foreign or distant, can indigenous intellectuals who re-
search their own culture be called ethnohistorians? Does it make sense to
continue to speak of ‘ethno-ethnohistory’ (Turner, 1988) to understand
the indigenous perspective?181 Why not simply use the term anthropol-
ogy or history? But what anthropologies or what histories?182 John V.
Murra gave a tremendous boost to Andean ethnohistory as an anthro-
pological technique consistent in its analysis and in the reconstruction
of the social and cultural structures of ethnic groups who came into
contact with the European powers, from an ethnological reading of his-
torical sources. For many years, he personally oversaw the Ethnohistory
of South America section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies,
offering his readers up-to-date analyses of Andean studies. Undeniably,
one of his achievements was the reconstruction of the history of the An-
dean peoples on a level comparable to the refined civilizations of the
non-Western world. Interestingly, during all those years, Murra always
refused to define himself as a historian or an anthropologist. However,
some historians like Karen Spalding, who was deeply influenced by the
monumental work produced by Charles Gibson (1920–85) on the in-
digenous history of central Mexico, unequivocally recognized that the
association between anthropology and history was really quite close to
social history.183
In recent years, studies related to the social memories of political vio-
lence, domestic armed conflict and reconciliation politics have predom-
inated in Peru (Jelin, 2001, 2002; Theidon, 2004). Citizen participation
has also been a recurrent topic in social studies, emphasizing the pro-
cesses of democratization and changes in local power. Especially in the
Andean areas in the southern part of the country, this process had a
greater impact once the political violence of the Shining Path and the
‘dirty war’ of the 1980s ended, which made it possible for local gov-
ernments to begin a process of reinforcement and greater participation
(Starn, 1993). The proliferation of conflicts related to local governance,
the dismissal of authorities, legal accusations and even violent protests
were the result of new mechanisms of citizen participation in their lo-
cal governments (Degregori, 1993; Remy, 2005; Wiener, 2009). In sum-
mary, both now and then, it is clear that the Andean peoples were never
passive, indolent individuals, but actively participated in dynamics of
power, political representation and resistance in the colonial and post-
colonial context.
1.1.6 Brazil
In his study of ‘peripheral anthropologies’, the Brazilian anthropologist
Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira wrote that since the 1960s, it has been
possible to detect a growing critical awareness amongst anthropolo-
gists about the dichotomies of Western vs. non-Western (or indigenous),
metropole vs. satellite, foreign anthropologist vs. local anthropologist
and centre vs. periphery. These ‘culturally colonized’ anthropologies
challenged the hegemony of the metropolitan disciplines.184 Beginning
in the 1990s, the history of the Indians, which had been overlooked by
historians in Brazil, developed productively in the field of anthropol-
ogy, where the first critical voices emerged, challenging old conceptions
that viewed Indians as passive victims of conquest and colonization and
nothing else. Anthropologists and historians like Manuela Carneiro da
Cunha (1986, 1998: 7–15) and John Manuel Monteiro (1956–2013)
represented the first attempts to consider them as historical subjects.
In a work that was initially a doctoral thesis done at the University of
Chicago (1985), Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and
the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America (1994), Monteiro
rescued Indians from invisibility in the construction of the colonial soci-
ety and captaincy of Sao Paulo, showing that the dynamics of conquest
and colonialization to a large extent depended on the native popula-
tions, whose actions resulted from the dynamics of their own societies. A
productive interdisciplinary line of research focused on the presence and
actions of the Indians and blacks in regional histories and, more broadly,
on the history of Brazil itself (Monteiro, 1998). Both were galvanizing
agents behind the history of the Indians in contact with colonial and
postcolonial societies, transforming them, in turn, into historical agents.
Following these theoretical-methodological premises, several special-
ists have questioned canonical views of the past that deny the capacity
of the different ethnicities in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo in order to
(re-)construct their history.185 Not only did they survive Portuguese co-
lonialism, but they preserved their traditional uses and customs, remain-
ing village Indians until the nineteenth century.186
Far from disappearing, victims of a demographic collapse, gathered
into villages and forcibly converted, Brazilian Indians, bolstered by in-
tense political activism, have been constructing their identities. While
in recent years they have reacted particularly intensely to the ideology
of assimilation, this has not been free of some essentialization of their
cultural differences. The internalization of indigenous movements has
provided these groups with a forum to introduce re-ethnification in
the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. This is particularly true since
the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted on
13 September 2007 by the United Nations Assembly, which helped to
revitalize the identity of indigenous peoples such as the Mapuche com-
munities in Neuquen (Argentina),187 the Chamorros in Guam (Mariana
Islands, US)188 and the Guarani-Kaiowá and Terena in Mato Grosso do
Sul (Brazil), amongst others, appealing to their cultural particularisms
(dietary habits, language, clothing) in addition to the lands that federal
governments and states seized from their ancestors.
The case of the Kaiowá is representative of the demands made by in-
digenous peoples based on their own motivations and interests. After
being assigned to indigenous reserves by the Indian Protection Service
(SPI) between 1915 and 1928, the Kaiowá became the object of the state
education and agro-pastoral expansion policies enacted during the ‘New
State’ period of Getulio Vargas, which created a full-fledged federal col-
onization project.189 As a consequence of the capitalist exploitation of
national land, the Kaiowá were forced to live in very small areas in a
systematic and relatively violent confinement process. Discussions re-
lated to the indigenist legislation that was partially incorporated into
the Indian Statute and the new Federal Constitution of 1988 (Articles
231–232) – in part, drafted with the participation of notable anthropol-
ogists like Manuela Carneiro da Cunha190 – forced the Brazilian state to
ensure respect for ethnic and cultural diversity and guarantee the right of
Indians to permanently enjoy the lands they inhabit, using new territo-
rial strategies like re-territorialization to defend their areas.191 In 1995,
recognition and delimitation processes such as the Panambizinho Indig-
enous Land initiative were extended, allowing the Kaiowá in 2005 to
recover 1,272 hectares of what was a much larger territory in its day.192
The Terena leaders of the Buriti Indigenous Land in Mato Grosso
do Sul have also demanded the return of their ancestral lands. A large
amount of the Terena land was occupied by Paraguayan troops during
the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70), and armed resistance was not
sufficient to expel the invaders.193 Although the SPI in 1930 forced the
Terena to concentrate their people on 2,090 of the 17,200 hectares that
they occupied in the early twentieth century, beginning in 2000, the
National Indian Foundation (FUNAI, established in 1967) drafted a
proposal to extend the reduced area, but without much success.194 On
15 May 2013, a group of Terena occupied a parcel of land that they were
claiming as part of the lands of their ancestors. The parcel, property of
a local politician, was located in the municipality of Sidrolândia and
was occupied for two weeks until elite police troops violently evacuated
them, leaving one dead and several injured.195
This and other topics have compelled specialists to rethink indige-
nous ideas about the past to better understand Amerindian societies and
their role in historical processes.196 How can the diversity of indige-
nous concepts about the past be understood in the historical process?
To what point have the indigenous claims for rights and their successes
legitimated a specific field of academic activities for Brazilian Indians?
Is there one indigenous anthropology and history and other Western
histories? One might naively believe that multiculturalism provides the
bases for justice and equality applicable, on paper, to all citizens regard-
less of race, colour or social class. In Multicultural Dialogue: Dilem-
mas, Paradoxes, Conflicts, Randi Gressgård considers these questions
from the standpoint of the coexistence of differences in a single national
political space. Reconciling these opposites – dignity/equality, identity/
difference – requires asking whether it is possible to transfer theoretical
debates about the sociopolitical recognition of ethnic minorities to the
level of praxis. In other words, the liberty, dignity and equality of human
beings before the law are universal rights of modernity (Taylor, 1994).
At the same time, however, the question arises regarding the need to
protect the particular features and specific qualities of individuals and
human groups. Today, many indigenous communities like the Xavantes
in the territory of Mato Grosso have abandoned their traditional diet
based on cassava, pumpkin and sweet potatoes, introducing sugary
drinks and processed foods with added sugar that have led to the ap-
pearance of chronic illnesses like diabetes. As a consequence of these
nutritional imbalances, obesity and childhood mortality have soared,
altering the relationship between the Xavantes and their ecological
environment.197
Latin American nation-states have invisibilized ethnic minorities
(or minoritized majorities) in national construction projects, in many
cases forcing these ‘minorities’ to fight for their rights against national
companies (Brazilian, Peruvian, Bolivian) and corporations and power
groups that instrumentalize them for their own ends. In the state of
Mato Grosso do Sul, where most of the Guarani-speaking people of Bra-
zil live, there is a long history of appropriated manpower and land. For
the large livestock and mining corporations, the Indians continue to be
an obstacle to progress. Military governments, which are heavily biased
towards exploiting natural resources from a capitalist and developmen-
talist perspective, act against the interests of indigenous communities.
Currently, biofuels like soy and sugarcane have produced the diaspora
of thousands of peasants and indigenous peoples, which threatened to
become a type of urban sub-proletariat in the Amazon and doubtless
endangering the biodiversity of the region as well.198
In central Brazil, the Kayapo (‘Mebengokré’), an indigenous commu-
nity that live on the banks of the Xingu River, were able to build their
first airport in the middle of the forest. They invested large sums of
money to exploit the Maria Bonita Gold Mine, which entailed the inevi-
table transformation of their so-called traditional way of life, a transfor-
mation that was recorded on video for the first time.199 In this respect,
the book by John L. and Jean Comaroff Ethnicity, Inc. offers proposals
to understand and conceptualize an ethnicity that has transitioned away
from its primordialist, ontological dimension and the ability of human
groups to commercialize their culture as a consumer product. Contrary
to a traditional, monolithic image that defines ‘ethnic’ as something that
ascribes certain fixed, predetermined and ‘natural’ cultural patterns to
the individual, the Comaroffs consider ethnicity as a constantly evolving
cultural product. From this perspective, the concepts of ‘culture’, ‘soci-
ety’, ‘power’ and ‘social reality’ should not be analysed in the present,
but as the result of historical processes. 200 The image of the Kayapo
loading video cameras onto their shoulders, writing on laptop comput-
ers and dancing for tourists reveals the adaptive strategies with which
different peoples and nations delimit their identities and project them
outwards.201
In the northeast part of the country, the ‘misturado’ (or ‘mestiçado’)
mixed-blood Indians have constituted themselves as an ethnic commu-
nity in opposition to the ‘pure’ Indians of the past, who are idealized and
presented as mythical ancestors. 202 Starting with the concept of territori-
alization as a process of social reorganization that depends on historical
contingencies (the ‘ethnicities’ of the French colonies, the ‘reducciones’
and ‘resguardos’, or communal landholdings, in Spanish America, the
‘indigenous reserves’ in Brazil, etc.), anthropologist João Pacheco de Ol-
iveira emphasizes the inter-social context in which ethnic groups are
constituted in defined historical processes.203 Other anthropologists,
like Rodrigo de Azeredo Grünewald, see territoriality as a latent force
in any human group. Through a process of ethnic revitalization and
ethnogenesis, for example, the Indians living in the Atikum Indigenous
Land of the Uma Hills in the municipality of Carnaubeira da Penha have
constituted themselves as ethnic communities with full rights. 204 These
examples have led María Regina Celestino de Almeida to conclude that
‘villages operate as a possible space for the recreation of the ethnic iden-
tities of the diverse groups that have come together there’. 205
The theoretical renewal of indigenism, territoriality and the idea of
plural identities must then be analysed as an open process of cultural
exchanges (or flows, to borrow from Ulf Hannerz), through which ethnic
groups construct their own traditions in a dynamic social space. In the
opinion of anthropologist Paul E. Little, the theoretical renewal of the
concept of territoriality must pass through a historical reconstruction of
the collective memory of the groups involved.206 Again, the key is under-
standing what it means to be Indian. In the face of the indigenous illusion
of aboriginal purity, 207 R. Radhakrishan asks why he cannot simply be
an Indian without being an ‘authentic’ Indian, wondering whether au-
thenticity is really a ghetto built to satisfy the ruling world.208 In the
Uma Hills, toré (‘Indian science’) determines the Indianness that distin-
guishes the Atikum from whites.209 In this group, individuals who decide
at some point to live elsewhere, abandoning their indigenous ethos, are
no longer considered caboclos, the ‘civilized Indians of the Uma Hills’.
Those who choose to live in the Uma Hills come to be seen as members
of the Atikum ethnicity from the moment that they actively participate
in the toré, a dynamic body of knowledge on which the secret of the tribe
is based.210 According to the Constitution of 1988, for a land to be con-
sidered indigenous, its Indian inhabitants must establish a traditional,
stable and regular occupation on it.211 To satisfy this requirement, the
Atikum sought out the surrounding peoples who taught them toré, so
that they could demonstrate their ‘ethnic purity’. Additionally, recent
studies have shown that powerful inter-ethnic relationships between In-
dians from the villages of Rio de Janeiro require a rethinking of the
processes of mestizaje. Are ethnic groups – mestizos, Indians, blacks –
and social groups – Indians, non-Indians – monolithic blocks that act
with one voice according to the ethnic and/or social places and roles
attributed to them?212 The instrumental reason of the Brazilian state
has been based on the incorporation of some 220 distinct ethnic groups,
according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE),
into the national territory.213 However, from the indigenous perspec-
tive, this territoriality cannot be explained exclusively as the geopolitical
strategy of conflicting groups, but rather as a socioeconomic logic that
these ethnic groups instrumentalize to their own advantage.214
Notes

8 Amodio, 2010: 380, 383.


structure and archetype (White, 1987). Ginzburg has highlighted the con-
nections between White’s scepticism and Italian neo-idealism, similar to
relativist positions (Ginzburg, 2010b: 312, 387).


Greco-Roman culture or, on the contrary, they should be assimilated with
the American savages they found in the New World. In other words, ‘were
the French to the Ancients what the Amerindians were to the French?’
(Melzer, 2012: 166).

100 Knight, 1997: 82.
101 Despite the fact that they began their activities at almost the same time, the
Direction of Indigenous Affairs and the National Indigenist Institute never
merged (Marzal, 1993: 417).
102 In 1938, Cárdenas funded the creation of the National School of Anthro-
pology and History (ENAH). Four years later, in 1942, the ENAH merged
with the INAH to teach indigenous history and anthropology.
103 Marzal, 1993: 391–6.
104 De la Peña, 2008: 168.
105 According to Knight, despite denying the superiority or inferiority of the
‘races’, indigenist intellectuals accepted that they were all biologically de-
termined and therefore that ‘race’, as understood in Mexico (Indian, white
or Indo-European, mestizo, black), did indeed exist (Knight, 1997: 87).
106 Marzal, 1993: 393–4; Knight, 1997: 94.
107 One example is seen in the fights led by the indigenous teachers in one of
the poorest and most isolated regions of Mexico, La Montaña, Guerrero
(1950–2000). See the doctoral thesis by García Leyva, 2010: 206–25.
108 Parallel to mestizaje, the Chicano movement emerged as a new ethnic myth
that attracted many Mexicans and Latinos living in the United States.
This movement manipulated pre-Hispanic symbols, particularly Aztlan,
the legendary homeland of the first Aztecs. As Aztlan was located in the
southwest United States, many Chicanos believed themselves to be the de-
scendants of the Aztecs who migrated to found Mexico-Tenochtitlan (Klor
de Alva, 1992: 3–8). As Roger Bartra has observed, the Mexican national
character only has a mythological existence. For a critique of the myths
produced by the hegemonic culture in postcolonial Mexico, see Bartra,
1996.
109 On the contrary, Guy Rozat (1992) formulated an inevitable critique: the
indigenous texts of the conquest analysed by León Portilla and others are
not historical, but theological documents, and must be approached from
this perspective. In other words, the ‘viewpoint of the defeated’ is really
a discursive trick, given that the indigenous texts produced between the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were profoundly linked to a medieval
theological-historical culture.

12 Krotz, 2008: 44; De la Peña, 2008: 175–7.

1
113 Krotz, 2008: 45–7.

115 The ‘alien’ status of Mexican Indians contrasts with the national state’s
push to integrate them. The problem is how to overturn this alien status in
a land that, paradoxically, belongs to them (De Certeau, 1991).

119 De la Peña, 2008: 172. Also, El pasado indígena (1996) by Alfredo López
Austin and Leonardo López Luján criticized the neoliberal policies that
plunged the indigenous peoples into misery. While there were few weapons
of resistance, the most valuable, according to the authors, included ‘a cul-
tural legacy that, forged over 13 centuries during the entire Early Preclassic
period, formed the essence of Mesoamerica’ (2001: 306).
120 Bonfil, 2009: 229–33. See also Bonfil, 1970.
121 Tavárez & Smith, 2001: 19.
122 Bracamonte, 1994. For an analysis of the dialogue with interlocutors from
other cultures, see Wulf, 2008: 110.
123 De la Peña, 2008: 179.
124 De la Peña, 2008: 180.
125 On the contrary, during the first years of independence, Chilean patriots
lauded the rhetorical figure of the Araucanian (Mapuche) as the fighting
Indian, heroic and invincible against the Spanish invader (Gallardo, 2001:
119–34).
126 Thurner, 1997: 9; Husson, 2001: 132.
127 Thurner, 1997: 12.
128 Méndez, 2000: 27.
129 Méndez, 2004. With reason, Frank Salomon wrote that ‘the turn of the
twentieth century was a dark hour both for Andean peoples and for An-
dean studies’ (Salomon, 1985: 86).
130 Salomon, 1985: 88.
131 Andrés García, 2010: 31–2; Salomon, 1985: 88. In the early twentieth cen-
tury, the different Andean nations, like the Aymara, were integrated into
the empire of the Incas and, in turn, into the ‘Peruvian nation’ (Branca,
2017).

133 For a criticism of the heuristic value of the opposition between peninsu-
lares and criollos, see Acosta, 1984: 73–88; Acosta, 1981: 29–51; Gara-
vaglia, ‘Una breve nota acerca de los “patriotas criollos”’; Pérez Vejo, 2010:
169–212.
134 Koselleck, 2004a: 37–8.
135 Lavallé, 1993: 23–5.
136 Mazzotti, 1996: 173–4.
137 Céspedes del Castillo argues that the real distinction between criollos and
peninsulares is not due to the place of birth, although that was the basis for
the difference. Indeed, some ‘criollos’ were born in Spain and some ‘pen-
insulares’ in America (cited in Acosta, 1984: 80). See also Lavallé, 1993,
2007: 375–85.
138 Cañizares-Esguerra, 2001: 204–10, 2007: 29–36.
139 Cañizares-Esguerra, 1999: 33–68.
140 See Cañizares-Esguerra, 1999: 33–68.

144 Bauer & Mazzotti, 2009: 1–42. See also Garrett, ‘Locating “criollo”’,
2012: 139–65. See also García-Bedoya (2003: 182), who has highlighted
the Janus-faced aspect of criollo subjectivities.

146 Salomon, 1985: 92; Villar & Combès, 2012: 7–31.

48 Rowe, 1964: 1–19.

1

150 Velasco Alvarado, cited in Branca, 2017.
151 ‘Una apreciación etnológica de la visita’, in Díez de San Miguel, 1964:
421–44.
152 Ortiz de Zúñiga, Visita de la provincia de León de Huánuco (1967).
153 In The Vision of the Vanquished (1971), Wachtel studied the traumatic
effects of the conquest on modern Andeans.
154 Examples of the importance that Andean ethnohistorians have attributed
to oral memory can be found in Wachtel (1990) and Abercrombie (1998).
155 Stern, 1993, 71–9.
156 There is an extensive bibliography about the Taki Onqoy (Quechua, also
transliterated as Taqui Onqoy, Taki Unquy), categorizing it as a movement
that was millenarian (Nathan Wachtel; Pierre Duviols), nativist (Luís Mil-
lones), regional (Guillermo Cock; Mary Doyle; Steve J. Stern) and so on.
There is no room to go into the debate here. However, it should be noted
that the element of ideological resistance in this movement has often been
magnified, overlooking the sociopolitical interests of the persecutors and/
or ‘idolatry extirpators’ who, like Cristóbal de Albornoz (1530–?), sought
some form of personal promotion and recognition, an argument presented
by Gabriela Ramos in an interesting article that appears in her book, jointly
edited with Henrique Urbano (1991).
157 Pease, 1979: 136–9.
158 Ortiz Rescaniere, 1973.
159 Larson, 1999: 241–4; Silverblatt, ‘Foreword’, IX–XII; Fisher & O’Hara,
2009: 15–30.
160 Fisher & O’Hara, 2009: 11. See also Ares, 1999: 133–46; De la Cadena,
2000; Graubart, 2009: 471–99; Presta, 2009: 41–53.

62
1 Escobar, 1970: 162.
163 Fuenzalida et al., 1970. See also Salomon, 1982: 84.
164 Smith, 1984.
165 As João Pacheco de Oliveira has observed, the process of deterritorializing
the indigenous people of Brazil led to the administrative recognition of
their lands by the state, ‘resguardando-lhes a posse permanente e o usu-
fruto exclusivo das riquezas ali existentes’ (Pacheco de Oliveira, 1998: 45).
166 Abercrombie, 2012: 137–45.
167 Lorandi, 2012: 19–20.
168 Only some anthropologists, like Viveiros de Castro (1992), have suggested
other forms of historicity, in other words, alternative (native) forms of
looking at the past that have nothing to do with Western chronology and
the succession of historical events in time through documentary sources.
169 Rivera Andía, 2011: 423–31.

72 Fernández Juárez, 2000b: 176.

1
173 Fernández Juárez, 2000a: 291–2, 2000b: 171.

177 J. Mª Arguedas, Las comunidades de España y el Perú, Lima: Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Departamento de Publicaciones, 1968.

the Resurgence Group also tried to combine the different efforts to defend
Indians in Peru. One of its members, Luis Enrique Valcárcel (1891–1986),
published a book with a prologue by José Carlos Mariátegui: Tempestad
en los Andes (1927). In this book, Valcárcel not only strongly criticized the
negative effects of mestizaje, but also defended a homogenous Andean cul-
ture, condemning the lack of a national spirit and calling for a new indige-
nous leader to lead this protest movement (Andrés García, 2010: 230–42).
179 Palomino, 2010: 22.
180 Palomino, 2010: 22, 45.

182 Pease and Saignes, cited in Lorandi, 2012, 19–20.
183 Spalding, 1984. In her book De indio a campesino (1974), Spalding called
for a study of the Andean world similar to what Gibson did with Mexico
(Pérez Zevallos, 2001: 109).
184 Cited in Krotz, 2008: 47–8. Cardoso de Oliveira’s first field study anal-
ysed the assimilation of the Terena Indians of Mato Grosso do Sul into the
world of the whites. (Eremites de Oliveira, 2009: 10–11).
185 Gambini, 1988.
186 Almeida, 2012: 113.
187 Kradolfer, 2011: 44–51. For a recent historical-anthropological analysis of
Mapuche shamanism, see Bacigalupo, 2016.
188 Pérez, 2005: 571–91.
189 Lourenço, 2008; Maciel, 2012: 25–39.
190 ‘Manuela Carneiro da Cunha: una antropóloga militante’. http://revista
pesquisa.fapesp.br/es/2009/12/01/una-antropologa-militante/
191 Maciel, 2012: 25–31. See also Little, 2002: 14.
192 Maciel, 2012; Maciel, ‘Após medio século: Terra Indígena Panambiziho’
(manuscript).
193 Eremites de Oliveira, 2009: 11.
194 Marques Pereira, 2009: 23–44.

96 Ventura, 2015: 53–65.

1
197 http://app.folha.uol.com.br/#noticia/581422 (consulted 10/08/2015).

99 Turner, 1992: 5–16; Altez, 2012: 137.

1
200 More than a political recourse that is automatically activated in situations
of conflict, ethnicity appears as ‘a labile repertoire of signs by means of
which relations are constructed and communicated; through which a col-
lective consciousness of cultural likeness is rendered sensible’ (Comaroff &
Comaroff, 2009: 38).

202 Pacheco de Oliveira, 2004: 19.
203 Pacheco de Oliveira, 2004: 22–3.
204 ‘[…] eles não são um caso de perdas que um grupo específico sofreu até se
tornar residuo de um cultura aborígene prévia; ao contrário, trata-se de
um agrupamento de pessoas de diversas origens étnicas (índios descen-
dentes de diversos grupos distintos, negros e brancos) que, ameaçadas
de perderem seu recurso básico (a terra), resolvem constituir-se como co-
munidade indígena e atribuir a si próprios tradições, tais como o órgão
tutor exigia para o reconhecimento de reservas indígenas no Nordeste’. De
Azeredo Grünewald, 2004: 140.
205 Almeida, 2012: 113.
206 Little, 2002: 11.
207 De Azeredo Grünewald, 2004: 140, 172.
208 Pacheco de Oliveira, 2004: 37. See also Little, 2002: 22–3; Almeida, 2010:
47–60.
209 De Azeredo Grünewald, 2004: 166–7.
210 De Azeredo Grünewald, 2004: 167.

212 Almeida, 2012: 114.
213 According to the 2000 census, these 200 groups together contain 734,000
individuals who speak 180 languages or 0.4% of the Brazilian population
(Dos Santos Luciano & Baniwa, 2006: 12).

2 Historical-Anthropological
“Masters of Thought”
I mean, whatever anthropology is, I think it is most fruitful to think in

processual terms so that explanations can be found in the unfolding of
social forms over time. But I shy away from abstract discussions.1
This chapter reviews the work of a number of anthropologists whose

undertakings are not formally defined as historical anthropology. How-
ever, they were pioneers in a form of anthropological thinking that es-
tablished this line of research, even though these authors may not share
or may not have shared our interpretation. As E.P. Thompson would
say, they are not notable for the construction of (theoretical) models or
categories, but for identifying new problems and the possibility of seeing
old problems in new ways.2 To solve this methodological problem, the
chapter considers the work of several true anthropological ‘masters of
thought’3: Julio Caro Baroja, Marshall Sahlins, Jean and John Coma-
roff, Eric Wolf and William Christian Jr., because of their observations
on the diachronic analysis of society within the context of more general
social theory.
2.1 Julio Caro Baroja: A Modern Classic

It would be a real sin not to dedicate a few pages of this book to the
oeuvre and contributions of Julio Caro Baroja. Although this author is
cited and recognized by historians, he has not received the attention that
he deserves, especially from anthropologists, despite being one of the
pioneers and leading exponents of a history and anthropology that are
original, erudite and inspiring.4
There is not sufficient space here to provide the type of full overview
and analysis already done by other authors like Castilla Urbano (2002)
and more (Marrosan Charola, 1993; Maraña, 1995; Ortiz García, 1996,
2005; Paniagua Paniagua, 2003; Alvar Ezquerra, 2006; Fuster García,
2014) on the education, career and conceptual and empirical developments
of this thinker from Itzea, Spain. Castilla Urbano’s study is an extraordi-
nary guide to the body of work by Caro Baroja, an oeuvre so prolific that
“Masters of Thought” 55
it would be impossible to cover and synthesize in its entirety. This chapter
instead focuses on a selection of his main theories, which will reappear at
times throughout this book. One of them, the inspiration for this volume,
is the premise that as history and anthropology never really should have
been separated the question of marrying them is not at stake.
Other sections of this book examine the specific ideas and contents of
some of Caro Baroja’s works, especially those dedicated to marginalized
and persecuted minorities and forms of religiosity in modern Spain. Un-
like the English-language authors discussed in this chapter and despite
the fact that they have been reluctant to specify any methods for histori-
cal anthropology, Caro Baroja was even more elusive in this respect and
not only in the field of historical anthropology. In fact, he reveals his
methods in the works themselves, between the lines. To a certain extent,
this makes us wonder if this book is revealing a secret that could jeopar-
dize the very workings of historical anthropology, an operation that can
only be done by stitching together investigations and not by theorizing
about them.
As a person, Caro Baroja is a story in and of himself and, as he noted,
a biography, and it is possible to observe the changes in his basic princi-
ples and methods. His early years were influenced by the Vienna school
and the German diffusionist and historical-cultural method. He was
more concerned with the question of the origins of cultural phenom-
ena, their dissemination and their link to other traditions, as seen in
his work on rural life in the Basque Country.5 Soon, however, he in-
corporated Robert H. Lowie’s critiques of Wilhelm Schmidt’s cultural
circle theory for having fallen into a type of ontological metaphysics of
purities. Without dismissing the cycle theory (which he would later draw
on once again to rescue historian Ibn Khaldun from oblivion before he
was claimed by the Maghreb world), Caro Baroja rejected functionalist
ahistoricism and methodological historicism to search for explanations
about the past in the present.6 His misgivings about theorizing gener-
alizations explain why he did not leave behind a conscious theoretical
legacy; the author preferred to give voice to the data, so that they would
not be manipulated by theories. This, however, was an argumentative
recourse, since there was an explanatory epistemology behind his work,7
much as in the work of William Christian Jr.
Caro Baroja’s theoretical revisions continued with a critique of the
psychology of peoples as essentialist and of the racialist theories in vogue
in Franco’s Spain, which he challenged in works like Los pueblos de
España (The Peoples of Spain, 1946). With his 1949 work Análisis de
la cultura: Etnología, Historia, Folklore (An Analysis of Culture: Eth-
nology, History, Folklore), Caro Baroja distinguished himself from the
postulators of functionalism by proposing the practice of a functional-
ism with closer ties to history. In this shift, he used the work done in the
1950s by Jakob von Uexküll and E.E. Evans-Pritchard as his models.
56 “Masters of Thought”
In practice, beginning in 1949, he established relationships with anthro-
pologists from America such as George Foster, who he accompanied
around Spain, and England such as Julian Pitt-Rivers. After receiving
a scholarship, he met Evans-Pritchard in England in 1952. During this
time, Caro remarked that Evans-Pritchard’s functionalism inspired him,
unlike that of Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, lead-
ing him to his diachronic and historical perspective, a bizarre reconcili-
ation at the time if analysed in its context.
It is no coincidence that Caro Baroja’s research on the Maghreb de-
veloped in the midst of these notable influences. His work on the Sahara
was the expression of these new insights. After accepting the position
from the Director General of Morocco and the Colonies José Díaz de
Villegas, despite the misapprehensions that characterized his relation-
ship with institutions, Caro Baroja embarked upon an intense field study
that produced an impressive quantity of data on the social structure of
the Saharan tribes and on historical aspects that would later take on new
meaning as the decolonization conflict consolidated.8 His work became
foundational for the Sahrawis themselves, who cite and know it, much
like the kastomu of the Kwaio people, who turned to Roger Keesing
to compile and raise the profile of their endangered culture. The func-
tionalist ethnography of the Awlad Tidrarin tributary tribe is presented
separate from the more historical chapters on Ma al-‘Aynin, a separation
that was criticized in J.S. Canby’s review of the book (1957) in American
Ethnologist. Less well known is his work on Ibn Khaldun, a real trea-
sure that predicted the later application of the North African author’s
theories by paragons like Gellner (1986) and Bonte et al. (1991). This
book contains substantial observations that would be taken up years
later by ethnographers of the Maghreb who were not even familiar with
Caro Baroja’s work, one example being the open and constructed nature
of nasab or genealogy (Caro Baroja, 1955a, 1955b, 1957a, 1957b).
This period also saw the publication of an article on historical research
and the methods of ethnology (1955), in line with Evans-Pritchard’s so-
cial history project, which he advocated during his 1950 conference and
in his work on the Sanusis (Evans-Pritchard, 1973). His publication on
morphology and functionalism is a compilation of conferences held at
the Spanish Institute for Political Studies. In it, Caro Baroja criticizes the
practice of homologies by authors who erroneously apply terms from one
time period to describe phenomena from another, such as ‘capitalism’,
‘totemism’ and ‘witchcraft’. The morphological method seems to exclude
what cannot be compared according to its own criteria. Moreover, this
method would have led to an obsessive search for the origins of things,
without being based on substantiated sources, as evolutionism had done.
During this time, Caro Baroja’s ideas involved extending function-
alism to the study of history; it made no sense to establish morpholog-
ical comparisons between societies when what was important was to
contrast the functions of different parts of a society and the relation-
ships between them. Here, Caro Baroja was responding to Malinows-
ki’s idea that it was not possible to reconstruct the history of primitive
peoples using their own sources, arguing instead that it was possible for
societies that have a knowable past in view of their numerous and var-
ied sources.9 However, although Caro Baroja was proposing to extend
the inspiration of a more sociological functionalism, he still argued for
maintaining a balance with the study of personalities and psychology,
above all using the biographical method that he would develop in later
works like El señor inquisidor y otras vidas por oficio (Mr Inquisitor
and Other Lives by Trade) and Vidas mágicas e Inquisición (Magical
Lives and the Inquisition).
After Caro Baroja’s direct contact with functionalism and the consid-
erations he expressed in his 1955 article, the author began shaping what
he himself would call functional-structuralism or historical structural-
ism. His book on Los moriscos del reino de Granada (The Moorish
Kingdom of Granada), which appeared in 1957, serves as an example
of this new way of doing social history, as the subtitle ‘A Social History
Essay’ suggests. Castilla Urbano (2002: 123), however, insists on Caro
Baroja’s reluctance to define a method, which he viewed as a burden if
applied mechanically.10 In fact, this reticence may have been due to a
fear that restrictive methods inhibit the imagination and the formulation
of new approaches or the reformulation of existing ones during research.
In truth, Caro Baroja was not barricading himself against a method, but
rather against ‘the method’. He argued that everyone should be able to
pave their own way using a synthesis of influences, but without the aim
of creating a school.
At the same time, Caro Baroja was anticipating criticisms of function-
alist staticism vs. a confrontational view of society, but without at any
moment adopting the Marxist perspective of Eric J. Hobsbawm or the
moral economy of E.P. Thompson, both of which were being developed
by those authors at the time. This viewpoint was consolidated in his
historical works on ethnic and religious minorities, primarily focused on
witchcraft, the Moriscos and the Jews (Caro Baroja, 1957a, 1961, 1962,
1967). Caro Baroja demonstrated the continuities in the accusations and
attitudes towards these marginalized groups, based on exclusionary du-
alist doctrines. The study of history made it possible to see regularities
and points of comparison between the groups being studied as well as
the processes of exclusion.
While, on the one hand, he challenged functionalism with the appli-
cation of a diachronic focus, on the other, he found inspiration in the
techniques of functionalist anthropology, which he used for the study of
‘primitives’ and applied to the study of marginalized European groups
in complex societies. Excluded minorities could only be understood in
relation to majority groups, from forms of inclusion or exclusion, like
purity-of-blood statutes, ties to power, contacts with outside societies or
forms of residence.11 The (alleged) difference with the societies studied
by functionalist anthropology is that complex societies have many more
documentary sources. While true in some cases, this assertion must be
qualified, since the colonial documentation retrieved by the many au-
thors cited in this book indicates a rich universe of sources for so-called
simple non-European societies, not to mention the fact that a large part
of non-Western humanity has also lived in complex societies. Caro Baro-
ja’s work also distanced itself from classic functionalism by paying atten-
tion to conflict and change, not only order and reproduction. In contrast
to theoretical speculation (whether anthropological or historicist), Caro
Baroja placed greater importance on the datum, on its context in specific
situations, and not so much on abstractions. But his craftsmanship de-
veloped over the years. His 1957 study on the Moriscos was still based
on published works and not on unpublished documents in contrast to his
work on the Jews, which took him into the archives.
With the diachronic study of societies, the concept of social history of-
fered the same academic guarantees as social anthropology by address-
ing its synchronic analysis.12 In this exercise, participant observation
was replaced by contrasting the different sources gathered from this past
society. Indeed, despite his distrust of methodologies, Caro Baroja en-
gaged in a constant ‘epistemological surveillance’ when, for example, he
stressed the fact that within the same society, different views of witch-
craft existed. As in other cases, it was necessary to diversify sources,
bearing in mind that they are partial.
Society cannot be seen as a static entity and, above all, cannot be
viewed as an ordered entity. Although Caro Baroja would emphasize the
importance of conceiving of the cultural as material, he did not adopt
the Marxist method due to his qualms about canonizations in general.
His explanations of conflicts include what could be seen as a kind of
shocking and overlapping chronology between different ways of under-
standing the world: people who embody ideas from another time that no
longer fit the world they live in, the peasant who is viewed as supersti-
tious or insane because he is convinced of things that were considered
completely normal a few years earlier.13 The relationship with the envi-
ronment also changes, but not as expressed in theories of adaptation;
if this were the case, all peoples living in similar conditions would be
the same or would not change. Human beings are shaped not by the
environment, but by their interpretation of it. Caro Baroja would use
the term ‘surrounding world’ to describe the physical and social envi-
ronment as interpreted by humans, which transforms and is conflictive
in its dynamic. One way of showing these disparities, especially between
ways of seeing the world (a kind of ‘un-synchronicity’) is by using the
biographies of individuals as they face the dominant forms of defining
the universe.
One of the main techniques used by Caro Baroja in his project was
precisely the biography, which appears in several of his works. Indeed,
his lecture upon becoming a member of the Royal Spanish Academy
focused on the biography. Individual histories can be used to create
a portrait of a time, a way to reconstruct an entire society. Other au-
thors have followed this path as well, most notably Eickelman (1992)
in Knowledge and Power in Morocco, in which he traces the history of
twentieth- century rural Morocco through a scholar from Boujad, com-
bining historical documentation with a life history.
2.2 Marshall Sahlins: Culture, Practical Reason

and History
Marshall Sahlins (1930–) is a prolific author who began his fieldwork in
the Fiji Islands and his academic career in the 1950s under the influence
of the cultural neo-evolutionism of Leslie White as well as the works of
Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi. His critical perspective led him, in fact, to
oppose the war in Vietnam from the university campus, developing the
concept of the teach-in, along with his friend and colleague Eric Wolf.14
After new fieldwork in New Guinea (Tribesman, 1968), Sahlins devel-
oped a critique of formalist economic anthropology and chronocentrism
that entailed the analysis of other peoples and periods from a liberal per-
spective. In his book Stone Age Economics (1972), he presented a critique
of classic evolutionist theories and the very idea of progress on the un-
derstanding that Palaeolithic societies and contemporary hunter-gatherer
societies did not, in fact, live in a state of scarcity and poverty. This hy-
pothesis tied the growing social and political complexity to the origin of
the state as the driving force behind human misery and inequality and the
construction of human needs as a product of culture, not nature.15
Sahlins’s later work (Culture and Practical Reason, 1976) contains
several parallels with the models of Anthony Giddens (1938–) and Pierre
Bourdieu (1930–2002), in its attempt to formulate a theory of praxis
that can overcome the dichotomy between social action and struc-
ture.16 Most significant here, however, are his ideas about the analysis of
change and time in anthropology. In Islands of History (Chicago, 1985),
Sahlins argues that culture and history cannot be analysed as distinct
entities. Cultural patterns (culture) function because of a revaluation of
practice and action (history), and structure is also a historical object. His
theories regarding anthropology and history focused on a series of ap-
proaches like the ‘functional revaluation of categories’ to show that the
old names on everybody’s lips acquire connotations far removed from
their original meaning.
In ‘Other Times, Other Customs’ (1983), Sahlins reflected on how
the idea of history is culturally constructed. In modern Europe, a deci-
sive change occurred in the concept of history, which transitioned from
heroic history, based on royal chronicles, the history of the elites and
‘memorable’ battles and events to a ‘popular’ history. In heroic history,
practice is identified with cosmic order and human action is synonymous
with divine action (providentialism). Social time is calculated based on
the royal genealogies of absolute monarchs or semi-divine figures, and
people imagine their own biographies according to the chronological
time of chiefs, gods and kings. Sahlins presents some examples of these
forms: societies with divine monarchs, for instance, in Europe with re-
gard to Ernst Kantorowicz’s theory (1957) on the double body of the
king and the symbolism of power in the African coronation ceremonies
studied by Luc de Heusch (1986). The death of a chief or king causes
chaos in the universe and in society, which must be restored through
the appointment (or coronation) of a new leader. Sahlins contrasts the
modern European view with societies like the Maoris, which he studied:
[…] where Western thought struggles to comprehend the history

of contingent events that it makes for itself by invoking underlying
forces or structures, such as those of production or mentalité, the
Maori world unfolds as an eternal return, the recurrent manifesta-
tion of the same experiences.17
According to Sahlins, the natives developed a mythical-practical ra-

tionality consisting of commemorating elements (myths) from the past
(much like Balandier’s model [1989]). As an example, the author de-
scribes the case of the anti-British Maori rebellion of 1844–46. The
central motivation for this uprising was closely related to the local my-
thology about cosmogenesis and focused on destroying the masts flying
the British colours, because for the Maoris, the poles, known as tûâhu,
were a symbol of power that represented their ancient claims to the land.
The attack on the masts expressed their discontent with the 1840 Treaty
of Waitangi, by which the Maoris yielded sovereignty to the queen of
England. Although the treaty supposedly respected Maori control over
their lands, for the Maoris there was no possible distinction between
political sovereignty and property, and the flagstaff represented political
power and control over the land.
Sahlins highlights the myriad confusions in the social sciences be-
tween history and change, as if persistence or connections between the
past and present were not part of the problem. Here, Sahlins agrees with
Nisbet’s (1979) idea about persistence:
From there it is only a small logical step to the confusion of history

with change, as if the persistence of structure through time […] were
not also historical. But again, Hawaiian history is surely not unique
in the demonstration that culture functions as a synthesis of stability
and change, past and present, diachrony and synchrony.18
Sahlins criticizes the theoretical opposition between history and struc-
ture. In many currents of thought, one of the basic premises is the con-
traposition of stability and change, the static and the dynamic. This
premise is based on a confusion between history and change. In other
words, reproduction and persistence are also part of history. In Sah-
lins’s concept of reproduction, this does not amount to a lack of change
or movement; rather, the generation that reproduces the categories of a
culture is not done in the same way, even though it is formally presented
and self-represents thus:
[…] the more things remained the same the more they changed, since
every such reproduction of the categories is not the same. Every re-
production of culture is an alteration, insofar as in action, the cate-
gories by which a present world is orchestrated pick up some novel
empirical content.19
This is all due to the fact that culture is a creation in action. Human expe-
rience is based on the appropriation of specific perceptions through gen-
eral concepts that order the world in an arbitrary and historical way, and
the use of concepts in empirical contexts submits cultural meanings to
practical revaluations. In this way, ‘traditional’ categories also transform,
although this transformation is relative because ‘things must preserve
some identity through their changes, or else the world is a madhouse’.20
From this concept of mytho-praxis, Sahlins also developed the con-
cept of the ‘structure of the conjuncture’ to grapple with the role of
social action in structures. Sahlins proposed a model similar to Gid-
dens’s ‘structuring structures’ or Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ or ‘constructivist
structuralism’ that allows for an area of individual freedom for agents
and/or actors within the limits imposed by these structures.21 The model
opens the way for a ‘political culture’ in general and concepts of justice,
authority and power in particular, by questioning how the reproduction
of a structure becomes its transformation. 22 Thus, the norms, values
and symbols shared by a social, ethnic and religious community con-
stitute fundamental elements to understand collective and individual
behaviours.
In the early 1990s, Sahlins’s thesis (1981, 1985), which he had applied
to the history of Hawaii and, especially, the presence, death and myth-
ification of Captain James Cook in 1779 was contested by Gananath
Obeyesekere (1992). This led to a passionate debate on the relationship
between anthropology and history. 23 The case demonstrated the diffi-
culties inherent in interpreting the past (and the present) and the emer-
gence of different interpretative alternatives. A debate centred on how
the Hawaiians understood Captain Cook before and after his death.
One of the main questions concerned whether the priests of Kuali’i had
regarded Cook as the god Lono before he was killed (Sahlins) or if he had
really always been seen as a colonizer who was made into a god a pos-
teriori (Obeyesekere). 24 This case broaches a central topic where several
problems that influence the work of the anthropologist converge: how do
other peoples understand themselves and the world around them? The
interpretation of what the natives supposedly thought about Captain
Cook contains a debate between universalism and relativism, the differ-
ent models to explain social action and the epistemological determinants
in the different analyses, in this case, of Sahlins and Obeyesekere.
Obeyesekere accused Sahlins of projecting a mythical thinking
(mytho-praxis) onto the Hawaiians that led them to believe that Captain
Cook was a god (and that they would put a ritual end to him, as they did
with one of the gods in their mythology), when in reality the Hawaiians’
political behaviour was rational, characterized by practical reasons to
expel a potential enemy. Moreover, Sahlins had incorrectly interpreted
the sources based on the testimonies of Cook’s companions, given that
they were not fluent in Polynesian languages and confused a god with
a political chief. Sahlins, therefore, should have studied the mythology
of the British. To argue that the Hawaiians conceived of these men as
gods implied, on the one hand, accepting that these were ‘superstitious’
peoples or, in other words, homogenizing ‘native’ Hawaiian culture in
terms of cultural purity, while, on the other, obscuring the devastating
effects of British colonialism in the Pacific.
Obeyesekere’s accusations regarding Sahlins’s ethnocentrism and
lack of ethical commitment received a solid response from the Amer-
ican anthropologist in How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook,
For Example (1995). While Obeyesekere portrayed Cook as a powerful
chief with unquestionable ‘divine’ qualities that were instrumentalized
by King Kalani’opu’u to his own advantage, Sahlins avoided these dual-
isms (‘divine’, ‘human’) to argue that rationality is not universal, but a
characteristic of Western thinking. He warned of the danger of falling
into the trap of rationalist universalism, observing that a historical event
is constructed culturally from a specific symbolic logic. Even if the Ha-
waiians allied themselves militarily with the Europeans, it did not mean
that they lost their ‘divine’ qualities, but that they were integrated into a
world of multiple incarnations – because of Cook’s powerful qualities,
they could turn him into the kino lau of Lono – for sociopolitical reasons
that ultimately depend on the historical context of the time. Similarly, if
the Hawaiians decided to attack them, they did so with the potentially
full awareness that these were gods.25
Sahlins’s did not stop there. In Apologies to Thucydides: Understand-
ing History as Culture and Vice Versa (2004), the author vindicated
historical anthropology, comparing different ways of thinking about the
past. To that end, he reconstructed and established parallels between
the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BCE)
and the Fijian War (1843–55) between the kingdoms of Bau and Rewa
using texts by Thucydides and the Methodist missionary John Hunt.
This comparative study reveals conflicting power structures between a
model of societies with exemplary displays of ritual power – Athens and
Bau, respectively – different to that of Sparta and Rewa. There is a ba-
sic contradiction in this comparison, which criticizes the universalism
of Thucydides from a universalizing perspective that allows Sahlins to
make his historical comparison. Throughout this work, Sahlins presents
different models of historical change and the way in which historical
contingencies are constituted by the cultural order, in a sort of neo-
culturalism. Sahlins continued this type of intellectual exercise, espe-
cially in his historical study of the illusion of the Western idea of human
nature (Sahlins, 2005, 2008).
In conclusion, in his search for a method for historical anthropol-
ogy, Sahlins’s work has passed from materialist neo-evolutionism (Stone
Age Economics, 1972) to a culturalist approach. Anthropologists Adam
Kuper and Jonathan Friedman have both observed an excess of cultural
determinism in Sahlins’s work, 26 with Sahlins swinging to the other side
of the pendulum after applying Marxist materialism in his early years.
The structural definition of culture would therefore imply considering
it as an a priori to the historical event.27 Other critics have emphasized
the dangers of a relativism that seeks to recognize different concepts of
time and history, precluding a common front for comparison or ‘objec-
tivation’, as observed by Jan Vansina. 28 The dichotomy between myth
and history opened the debate on the forms of history and temporality,
particularly in those societies ‘not exclusively determined by the evolu-
tion of the state institution and colonial domination’. 29
In any case, Sahlins’s contribution was clearly to shake the anthropo-
logical discipline out of its ‘intellectual laziness’ in the study of global-
ization. The traditional subject of anthropology was not disappearing,
as suggested by postmodern philosophy, but anthropology needed to
analyse the new dialectic between different worlds in contact and their
power relations, as Sahlins suggested in his illuminating article ‘What is
Anthropological Enlightenment?’ (1999), where he challenges concepts
of change that are not always suited to observing processes of domina-
tion or indigenous strategies to appropriate modernity.
2.3 Jean and John L. Comaroff: Ethnography and

Historical Imagination
The oeuvre of Jean (1946–) and John (1945–) Comaroff is rich and com-
plex. It includes a variety of monographs on South Africa and the mod-
ern colonial and capitalist world, in addition to theoretical endeavours
that recover the humanism of the discipline without forgoing the rigor of
the social sciences, the contribution of the classics and considerations of
the problem of change and power relations.30
From the time that they met while studying anthropology at the Uni-
versity of Cape Town, their personal and academic lives have merged,
beginning with their primary ethnographic work amongst the Barolong
boo Ratshidi, part of the Tswana chiefdoms living along the South
Africa-Botswana border. Work that began in 1969 and was extended
with later visits to the area allowed them to construct a diachronic per-
spective of these societies, and they have written numerous works on the
political and religious history of the Tswanas that combine an analysis
of social agencies and structures with the dialectical tension between
the micro and the macro, viewing power relations as the engine of his-
tory (Jean Comaroff, 1985; Comaroff & Comaroff, 1991). One of their
most important studies of the historical process is a work published in
two volumes, Of Revelation and Revolution (Comaroff & Comaroff,
1991, 1997), which reconstructs the concept of hegemony and its so-
cial effectiveness as an unconscious form inserted into the world taken
for granted (Donham, 2001; Merry, 2003). This dynamic perspective is
also incorporated into the study of African rituals from their more so-
ciopolitical dimension (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1993). Contrary to the
classic assumptions that present ritual exclusively as a mechanism for
social reproduction and cultural continuity, the research in these vol-
umes observes that ritual is also a setting and means of experimental
practice, subversion and transformative action, in short, a vehicle for
‘history-in-the-making’, legitimating the world or modifying it.31
Throughout all of their work runs a thread that ties local analysis to
large global processes, as in their analysis of the late twentieth-century
capitalist world (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2000) and the forms that vio-
lence and the state take in the postcolonial world (Comaroff & Coma-
roff, 2006). It also appears in their recent work on new ethnicities and
their adaptation to market capitalism (analysed in the epilogue to this
book) (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009).
Of all these thought-provoking works, the ambitious proposal that
they present in the introduction to Ethnography and the Historical
Imagination (1992) is, without a doubt, one of the most commendable
contributions to any consideration ‘in praise of historical anthropology’.
The key elements:
• Rethink the method. At no time do the authors declare an intention

to construct a theoretical model. They base their work not only on
the Marxist tradition of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) and Ray-
mond Williams (1921–88), but also the post-structuralism of Mi-
chel Foucault. However, at a time of postmodern deconstruction/
destruction when anthropology revolved around ‘American aca-
demics agonizing about themselves’, the Comaroffs argued that an-
thropology should still be distinguishable by its method more than
its theories, terminology or the object of study. Ethnography would
continue to be the basic tool to produce knowledge.32
• To see this idea through, it would be necessary to redefine a
neo-modern anthropology. In a world of transformations, anthro-
pology could not remain dormant, witnessing a disappearing world;
rather, an anthropology of change needed to develop. To face this
challenge, it was necessary to rethink the dualisms that dominate
both society and social theory and that set categories up against
each other: tradition and modernity, the group and the individual,
ritual and rational, and more.
• Anthropology also contributed to these oppositions, excluding cer-
tain societies from history for lacking a written language, emphasiz-
ing the sphere of tradition, social reproduction or cosmology instead
of analysing change or chaos. This challenge required opening up
to different concepts of history and defining this changing world
within the ‘new modern world’. It made no sense to apply a sterile
universalism to which the concept of history is exported from the
colonizing centre. Instead, the world needed to be thought of as the
generation of new hybrid forms where local agents and societies cre-
ate their own view and adaptation of modernity.
Faced with the ‘postmodern drift’, which reduced anthropology to a

textual dimension, depriving it of any cognitive value, the Comaroffs
thought about a way to construct an anthropological science situated
in history and how to continue to return to the contributions of direct
observation. How was it possible to do modern, global ethnographies
that explain the constitutive practices of social action?33 Paradoxically,
ethnographies that demonstrated ethnocentrism and false Western uni-
versalisms also often accompanied colonial expansion. However, eth-
nographic work is inherently paradoxical, since it must recognize the
presence of the researcher.
This recognition of epistemological limits, however, does not mean
that the society being studied cannot be represented. Here, the Coma-
roffs criticized postmodern authors like James Clifford and George C.
Marcus, for whom anthropology is primarily reduced to texts, that is,
to interpretation, to hermeneutics and not to the contexts that produce
them. The idea that it was not possible to write ‘about others’ led to
relativist extremes that the Comaroffs ironically mocked, recalling some
graffiti from the London School of Economics washroom that said, ‘Is
Raymond Firth real, or just a figment of the Tikopean imagination?’34
Amidst the postmodern tempest, the Comaroffs tried to elevate
ethnography:
Ethnography […] is not a vain attempt at literal translation […] It is

a historically situated mode of understanding historically situated
contexts […] We tell of the unfamiliar […] to confront the limits of
our own epistemology, our own visions of personhood, agency, and
history.35
This project also challenges the object of study itself. Who and what
should ethnography study? According to the authors, it would be a mis-
take to reserve anthropology for the study of the ‘local’ or ‘regional’, as
if it could not analyse ‘global’, that is, general and complex, phenom-
ena.36 Rather, they propose to take anthropology to an ‘awkward scale’
(2003), to do local work within a global analytical framework.37
2.3.1 A Proposal for a Provisional and Reflexive Historical

Anthropology
The idea behind historical anthropology does not consist of thinking
that anthropology should adopt a historical perspective and vice versa,
as Saurabh Dube seems to argue.38 The historian does not just have to
read archival material with an ‘anthropological filter’; the anthropolo-
gist does not just have to accept the historical dimension of fieldwork.
Rather, it requires recognizing that the division is impossible, since all
theories of society must incorporate a theory of history.39 Historians
like Carlo Ginzburg and E.P. Thompson did approach human groups
from other periods in a way similar to the approach used by anthropol-
ogists to understand ‘exotic’ cultures, sharing the problem of grasping
the native point of view from another place and time. This also involved
studying non-hegemonic groups under-represented in the official history.
More was at stake than ‘giving voice to the other’. Contextualization in
the framework of relations of power and domination was required in
order to analyse the silences, exclusions and over-representations.
The Comaroffs’ proposal is neo-modern, in that it considers the possi-
bility of objectivation but using a provisional and reflexive strategy. The
objective is not to distinguish between an ideological history and a real
history, but to understand that a focus that envisages ‘historical stages’ is
also a (Eurocentric) myth that presents itself as universal when it is really
parochial.40 Instead of the European tendency to put itself at the centre
of historical developments, the focus should be placed on studying other
forms of historical consciousness and how they are constructed and es-
sentialized by individuals and cultures.
Committing to historical anthropology must begin with an analysis of
the responses given to the strange flirtation between anthropology and his-
tory. When E.E. Evans-Pritchard used the famous Marett lecture at Exeter
College, Oxford, in 1950 to declare that his goal was to do ‘social history’,
to what exactly was he referring? To the perception that, at heart, an-
thropologists must interrogate the researcher’s modern subjects plain and
simple, using the entire arsenal of social theory to that end? To delve into
this challenge, the Comaroffs distinguished three overarching concepts:
• The mechanical analysis of structural time: society functions based

on a series of contradictions and conflicts that do not transform the
system but reinforce it. This was the British functionalist metaphor,
also used by French neo-Marxists like Claude Meillassoux (1925–
2005), especially with regard to the (economic) reproduction of the
system of capitalist domination and its ideologizing and alienating
potential.
• An analysis of the structure of societies based on contrastable and
correlated elements and variables (e.g., the type of transmission of
power, the frequency of marriage between certain relatives). For the
Comaroffs, the model is interesting, but correlations between fac-
tors cannot be confused with the logic of social practices.
• An analysis of the social orders that exist over time (including the
so-called primitive peoples). This perspective, shared by the Coma-
roffs, is similar to the thinking of Edmund Leach and Louis Du-
mont: study social practices, situate local systems in the broader
political and social worlds of which they form part, recognize that
all human communities constitute an interaction between internal
forms and external forces.
This third point, the focus on societies as processes over time, contains
several challenges: the concept of ‘system’ would be a fiction, an analyt-
ical licence to explain the world and the invisible connections between
social phenomena. However, counter to postmodern scepticism and al-
though social life seems episodic or irregular, it has not been demon-
strated that forms and relationships do not exist.
In the recognition of ‘other histories’, it is very important to consider
the endogenous perspective of social worlds. However, it has been quite
common to exclude certain indigenous populations from history until
the arrival of ‘people with history’ (Wolf, 1982), even though the history
of the indigenous people did not begin with the arrival of the Europeans.
This prejudice is rooted in perspectives that refer to ‘pre-capitalist soci-
eties’, as if there were no history before capitalism. Indigenous peoples
did not construct the past through a (colonial) chronology, but through
mythical time. Here, the Comaroffs do not find much illumination in the
works of Wolf, Meillassoux, Sahlins and Bourdieu and their view of the
historicity of non-European peoples.
The analytical units and methods used in anthropology begin with a
very clear view. Events and individuals are studied in accordance with
the expectations of the anthropologist or the historian. The usual tech-
niques take the concept of the individual for granted: biography, life
history, memoir, personal diary and so on. These forms, however, re-
flect the idea of a seventeenth-century person in Europe, in which an
individual is an accumulation of events and their agent. The irony lies
in the fact that for historical purposes, the importance of agency and
events is not always as great as, for example, laws that may shape a
person’s daily life. By way of illustration, the Comaroffs compare the
Battle of Trafalgar (1805), an episode full of agency and events, with the
1870 Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed married women
to be the legal owners of property and their earnings. This law affected
nineteenth- century living conditions in Great Britain much more deci-
sively than the battle.
The best way to explain the Comaroffs’ modus operandi is to present
an example from the analyses included in their book Ethnography and
the Historical Imagination: the study of missionary spaces in nineteenth-
century South Africa. The main methodological problem with this type
of research is to go beyond the rhetoric of the actors, in this case mission-
aries, to analyse forms of control over practices and bodies. The British
missionaries tried to ‘civilize the natives’, reconstructing their habitat
and habitus in the image and likeness of the bourgeois ethos of the in-
dustrial revolution. Their analysis, however, did not entail a mechanical
application of models and theories, but interrogated the sources using
ethnographic questions. The imposition of square buildings over indige-
nous round ones, which were considered less rational, is one example of
the practical applications of their metaphors. The African desert was to
be planted with gardens that would become the icon and example of the
civilizing mission. Local actors, like ‘rainmakers’, were delegitimized
by the missionaries, who presented science as superior to indigenous
magic. The Comaroffs were able to use oral history and documents to
see how the Tswana view of knowledge exchange allowed them to main-
tain their assumptions about the cosmos despite missionary pressure.
The missionaries transmitted the colonial ethos of private property,
competition between individuals and the use of time. Local women’s
work in the field was to be confined to the domestic sphere and was
branded as backwards. Monetarization, the orientation of production
to the market, and processes similar to those presented by Stoler (1985)
and others were the expression of these new tensions. In this respect, the
missionaries embodied the bearers of the Protestant ethic of capitalism.
Religion was not conceived of as an autonomous sphere, but as a dis-
seminator of a discipline (Asad, 1993), an intraworldly asceticism in ac-
cordance with the new work ethos. Moreover, although the missionaries
promoted a local ‘colonization of the consciousness’, the consciousness
of colonialism was ambiguous, since the same missionaries projected the
idea of the lost paradise of a pre-industrial society onto Africa, and con-
stituted a fraction of the dominant group competing with other views
of colonialism.
In short, the Comaroffs’ analysis reconstructs a context from the past
using holistic ethnographic tools, showing the tensions between the
ideological models of the dominators (state model, the settlement colo-
nialism of the Boers and the colonialism of the missionaries) and their
expressions on the land, on bodies and spaces, in the daily theatre of
representations, imposing grids on the space and readying society for the
modern capitalist ethos. Thus, they revised essentialist theories about
power and, in this case, colonialism by showing its paradoxes and ten-
sions, just as the following author did.
2.4 Eric Wolf: Anthropology and Power Anew

The intellectual example of Eric R. Wolf (1923–99) provides the oppor-
tunity to examine numerous aspects related to the sphere of power. He
is also a highly intriguing figure with regard to the connections between
biography and theory. Wolf was born into a Jewish family in Vienna and
spent his childhood and adolescence constantly surrounded by multicul-
tural influences that attuned him to other cultures. In 1933, his family
moved to the mountainous Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, fleeing the
fascism of Nazi Germany. Five years later, when the Nazis extended
their persecution of the Jews and other non-Aryan groups, young Eric
was sent to England to continue his studies, while his parents were hid-
den by a Catholic Czech family. Thanks to this personal experience, he
came to have first-hand knowledge of political markers. At the young
age of sixteen, he was sent to a detention camp for Jews and potential
enemies located north of Liverpool. His case also reflects the contra-
dictions of the era. There, he came into contact with important Jewish
thinkers from Central Europe, above all Marxists. He was also schooled
in the sociology of Max Weber, meeting notable Weberians like Norbert
Elias (1897–1990), who gave lectures on the concept of society. In the
early 1940s, he moved to the United States, where he enlisted as a volun-
teer in the 10th Mountain Division fighting in the Alps.41
After the Second World War, while still a recruit, he enrolled in the
anthropology programme at the University of Columbia.42 Despite the
dominance of culturalism at the university at the time, Wolf distanced
himself from the perspective of Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture,
1934) and adopted a materialist focus that led him to reject both the cul-
tural ecology of Julian H. Steward (The People of Puerto Rico: A Study
in Social Anthropology, 1956) as ahistorical and the natural history of
Alfred L. Kroeber (The Nature of Culture, 1952) as supra-historical,
while contacting influential leftist researchers like John Murra, Elman
Service, Stanley Diamond, Paul M. Sweezy and Sidney Mintz.
The genealogy of Wolf’s work begins with a project directed by Julian
Steward and including the participation of other scholars like Robert
Manners, Sidney Mintz, Elena Padilla and Raymond Scheele.43 The
Puerto Rico Project (1948–49), supported by the Rockefeller Foundation
and the University of Puerto Rico, formed the basis of his dissertation,
which he defended in 1951, on the San Jose tax system and coffee grow-
ing on the Caribbean island. Based on the evolutionist theses of Gordon
Childe (1969), Leslie White (1949) and Julian H. Steward (1955), Wolf
and Mintz argued that the idea of civilization, supported by a complex
division of labour, could only have developed out of agricultural systems
like plantations that could create a surplus that would later be monopo-
lized by the ruling classes.44 His Ph.D. dissertation, Culture Change and
Culture Stability in a Puerto Rican Coffee Community, was inspired by
the cultural ecology of his mentor, Julian Steward.45 He was a pioneer in
regional anthropological studies, who produced a series of later investi-
gations into the sociological integration of peasant societies.46
After finishing his doctorate, Wolf began to teach anthropology at
the University of Illinois-Urbana, where Steward had gone to work. Be-
tween 1951 and 1992, he continued another stage of fieldwork in Mex-
ico, where he observed the constitution of ‘Mexicanness’ and the idea of
a nation.47 Financed by the Doherty Foundation, his research focused
on the role of the Bajio region in the formation of the Mexican nation.
He wanted to show that cultural regions could not be understood as
isolated or disconnected from the higher-level units of which they form
a part. Unlike the functionalist school, Wolf analysed the community
and region from the existence of ‘levels of sociocultural integration’, as
Julian Steward would say, which allowed him to better understand the
transformations (or evolution) of simple societies to complex ones.48
Along with his great friend Àngel Palerm i Vich (1917–80), the Catalo-
nian ethnographer in exile in Mexico, he did fieldwork in Acolhuacan
in the Texcoco region and the stony fields of San Angel. From this field-
work, Wolf published several books and articles, some co-authored with
Àngel Palerm, which were later collected in Agricultura y civilización en
Mesoamérica (Agriculture and Civilization in Mesoamerica, 1972). In
1959, he moved to the University of Chicago, fleeing ‘a gerontocracy […]
and ritual and obeisance to the ancestors’.49 In 1965, he did a study of
the Tyrol region, where he focused on the connections between history,
ethnicity and ecology.
In 1966, Wolf published a book that would become a classic in the
social sciences, Peasants, in which he reinterpreted Marxist concepts
like the Asiatic mode of production, defining it as a despotic or Orien-
tal mode of production to define the political relations and production
of ancient Mexico. To that end, he used the theoretical tools of Ger-
man historian Karl A. Wittffogel (1896–1988) and Russian economist
Alexander Chayanov, whose works on the rural peasant economy re-
volved around the family, based on self-consumption and not on surplus
production. In his analysis of peasant communities, Wolf differed from
orthodox Marxism by highlighting the adaptive (cultural) capacity of
human groups in certain historical and ecological situations. Contrary
to studies that saw natives (now peasants) as members of traditional so-
ciety or folk, that is, static and passive groups, Wolf gave them a greater
leading role, situating them in the global historical dynamic.50
During this turbulent period, Wolf stood out for his political activ-
ism, calling for anthropological ethics and participating alongside his
friend Marshall Sahlins in the first teach-in and the American criticism
of the Vietnam War, which aroused a greater interest in Marxist theory
in the scholar (Wolf, 1971).51 In 1967, he led the ‘Carnegie Seminar
on Developing Nations’ at the University of Indiana in Bloomington,
analysing the nature and causes of peasant revolutions.52 The results of
this experience were published in 1969 in the book Peasant Wars of the
20th Century, which combined ‘peasant studies’ with a consideration
of political and social movements that sparked revolutionary changes.
The United States was immersed in an unpopular war with a high cost
in human lives. Wolf strongly opposed this military intervention and
denounced (along with his colleagues Joseph G. Jorgensen, Guillermo
Bonfil Batalla and Àngel Palerm) American espionage and intervention
in Thailand and Mexico.53
In 1971, Wolf left the University of Michigan for the City University
of New York (CUNY). From there, he emphasized the importance of
offering anthropology as a humanistic discipline and critical tool geared
towards social questions. He carried out comparative analyses of Mex-
ico, Russia, China, Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba, uncovering the roots of
their sociohistorical transformations. Anthropology thus came out of
its conventional sphere to study processes and their causes. In this same
line, in 1982 he published one of his most acclaimed works, Europe and
the People Without History, a book rooted in a Marxist tradition whose
genesis was influenced by Geertz’s early work (Agricultural Involution:
The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia, 1964), Sahlins (Stone
Age Economics, 1972) and Wolf himself (1969). This project consisted
of understanding the history of humanity as a network of interconnected
processes that necessarily involved a global and historical vision. Unlike
classic political economy, Wolf believed that societies needed to be un-
derstood from the relationships or ties that individuals maintain with
each other. This holistic perspective demands a new anthropological
theory capable of recognizing the universality of the contact between
societies, studying historical processes from variables that are always
unequal, especially with the appearance of modernity and capitalism.
In other words, societies and cultures must be rethought not as separate
units, but as part of a common history.
Likewise, it was necessary to rethink the genesis and expansion of
some explanatory patterns that prioritized structures and systems to the
detriment of historical actors, in particular those who had traditionally
been overlooked by official history and who, therefore, found themselves
in a position of subalternity.54 Theoreticians of capitalism and the world
market like André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein had not
connected the history of capitalist development with transformations in
local populations. Their objective was to offer a theory of the world-
system that reflected how the centre (metropole) had exploited the pe-
riphery (colonies), creating a market and division of world labour.
To understand this uneven relationship between centres and periph-
eries, Wolf analysed the exchange of work according to three modes of
production: (a) the kin-ordered mode of production, in which there is nei-
ther capital nor tributes. In this system, leadership is informal, based on
the personal qualities of the leader. There is no despotic or authoritarian
power and decisions are made collectively. Resources are also distributed
equitably between the members of the kinship group. The social order
is not maintained via coercion, but through tradition and custom; (b)
the tributary mode of production which lacks a labour market, because
the individuals participate in the means of production. They must, how-
ever, pay taxes and tributes. This category includes the feudal and Asiatic
modes of production; and (c) the capitalist modes, which are defined by
the capitalist appropriation of the means of production (technology, fac-
tories, etc.). By separating these from the workers, they are forced to sell
their labour in exchange for a salary. The leitmotiv of capitalism, then, is
the accumulation of capital through a constant rationalization of work
and the technical improvement of the processes of production.55
Wolf argued that the ‘circulationist’ Marxism of Wallerstein did not
adequately describe the effects that mercantile and capitalist develop-
ment had on the micropopulations traditionally studied by anthropol-
ogy. His peripheries were relegated to the confines of the world-system.
For this reason, Wolf unambiguously stated that ‘I set out to write a
kind of anthropological history of the world, to place the micropopula-
tions studied by anthropologists within this new understanding’.56 This
project faced two major obstacles: one, the need to rethink classic Eu-
rocentric theories; and two, the obligation to address the study of local
histories. The framework for this focus was the new attempt to create
a contextualized anthropology from interconnected ethnographic real-
ities, with a special emphasis on diachrony and complex processes, but
without eschewing the study of the local. Despite these good intentions,
the history of ‘pre-capitalist peoples’ was absorbed by the expansion
of Western capitalism, a state of affairs criticized by some anthropolo-
gists like Jan Vansina, Talal Asad and Sherry Ortner because it denied
them initiative. They asked whether other, local histories existed in the
formation of social subjects, despite this expansion of global capitalist
development.57 This was the primary focus with regard to the trans-
formations that occurred in the other productive models, like the trib-
utary and kin-ordered models. In this intellectual context, Wolf gave
the Westermarck Memorial Lecture (1984) ‘Incorporation and Identity
in the Making of the Modern World’. This little-known text, included
in the posthumous 2001 compilation, Pathways of Power: Building an
Anthropology of the Modern World, revealed Wolf’s interest in the mul-
tiple forms of resistance (agency) used by colonized peoples. Again, the
concept of political culture would be one of the main interpretive tools.
Unlike traditional institutional history, the modes of collective action of
subaltern groups attracted the attention of specialists. Although analys-
ing the agency of dominated groups in terms of resistance is reduction-
ist, 58 Wolf was especially interested in the participation of these groups
in the processes of historical change.
This perspective also broke with many years of premeditated igno-
rance about the history of ‘primitive’ societies and an idea of history
and conceptions of time that were restricted to the peoples considered
civilized, having a written language or a state. Even though Wolf had
already expressed his interest in linking power to culture, it was not
until the publication of his last work Envisioning Power: Ideologies of
Dominance and Crisis (1999) that a formula appeared to study the topic
ethnographically and historically. The book was the result of a series of
discussions with students in the University of New York doctoral pro-
gramme in 1984 on the impossibility of understanding mental represen-
tations and, particularly power, as isolated or independent from material
and historical processes.
In this work, Wolf analysed the relationship between modes of produc-
tion, ideology and power dynamics in three different types of societies.
To do so, he undertook a new comparative exercise of symbolic forms
and asymmetrical power relations in three key cases: (a) the potlatch, a
ritual that exhibited and affirmed privileges amongst the elite chiefs of
the Northwest Pacific Coast Kwakiutl tribe (or Kwakwaka’wakw, as they
call themselves), through the public transfer (or destruction) of objects of
symbolic value. Wolf was unique in analysing the potlatch not only from
the perspective of its own cultural logic, but from the transformations in
the traditional social order caused by the arrival of capitalism; (b) human
sacrifice amongst the Aztecs in central Mexico. As heirs to the ancient
Olmecs, Teotihuacan and Toltec civilizations, they claimed responsibil-
ity for perpetuating the socio-cosmic order. The nobility, identified with
the god Huitzilopochtli, insisted on ritual sacrifice as payment for the
divine gift of life. This, according to Wolf, demonstrated the relationship
between ritual and power. The ideology justified a hierarchical order of
social positions between gods, nobles, commoners and slaves; (c) the Na-
tional Socialist ideology of the German Third Reich, which gave rise to
an exacerbated nationalism based on the superiority of the Aryan ‘race’.
The fatal consequences are very well known: the extermination of mil-
lions of Jews in concentration and extermination camps.
Despite his interest in historical anthropology and in understanding
society as a processual phenomenon, Wolf also preferred not to formu-
late great, abstract explanatory theories. Neither did he like to revisit
his old works. However, the organizers of Pathways of Power, Sydel
Silverman and Aram A. Yengoyan, were able to gather an excellent
collection of essays that illustrate Wolf’s determination to make com-
plex analyses using individual cases, presented from a dynamic point
of view. His analysis of social processes and refusal to consider cultures
as static configurations separate from social and political forces led him
to analyse culture in terms of power relations.59 Unlike the dependency
theorists, Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, and Wallerstein’s circulation-
ist Marxism, it is clear that this ‘accidental anthropologist’, as Robert
McG. Thomas described him in 1999, opted to integrate the local (an-
thropology) into the global (Marxist tradition) in an attempt to reach a
historical-anthropological holism.60
2.5 William Christian: Visions of a Religious

Anthropology
The final author provides an introduction to the field of religious anthro-
pology, which occupies a pivotal position in the shaping of historical
anthropology. This section, then, provides an overview of how his body
of work fits into a powerful intersection of traditions. In many cases, ap-
proaches to ‘the religious’ involve taking on the transformation processes
that occurred in Europe between the Middle Ages and the modern world,
challenging hypotheses about secularization. Different symbolic systems
interact; forms of legitimation, orthodoxies and heterodoxies compete.
In truth, these studies put categories of religion and systems of beliefs,
magic and superstition to the test by situating them in their dynamic con-
texts of construction, creating an analytical problem (Tambiah, 1990;
Keitt, 2005; Salazar, 2009). In other cases, the very boundaries between
‘the religious’ and the fields of politics and economics are at stake.
One of the most fruitful fields that has attracted the attention of the
great authors of historical anthropology is witchcraft. A most polysemic
concept, the archaeology of these studies dates back to the renowned
work by Evans-Pritchard (1937) on the Azande, which inspired several
authors who would apply the study to European phenomena despite crit-
icisms of the universality of the concept (Geertz, 1975). Although the
genesis of these studies lay in England, Julio Caro Baroja was also one of
the earliest experts in the field.61 Another interesting precedent is Mar-
garet Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which applied some
of James George Frazer’s findings to the study of European witchcraft in
1921. This work broke with earlier studies by recognizing the existence
of sects parallel to the official church, although Murray was aware that
the information from the accused was obtained under torture.
Six years after the appearance of Caro Baroja’s book on witches in
1961, historian Hugh Trevor-Roper published The Crisis of the Seven-
teenth Century: Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, which
openly opposed the anthropological perspective and his British peers who
practiced this exercise. These included Keith Thomas and Alan Macfar-
lane, who presented their perspective at the 1968 Conference of the Asso-
ciation of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom. These studies
evolved within the general framework of disenchantment put forth by
Max Weber to describe the devaluation of some religious forms and the
emergence of science – though these were not always separate, as seen
in the paradigmatic case of Isaac Newton and his works on hermeticism
(Tambiah, 1990). In fact, some of Keith Thomas’s inquiries (Religion and
the Decline of Magic, 1971) coincide with those posed by Lucien Febvre
(1947) in his book on Rabelais regarding the ‘unbelief’ of modernity,
an echo of the questions posed by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism. In Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A
Regional and Comparative Study (1970), Alan Macfarlane transplanted
elements from Africanist theses to the European continent, using court
records to show how the accusation of witchcraft in Elizabethan England
was laid against poor women and widows, made into scapegoats to ex-
plain the misfortunes of a convulsive historical period. In other words,
he provided a functionalist or perhaps anomist explanation. Pier Paolo
Viazzo62 regarded this work as a true methodological leap, a move to the
world of the micro and the great ethnographic detail provided by the ar-
chive. Macfarlane analysed 1,200 trials held in Essex between 1560 and
1680 with the precision of an intense fieldwork exercise, reconstructing
the different social structures and comparing their functions.
Closely aligned with this work is Carlo Ginzburg’s micro-historical fo-
cus and his numerous works on the early modern era such as his work
on the benandanti (Ginzburg, 1966). An important contribution to the
study of change in symbolic universes and political practices, The Night
Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries details the circumstances of the benandanti of Friuli, north-
eastern Italy, persons born with a caul, who were believed to protect the
local crops against witchcraft in the sixteenth century. One century later,
the Inquisition redefined the benandanti themselves as witches. Unlike
the mentalités school, this study focused on how a homogenous idea of
culture can be constructed using coercion, hiding its diversities. This Ital-
ian tradition of criticizing the hegemonic culture and rescuing those ex-
cluded from history also includes the book by Ernesto De Martino, The
Land of Remorse (1961). While particularly ethnographic, this text also
considers the context of tarantism and its tense relationship with the En-
lightenment. A notable heir to Gramsci and De Martino, Clara Gallini
began her endeavours in historical anthropology with an examination of
forms of protest in ancient Rome (1970), before delving into the confron-
tation between Catholic rhetoric and scientist positivism in the nineteenth
century in a study on somnambulism and magnetism (Gallini, 1983). She
followed this with an analysis of the medicalization of religion in Lourdes
and the doctors who switched from certifying miracles in 1858 to begin-
ning to treat them as clinical cases around 1873 (Gallini, 1998).
Since the foundational work by Marc Bloch (1924) on the curing hands
of thaumaturgical kings, a number of historical works have cast an an-
thropological eye on events, part of a dynamic point of view defined by
Claude Lévi-Strauss as the ‘effectiveness of the symbolic’ (Lévi-Strauss,
1958) in its many manifestations. However, these works have tended
to incorporate a link between these phenomena and power relations.
For example, from a more Weberian and Foucauldian perspective, Ta-
lal Asad synchronized the links between symbology and power (1993)
not only regarding religious categories and secularity, but also in terms
of the connection between religious ethics, ritual forms and corporal
discipline. Legitimacies, whether corroborated or disputed by symbolic
systems, are central to the history of religious movements, social revo-
lutions and social cosmologies, as demonstrated by historical studies on
millenarian movements (Worsley, 1957; De Martino, 1977; Lanternari,
1979; Cohn, 1981; García Arenal, 2000).
In this field of study, Spain – the focus of much of William Chris-
tian’s work – has not only been influenced by Julio Caro Baroja. In 1990,
Carmelo Lisón Tolosana wrote the particularly provocative Demonios y
exorcismos en los siglos de oro (Demons and Exorcism in the Golden
Age), which has been followed by a new generation of prolific and highly
interesting authors like the historian María Tausiet, whose original stud-
ies on witchcraft, possession and the devil, victims of tarantism, relics
and the situated definition of the emotions also draw on Christian’s work
(Tausiet, 2002, 2004, 2009, 2013; Tausiet & Amelang, 2004, 2009). The
connection between social transformations and particular symbolic pro-
cesses is more than manifest in the available historical materials about
possession in Europe, a widespread phenomenon in the seventeenth cen-
tury. Like the possessions in the northeastern Spanish city of Jaca studied
by Tausiet and other cases, it is not coincidental that this appeared during
the Counter-Reformation. Indeed, one of the texts by Jesuit historian
Michel de Certeau, the creator of his own religious anthropology, focuses
on one of these phenomena, providing a detailed account of possession in
the French town of Loudun in 1632 and the fight to create a judicialized
and medicalized interpretation of the truth (De Certeau, 1970).
From another perspective, the intersection between symbology and
politics in this ambivalent modernity has been examined in some won-
derful monographs, like the study by Manuel Delgado (1992) of anti-
clericalism in Spain, a topic also investigated by Caro Baroja (1980), and
the work by Gerard Horta on Catalonian spiritism between 1860 and
1939 and its dissemination amongst revolutionary sectors (Horta, 2004).
These studies also challenge the narrow definition of religion itself, be-
yond the institutional framework controlled by churches, and the gener-
ation of new symbolic forms to respond to the great human questions.
2.5.1 Observing Divine Presences

William Christian’s work tries to break down these boundaries or rather
obstacles that impede comprehensive understanding. This author’s
curiosity led him to surmount barriers and apply a methodological
imagination that combined ethnography, the analysis of historical doc-
umentation and other sources, including visual ones. However, his par-
ticularly valuable contribution to the field concerns his way of looking
at sources in his focus on the social phenomenon of religion in Western
Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day. A constant through-
out his work is his interrogation of the nature of religion and his use of
anthropology to challenge, what is considered a religious phenomenon,
going beyond the dominant rhetoric that has monopolized definitions or
excluded other expressions. Christian’s analyses shake these certainties
to consider the phenomena from the point of view of the people involved
in them, avoiding an aseptic laboratory perspective.
To some extent, Christian came to Spain as an outsider, since his
family was Protestant. His father was a professor of religion and his
mother’s family had a Quaker background, a religion where there are no
mediators between the believer and the divinity, a phenomenon similar
to what Christian would observe in the visions he investigated.63 How-
ever, like many of the authors analysed in this book, he refused to follow
a particular unnameable theoretical current, showing greater interest in
people than in other anthropologists. In fact, the boundaries between
disciplines struck him as beyond ridiculous, since ‘what is interesting is
the phenomenon, not the discipline’.64
From this point of view, dichotomies like orthodoxy vs. unorthodoxy
or organized religion vs. popular religion are also called into question
in an analysis of the social in a more phenomenological tradition and a
search for the intricacies of the lebenswelt, the quotidian and its mean-
ings. However, from a certain ‘theoretical distance’ that respects ‘facts’,
Christian emphasizes the correlations between religious phenomena
and the social and political tensions of their era, as suggested by so-
cial anthropology. This theoretical distance seems to fear the imposition
of theoretical models on people, who become their agents or puppets.
Christian’s approach applies a special sensitivity to find the balance be-
tween knowing the subject and the external explanation. He also pays
special attention to a population that is habitually excluded from writ-
ten sources, demonstrating the possibilities of making these anonymous
people come to life along the lines of authors like De Martino.
Analysed as a whole, the study of apparitions and visionaries in the
contexts of social change make it possible to connect classic texts like
those by Peter Worsley on ritual phenomena and the end of days. Appa-
ritions appear throughout history as moral warnings and, to a certain
extent, generate processes of reconstruction (or revitalization, in the
words of other authors). These processes, however, are also the expres-
sion of social and political transformations.
As Carmelo Lisón Tolosana explains in the introduction to the Spanish-
language version of Person and God in a Spanish Valley,65 Christian
initially came to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago, and his trav-
els around the country in search of religious phenomena continued un-
abated after that experience. He immersed himself in different types of
archives, but also took pains to engage with people for his ethnographic
work. His examination of sanctuaries and apparitions led him to pose
a number of questions about the historical context of the phenomenon,
which resulted in the publication of two major texts, Apparitions in
Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Christian Jr., 1981) and a more
general study of the forms of religiosity in the sixteenth century in New
Castile (Christian Jr., 1989). In the latter case, his main source was a
questionnaire sent out by Philip II’s chroniclers between 1575 and 1580.
The answers to the survey allowed him to understand a religiosity that
appeared to come out of the hegemonic centre and was defined as a local
religion with its own sacred history formed around chapels, sanctuaries
and relics. This perspective, however, went beyond the dichotomies be-
tween organized and popular religion, large and small traditions. The
expression of local religion actually revealed the importance of an eth-
nographic approach to societies and times, indicating the dialectic be-
tween models and practices.
The diachronic perspective on apparitions is a central axis that makes
it possible to capture not only the transformations in societies between
the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, but also the predominant guide-
lines for relationships with the divine presence at each historical mo-
ment. Two dominant types of apparitions emerge: (1) human figures
who appear to seers (between 1400 and 1525 and again after 1900),
especially the Virgin Mary; and (2) apparitions of signs of the divine
presence (sweating, blood, tears on the figures on crosses) that anyone
can see (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and several twentieth-century
cases). Very generally speaking, the first type of apparition declines with
the beginning of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, while
the second type spreads. This occurred after the Fifth Council of the
Lateran in 1516, when the Inquisition began to exert greater control
over visions, taking them from more secular spaces and relegating them
to the convents with their forms of mystical spirituality. Seers began to
be suspected of being inspired by the devil, while other persecutions,
like those of the Illuminati, were launched.66 This would transform the
guidelines for the following three hundred years. Christian, however,
did not only propose to find sociological explanations: ‘Rather than ex-
plaining away the visions, or even explaining them, I have tried to learn
from them how people experienced both the world they knew and the
world they had to imagine’.67
One fascinating aspect of these studies is the approach to the pro-
cesses of constructing and transmitting the imagination of visionaries
and communities. The visions were not improvised, but reproduce pat-
terns of legends about the way in which the Virgin appears,68 and these
models are clearly propelled into the modern era by the propagation of
images using new iconographic supports (particularly postcards).69 This
imagination, however, cannot be understood as a mere recreation, as
people included innovative and creative elements over time. Thus, they
also changed the way in which the divine presence was represented. One
interesting case is that of the Marian apparitions. The early apparitions
were much less standardized, more severe and nocturnal, while over
time they came to represent the canons of beauty and loveliness, becom-
ing more docile and diurnal.
Throughout history, these apparitions have also repeated moral stan-
dards with very clear political consequences: the divine presence may
provide guidelines or responses to problems, but it also announces and
warns of imminent disasters with powerful consequences for the com-
munity, producing what classical theory has denominated a ‘revitaliza-
tion’. The resurgence of apparitions in the modern world corresponds to
these sociopolitical processes: the apparition at La Salette (1846) warned
of imminent dangers and called for a return to devotion; the apparition
at Lourdes (1917) confirmed the cult of the Immaculate Conception; the
apparitions at Fatima (1917) coincided with the first secular government
in Portugal and warned of the dangers of the Soviet revolution. In his
magnificent monograph on the visions at Ezkioga (Christian, Jr., 1996),
William Christian considers the political tensions in Second Republic
Spain, and later apparitions like those at Garabandal (1961–63) spoke of
other dangers like the Cold War and even the appearance of extraterres-
trials, a historical phenomenon that constitutes a sort of secularization
of the Marian apparitions (Christian, Jr., 1999b).
While in earlier works Christian limited himself to the use of documents
as his basic source, the study of phenomena closer in time allowed him to
combine archive techniques with ethnographic techniques, although he
was already using ethnography as a method to observe the documents.
Interviews, oral sources and the observation of rituals dating back to the
1960s made it possible for him to reconstruct apparitions and moving im-
ages like the Christ of Limpias in 1919 (Christian, Jr., & Karsznai, 2009).
The book Moving Crucifixes in Modern Spain introduces some consider-
ations that would later lead to the question of ontologies and the natures
of divine entities, with the humanization of images or the divinization of
human beings (Christian, Jr., 1992, 2004, 2009a, 2009b, 2012).
2.5.2 Ezkioga and the Republican Apocalypse:

Politics and Religion
Christian’s triangulation of sources and approaches culminated in a
study of the visionaries of Ezkioga (Basque Country) in 1931–32, Vi-
sionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ. This book
is exceptional because of its wealth of documentation, the analytical
density and the reconstruction of a phenomenon from the past that had,
in truth, been silenced and stigmatized.70 The final section of this chap-
ter is dedicated to this book because the author’s modus operandi reveals
an inspiring way to research and travel to the past. The method is not
expressly set forth, but must be read between the lines and in the ac-
count of the results discussed here. Christian does not only shed light on
a phenomenon that was supressed, forgotten and literally hidden (like
some of the documents) in unsuspected places, but also looks at the story
from opposed angles simultaneously. To begin, a chronology of political
and religious events reveals extraordinary coincidences between the fear
amongst the conservative sectors regarding the advance of anticlerical-
ism and the beginning of the visions, with their impassioned initial suc-
cess, and their subsequent concealment by the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Second, the enormous amount of documentation used makes it possible
to witness the central human processes that explain the symbolic effi-
cacy of the visions; the world searches for questions with no answers,
like death, illness and suffering in general.71 Third, the book explores
the coexistence of, struggles between and competition over worldviews
that are not always easy to separate. This was especially true when the
Church tried to delegitimize the visions and when specialists like the
Jesuit José Antonio Laburu, who filmed the trances, attributed low mor-
als to some visionaries who did not follow the models of true visions,
like those of Saint Teresa.72
Documents related to the promoters of the visions, different testi-
monies, journalists and members of religious orders produced a huge
amount of information about Ezkioga, both written and visual. To this
Christian added his incisive fieldwork, which was almost detective-like,
to find testimonies of witnesses to the phenomena, demonstrating the
difficulty inherent in stirring up a hidden memory. In this reconstruction
of the past, of course, both oral and written sources harbour their own
biases:
No doubt local people are much more likely to retain anecdotes an-
chored in kinship and place and less likely to remember messages
of political or theological importance. By contrast, the written re-
ports of ideologues like Burguera would likely leave out the more
local meanings. These seers were speaking simultaneously to both
levels.73
From a methodological point of view, Christian’s work with visual an-

thropology to analyse the rituals, the sites of the visions and even de-
tailed identification about people whose presence is not registered in
certain written or oral sources is particularly notable. In fact, this di-
versification of sources was necessary for him to complete his Sherlock
Holmes-like study.74
The reconstruction of some ‘events’ and their multiple interpretations
also entails the reconstruction of the social ties that they produce: the re-
lationship between the seers and those who broadcast the phenomenon
to the outside world as well as the relationship between the seers, their
supporters and the different religious movements that saw an opportu-
nity to spread political and moral messages in the face of pressure from
atheism and communism through the seers. The messages in the visions
were not, then, mere pietistic phenomena, but had to be interpreted in
relation to the political climate of the time: the ‘messages’ from the Vir-
gin or the deceased were a warning to the living about these secularizing
movements.
In many passages, the detail in this work acquires shades of the fic-
tional, interweaving biography and group encounters. The triangulation
of sources allows for a weaving together of numerous histories, syn-
chronic events that parallel the apparitions at Ezkioga within the general
history. The connection between the seers and their supporters revealed
synchronies and interactions between a sort of patron and client that
generated messages about a changing world and connected people from
different social statuses. The links established between the rhetoric of
some supporters or the faithful who warned of moral decline in the bod-
ies of women and other dangers arising from the Republic were partic-
ularly symptomatic, as was the ritual expression of performances aimed
at counteracting these dangers through the seers such as the physical
sacrifice expressed in representations of the crucifixion. In this respect,
the visions also followed Indo-European models of sacrifice. The social
production of visions is, unquestionably, one of the study’s great con-
tributions, revealing the mechanisms that the protagonists themselves
adopted in a collective phenomenon. Social interactions emerge, with
feedback from press images and the imitation of models, suggested by
forms of socialization in collective rituals, family conversations, doctri-
nal texts, images and other imitative mechanisms.75
This is a complex work that exposes the division between Catholic
sectors, which were fearful of the Republic. While some supported the
visions, which they understood to be a sort of redemptive mechanism,
others like the Jesuit José Antonio Laburu and the Church’s own official
position opposed them, claiming that they were false or inspired by the
devil. As De Martino had already observed in his study of tarantism
and its progressive definition according to the rhetoric of psychiatry and
mental illness (De Martino, 1999), the phenomenon was eventually judi-
cialized or placed in the hands of psychiatry and science.76
In any event, the thousands of pieces of data masterfully collected
for this intertwining of biography, collective action and sociopolitical
tensions are indicative of a changing world that shared characteristics
with other millenarian and apocalyptic phenomena (De Martino, 1977;
Cohn, 1981). Many of the messages from the seers would develop into
warnings about the advent of the end of time, something repeated in
modern history around the cult of the Sacred Heart used in the con-
struction of the concept of the Spanish nation, from the moment in 1919
when Alfonso XIII consecrated the nation to the Sacred Heart to the
recent confirmation of that contract at the same spot in 2019.
These connections are reproduced in the visions at Ezkioga and other
places. Politics is clearly inscribed in the religious grammar, in the mes-
sages sent by celestial beings to the seers that foretell of a civil war,
warning of the dangers inherent in abandoning the practice of prayer in
a context that required pietism (many of the visions took place during the
rosary). As with other instances of revivalism, the visionaries, like the
prophets, called for moral and bodily codes.77 Regeneration imprinted
a morality on bodies, so that they would not fall into Republican disar-
ray. Elements appear here that are repeated in other times and contexts,
as observed in the literature (Worsley, 1957; Lanternari, 1979; García-
Arenal, 2000). These common models suggest a common prophetic base
at the origin of religious movements that acquire importance or stability
due to their connection with determining political factors that explain
their dissemination, failure or transformation.
Notes

12 Castilla Urbano, 2002: 130.

20 Sahlins, 1985: 153. For this reason, far from thinking of culture as an en-
dangered object, Sahlins cautions about the danger of abandoning it for
the sake of ‘sentimental pessimism’, ‘on pain of failing to comprehend the
unique phenomenon it names and distinguishes: the organization of human
experience and action by symbolic means’ (Sahlins, 2000: 158).

22 Kuper, 2001: 209; Aljovín de Losada & Jacobsen, 2007; Aljovín de Losada,
2012: 54–5.
23 This debate is summarized in Borofsky, 1997.
24 Something similar occurred when the first Jesuits reached Brazil and then
Paraguay, where many of them were considered successors to the mythical
hero Sumé, associated with Saint Thomas, one of the 12 apostles of Jesus
Christ, who had supposedly evangelized the natives of the New World be-
fore the arrival of the Europeans (Vieira Cavalcante, 2009: 27–35).
25 For a more complete discussion of these topics, see the review by Jonathan
Friedman (1997: 261–2) in American Ethnologist. Frank Salomon also an-
alysed the various interpretations of the past that can result from the same
source when it is read by an indigenous historian (Obeyesekere) and a for-
eign academic (Sahlins) (Salomon, 1999: 19–95).
26 Kuper, 2001: 232–3.
27 Wilde, 2018: 103.
28 Vansina, 1968: 153–75.
29 Wilde, 2018: 104. Our translation.
30 In La identidad de la antropología (1990: 9–22), Josep R. Llobera also de-
fends a conception of the discipline that is at once humanist, critical and
scientific.

34 Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992: 9.

36 Lorandi, 2012: 29.

40 See, in this respect, Jack Goody’s critique of the Eurocentric and Western
warp of European history (Goody, 2006: 7–15).

4 4 Wolf, 2001: 215–29.

46 Contreras et al., 2000: 323.

48 Contreras et al., 2000: 324.


54 Some theoreticians like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have criticized the theo-
retical Eurocentrism that naturalized the colonial organization of the world,
rhetorically questioning whether subalterns ‘could speak’ for themselves
(Spivak, 1995: 24–8).

60 McG. Thomas, 1999. The influence of social history on Wolf’s work is also
well known. As E.P. Thompson wrote, ‘we cannot understand the parts un-
less we understand their function and roles in relation to each other and in
relation to the whole’. Wolf defined his analysis as a relational and proces-
sual history (Taylor, 1985: 121).

64 Aliaga et al., 2014: 118. Tim Ingold expressed this in similar terms in his
book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013), in
which he firmly argues for an interdisciplinary approach.
65 Christian, Jr., (1978: 11). Interestingly, Christian mentions that the use of
the word ‘popular’ in the Spanish version (Religiosidad popular. Estudio
antropológico en un valle español) does not conform to his perspective and
was due to a translation of his Person and God in a Spanish Valley that was
altered for editorial reasons (Aliaga et al. 2014: 115).
66 This type of ‘scandal of ecstasy’, established by the Holy See around 1525
(García-Arenal & Pereda, 2012: 113), also took place in Muslim contexts,
when nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformist movements went after ec-
static brotherhoods, saints and mediators (Spadola, 2008).
67 Christian, Jr., 1981: 9.

72 Christian, Jr., 1996: 138–45.
73 Christian, Jr., 1996: 177.

3 Epistemologies and
Methods
I became aware of the potential offered by local archives, whose humble

documentation –if appropriately interrogated – made it possible to study a
community from the past using methods that, in principle, were not so dif-
ferent to those used by anthropology to study a community in the present.1
In 1950, French ethnographer Michel Leiris wrote that the appearance

of ethnography was closely related to the colonial project. Most eth-
nographers did their work in colonial or semi-colonial contexts that de-
pended on their country of origin and, to a large extent, assimilated the
people they studied and their representatives as agents of the colonial
administration. 2 Doing an ethnography of the archive, applying the an-
thropological method to the study of documents, has the disadvantage
that much of the object of study has long since turned to ash. However,
despite the fact that the ethnographer who works with documents (dia-
chronic ethnography) finds it impossible to do participant observation,
the continued analysis and use of historical material makes it possible to
understand the society being studied. Cultures are inseparable from his-
tory; they are not closed value systems, but dynamic processes that are
constantly altered by external agents.3 These methodological intentions
are more than maxims defended by a few authors. They issue interesting
challenges to think about new and old strategies for the study of society.
This chapter presents some provocative attempts to open pathways to
the past through reading the archive using the lens and questions of an-
thropology. This means, first, turning essentially historical sources into
ethnographic material and investigating it using innovation and, second,
developing strategies to read these sources as if they were living infor-
mants.4 Finally, the chapter discusses the enormous potential to practice
triangulation between different sources, whether written, oral or visual.
3.1 Interrogating the Archive

Proposals for handling the obstacles in historical documents include,
most notably, a short article by Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Ponti, ‘The
Name and the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographical
86 Epistemologies and Methods
Marketplace’ (originally published in 1979), which emphasizes the dif-
ficulty inherent in reconstructing human conduct in the world based on
action and conflict as opposed to ethnographic work. The individual
must be situated beyond the prescriptive and normative systems that
govern his conduct. Ginzburg and Ponti distinguish between aggrega-
tive documentary data (used in quantitative historiography, e.g. births
and deaths) and nominative data. With the latter, it is possible to track
specific people and follow Ariadne’s thread to piece together, or restore,
the jigsaw puzzle of a society.5 Nominative data can also be later used to
work on a quantitative level. This is not a matter of opposing the qualita-
tive and the quantitative, but rather of doing away with anonymity and
avoiding the monopoly of the dominators in the restitution of history.
Another area of study that has generated highly interesting method-
ological debates is European witchcraft and demonology (Viazzo, 2003).
One of the central arguments concerned the use of sources created from
the point of view of the dominators. Can the court records and proceed-
ings of repressive authorities like the Inquisition be used to obtain infor-
mation about the persecuted population? Ginzburg complained about
the delay in accepting the incalculable historical value of these sources.6
One could ask, for example, whether it is possible to accept as ‘true’
information about the lives of witches that was the product of torture
and forced confession. Some studies, such as the work by Margaret A.
Murray (1863–1963), even advocated entering into the belief system of
the witches, although her sources were generally limited. Despite the
bias permeating these sources, she believed that it was possible to find
information about pagan religions that anthropology found in other cul-
tural contexts. This conflicted with the opinion of authors like Hugh
Trevor-Roper who, in an extensive work on the repression of witches
published in 1967, denied that anthropology had anything to contribute
to the analysis, arrogantly sputtering that the only focus of anthropol-
ogy is the study of foreign tribes.7
The 1968 conference on witchcraft held by the Association of Social
Anthropologists of the United Kingdom was the site of two brilliant
talks given by professors Alan Macfarlane and Keith Thomas. The for-
mer presented an analysis using archive material related to Essex County
from the Tudor and Stuart periods that would form the basis of his doc-
toral thesis (Macfarlane, 1970), while the latter offered a more general
view of the social function of belief in witchcraft as reinforcing ‘accepted
moral norms’ and as the changes regarding disenchantment and the de-
cline of magic analysed by Max Weber (Thomas, 1971).8 Both authors
applied anthropological theory to historical material. In the words of
Pier Paolo Viazzo:
[…] the documentation they analysed shows that in English towns

during the Elizabethan era, a belief in witchcraft served to explain
Epistemologies and Methods 87
the misfortunes suffered by their inhabitants, that accusations were
methodically used to resolve a conflict and that suspicions and ac-
cusations were mainly aimed at a particular category: old women,
often widowed and always poor […].9
Macfarlane and Thomas explained the stigmatization of old women as

a consequence of a change in English society in the second half of the
sixteenth century. At that time, there was a transition in poor relief,
which ceased to be a family matter and was given over to the state.
This led to an increase both in the number of female beggars and in
the abuse meted out to them. Over time, they began to be blamed for
the misfortunes and illnesses in the area. The unique contribution of
these works was their microscopic analytical detail, using theoretical
tools with sources that had often been overlooked by historians, such
as parish archives, astrology notebooks and lesser literary works. Carlo
Ginzburg later applied this perspective in his study of Domenico Scan-
della, also known as Menocchio, the Friulian miller who was tried and
then burnt at the stake in 1600 for his heretical statements, showing,
in Stephen Greenblatt’s words,10 that his argument that the world had
been created out of a primordial chaos from which God and the angels
emerged, like worms from cheese, represented a ‘radical subversion’ of
the Renaissance ideology.
The potential to read documents against the grain, as Walter Benjamin
suggested, contrary to the intensions of their creators, means deciphering
them not as a source of truth – religious dogma, science – but as the ex-
pression of points of view of specific people and power relations.11 Thus,
Inquisition documents, often vilified by confessional historians working
from an exclusively institutional perspective, make it possible to study
dense court records loaded with information that facilitates access to a
social history of the past.12 These ‘archives of repression’ provide a his-
tory of excluded and persecuted groups and of the particular systems of
domination that emerged with modernity: the persecution of ‘heretics’,
witches and religious heterodoxies across Europe during the medieval
period and the transition to the modern age. This led to the publication
of numerous highly interesting monographs on other ethnic or religious
(marginalized, subaltern) groups from history, like the Moriscos and
conversos, which cast a new, anthropological eye on the behaviour of
the intellectual, moral and fantasy world of other subjects, like the miller
Menocchio, who had not received sufficient attention before.13
Like Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane produced a work of historical
ethnohistory, this time about Essex. He combined various sources and
documents like notarial deeds, formal letters, parish books and the like,
with which he reconstructed the social structure, kinship relations and
other aspects of that society. Macfarlane’s analysis was also informed by
his being schooled in the methodology of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who was
part of the examining committee for his doctorate (of course, it was at a
1961 conference in Manchester that Evans-Pritchard argued that history
and anthropology were identical disciplines). As a result, Macfarlane
looked for the ‘functions’ of institutions in the data, as well as the inter-
relationships between parts.14
Working in a similar thematic territory, Carlo Ginzburg also insisted
on the importance of context, although his methodology was more her-
meneutical, emphasizing the possibility of filtering the power biases of
the authors of the documents analysed to obtain information on the life
of the people who were accused, prosecuted and subordinated. As early
as 1961, Ginzburg, inspired by the works of De Martino (1948) on the
confrontation between the Western scientific spirit and magic, had al-
ready expressed his interest in witch trials. At the Archive of the Archdi-
ocese of Udine, he began to study the Inquisition trials, in particular the
attitude of the judges, and the men and women accused of witchcraft in
Friuli in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. There he discovered the ex-
istence of the benandanti, those born with a caul, to whom powers such
as the ability to leave their bodies and battle with malign entities were
attributed. Observing their explanations of their travels in the witch
trials, Ginzburg highlighted the significant parallels with shamanism,
establishing comparisons with the work of anthropologists like Claude
Lévi-Strauss.15
Another author who has used similar methods to reconstruct a per-
secuted group is Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who wrote a widely dis-
seminated book, based on somewhat homespun research, on a small
agro-pastoral town in the Pyrenees, Montaillou, whose nearly 200 in-
habitants were prosecuted by the Inquisition as Cathars from 1294 to
1314 (Ladurie, 1975). Le Roy Ladurie applied a classic ethnographic
analysis to a Latin manuscript containing the inquisitional records of
Jacques Fournier (the future Pope Benedict XII) between 1318 and 1325.
Years later, the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo criticized the reliability
of the French historian’s ‘novelistic realism carried to extremes’, arguing
that the words of subordinates were not accurate because they had been
distorted by the Inquisition records.16 Rosaldo was sceptical about the
possibility of understanding the cultural meanings and power relations
behind these documents.17
Against futile and contradictory postmodern criticism, Ginzburg de-
fended the methodology of microhistory, while recognizing the difficulty
of working with documents that were far from neutral. This work re-
quired analysing the conditions in which the document was produced.
After examining the records of the long trial of Adriano Sofri, who was
accused of plotting the assassination of police officer Luigi Calabresi
in Italy in the 1970s, Ginzburg ironically noted that these records were
riddled with ‘little mistakes’ (as he says in The Judge and the Historian,
1991).18 In his opinion, a historical source is not only an object of study
used to understand who wrote it and its context, ‘what is tells’ can be
used as well. The fact that a source is not objective does not mean that it
is useless (The Cheese and the Worms, 1976).
3.2 Ethnography and the Colonial Archive

I see the call for an emergent methodological shift: to move away
from treating the archives as an extractive exercise to an ethno-
graphic one.19
The application of an anthropological approach to the archives has been

particularly well developed in the field of colonial studies. 20 Earlier, the
archive as an ethnographic source, tool and object had been thoroughly
reconsidered to be seen as a subject (Combe, 1994; Cerutti et al., 2006).
Several works have analysed the system of archives and bureaucracies
with their filing mechanisms as a system of domination (Feldman, 2008),
and the new ethnography of the archive has made it possible to rescue
‘arrested histories’ (McGranahan, 2005). This rescue corresponds to an
ethnographic sensibility that takes local and oral histories into consider-
ation and rethinks the production in the archive, incorporating the men
and women excluded from history (Amin, 1995; Lawrence et al., 2006).
In Spain, anthropology survived during the dark years of the Franco
period in university departments of prehistory, anthropology and the
history of the Americas. At the University of Barcelona, Claudi Esteva
Fabregat (1918–) encouraged the study of American archaeology, ethno-
history and Andean ethnology. In 1972, as a professor in the Depart-
ment of Anthropology and History of the Americas, he taught the first
generation of Catalonian anthropologists, including Jesús Contreras,
Gonzalo Sanz, Joan Frigolé, Maria Jesús Buxó, Juanjo Pujades, Dolors
Comas, Josep Mª Comelles, Joan Prat and Ignasi Terradas. 21
The University of Seville was also a pioneer in introducing Amer-
icanist anthropology into the Spanish academy. In 1959, after being
granted an endowed chair in History of the pre-Hispanic Americas and
American Anthropology, José Alcina Franch (1922–2001), an Ameri-
canist anthropologist from Valencia, encouraged the practice of social
anthropology in the Americas. 22 Educated in the Boas school under the
influence of Manuel Ballesteros in Madrid, Alcina Franch was a pio-
neer in the use of written sources in anthropological research, in part
because of his proximity to the General Archive of the Indies, which
contains valuable documentation on tribute valuations, visits made by
civil and ecclesiastical authorities, memorials, probanzas de méritos (lit.
‘proof of merit’, a demonstration of one’s contribution to the Spanish
conquest), wills, notarial procedures, lawsuits and more. 23 As the first
director of the Department of the Anthropology and Ethnology of the
Americas from 1959 to 1967, Alcina Franch was a notable defender
of anthropological archaeology, 24 while some of his students, such as
Alfredo Jiménez, Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa and Salvador Rodríguez, made
ethnohistory their own in Andalusia and the Americas. 25 Here, too, the
role of the ‘indigenous peoples’ themselves in administering the archive
along with critical contributions from feminist historiography – which
drew attention to the lack of women and other specific topics in the
study of the colonial process – are significant (Burton, 2003; Ghosh,
2004; Arondekar, 2005). 26
In Along the Archival Grain, Ann L. Stoler argues that rather than
merely approaching archives as sources, focus should be placed on archi-
val production, with all of its contradictions. Following in the footsteps
of predecessors who reflected on the archive, such as Farge (1989), Stoler
faces the challenge of the colonial archive, recognizing a certain Webe-
rian perspective in her emphasis on the power of the archive as a bureau-
cratic instrument. The archive, however, is also a place and product of
its time. To develop this thesis, Stoler used her research on the colonial
archives of the Netherlands Indies as a reference point. In her work, the
archive comes to be seen as a space of production and consequently,
attention can be paid to the principles that governed its practices. In this
analysis of archival forms, the archive becomes a process more than an
object, in which styles, affective tensions, classification categories and
the epistemological political anxieties that produce documentary prod-
ucts can all be analysed. Moreover, the archive is not only created by
officials and the direct creators of the document, but by multiple pro-
tagonists in a society (teachers, doctors, priests) and local informants
(Dirks, 1993). The documents also indirectly provide information about
the prosecuted, the judged and the excluded. For all of these reasons, the
archive is not a mere expression of domination, but evokes centrifugal
and centripetal forces, revealing authority, frictions and uncertainties.
The cryptic and panoptic operation of the institutions of domination
produce reserved, secret knowledge. In the archival work produced for
institutions, some reports on social events and people arbitrarily trans-
form those people into problems, and it is not by chance that at the core
of many of these ‘problems’ is the daily life of people who attracted in-
stitutional interest: conversos, mothers of mixed-race children, in short,
anyone who could be defined as a passeur (Liauzu, 2000; Mateo Dieste,
2003b). Here, the logic of the so-called secret is imbued with a kind of
fetishism. In reality, many reports labelled ‘secret’ had no other function
than to give life to what they named or to classify commonalities, like
the presence of the Dutch vagabonds in Batavia, as confidential. The
secret is not the information per se, but the process and mystery that
surround the consecration of a report made secret and the potential re-
sulting uncertainty for the powers that be. Moreover, the very criteria
regarding secrecy can change at short notice, as with the vagabonds of
Batavia in 1874, a matter that was not classified as secret until 1900.
Understanding the archive requires an understanding of the institu-
tion it serves and its political aims. The archive is, above all, a mech-
anism of the state. The colonial apparatus gathers data and organizes
information, interpreting the past from the point of view of the interests
of the present. In this work, the administration classifies people and re-
lationships, and the techniques of this construction become moral sci-
ences, like statistics: ‘statistics used deviations from the mean to identify
deviations from the norm’. 27
At this point, the main question continues to concern what it means to
do archival ethnography:
Students often ask what and where is ethnography in the colonial

archives: is it in what, where, or how we approach these gatherings
of documents? Is it in the issues addressed or their treatment? What
would, and should, what Marilyn Strathern calls “immersement”
look like for the ethnographer on historical-colonial ground? One
could respond that the ethnographic space of the archive resides in
the disjuncture between prescription and practice, between state
mandates and the manoeuvres people made in response to them,
between normative rules and how people actually lived their lives. 28
This distinction between prescription and praxis allows for different

readings of the colonial archives, not only as an expression of state
power. Archives cannot only be read as repositories of power, but as
uncertain movements in a force field, where adjustments and changes are
made and where feelings and emotions are also an indication of power
relations. Part of this exercise involves deciphering how the ‘common
sense’ of officials and producers of archival material operated and was
constructed. Here, Stoler proposes to focus on the social categories used
and on deciphering their ‘social etymologies’. 29 These are the reflection
of power relations, although the categories used are not only words, they
also trace practices. Anthropology is a useful tool when it comes to an-
alysing common sense.30 The builders of archives follow epistemic hab-
its that, while neither fixed nor uniform, shape the distinction between
the thinkable and the unthinkable. Categories of mixing are a revealing
example of the classification difficulties caused for administrators by
social processes, as Stoler demonstrates with the Euro-Asians and as is
apparent in many situations in which the ambivalent nature of identity
is revealed.31
This production is generated within a framework of affective tensions.
While Weber argued that modern bureaucracy is centred around a ratio-
nal control that eliminates emotions and passions, Stoler holds that the
colonial administration also functioned on the basis of emotional ele-
ments and an ‘episteme’ of uncertainty, not only truth. Feelings form part
of political reasoning. Here, savoir faire is an indicator of an official’s
education level, seen in their texts and in the references they cite. This is
not just a matter of observing the documents produced, but of observing
how they are read and the contradictions they confront.32 Studies of
rumours can be included, for example, as a relevant source, also demon-
strating the interaction between the oral and the written (White, 2000),
a problem anticipated years earlier by Marc Bloch (1921).
Archive ethnography observes the documents of power in order to
scrutinize the power of documents and the dialectic between norma-
tivity and praxis. Here, judicial archives are particularly suitable; law-
suits, claims and trials are recurrent sources used to explain conflict
and asymmetrical social relationships, as well as the limits of power
itself and the possibilities of counter-power. There are notable examples
of this resource in both ethnography and history (Dupret et al., 2008).
Colonial situations in particular have often been analysed based on this
type of situation, examples being Ravi Mumford’s use (2008) of the An-
des to explore the possibilities of interpreting lawsuits in Spanish courts
with indigenous litigants in sixteenth-century Peru; British colonialism
in India; and the thoroughly studied Islamic case, with its tension be-
tween norm and praxis. Here, illuminating studies based on lawsuits
and legal documents reveal social dynamics that are much more varied
and surprising than suggested by more ‘normative’ sources. This phe-
nomenon, which dates back to early Islam (Simonsohn, 2011), continued
under the Ottoman Empire, when the dynamism of religious groups was
quite conspicuous in the crossover of legal systems, as in the registry of
legal transactions between Christians and Jews in Istanbul in the late
seventeenth century. Although they lived in Islamic lands as protégées
(dhimmi) and were allowed legal autonomy, many Jews and Christians
preferred to use Islamic legal courts (Wittman, 2008). Thus, social ac-
tion emerges and challenges the very criteria of dominant classification.
Alongside the use of judicial archives as a mechanism to analyse social
relations, the imperial creation of archives on ‘people and cultures’ rep-
resented an important turn. K.T. Dirks observed an interesting change
around 1857 in the colonial archives on India, when anthropology sup-
planted history in the colonial approach to knowledge (Dirks, 2002: 56).
The colonial state became an ‘ethnographic state’ (Burke, 2014), not in
the sense of academic anthropology, but in the sense that the interests of
colonial policy transformed in face of the need to identify populations in
order to control them after the great rebellions of 1857. However, prior
to the examples presented by Dirks, Iberian colonialism in American
had already incorporated early para-ethnographic projects, especially
under the missionaries, and, in fact, missionary archives are an import-
ant example of this domination project. Moreover, to prevent a further
‘theft of history’, it is also important to consider other non-European
historical archives and ways of organizing information related to the
reproduction of power and the administration of populations.33
This approach emerged in other colonial contexts as well, such as
in black Africa, seen in the cognitive apparatus that surrounded Lord
Frederick Lugard and British indirect rule (Asad, 1973)34 and its French
equivalent in western and northern Africa (Burke, 2007).35 The disci-
plines and their products collected in the archives became specialized;
history was relegated to the study of metropoles and Westerners to con-
struct the foundational myths of the modern nation states, 36 while an-
thropological museums and archives specialized in the colonized peoples
excluded from history. This ethnocentric, perverse separation would cul-
minate years later in the distinction between sociology and ethnology in
similar terms, as Bourdieu observed during the Algerian colonial war.
Sociology was to study Europeans and ethnology natives. To invert the
terms would be unacceptable.37
This review of the documents of power and the power of documents
cannot neglect the role played by statistics in the modern world, as Stoler
suggested with regard to the colonial world. Statistics, which are tied
to the state, 38 can be read not only as a source, but also as an object of
study in the mechanics of societies, as advocated by Talal Asad (2002:
67). This author, however, has also criticized the limitations of anthro-
pology with regard to ethnographic experience as the only way to un-
derstand a society. He has collected criticisms and suspicions regarding
research that is based on a biased and personal experience, as formulated
in classic ethnography (this is not the place for a long, dense discussion
on postmodern considerations of the ethnographic bias; amongst others,
see Clifford & Marcus, 2010). Asad does not so much question the va-
lidity of a qualitative or quantitative method, but rather how research
should deal with the typologies and labels inherent in the samples and
representations of a specific society.39 The social structures being stud-
ied are not accessible to direct observation and require other analytical
techniques, like statistics. As Meyer Fortes wrote, ‘we are, as it were,
in the realm of grammar and syntax, not of the spoken word’.40 Asad
also sees this approach in the work of the Comaroffs, but characterizes
their explanation of how to obtain an empiricist foundation from the
ethnographer’s imagination as ‘obscure’, and he highlights the distinc-
tion between historians and anthropologists, since the former work with
texts, and the latter with their presence at the events described, that is,
by interacting with living people:
This obscurity may be resolved if by the ethnographic gaze we take

the Comaroffs to mean the construction of a discursive universe in-
habited by human types who are capable of being understood be-
cause, like them, they are human.41
Once the political role of statistics is established, however, they are

certainly useful as an archive technique that is not only demographic
(census analysis, parish files, birth, death and marriage studies, etc.), but
also for the analysis of phenomena as symbolic as the typification of the
spiritual practices of saints and their miracles. Cornell (1998) applied
this approach in a study of Maghrebi saints using hagiographies from
the Almohad period. By analysing the information in 316 biographical
notes and following the method applied by Weinstein and Bell (1982)
in their study of Christian saints, the author makes statistical correla-
tions between the ethnicity of the saints (Arab, Berber, ‘black’), their
geographic origin, their educational profile (early education, advanced
religious education, etc.), occupational status, spiritual practices (piety,
asceticism, scrupulousness, seclusion, poverty, humility, chastity, fast-
ing), the factors that gave them a special status (paranormal phenomena,
patronage, states of awareness, intercession, spiritual guidance, political
opposition, charity, political involvement) and types of miracles (mysti-
cal contemplation, visionary experiences, prophecy, power over animals,
miracle-working with food, wide travel, cures, struggles with demons,
wonder-working relics). As most of the labels are translations of Arabic
terms from the texts, this work is also an exercise in interpreting ‘indig-
enous’ categories, with the consequent interpretation problem suggested
by the anthropological tradition.42 Thus, epistemological vigilance must
be attuned to the categories used when labelling groups and social prac-
tices, which may be biased or simply reflect the implicit ideas of the
builder of the typologies (see Chapter 5 on the production of ethnicity),
as illustrated by Bourdieu (1973) in his work on the social construction
of ‘public opinion’ through statistics.
3.3 Dialogues between the Oral, the Visual

and the Written
Many of the problems attributed to written and historical sources
are not that distant from the problems found in contemporary oral
sources and diverse ethnographies, when it comes to the question of
Karl Popper and his rejection of certainties. Indeed, epistemological
vigilance can serve both techniques in a similar way while maintain-
ing the differences. Here, again, the work done by Julio Caro Baroja
(1991) on lying in Spanish history comes into play, especially regarding
the country’s mythical or legendary origins, located in a far-off space
and time. The political, religious and territorial unification of the Ibe-
rian Peninsula carried out by the Catholic Monarchs became a raison
d’État. At that time, an Italian humanist, Annius de Viterbo (better
known as pseudo-Berossos), supported this idea of unity. In his work,
De primis Temporibus et quatuor ac viginti Regibus Hispaniae et eius
Antiquitate, included in the treatise entitled Commentaria super opera
diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Commentaries
on the Works of Various Authors Discussing Antiquity, Rome, 1498),
he stated that there had been 24 ancient kings of Spain. This assertion
was based on the thesis of Berossos the Chaldean, who believed that
Tubal, the grandson of Noah and fifth child of Japheth, was the first
to populate and rule over ancient Spain, a well-known argument in
humanist and court circles.43 In 1588, during the reign of Felipe II,
texts carved in lead and relics from the Sacromonte neighbourhood of
Granada were discovered, which contained praise of the Arab peoples
and their language delivered by the Virgin Mary herself. These forg-
eries, according to Caro Baroja, emerged in a context of anxiety and
uncertainty produced by the Inquisition accusations against the ‘New
Christians’.44
It is, therefore, essential to listen to the methodological suggestions
and similes supplied by another epistemological debate related to the use
of oral sources and study genres themselves (oral history, oral tradition,
etc.). It is clear that oral history is a resource intended for modern re-
search, but the methodological approaches of authors like Jan Vansina
can also be useful when analysing the elements of oral culture somehow
transcribed in documents from the past. At the same time, however,
anthropological history is not only a discipline about the past, but is
connected to analyses of present projections into the past (and vice versa)
(Thomas, 1994). The social sciences cannot cover an impossible present,
in that it rapidly becomes a yesterday.
Vansina set the benchmark for the critical use of oral history. The
author stressed that before beginning historical research into a group,
it was essential to delve into the study of that group, whether through
ethnographic contact or knowledge of the language and cultural refer-
ence points.45 In fact, this exercise is one of the objectives of historical
anthropology, the reconstruction of the history of a society from differ-
ent points of view, shaped by factors of power, class or gender (Passerini
et al., 1996).
Since the 1970s, a series of studies have been published that have
combined and handled archive sources with oral sources.46 The work
by Ignasi Terradas on the inhabitants of Ametlla in Merola, originally
published in 1979, was a pioneer in the use of oral history to analyse the
establishment of industrial colonies in Catalonia in the late nineteenth
century. Through interviews with the eldest members of the town, he
was able to understand the impact that the industrial colonial system
had on their lives.47 The contrast between oral sources and documents
makes it possible to produce rich reconstructions of a recent past that do
not constitute mere sums of partial truths, but represent different views
of reality as an expression of a politicized memory with its own commu-
nicative strategies and rule of armed conflicts and genocides, colonial-
ism, the life of subordinate or dominant groups and the reconstruction
of social relations (Valensi & Wachtel, 1976; Fraser, 1979; Passerini,
1987; Portelli, 1989, 2004). This politicized memory has emerged most
notably in situations of conflict and dictatorships that enforced silence
and buried part of the past. The reconstruction of Latin American dicta-
torships and the Franco dictatorship forms part of these present battles
over the past, where fieldwork is done on the victims’ remembrance and
forgetting (Ferrándiz, 2014; Olaso, 2016) and the very mechanisms of
repression (Gómez Bravo, 2017). These archival reconstructions, trian-
gulated with fragile memory, also include considerations that question
the role of historiography as justifying regimes of domination, as with
the Franco era (Alares López, 2017). In some cases, the contrast be-
tween written, oral and even visual highlights the contradictions be-
tween sources, as William Christian explained years ago while he was
preparing his monograph on Ezkioga (Christian Jr., 1996). For example,
Christian found images of many of the people who did not mention hav-
ing been part of the mass encounters around the Marian apparitions in
their testimonies in photos after patient searches of group images done
with a magnifying glass.
The availability of colonial reports on institutions, meetings and polit-
ical representations, and the possibility of having witnesses to those pub-
lic events has generated multifaceted collages, where both the memories
in the testimonies and the intention and partiality of the written sources
can be compromised. Moreover, in addition to contemporary oral
sources, there is a methodological strategy to interpret written sources
from the past as a reflection of oral sources from their time. The basic
problem is the same: ‘It follows that oral traditions are not just a source
about the past, but a historiology (one dare not write historiography!) of
the past, an account of how people have interpreted it’.48
Some texts from the past are based on oral sources or are the ex-
pression of them, such as cases from the Inquisition, confessions and
other genres. The legitimacy of each type of rhetoric varies historically
and transculturally. The criteria of truth, credibility or certainty absorb
different sources according to the context and the role attributed to the
written and the oral (Goody, 1985; Bloch, 1998).
The Muslim Arab world illustrates this dialectic between written and
oral. On the one hand, the written text enjoys undisputed legitimacy,
often amongst historians as well, that gives the document an intrinsic
aura of truth. Ethnographies on a region mention informants who direct
the researcher to books and documents to find the ‘truth’ about their
culture. However, as Kilani (1992) showed in his fieldwork in the oases
of Tunisia, documents in the Arab world can also be suspect because of
their evocative and legal power. Some people are hesitant to share docu-
ments and genealogies because of the power attributed to them, as they
contain biographical details that could allow access to land rights or spe-
cific inheritances. Kilani could never find the document promised by his
informants and became familiar with every type of excuse used to justify
its eternal absence. Here, the document itself is a living, reinterpreted
element. Writing guarantees the authenticity of the oral word. What
counts is the invocation of the written document, which becomes sym-
bolic capital to obtain or reproduce other resources.49
At least in the Islamic origin myth, this legitimacy of the written was
originally nurtured by the revelation of the divine word (Messick, 1993).
In the history of other genres like the hadiths, legitimacy is also based
on the chain of transmitters, which includes oral witnesses. Orality is
what gives power and credibility to what would later be established as
a written and compiled text. Caro Baroja (1955a, 1955b, 1957a, 1957b)
well understood the function of these documents and their interaction
with oral culture, as seen in his work on the Sahara. In fact, he was
one of the first authors to take the work of Ibn Khaldun and his primal
conception of nasab (genealogy) as something more constructed than
descriptive, in the style of Lewis Henry Morgan’s distinction regarding
categories of kinship.
These dialogues between the oral and the written can be triangulated
by adding another type of source: the visual. The study by Panofsky
(1972) on iconology revealed the diverse readings that images can of-
fer the study of societies, viewing them as equal to or more important
than classic written sources. Just as non-verbal communication is one
of the primary mechanisms of cultural transmission, images require
special attention to understand the forms of enculturation, indoctrina-
tion and the struggle to define reality. Burke (2005) summarized this
type of potentiality as a methodological recourse for the analysis of
iconographies, indoctrinations, devotions, controversies, protests and
stereotypes. As classic anthropology collects ‘material culture’, why not
continue this essential labour in historical anthropology, freeing it from
the collectionist element, where the object loses its original meaning to
become an exhibit in a Wunderkammer. Research into colonialism in
particular has benefitted extraordinarily from this study of images as a
product of power relations to understand both the colonial ideology and
the forms of resistance and mechanisms to generate stereotypes (Mateo
Dieste, 2011). This does not only concern the material object per se, but
also how each era interprets and uses these objects as clothing, everyday
utensils, food, objects of power, relics and so forth. These objects can
embody values, curative powers or become markers of group bound-
aries by being represented as elements that give life to the collective or
community.
Decoding ‘the written’ is not restricted to the paper document, given
that it also becomes material culture and acquires other values according
to the moment. One illustrative case is the ‘national’ archive, created in
the modern age by states as part of their own ad hoc legitimation. Just
as Ernest Gellner wrote that having a nationality in the modern world is
like having a nose and two ears, perhaps having a mouth is as natural as
a nation having its national archive.
Looking at iconography, collecting images in all their changing for-
mats has made it possible for various authors to analyse the forms of
representing alterity, especially during the colonial expansion. The
transformation of both the images and the formats becomes very clear
in longue durée studies, such as Martín Corrales’s (2002) analysis of the
image of the Maghreb in Spain from the sixteenth century to the pres-
ent day. This work showcases repetitions, continuities, transformations,
styles, reinterpretations of the same images and different readings of
the same image. This emphasizes the importance of observing a variety
of formats: cathedral facades, religious sculpture, chapbooks, popular
literature, engravings, publications, official documents, magazines, pub-
licity, posters, cartoons, children’s games, postcards and more.
The literature that focuses on the exploitation of visual colonial ar-
chives has shown its enormous potential for the study of imperial cul-
ture, the dissemination of stereotypes and the war of images (Bancel et
al., 1993; Sánchez Gómez, 2013). One challenging space that has caught
the eye of anthropologists are the so-called human zoos and, especially,
colonial exhibitions as a form of representing humanity, with conse-
quences not only for the colonial society, but also for postcolonial sit-
uations, particularly when it comes to producing images of immigrants
(Blanchard & Bancel, 1998).
3.4 Social Theory and History

A common denominator and one of the distinctions of the different fo-
cuses discussed here is the need to link sociohistorical analysis to some
type of social model, a social theory in terms of how change is explained,
materially and symbolically, how conflict and consensus are understood
and how society, individuals, groups, relationships, structures and strat-
egies are defined. This, of course, involves historically situating all these
basic concepts – like ‘individual’ and ‘society’ – that have not always had
their own place or pertinence, as comparative anthropology has done.50
At the same time, social theories must be open to the diachronic study
of societies, without being overcome by models that are now taken for
granted. When the social sciences attempt to analyse change or trans-
formation in societies, the point of view is teleological, that is, they
are almost normative or predictive, as in the case of evolutionism or
developmentalism. Or they may propose that societies necessarily pass
through the fixed stages of their predecessors (the evolutionism of Lewis
H. Morgan and Edward B. Tylor), establish ‘cultural circles’ (the Kul-
turkreise of the German school) that expand out from some basic traits
or, like Tunisian Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), postulate that all societ-
ies undergo perpetual change. According to geopolitician Yves Lacoste,
these hypotheses are a clear precursor to the conceptual contents of his-
torical materialism (Al-Muqaddimah, 1374–78).51
Clearly, the starting point predetermines the chosen subject and the
elements ‘found’. In the words of Pier Paolo Viazzo:
It is understandable why Levi resolutely distanced himself, whether

from Geertz or from Geertzian historians like Darnton, who looked
for the meaning of cockfights in Bali or a cat massacre in Ancien
Régime France within a coherent and almost immobile cultural
system. It is also understandable why different, but equally harsh
critiques have been aimed at Laslett, accused of using a concept of
social or family structure that was no less static and normatively
inflexible than that which elicited the reaction of Firth and the
transactionalists.52
Methodological imagination must be prioritized without dogmatisms.

For example, Jeremy Boissevain’s (1979) theories on the analysis of per-
sonal networks can also serve to piece together the past from a trans-
actionalist model. This model appears to propose an alternative, both
to the structuralist rigidity of Peter Laslett and to the culturalism of
Clifford Geertz and Robert Darnton.
Theoretical debates in other areas have also passed on to the study of
history, specifically amongst family historians. While Laslett spoke of
family types, other authors borrowed from the observations made by
Meyer Fortes (1906–83) on Africa, using the concept of the developmen-
tal cycle to underscore how different family types (nuclear, extended,
etc.) are not exclusive, since domestic groups transform over time. In
1972, Lutz Berkner stressed this idea of the developmental cycle and
one year later, Giovanni Levi voiced some reservations about Laslett’s
methodology, revising the structural concept of the analysis to propose
a concept of strategies, which French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also
advocated in his works on the role of marriage strategies and social re-
production. In his studies on marriage in Bearn and Kabylia, Algeria,
Bourdieu (1988) rejected the rigidity of the concept of ‘kinship rules’
inherited from the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, proposing instead a
system of dispositions (habitus) or common sense, in which individuals
act according to a ‘sense of the game’ that leads them to ‘choose’ the best
possible option.
One example of these theoretical debates is the work by Giovanni
Levi, The Immaterial Inheritance (1985). In this analysis of a village
priest accused of practicing mass exorcisms, Levi reconstructed the
interpersonal relationships and alliances between families in a town
in Piedmont and the political role of its leaders. Levi’s dense analysis
is not at odds with the microanalysis of marriage strategies or power
structures.53 This approach would shape future studies on kinship net-
works, many of which are now paradigmatic such as those coming out
of the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, where David Warren Sabean
analysed the moral economy of Neckarhausen, in southwest Germany
(1990, 1997) in Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Dis-
course in Early Modern Germany.54 Through a series of episodes that
occurred in small villages in the community, Sabean reconstructed the
life of the inhabitants of the duchy of Württemberg (1580–1800) in its
entirety and on different levels, revealing the fundamental role of its
kinship and alliance systems in the context of the transition to the mod-
ern world.55 From 1700 to 1740, members of wealthy families married
women from lower strata, creating vertical relationships of patronage.
However, beginning in 1750, these marriage patterns were modified
through an endogamic system of alliances articulated around a new
organizational principle of modern society: social classes. Contrary to
what had been believed, marriages between blood relatives like cous-
ins, far from decreasing, increased until 1900, reinforcing a patrilineal
system of class stratification. Sabean successfully demonstrates the key
role played by families in the mechanisms of production and circulation
of goods, property, access to resources, the acceptance of certain duties
and norms, honour, production and exchange, all articulating mediated
social relationships.56 Clearly, marriage strategies cannot be dissociated
from other social reproduction strategies (economic, educational, etc.)
(Bourdieu, 1988). The changes in status and activity for women are
striking, as they begin to play a leading role in the family reconfiguration
of the early nineteenth century.57
One of the great concerns about subverting the limits between anthro-
pology and history is inevitably related to the sources and techniques
used by two disciplines that are taken for granted.58 Indeed, anthro-
pologists and historians like Jean and John L. Comaroff (1992), Jonas
Frykman and Orvar Löfgren (1987) and Nicholas Thomas (1996) resist
defending the dichotomy between explanation and interpretation, not
only because they fear dogmatization, but because they detect a danger
for the practice of anthropology given the discipline’s ‘historical turn’. 59
In France, the works of Febvre and Bloch instead manifest a concern
about history moving closer to anthropology, while in Germany, the
creation of a specific discipline, Historische Anthropologie has been
advocated.60 In practice, some important works, like those by Bernard
Cohn on northern India, have included ethnographic notes from archive
material in addition to the fieldwork that he had done in the region,
demonstrating that anthropology can – and must – analyse historical
change free of prejudice.61
3.5 History, Histories

Analyses of the colonial period have also been fundamental, both for
understanding the modern world and for offering methodological re-
sources for the historical-anthropological study of the relationship
between power and knowledge (Asad, 1993). The transition from colo-
nialism to the unequal postcolonial world system also caught the atten-
tion of pioneering authors in the analysis of change. In 1957, Algerian
writer Albert Memmi, one of the scholars at the vanguard of the analysis
of the complex interactions that characterize the relationship between
colonizers and colonized, published The Colonizer and the Colonized
(1957) in the midst of the Algerian revolution. This colonial relation-
ship, in the words of Memmi, ‘chained the colonizer and the colonized
into an implacable dependence, moulded their respective characters and
dictated their conduct’.62
Georges Balandier’s combination of anthropology and the analysis of
social dynamics is also highly interesting in this context. This ‘new’ po-
litical anthropology proposed to rescue history as an informative tool
in the observation of the processes of power.63 The situations of global
inequalities thus challenged the myth of free trade and laissez-faire. Free
trade did not develop out of monopolies, as Karl Polanyi (1944) ap-
peared to suggest, but through what A.G. Frank termed the development
of underdevelopment.64 This was a stage based on initial political and
military conquests that later reproduced this initial violence in a form
of protecting global property.65 Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) defined it
as a global system, and his theories had an important impact on anthro-
pology, which discovered that the places where research was done were
not small isolated worlds, but ‘peripheral nodes’ in massive networks of
economic relations and had been for centuries.66
This focus exposed the geopolitical unity of global capitalism. In re-
sponse, Eric Wolf’s 1982 work, Europe and the People without His-
tory, appeared to respond to Wallerstein’s challenge by laying bare the
impact that the global system had on ‘peripheral’ peoples, observing
the power relations that they established, without negating the active
role of the peoples themselves. However, both authors overly value the
importance of capitalism according to its demographic and geographic
consequences.67 Despite that, authors like Jan Vansina have emphasized
that the importance of Wolf’s analysis lies in having introduced anthro-
pology into the Marxist tradition. In fact, his great contribution as an
anthropologist consists of highlighting the role of these peoples as ‘dom-
inated agents’ excluded from history. Wolf was able to unmask some lit-
tle discussed dualist approaches, like those of Lévi-Strauss, who defined
certain societies as ‘stateless’, ‘segmentary’, ‘traditional’ or ‘cold’.68
The reading of history seen from the non-European side was not partic-
ularly easy. At the same time that Wolf was presenting his magnum opus,
Marshall Sahlins gave a series of conferences on the controversial death
of Captain James Cook. As seen in Chapter 2, reconstructing the events
of 1779 presented a historical challenge. To meet it, Sahlins applied an
anthropological reading to the historical documents, but he was not en-
tirely successful in his attempt. Instead, Sahlins brilliantly proposed that
Cook’s death had been read differently by the English, who saw it as an
assassination, and by the natives, who had sacrificed him, believing him
to be a divinity who appears each year to regenerate the cosmos. Sahlins
also stressed that there was a clash between two ways of seeing the world
and two forms of history: English history, marked by events and a linear
point of view, and the local history, organized around ritual and mytho-
logical thinking and a cyclical point of view.
Sahlins argued that there is no one way to read history or any histori-
cal objectivity. The past can be interpreted in multiple ways. These views
coincide with the postmodern criticism of the social sciences. To what
extent do Sahlins and, especially, Wolf share the postmodern diagnosis?
Does saying that several visions of the world coexist mean that history is
impossible? Or if, as François Hartog proposes, we are living in ‘an om-
nipresent present’, is it no longer valid to reactivate the authority of the
past? These queries challenge not only the nineteenth-century question
about a history focused on events, but the very possibility of projecting
into the future.69
As an aside, several important debates arose from the modern-
postmodern problem. American anthropologist Marvin Harris (1927–
2001), for instance, argued that the impossibility of objectifying or
demonstrating what had happened in the past, as argued by postmod-
ernists, could have serious ethical consequences: is it really impossible to
document the inequalities and atrocities resulting from Nazism, racism
and the capitalist exploitation of oppressed peoples (Harris, 2007)?
The problem concerns determining whether there is a historical time
that is common to all societies or whether, on the contrary, it is neces-
sary to speak of diverse ‘historicities’70 or the possibility that there are
different ways of understanding time and the human relationship to it
and the cosmos itself. Behind this debate, however, lies another more
formidable theoretical debate that concerns the epistemology of anthro-
pology: are all humans equal? Does the fact that they are driven by dif-
ferent variants of a common reasoning ability mean that models cannot
be established to explain their actions, behaviour or modes of thought?
Gananath Obeyesekere offered a response to these questions that was
anything but relativist. In Sahlins’s work, Obeyesekere saw a return to
the primitivist differentialism of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (Primitive Mental-
ity, 1922). Obeyesekere, in contrast, challenged relativist postmodern-
ism, defending the universality of practical rationality and denying that
the Hawaiians identified Cook with a god (in other words, he denied
that they were ‘superstitious’). Here the ‘superstitious’ one was Sah-
lins, who believes in the myth of Cook deified by the natives.71 Sahlins
and Obeyesekere debated each other bitterly. Ironically, to defend his
more relativist or anti-positivist position, Sahlins had to draw on the
‘positivist’ resource of demonstration to base his argument (whether or
not something happened, what the people of the time did, what they
thought; the Comaroffs and others have also questioned whether so-
cial action is purely conscious or unconscious). Other questions related
to the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate concerned the subject as construc-
tor of history, the different versions of history and its various views
and legitimizations. From Boasian historicism, anthropology contrib-
uted the idea that every view of the world should be evaluated for it-
self, without hierarchies. Applying this ethnocentric criticism to history
also means questioning – as postmodernists would say – the ‘authority’
of a single observer (the scientist, the historian, etc.). It is with good
reason that Michel Leiris in 1950 lamented the fact that ethnography,
one of the sciences that should contribute to the production of an au-
thentic humanism, was so unilateral. In other words, if Westerners are
using ethnography to study the cultures of other peoples, none of those
peoples would be able to follow suit with Western societies.72 Accord-
ingly, Leiris proposes the utopia of training ethnographers in colonized
countries from scratch to come to Europe and study its ways of life.73
Here, cultural relativism can be applied to the historical focus and to
chronocentrism.
In recent years, several authors have emphasized the importance of
analysing conceptions of time and history in different cultural con-
texts (Iggers & Wang, 2008; Ventura i Oller, 2015). Indeed, even to-
day there is still a great need to review the hegemonic forms that have
hidden ‘other’ ways of understanding history from an anthropology of
history (Palmié & Stewart, 2016). In some situations, this historicity
has been and is the subject of dramatic fights, which are not only po-
litical but also academic, like the battle to define the past in Israel and
Palestine.74
However, authors like Klein (1995) emphasize that this idea of his-
torical pluralism once again falls into the dichotomies that divided the
world into a dualism between us and them, between ‘hot’ societies and
‘cold’ societies. The question posed by the end of the Western theoretical
monopoly in anthropology is: who is this ‘us’ that comes together to
speak about ‘the history of others’? In other words, anthropology should
not form part of the Western side, but neither should it form part of the
supposed ‘other’ side. Neither should Obeyesekere’s criticisms have more
authority because he is ‘indigenous’ (although not Hawaiian). Just as
Sahlins cannot be the spokesperson for the West, Obeyesekere cannot be
spokesperson for the ‘non-West’: ‘the bizarre pretension that a Sinhalese
has privileged intuitive knowledge about the Hawaiian mindset thanks
to a common subalternity in relation to the West’.75
The debate is not over. Finally, Western authority, the heir to the hu-
manist philosophy of the Enlightenment and colonialism, has been chal-
lenged. In the words of one Hawaiian anthropologist, ‘the tradition of
Western outsiders conversing with indigenous informants may become
obsolete’ (Kane, 1997). However, to what point does being indigenous
ensure the quality of the work and the perspective? This, of course, applies
to indigenous Westerners, as well. For better or for worse, anthropology
was begot out of an experience of alienation that led to the construction
of new views. This alienation, however, can and should also be extended
to one’s ‘own’ environment. According to Evans-Pritchard, anthropol-
ogy was a humanist discipline that offered the challenge of comparing
and translating the concepts of the culture being studied to that of the
studier.76 These critical alternatives should not reject comparison and
translation or confirm exclusivist political barriers. Unfortunately, it ap-
pears that exclusivist cultural categories from the late twentieth century
are being imposed. In other words, it must be possible to challenge the
theoretical hegemony of Anglo-Saxon academic anthropology (or that
of any other former metropole) without necessarily justifying a supposed
incommensurability that would do a disservice to humanist proposals.77
3.6 Chronocentrism, Memory and Power

Any critical reflection must also address the fact that the epistemological
problems analysed here are intertwined with widely known ethical fac-
tors and political biases: how does the present affect the way of recon-
structing the past and what role does this view of the past and of history
itself play? The creation of the past as an object is an absolutely relevant
challenge; the construction of the nation, of an ethnicity, of a religious
group, debates about genocides, conflicts from the past and memory are
all examples of this challenge.
The possibility of recognizing those excluded from history is at
the core of this book and has been demonstrated in numerous mono-
graphs. An interest in observing power relations, their hegemonies and
their cracks cannot neglect the excluded as agents of history. From the
Gramscian tradition, Ernesto de Martino (2004) transferred this work
to an anthropology of groups and populations long before postcolonial
studies of subalternity (Spivak, 1995; Guha, 1997).78 In this vein and
in light of the analytical exercises of Carlo Ginzburg and others, it is
essential to stress that it is both useful and possible to rescue excluded
men and women from sources from the hegemonic power, if there are no
other sources. This recourse is only viable after a critical decoding of the
sources, making a distinction between the documents of power and the
power of documents. It is possible to extract the study of the relatio in
order to analyse the erasures of the past (Trouillot, 1995).
This question makes an appearance in numerous chapters and articles
that play with the relationship between the ‘past in the present and the
present in the past’, and this two-way present-past flow has been inter-
preted in a number of ways.79 The postmodernists, however, turned the
question on its head: the supposed past cannot be reconstructed, given
that it is a construction from the present. However, Nicholas Thomas
demonstrated how to look at an issue from both sides, without excluding
either of them (Thomas, 1994). In fact, the political use of the past has
been widely analysed in, for example, studies of modern national think-
ing, based on the idea of tradition or an origin myth, whether applied
to expanding nations, indigenisms or various ‘defensive’ nationalisms
(Guibernau, 1998; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1988).80 Ann L. Stoler, ar-
guing for the need to grasp the discontinuity between past and pres-
ent, has proposed the polysemic term ‘duress’ to understand the current
world and its ‘imperial ruins’, with a view to analysing all that remained,
transformed or disappeared between the colonial and postcolonial eras,
whose boundary is difficult to trace, indeed.81
The political power of words is still reflected in the terms used to desig-
nate the disciplines and their boundaries. A quick word search produces
some revealing results: in French, the term anthropologie historique is
more commonly used than ethnohistoire, and does not generally desig-
nate the study of a human group as much as the study of sociocultural
phenomena (e.g., the historical anthropology of time). In contrast, in
English, ‘ethnohistory’ is more common than ‘historical anthropology’
with regard to dozens of monographs on, above all, indigenous peoples.
To some extent, it seems like this sub-discipline aims to analyse a history
of ‘isolated’ peoples.
When reconstructing a past society, the language of the present one
is clearly amongst the greatest epistemological traps in the study. Here,
the debate – although disputed – about ethnic and external categories
can be useful. The projection of categories and concepts, like purity of
blood, race, mestizos or mixed people, is more common in comparative
analyses. As Miri Song has observed:
In Britain, mixed people are referred to by officialdom as an “eth-

nic group”, but this terminology is rather misleading because what
mixed people have in common is their mixedness, as defined by the
state, rather than any common ethnic or racial ancestry as such.82
This methodological problem is not new. In his text, Futures Past (1979),
Reinhart Koselleck analysed the difficulty of working with categories
from the present to analyse phenomena – or events – from the past.
This epistemological challenge is not unlike the problems inherent in
anthropology, when it tries to analyse phenomena from other cultural
contexts and their own reference points, invoking the supposed ‘objec-
tivity’ of the ethnographic method.83 The debate is an old one and much
has been written about the role of historians in the construction of social
categories. Perhaps, however, less work has been done on the common
denominator that affects both historians and anthropologists and the
potential lessons that could come from comparing ethnocentrism and
chronocentrism.84
How can societies be analysed from the perspective of the modern/
postmodern debates in the social sciences? The criticism of anthropol-
ogy and history as objective disciplines serves to show the mechanisms
behind the construction of knowledge and their ties to questions of
power. However, having acquired this constructivist awareness supplied
by postmodernism, what then is to be done with the documents, the so-
cieties of the past, what can be said about them, their people, their ways
of thinking, their social relations and the exercise of power?
An initial step involves putting the house in order. The rather stunted
debate about the history of anthropology is part and parcel of the same
set of problems (Stolcke, 1993a). Putting the focus on anthropology raises
issues similar to those raised when studying the local experiences of so-
cieties. This was a key issue for nineteenth-century authors, although,
as is well known, their questions were shaped by a supra-historical, evo-
lutionist starting point and focus. This focus was more normative than
descriptive, since it tended to ‘explain’ institutions in sequential order
through a dynamic of stages of society, presupposing universal laws de-
termined by the idea of progress and linear time (Marx himself was
inspired by the anthropological work of Lewis H. Morgan). However,
other anthropologists like Boas had already called attention to the prob-
lem, and around the same time a little cited author, the English historian
Frederick William Maitland (1850–1906), criticized evolutionist teleol-
ogy, saying that anthropology should be historical or be nothing.85
An overview of the history of anthropology shows that history and
social change were in no way negated by the ‘bookish ethnology, as am-
ateur as speculative, of the evolutionists and diffusionists’.86 According
to Viazzo, 1922 was the critical year when anthropology was sepa-
rated from history, the year that saw the publication of books by Bron-
islaw Malinowski (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922) and Alfred
Radcliffe-Brown (The Andaman Islanders, 1922).87 In his book Out
of Time: History and Evolution in Anthropological Discourse (1989),
Nicholas Thomas warns that prioritizing a long-term ‘ethnographic pres-
ent’ excluded the anthropological object from historical time. Viewed as
an exclusive method – and rite of passage – of the anthropologist, the
ethnographic practice seemed to exist outside of historical time.88 Proof
of this was the disdainful way that professional ethnographers tried to
exclude and delegitimize reports from the early explorers, missionaries
and colonial civil servants. This marginalization of the (colonial) history
done by modern ethnographers, according to Thomas, has always been
problematic.89 It is no surprise that Lévi-Strauss himself in his book The
Sad Tropics (1955) described the work of the French explorer Jean de
Léry as the ‘breviary of the ethnologist’.90
The anthropologist needs historical data to understand the change
that is always occurring in structural processes. However, presentism
must be avoided when evaluating and interpreting the past using the
criteria of the present.91 Social phenomena are historical by nature; hu-
man beings interpret reality from within social structures and mean-
ings whose origins cannot be detached from the past. But what is this
history? In his last book, The Theft of History (2006), Jack Goody
(1919–2015) wrote that ‘Europe has stolen the history of the East by
imposing its own versions of time (largely Christian) and of space on the
rest of the Eurasian world’.92 In antiquity, Athens became the cradle of a
democracy whose values, of course – freedom, equality, rationality – did
not quite mirror common Greek cultural practices like slavery. Other
cities like Tyre, a Phoenician colony, and Carthage also followed demo-
cratic procedures, but they were deliberately ‘written out of the script’.93
However, imagining an exclusive European antiquity made it possible
to create a developmental scheme that pointed towards the take-off of
modern capitalism. India and China were also ‘civilizations’, but after
José de Acosta’s (1540–1600) famed Natural and Moral History of the
Indies (1590), European historians considered those countries inferior
because, despite their cultural sophistication, they were not Christian.94
The present and past, in effect, are regarded as the peak of a Christian
Europe that consolidated its domination over the world beginning in
the sixteenth century, first through trade and then through the conquest
and colonization of new lands. The imposition of this domination led to
the establishment of a hegemonic model that allowed western European
countries to take ownership of time and apply it to the rest of the world.
The challenge represented by Islam was an important factor in the con-
solidation of ‘Europe’ as a single family or civilization, giving form to
the idea of the ‘West’.95 However, anthropology must return time to the
peoples ‘without a history’, not because they lived outside of it, but be-
cause European history simply did not correspond to them.
Notes
1 Viazzo, 2003: 11.
2 Leiris, 1995: 34.
3 Leiris, 1995: 40–1.
4 Jiménez, 1995: 32, 1972: 163–96; Sanchiz Ochoa, 1997a: 54.
5 Ginzburg, 2010: 9; Ginzburg and Ponti, 1991: 1–10.
6 Ginzburg, 2010: 396.
7 Trevor-Roper, 1985: 77–152.
8 On Thomas’s use of ethnographic examples in his Religion and the Decline
of Magic (1971), see the debate in the 1975 issue of the Journal of Interdis-
ciplinary History (Amodio, 2010: 385).
9 Viazzo, 2003: 219.
10 Greenblatt, 1981: 40–61.
11 Burke, 2006: 62; Ginzburg, 2010: 15.
12
Ginzburg, 2010: 396–7.
13 Ginzburg, 2010: 374.
14 Macfarlane also applied this total analysis in a pioneering monograph on the
life of a Protestant vicar in Essex Ralph Josselin (1977) during the second
half of the seventeenth century, using a diary that allowed MacFarlane to
recreate the social life of the era from within.
15 Ginzburg, 2005, 2010: 371.
16 Rosaldo, 1986: 79.
17 Rosaldo, 1986: 82.
18 Amodio, 2010: 387–8.
19 Stoler, 2010: 47.
20 See the works by Dirks (2002) and Stoler (2010).
21 Martínez Mauri & Orobitg Canal, 2015: 7–12.
22
Cabello, 2004, cited in Martínez Mauri & Orobitg Canal, 2015: 12.
23
Sanchiz, 1997a: 53–60; Suñe, 1997a: 69–105.
24 For his interpretation of so-called ‘archaeological anthropology’ or ‘new ar-
chaeology’, see Alcina Franch, 1973: 47–62, 1989: 5–9.
25 Jiménez, 1997a: 29. One of the projects where ethnohistorical methodology
was applied looked at the territories of the Audience of Guatemala (sixteenth
century), which comprised a vast area, including the current republics of
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Mexi-
can lands of Chiapas and Soconusco (1997b: 107–16).
26 Some authors, like Pilar Sanchiz Ochoa (1997a: 59), believe that ‘the lack
of data on values and beliefs (although the Spanish of the era did interpret
them) makes it impossible to fully understand the mental aspect, and of
course, reach the ideal level of the indigenous culture’. We believe that doc-
uments provide quite valuable information to help understand the political,
social and economic motivations of ethnic groups at local level.
27 Stoler, 2010: 31.
28
Stoler, 2010: 32.

29 Stoler, 2010: 35.
30 See here the text by Keesing (1987) on the political production of knowl-
edge, Bourdieu’s doxa, the ‘world taken for granted’ of Schütz and Geertz
and Mary Douglas’s ‘implicit meanings’.
31 See the work done by our research group, Antropologia e Historia de la
Construcción social de identidades sociales y políticas: Stolcke (2008), Ma-
teo Dieste (2012a), Ventura et al. (2014), amongst others.
32 Stoler, 2010: 49.
33 On the Ottoman case, see Fetvaci (2013).
34 In 1921, Lord Lugard wrote The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa,
an authentic manual that emphasizes the importance of being familiar with
African political organization. This question would guide the aims of func-
tionalist political anthropologists until well into the 1940s. As far back as
the 1920s and 1930s, a large number of colonial civil servants had become
members of the Royal Anthropological Institute. In 1926, the International
African Institute was founded, the birthplace of classic functionalist ethnog-
raphies by Fortes, Evans-Pritchard and Seligman.
35 In the colonies themselves, the need to ‘know the natives’ led to the creation
of institutions like the Committee for Historical and Scientific Studies of
French West Africa in 1915 to study the Sudanese legal system. In 1914,
Delafosse established the Colonial School, followed by the Paris Institute for
Ethnology in 1924. The processes were similar in North Africa. In 1904,
M.A. Le Chatelier, a professor at the Collège de France, founded the Sci-
entific Mission of Morocco. In 1914, he agreed with the government of the
French Protectorate in Morocco to publish the series Cities and Tribes of
Morocco, largely based on reports from the colonial information service.
36
It is quite significant that the first modern national archive came into being
after the French Revolution in 1790 (Dirks, 2002: 61).

64 Foster-Carter, 1977: 46–55.
65 Terradas, 1988: 284.
66 Viazzo, 2003: 302.
67 Terradas, 1988: 285.
68 Altez, 2012: 136.
69 Hartog, 2009: 1438–42.
70 On this subject, see the excellent article by Stewart, 2016: 79–94.
71 For a consideration of this type of projection, see the intriguing text by Witt-
genstein (1967) and his criticism of Frazer that the idea of superstition is not
inherent to the ‘natives’, but to Frazer himself.
72 Leiris, 1995: 54. In the midst of the decolonization process initiated by
France at the Brazzaville Conference (1944), Leiris published the piece ‘L’et-
nographe davant le colonialisme’ in Les Temps Modernes (August, 1950).
This work presents a critique of the decolonization processes in Africa and
Indochina (Delgado, 1995: 7–32), as a continuation of his first major con-
sideration of colonialism in Afrique fantôme (1934), a book that exposed
the bad practices of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition (1931–33) of Marcel
Griaule, for whom Leiris served as secretary.
73 Leiris, 1995: 55.
74 Stoler, 2016: 37–67.
75 Viazzo, 2003: 317.
76 Viazzo, 2003: 2–3.
77
This sceptical spirit underlies the study by S.J. Tambiah (1990), which offers
an interesting alternative model.
78 The main goal of the so-called Subaltern Studies Group was, broadly speak-
ing, to rectify the elitist inclination behind the analysis of the history of
British colonialism and Indian nationalism, establishing a perspective that
viewed subalternity ‘as a name for the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age,
gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha, 1988: 35). For these postco-
lonial intellectuals, the central question in the historiography of colonial
India was ‘the study of the historical failure of the nation to come to its own’
(Guha, 1988: 43).
79 Ingold, 1996a: 161–84.
80 Similar processes have occurred around genealogical interpretation, for ex-
ample, regarding purity of blood in different contexts (Porqueres, 2001) and
in the political battles for access to genealogy in the Arab-Muslim world
(Bonte et al., 1991; Kilani, 1992).
81 Stoler, 2016: 25–30.
82 Song, 2012: 566.
83 Pagden, 1991: 43–53.
84
Taylor, 1988: 151–92.
85 Viazzo, 2003: 69; Altez, 2012: 125. Maitland criticized the anthropological
use of the past by Henry Maine (1822–88) in his Village Communities in the
East and West (1871). See Nolan (2003: 570).
86 Viazzo, 2003: 1, 65.
87 Thomas, 1989, chap. 2.

88 This argument was made earlier by Bernard Cohn in ‘History and Anthro-
pology’ (1980: 199).
89 Thomas, 1990: 155–6.
90 Lévi-Strauss, 1988: 83.
91 Viazzo, 2003: 55.
92 Goody, 2006: 286.
93 Goody, 2006: 291.
94 To understand the commotion that accompanied Christianity with its new
time and an authority from the past that was radically different to that of
the Roman Empire, see Hartog (2009: 1425–8).
95 The word ‘Europeans’ seems to have emerged in the eighteenth century
in reference to the victory of Charles Martel over Islamic forces in Tours.
J.M. Roberts, of course, noted in The Triumph of the West that groups be-
come more aware of themselves in the presence of an outside challenge and
that such awareness fosters cohesion.
4 Colonial Systems of Power
and Domination
There is no sweet tamarind fruit as there is no mulatto virgin.1
The sixteenth century was a time of great change and transformations

that shaped the political and economic life of the Old World. For French
historian Pierre Chaunu (1984), the period represented the greatest mu-
tation ever in human space. The ‘dis-covery’ of the New World pro-
duced the first rupture with the Old World principles of anthropology,
time and geography, with a new, savage nature, new barbarians and new
frontiers. 2 What really shook the Iberian monarchies, however, were the
subsequent conquest and exploitation, led by the most disadvantaged
sectors of the Christian reconquest who, under pressure from profound
socio-economic changes, decided to set sail for the New World as a way
to get ahead in an open world full of possibilities.
In the words of William B. Taylor, ‘[…] Spaniards and Portuguese
thought of America in a unitary way, as a “New World” so different
and unknown that it had to be invented […]’.3 But America was not
empty. Savage, half-naked beings lived there.4 The magnitude of the
moral differences, let alone the phenotypes, produced a great commo-
tion in traditional knowledge.5 Old ontological categories were shown
to be completely inoperative. The fundamental texts of Christianity did
not provide any clues about the human nature of these strange beings.
Early on, chroniclers defined them as a very naïve, pure and new hu-
manity, situating them in an idyllic ‘golden age’ or ‘age of natural law’
(Christopher Columbus; Peter Martyr of Angleria). However, this image
changed quite quickly, and they came to be described as peoples without
a history, without writing, without religion, whose depraved customs
indecently assaulted Christian morals. Their cultures were catalogued as
barbaric compared to ‘civilized’ uses and practices (Amerigo Vespucci,
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Ginés de Sepúlveda, José de Acosta).6 The
representation of their exterior appearance invented the ‘Indian’ and, at
the same time, reinforced the perception of ‘us’ as a superior cultural
identity.7 This feeling of belonging often vacillated between the poles of
attraction and repulsion, producing social phenomena that ranged from
intergroup cohesion to more aggressive and militant ethnocentrism.
Colonial Systems 113
One of the most important changes was the insertion of local groups
into global political structures. After the ‘dis-covery’ of America, the
Iberian empires expanded throughout an Atlantic world destined to ag-
grandize the Habsburg monarchy in their overseas enclaves, governed
by the logic of material gain flowing from the Indies to the metropole.
This ‘first stage of globalization’ has mistakenly been associated with
various Eurocentrist axioms about modernity.8 On the contrary, the
dissemination of this European modernity – or the export of political
and economic institutions and ways of life in well-defined historical
contexts – spread via cosmopolitanism and the circulation of ideas and
knowledge between the Old and New Worlds (globality).9 As John H.
Elliott would say, between the extremely diverse and extensive ‘Atlantic
world’ and ‘Pacific world’, it was possible to transcend national, longitu-
dinal and teleological structures and write a kind of transnational (i.e.
comparative), horizontal and trans-imperial history about some of the
most dynamic regions in Hispaniarum Rex.10
Of course, this does not mean that the natives of the West Indies had
not already developed long-distance forms of exchange with other cul-
tures. The great American civilizations (Mayas, Incas, Aztecs) covered
thousands of kilometres to forge their empires (in the case of the Incas)
or associations of prestige (in the case of the Mayas and Aztecs), es-
tablishing political, social and economic exchange networks between
unrelated ethnic groups (Berdan, 1982, 2014; Demarest, 2004). Sim-
ilarly, the inhabitants of the other Indies (Filipinos, Chamorros, Car-
olinians, Hawaiians) – in what for a time (1513–1607) was known as
the ‘Spanish lake’ (Bernabéu Albert, 1992) – had created trade net-
works with neighbouring peoples to exchange products and forge al-
liances long before the establishment of the Manila-Acapulco galleon
route.11
It was, in fact, after Christopher Columbus disembarked in the
Caribbean on 12 October 1492 and Vasco de Gama reached a port in
southwest India on 27 May 1492 that the Spanish-Portuguese monar-
chies promoted the Westernization and globalization of the economy
and culture, developing political networks of governance through which
they expanded across overseas territories (Bernand & Gruzinski, 1996;
Gruzinski, 2004). With the sixteenth century, European domination
spread across the other continents. However, this process, which began
in different spaces and was directed from different countries, was far
from homogeneous. The expansion generated a variety of colonial situ-
ations, the outcome of both local reactions and the colonizers’ different
expansion models. Despite some commonalities, the colonial projects
differed in their religious and political ideologies, their legal frame-
works, the metropolitan social sectors driving them, the socio-economic
models established and the ways in which the colonizing populations
settled as well as in the political management of the colonized popula-
tions themselves (Fieldhouse, 1981).
114 Colonial Systems
However, this social mobility from the ‘centre’ to the ‘peripheries’
did not impede the ability of local groups to affect global decision-
making. European globalization was preceded by an earlier process: the
strengthening of regional and local habits. Years ago, William B. Taylor
cautioned that ‘to describe local social structures, integration, central-
ization, and standardization only in terms of capitalism and external de-
pendencies neglects the role of local modes of thought and practice and
local arrangements of power in forming those dependencies’.12 Colo-
nialism, of course – unlike ‘coloniality’ – is an ambivalent, fluid process
that involves appropriation, cultural borrowing and effective resistance
by the colonized.13 The result is a tension between cultural homogeneity
and diversity that some modern theoreticians have defined as ‘glocal’.14
In this respect, the cultural patterns of indigenous peoples did not only
survive the arrival of the Europeans, but they integrated, adapted and
reinterpreted their values and traditions to the new Christian codes and
symbols as a way of preserving them in a type of cultural syncretism.15
4.1 From the West Indies to the East Indies

In the mid-seventeenth century, Spain and Portugal established massive
overseas empires.16 In addition to the practical pursuit of material gain,
the Spaniards were interested in a ‘spiritual conquest’, to use the term
popularized by Robert Ricard (1900–84), of the cultures they came into
contact with. The product of centuries spent fighting Muslim culture,
they wanted to spread the Christian faith and reinforce Christianity
through the evangelization of the Indians of the New World. Evange-
lizing was primarily a task for the mendicant orders, for whom the idea
of a Christian mission became synonymous with ‘civilization’ (Prosperi,
1992). Franciscans, Dominicans, Mercedarians and Augustinians were
followed by the Society of Jesus, considered the first global religious or-
ganization, motivated by an extraordinary, evangelizing effervescence.
However, while the trend in America in the late sixteenth century was
to replace friars with the diocesan clergy, in the Philippines, this was not
possible due to the scarcity of secular clergymen. This forced the clerks
regular to carry out the functions of parish priests in certain strategic ar-
eas with a very low Spanish, peninsular or American population, making
them, in the words of Marcelo H. Del Pilar (1889), a true ‘friarocracy’.17
One of the first political and ecclesiastical reforms in the Indies was the
regrouping of the indigenous population into reducciones or restricted
villages, a process that was not tension-free. In the beginning, the re-
ducciones were institutions established by the metropolitan government
aimed at preserving the first source of wealth: the ‘Indians’. ‘Reducing’
the Indians in San Francisco Acámbaro in Michoacan (1526–32) and
Santa Fe de la Laguna on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro and the con-
struction of the famous ‘village-hospitals’ in the Tarascan capital of
Tzintzuntzan (1532) were all intended to meet this objective.18 The head
of the project was Vasco de Quiroga, the future bishop of Michoacan
(1537–65), who was inspired by the critical humanism of Erasmus of
Rotterdam and, particularly, by Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, written in
1516, to concentrate the Mexican Indians in villages.19
Similar attempts to organize missions in New Spain were under-
taken by Franciscan missionaries Martín de Valencia (1474–1534) and
Pedro de Gante (1523–72), and by the first bishop of Mexico, Juan de
Zumárraga (1476–1548) and the Second Audience in Oaxaca (1537) and
Guatemala (Tuzulutlan, 1537; Vera Paz & Tierra de Guerra, 1547–56).
These Franciscan socialization projects, influenced by millenarian cur-
rents (Revelations 20), violently reacted against any manifestation of
indigenous religiosity, destroying what they considered pagan temples,
books and false images. Given that manpower was scarce and the indig-
enous population was not easy to replace, the reducciones prioritized
concentrating disperse rural populations in villages near new croplands
or grazing fields. The establishment of the congregaciones or Indian vil-
lages was done on the basis of an institutional structure that had irrep-
arable consequences for the indigenous population: deterritorialization,
exploitation and the migration of local groups, in addition to the subse-
quent readaptation of regional socio-economic structures to the logic of
the market.
In Ireland, the emerging English colonial empire established an equally
destabilizing social organization for the native population. During the
reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), the moderate Protestant Sir Henry Sid-
ney (1529–86), who was appointed governor in 1565, implemented a
colonization project aimed at attracting the ‘Catholic barbarians’ in the
English Pale. Specifically, the plan consisted of depopulating an area of
bellicose Celtic-Irish and replacing them with new settlers who could be
expected to be more loyal. By reforming the language, laws and native
customs, this project became the first step towards the establishment of
English hegemony on the neighbouring island. Despite the formal dif-
ferences, everything seems to indicate that the pattern was not English,
but Spanish. Between 1553 and 1556, Sidney had been in Spain as an
emissary of Queen Mary I (1553–58), where he probably learned about
the Spanish techniques to ‘reduce’ the ‘barbarians’ in the Indies. 20 From
an Anglican perspective, the Irish Catholics were extremely licentious
heathens, due to their ignorance of the benefits of civilization. 21
In Peru, the only way to guarantee good moral order consisted of ap-
plying a policy of concentrating the indigenous population in congrega-
ciones, Indian villages or reducciones under the care of the Society of
Jesus, according to the stipulations of the first Jesuit Provincial Con-
gregation held in Lima (16–27 January) and Cusco (8–16 October) in
1576. 22 In the Andean world, the internal organization and evolution
of community production, centring on the pre-Columbian ayllu, were
also affected, fundamentally because of the change in long-standing
traditional social hierarchies in these groups.23 These changes were
compounded when the natives were relocated to new places with new
government policies – the colonial ayllu – that forced them to produce
surpluses to maintain the Spanish authorities and priests. Little by little,
the continuity of the traditional values, their renewal and/or dissemina-
tion were also affected by the new models of social, political and moral
engineering imposed from the outside, in addition to the usurpation of
unoccupied lands, whether legally or by allowing the intrusions of the
Europeans.24
To encourage the natives to leave, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–
80) went so far as to burn their original villages and completely destroy
their goods, creating profound ecological imbalances. 25 The goal of this
‘Peruvian Solomon’ was to implement a social engineering project based
on ‘reducing’ the Indians to villages that would cover the entire vice-
royalty. While this ambitious project failed as an effective method of
ideological and social domestication (what Michel Foucault termed ‘gov-
ernmentality’), it did represent the first attempt by the Spanish Crown to
establish its political hegemony in colonial Peru. To meet this objective,
Toledo counted on the support of the royal and religious civil servants
of the Society of Jesus, especially the provincial, Father José de Acosta
(1576–81), who was responsible for administering two of the most im-
portant parishes or reducciones in Peru: Santiago del Cercado (1571)
and Juli (1576). Cercado was an urban reducción located in Lima, where
recently arrived Jesuits learned Quechua, while Juli was located in the
Chucuito region, next to Lake Titicaca. From the beginning, both re-
ducciones operated as laboratories for the future evangelization of the
Peruvian Indians. 26 For the Jesuits, this model became the only way
to ‘civilize’ the ‘barbarians’ through a type of disciplinary control of
the Indians’ conduct that was almost police-like. The aim of this forced
socialization was to repress ‘wayward’ behaviour, in other words, po-
lygamy, common-law unions, group drunkenness, sloth and idolatry.
Most studies agree that Juli was a quite arresting experiment in the
south-Andean Altiplano, from which the Society of Jesus expanded to
the Jesuit province of Paraguay (1609–37). However, other historians,
like Antonio Darí (2007), have different opinions about the Jesuit pater-
nalism, which turned the Juli parishes, in the words of Manuel Marzal
(1992), into a ‘possible utopia’.
The Society of Jesus was the first ‘globalized’ religious order whose
objective consisted of defending and propagating the gospel to the four
corners of the Earth. Recent studies have analysed the Jesuit mission as
a response to the global challenges faced by Christianity. 27 Amidst the
expansion of Tridentine Catholicism, Catholic missions were critical in
the formation of the Iberian colonial empires (16th–18th c.).28 In the
Philippines, the political and religious authorities in Manila decided to
concentrate disperse, independent barangays in villages or doctrinas, to
facilitate evangelization and increase production and tribute collection. 29
The organization of the people, the concern of the civil authorities about
caring for and controlling them, in a word, the ‘police’ question, was
constructed around the subjugation of the native populations in curates
or parishes. Like the other religious orders, the Jesuits did not only act
as parish priests, but also as the political and economic administrators
of the missions in their care, encouraging the circulation of missionary
knowledge around the world (De Castelnau-L’Estoile et al., 2011). In
theory, their objectives were aimed at transforming the identity of the
Asian peoples for the greater glory of God (Ad maiorem Dei gloriam)
and the greater universal good of men. In practice, the Jesuit mission-
aries themselves were also profoundly affected by the cultures that they
tried to evangelize.30 The acceptance of some reducciones or parishes
did not hinder the missionary activities of the Society of Jesus in the
Philippines; rather, they expanded their activity to more conflictive adja-
cent islands like Mindanao and Jolo, which were under the influence of
Islam, and the archipelagos of the Carolines, Palau and the Marianas on
the periphery of the Catholic Spanish Empire.31
Unlike the Chinese and Japanese civilizations, the inhabitants of Mi-
cronesia were not regarded as sophisticated civilizations comparable
to the Europeans, which is why they were conquered and evangelized
(Coello de la Rosa, 2010). When translating Christian dogma to local
cultural expressions, the Jesuits never tried to attract the Chamorro and
Caroline peoples culturally, as they considered them inferior in moral
terms. The intention of their missions was not, like those of Michele
Ruggieri (1543–1607), Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) and Mateo
Ricci (1552–1610), to teach mathematics or languages, but to convert
gentiles to Catholicism, saving them from eternal damnation. In ex-
change, unlike the Chinese and Japanese, these ‘destitute, ignorant In-
dians’ were forced to abandon their rites and traditions as pagan and
collaborate with the new political and religious authorities on the is-
lands.32 To that end, the Jesuits did not accommodate the natives, but
applied coercive, violent methods, a ‘Jesuit accommodation’. To under-
stand the particularities of these methods, it is necessary to situate the
islands in the broader context of imperial geographies, 33 colonial spaces
where missionaries, as cultural mediators and agents, played a key role
in the construction of a political-moral and cultural order in the Pacific
(Gruzinski, 2005).
This process of globalization requires a rethinking of the Gramscian
concept of resistance as a consciously organized reaction to the colo-
nizer. The underlying problem lies in the fact that the colonial project
is an objective condition that is imposed on the two parts of the col-
onization. Just as the colonized are not perpetually resisting colonial
domination in defence of a supposed cultural purity and/or essentialism,
the colonizers do not represent an efficiently established state policy (as
explored in the last section of this chapter). Rather, there is a constant
negotiation process through which the colonized and colonizers have
new forms of existence imposed upon them.34 Indigenous social tradi-
tions, micro-solidarities and elements of belonging and identity resisted
being uprooted by the metropolitan political authority, instead adapting
themselves to a new market logic that the natives conveniently incorpo-
rated into a monetarized economy within a global framework of colo-
nial expansion and overflow.
Contrary to the views of the postcolonial drift, indigenous peoples
were not simple victims of metropolitan imperialism; they appropriated
foreign beliefs and customs and incorporated them into their own. In
this respect, the colonial discourse and colonial power are not com-
pletely in the hands of the colonizer. Rather, colonialism must be seen as
a cultural process that has an impact on the concept of the practice or
historical action of the subjects and agents in the (post)colonial arenas
and cultures involved (Thomas, 1994; Cooper & Stoler, 1989). In Peru,
for instance, the Andean peoples created a complex system of alliances
to obtain advantageous positions in a mercantile economy (Stern, 1993).
However, in the mid-1570s, the alliances between the kurakas (indige-
nous lords) and the Spanish failed. The mercantile economy underwent
an accelerated expansion. The gradual monetarization of the economy
operated as the primary motive to integrate other activities parallel to
mining such as trade, with this mechanism producing a structuration in
the system of exchanges that, moreover, directly or indirectly absorbed
the work of the indigenous communities.35 Many natives, mainly out-
siders, periodically headed to the foothills of Cerro Rico, attracted by
the silver of Potosi and the possibility of evading the tribute, which was
harmful to the self-sufficiency of the traditional communities and the
authority of the kurakas.
This process of adaptive resistance highlights the limitations of the
literature that insists on representing cultural contacts as destructive and
corrosive.36 Without ignoring the negative consequences (wars, demo-
graphic collapse, epidemics) of the arrival of the first missionaries (Juan
Pobre, 1602; Diego Luis de San Vitores, 1668) on the Marianas Islands,
the Chamorros did not disappear, but rather developed an extraordinary
capacity for sociocultural adaptation.37 As Marshall Sahlins observed,
the Pacific natives had always mixed, first as the result of commercial
exchanges with neighbouring islands, and then due to the transoceanic
exchanges that facilitated the arrival of the Europeans (Sahlins, 1981).
The Chamorros also established trade relations with the southern islands
(Palau, the Carolinas) and later with the Spanish, Filipinos and the re-
cently arrived neo-Hispanic criollos, constituting a neo-Chamorro eth-
nic mosaic (Del Valle, 1979). Beginning in 1830, the number of mestizos
on Guam had doubled, and the Spanish census no longer distinguished
between the indigenous and foreign populations.38 Between 1830 and
1855, the population of the Marianas increased significantly to 9,000
inhabitants, 39 but the following year, it fell by half.40 To mitigate this
situation, Governor Felipe de la Corte y Ruano (1855–66) authorized
the arrival of 1,000 convicts from the Philippines.41 Sometime around
1860, new contingents from the Carolinas arrived to work on Guam and
Saipan.42 The benefits of this immigration population were unquestion-
able, halting the demographic decline on the archipelago. However, the
high number of Carolinians heightened the xenophobia in the receiving
society. It was at that time that what has come to be called the kostum-
bren Chamorro (‘the Chamorro way of life’) began to take shape, a syn-
thesis between cultural elements from different places that established
the mythical bases of ‘traditional Chamorro society’ and that persisted
until the late nineteenth century.43
What is the identity of the Chamorros as the twenty-first century be-
gins? What is or what does ‘being Chamorro’ mean? Maurice Halb-
wachs (1968) observed that collective memory is the reconstruction of
the past that goes back to a common origin, a common history and a
common land. For twenty-first century Chamorros, the past only makes
sense when historical events are selected and interpreted in response to
present demands. This ability to reproduce their culture, understanding
it as a worldview or ethos, directly leads them to search for natural
and cultural attributes that identify or differentiate them, possibly as
a nation, from other human groups around them. These elements – or
feelings – of self-identification are related to collective memory, tradi-
tions and symbols that cannot simply be considered fetishized elements
of the cultures they represent, but are always changing, historical so-
cial alignments. As Roger M. Keesing has rightly noted, although it
is thought that cultural identity discourses in the modern Pacific pro-
duce countercultural images, these images depend to a large extent on
Western ideologies.44
One example of this counter-hegemonic discourse is the eloquent
speech that an upper caste Chamorro leader named Hurao, from San
Ignacio de Agaña (or Hagåtña on Guam), gave in 1670 to 2,000 soldiers,
in which he voiced his misgivings about the superiority of European
culture while defending the ancestral customs and ways of his people.
This talk, which is included in Histoire des Isles Marianes nouvellement
converties à la religion chrétienne (Paris, 1700) and allegedly written by
Jesuit priest Charles Le Gobien (1653–1708), confirmed that, as Keesing
has noted, the Manichean conceptual structure of missionary discourse
existed in the Pacific, especially in counter-colonial discourse.45 Unlike
Kepuha, the first Chamorro leader baptized – and subjected – by Father
San Vitores in Guam, Hurao represented the other side of the coin. He
was a resistance leader who not only confronted the Spanish invaders, but
also managed to displace Kepuha as the emblem of Chamorro culture.
In contrast to the so-called foreign martyrs who died over the course of
the seventeenth century, Hurao became a sacrificial hero, raised to the
status of local martyr. More importantly, long after the context of the
Spanish invaders, his discourse now addressed North American allies in
the Second World War.46
Following this reasoning, the Chamorro identity is constituted
through narrativity and relationality. Social action is narratively me-
diated and provides a way to understand a lived reality.47 This nar-
rative identity is not simply false, but rather a ‘historical fiction’, as
Paul Ricoeur would say, it selects elements, whether real or invented, to
create a discourse or narrative shared by a collective subject in the con-
struction of an ‘us’ from an ethnic point of view.48 In this context, some
authors like Jonathan Blas Díaz have tried to reconstruct the history
of the Chamoru people – ‘the Chamoru race’ – from a primordialist
perspective that looks for identity – a static, inherited and stereotyped
identity – in the spirits or aniti49 of the ancestors, in tradition and in an
attachment to nature. Their idea of reconceptualizing Chamorro iden-
tity is based on a perpetual essence that has survived for centuries, de-
spite the presence of the Spanish, Japanese and Americans. Drawing on
Eleazar S. Fernández’s (1994) concept of a ‘theology of struggle’, Díaz
(2010) described the Chamorros as a peaceful, Catholic people sub-
jugated by American (neo-)colonialism, dreaming of the reunification
of the Marianas Islands as an independent political entity. The leaders
of nationalist movements like Nasion Chamoru or Chamorro Nation,
Guahan Indigenous Collective, Famoksaiyan and the Organization of
People of Indigenous Rights (OPI-R)50 have made the discourse of no-
ble Hurao an icon of Chamorro nationalism and brave Hurao the leader
of postcolonial subalternity.
4.2 Between the Global and the Local

In Europe and the People Without History (1982), Eric Wolf discussed
the importance of considering world history as a network of unequal po-
litical relations and interconnected processes. During the last quarter of
the twentieth century, after decolonization, new theories were put forth
to explain both the colonial period and the transition to postcolonial
periods. In the Latin American case, important studies appeared, includ-
ing those by Celso Furtado (1969, 1971), Darcy Ribeiro (1970, 1971),
Fernando Enrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1969), which established
connections between the colonial past and modern processes of domi-
nation.51 Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory (1974) is one of
the best known, but Georges Balandier (1971) and others of the time
were also describing the paradoxes of an unequal world based on forms
of power between centres and peripheries in the context of African an-
thropology. The colonial processes of the past, analysed in historical
perspective, were considered responsible not only for economic and so-
ciopolitical transformations, but also cultural ones.52
Since then, various models have appeared. Some present a Eurocentric
expansion origin; others consider the influence of local reactions; oth-
ers propose the existence of multiple centres. From the perspective of a
global systemic anthropology, authors like Jonathan Friedman (1946–)
have even argued that comparisons need to be made with past periods
in order to observe historical cycles of hegemony and ‘de-hegemony’,
and to relativize both the alleged innovation or exclusion of European
expansion and the reductionisms related to determinist arguments about
modes of production.53 In truth, many findings from colonial ethnogra-
phy that describe so-called simple societies do not discuss the fact that it
was often the colonial penetration itself that disorganized complex local
structures or that economic exchange systems and organizations had
existed in the past that were not isolated cases.
Beyond all these interpretations, however, one particularly useful ap-
proach applies a macroanalysis to new power flows without losing sight
of the local effects observed in documents and detailed ethnographic
studies. One highly thought-provoking study that combines these two
dimensions is Sidney W. Mintz’s (1922–2015) Sweetness and Power:
The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). In this original work,
Mintz manages to simultaneously present the transcontinental connec-
tion between production, distribution, consumption and forms of in-
equality, and the interdependence of all these processes. In other words,
the exploitation of the plantations in the American colonies was con-
nected to the forced movement of millions of Africans as slave labour,
and this entire political-economic complex was related to European in-
dustrial expansion and the new class structure. The sugar produced in
the colonies, then, went from being a luxury good for the aristocracy
to becoming a type of fuel for the working classes, a high-energy food
that accompanied industrial labour. Mintz’s study obviously required a
diachronic focus, but he never eschewed the interrogative power of the
anthropological tradition:
Though I do not accept uncritically the dictum that anthropol-

ogy must become history or be nothing at all, I believe that with-
out history its explanatory power is seriously compromised. Social
phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the re-
lationships among events in one “moment” can never be abstracted
from their past and future setting.54
Very few studies take it upon themselves to analyse the complete process
of power relations, and those studies are usually fragmented, either in
Europe or in the colony. In fact, Mintz’s work is a response to questions
that arose during his 1948 ethnographic work in Puerto Rico on the
destination and use of tropical products.55 The inhabitants of Barrio
Jauca were involved in processing sugar, but it was not being manufac-
tured for them:
Had there been no ready consumers for it elsewhere, such huge quan-
tities of land, labor, and capital would never have been funneled into
this one curious crop, first domesticated in New Guinea, first pro-
cessed in India, and first carried to the New World by Columbus.56
These ‘banal’ details revealed the existence of a chain of production and

consumption. The local phenomena could not be understood without a
macroanalysis of the processes that would come to be called global. In
his project, Mintz did not hesitate to criticize the idea that anthropology
should only focus on static, simple societies supposedly isolated from
the West, pristine and removed from colonialism: ‘unspoiled aborigines
on the one hand, hymn-singing mission children on the other’.57 Here,
the goal of the anthropologist as hero seems to be to understand the
‘primitives’ in their historical contexts instead of studying change and
the process of becoming ‘modern’. Even in that case, anthropology has
sought substitutes for the primitives, concentrating on ‘ethnic clusters,
exotic occupations, criminal elements, the “underlife,” etc.’58
The primary findings of Sweetness and Power were the result of ques-
tioning something so obvious that was it undisputed – ‘demand’ – as Mintz
had once assumed that there was a natural need for sugar. The study also
allowed him to observe another type of process related to social structures:
the changing value of taste according to socio-economic factors. His anal-
ysis revealed social mechanisms similar to those described by Pierre Bour-
dieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979).
The consumption of sugar, an aristocratic practice in 1650, became an
essential part of the proletarian diet in Great Britain around 1900.59 This
transformation in consumption was linked to social processes that can-
not be explained in isolation; it was also in the mid-seventeenth century
that Great Britain established its Caribbean sugar planting systems, which
would be applied to production in the Spanish colonies.
After analysing the entire production context, Mintz reconstructs the
transformations in the use of sugar in Europe and, especially, England,
showing how it changed from being a condiment, spice or a decorative
or curative substance to becoming the high-energy element in the av-
erage diet. He also followed sugar’s decline as a symbolic element of
power after it became more plentiful and popular,60 used to accompany
stimulating drinks like tea and coffee. This inversion occurred over the
course of the nineteenth century, precisely when the lower classes began
to consume more sugar, part of the introduction of new forms of orga-
nizing time. In fact, this change corresponded to the need for industrial
energy efficiency, which was projected onto bodies and food.
The world is interconnected, but not in any which way. The connec-
tions are made through economic and political relationships, filtered
through meanings, both internal meanings bestowed upon sugar by its
consumers and external meanings bestowed by commercial and political
actors. Mintz cites the cynical phrase uttered by the colonialist Edward
Gibbon Wakefield in his book:
It is not because an English washerwoman cannot sit down to

breakfast without tea and sugar that the world has been circum-
navigated; but it is because the world has been circumnavigated that
an English washerwoman requires tea and sugar for breakfast. Ac-
cording to the power of exchanging are the desires of individuals
and societies.61
It is, perhaps, a children’s book that best complements this stimulating

analysis and serves as a metaphor for this section. In Roald Dahl’s 1967
classic masterpiece, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a child from
the proletariat class and his grandfather realize their dream of visiting
a chocolate factory, although in the end family ties and the work ethic
prevail over the contest prize. What is most extraordinary about this
factory, however, is that it relies on the very unique Oompa Loompas,
African pygmies who work for the owner, Mr. Wonka, in a macabre
metaphor for the universe presented by Mintz: African slaves manufac-
turing sweets for consumption by the European working classes.
From a different point of view and a later theoretical moment, Engseng
Ho, in The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian
Ocean (2006), also proposes a transoceanic ethnography to demon-
strate the social interrelationships and proximities between different ar-
eas, linking the study of the local with the global. Unlike when Mintz
was working, when Ho did his study, the literature of the social sciences
had established some common understandings about globalization, and
his text is rife with concepts that are widespread in the academy like
hybridization and cosmopolitanism. Be that as it may, this type of work
shows that so-called globalization, seen as a phenomenon from the last
third of the twentieth century and driven by technological, economic
and cultural factors, actually began much earlier and is not necessarily
the product of ‘Westerners’, as Jack Goody criticized with regard to the
‘theft of history’.62 Ho’s work not only expresses the correlation between
different economic systems, as shown by Wolf and Mintz, but extends
the question to kinship ties as the creators of belonging. The monograph
follows a group, the Hadrami Yemenis, and their diaspora across the
Indian Ocean over five centuries, which resulted in the construction of
a commercial, political, cultural and religious network that connected
different parts of the region parallel to European expansion and without
the support of a colonial state institution.
To analyse this complex network, Ho began in Tarim, the site of
sanctuaries and the graves of the sayyids (saints) visited during the
pilgrimages made by members of the Hadrami diaspora. The Hadra-
mis established trading posts and spread out across the eastern coast
of Africa, the Indian Peninsula, Malaysia and the Indonesian archipel-
ago, bound by a shared patrilineal genealogy and tension with the lo-
cal societies. The Hadrami case offers an extraordinary opportunity
to look at a phenomenon little studied in anthropological literature,
the practical interaction between different kinship systems, their hier-
archies and transformations over time. While the Hadramis were bear-
ers of a patrilineal system based on nasab (Arab genealogy), the local
kinship systems differed; they were bilateral in Malaysia, patrilineal
in Somalia and matrilineal in Sumatra and amongst the Nayar. This
circumstance has been observed by other authors like Françoise Le
Guennec- Coppens, who discovered that the descendants of Hadrami
men and women from the local elite on the Comoro Islands belong to
the mother’s group due to the prevailing matrilocal system.63 Therefore,
the status of the diaspora Hadramis in many cases depended on their
interaction with the local regime of social classes and kinship systems.
Thus, Hadrami belonging and identity was mobile and changing, and
the pilgrimage to the graves of Tarim was not only the reflection of a
homogeneous identity, but also the expression of ambivalent diversities
that converged in a ritual space.
Another important case study provides insight into transcontinental
influences, again underscoring, as Carlo Ginzburg does,64 the value of
dialectical analyses between the micro and macro. Jonathan Friedman’s
study of the sapeurs in ‘The Political Economy of Elegance’ (1994) anal-
yses the development of elegance clubs amongst the lower-urban classes
in the mid-twentieth-century Congo. While local society already used
the art of dressing as an instrument of self-definition,65 the practice in-
tensified with the colonial introduction of the concept of the ‘évolués’
for Africans who had adopted European values. However, the phenom-
enon cannot merely be interpreted as the consumption of modernity as
imposed by colonialism; rather, it was ‘a question of complementarity
in which a colonial regime maps on to an already existing hierarchical
praxis’. To ‘saper’ meant to dress elegantly, and as an institution, the
SAPE referred to the Société des Ambianceurs et Personnes Élégantes.
The movement developed amongst young, single men who met in clubs,
creating community ties. Their primary activity consisted of accumulat-
ing clothing that imitated European haute couture, in order to become
a ‘grand homme’ and complete the great rite of passage of moving to
Paris (Gandoulou, 1984, 1989). Dressing elegantly meant appropriating
the status of a white man, in a sort of mimesis similar to other African
cults and movements.66 The phenomenon became a reflection of the so-
cial changes resulting from urbanization and monetarization as well as
the tensions between the ethnic groups in the country, since the SAPE
developed, above all, amongst the Bakongo. Moreover, the SAPE fit into
the worldview and conceptions of the locals with regard to the accu-
mulation of life force, as occurs in witchcraft. Here, elegance subverts
power, because the appearance of success and wealth is obtained with-
out passing through the conduits of work and power, and its symbols
are adopted. Finally, the SAPE cannot be interpreted as an imposition
of liberal consumerist narcissism or an ethnocentric projection. Rather,
it is a particular form of experience in which local world views adopt
external elements, much like cargo cults, in a strategy that appropriates
modernity (Sahlins, 1999).
The last monograph analysed in this section raises questions about
the dissemination of ideas and the generation of ideologies and world
views and criticizes linear views of modernity as an expansion from
the centre to the periphery. In Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the
Anti- colonial Imagination (2008), Benedict Anderson, renowned for his
conception of the nation as an imagined community, emphasizes the
leading role played by a group of enlightened (ilustrados) Filipinos who
sought liberties and rights from the metropole.67 Anderson focused on
two well-off mestizo activists who spoke Spanish and had been educated
in Manila and Europe, José Rizal Mercado y Alonso (1861–86) and Is-
abelo de los Reyes y Florentino (1864–1938), to demonstrate the exis-
tence of a dense and complex network that linked anarchism with the
anti-colonial movements of the late nineteenth century. Without making
any attempt to explain these movements, the author merely verifies and
documents this dense thick international network of people, producing
and exchanging ideas and political policies at meetings or in letters,
which Anderson termed ‘early globalization’. His thesis emphasizes the
simultaneity and interconnection at the end of the century between the
Caribbean, the wars in Cuba and Puerto Rico, maritime Southeast Asia,
the Philippines rebellion and anarchist movements in Europe. The lead-
ing figures in this network of ideas and policies communicated in various
languages, challenging the borders constructed by modern nation-states
and even the social sciences themselves when it came to tracking move-
ments outside Europe as mere reproductions of Western models. Using
a method that focuses on the intersection of biographies, Anderson
narrates the tale of this creative network of flows, exchanges, trips and
encounters almost at the pace of a novel. A metaphor for this world in
motion, ethnographer, journalist, revolutionary and nationalist Isabelo
de los Reyes had appeared at the Philippine Exposition in Madrid in
1887 as a man of letters, although, paradoxically, in a setting that rep-
resented racialist evolutionism (Sánchez Gómez, 2001).68 From his po-
sition as a journalist, De los Reyes advocated ‘folk-lore filipino’, which
he rebaptized as ‘folk knowledge’, to present Filipino culture in a polit-
ically revolutionary way by criticizing ethnocentric peninsular folklore.
His study of his home region of Ilocos, for example, spoke of ‘a certain
local fruit [that] provided a better antidote to the cholera virus than that
currently manufactured at the instance of the Spanish medical scien-
tist’,69 recognizing the natives’ deep, contemporary – not traditional –
understanding of medicinal plants. He described himself as a ‘brother of
the forest peoples, the Aeta, the Igorots and the Tinguians’, who allowed
him to construct the basis for a cultural renaissance that would con-
front the colonialists, honour the Ilocanos and liberate them from the
stereotype of ‘superstitious’ attributed to them by the colonial Church.
To that end, De los Reyes inverted the perspective, speaking of the Ilo-
cano superstitions found in Europe. His ingenious rhetorical recourse
challenged those who would mock his countrymen by comparing the
superstitions of the Ilocanos with those of the Europeans.70
4.3 Gender, Class and ‘Race’: Colonial Intersections

Since the works of Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1989, 1991) were first pub-
lished, the acclaimed concept of intersectionality has been used to describe
the intersection of different explanatory factors to understand the con-
struction of social inequalities, placing special emphasis on the interaction
between the social categories of gender, class and ‘race’ or ethnicity.71
These analytical concepts are, moreover, also debatable, since they seem
to reproduce the hegemonic dichotomies that contrasted nature vs. cul-
ture, but now with sex vs. gender and ‘race’ vs. ethnicity (Collins, 2000;
Stolcke, 2000, 2010). The model of intersectionalities is also quite valuable
with regard to analysing historical societies and rethinking sources using
new approaches (Nash et al., 2013). This section discusses two texts that
have become benchmarks in their field that look at two different colonial
contexts at two different historical moments, focusing on the articulation
of power between gender, class and ‘race’. The first by Verena Stolcke ex-
amines nineteenth-century Cuba, while the second by Ana L. Stoler looks
at colonial Indonesia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Verena Stolcke’s Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial (Racism
and Sexuality in Colonial Cuba [1974], 1992) is a pioneer in its field,
an early exercise in historical anthropology that preceded the theory of
intersectionalities. It was inspired by both mid-1970s feminist critical
theory and by anthropologists like Louis Dumont and Edmund Leach
in its consideration of sex and alliances as elements of social structure.
Stolcke’s study of Cuba in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries re-
veals the role played by racial prejudices and gender hierarchies in the
formation of the country’s slave society. The structure between kinship
and gender revolved around three interrelational moments that explain
the slave order: (a) the historical-cultural constitution of gender rela-
tions; (b) the interaction between the cultural construction of gender and
the sociocultural configuration of kinship, mediated by the organization
of procreation; and (c) the historical-structural contextualization of
these intersectionalities.72 At the same time, the relegation of marriage
and sexuality to the private sphere formed part of a mere ideological
representation, given that in reality, these purely political questions were
directly linked to social dynamics and the creation of boundaries be-
tween groups. The sexed bodies of upper-class women perpetuated the
honour of their families. Therefore, they needed to protect the purity of
the group, represented through new categories of ‘race’ combined with
ideas about purity of blood coming from the Peninsula. By contrast,
slave women of African origin were taken sexually by white men, result-
ing in common-law relationships, despite the best efforts of the Catholic
Church to consecrate them.73 The strategies used by these women are
difficult to determine with the available data, but requests for interracial
marriage permits seem to indicate that one of the avenues to transforma-
tion involved ‘whitening’, in other words, giving descendants a physical
appearance that would increase their social status. The study of inter-
racial relationships cannot, then, be understood without analysing the
role of women as reproducers of social status. Although Stolcke’s study
is limited to Cuba, it applies a theoretical framework and questions that
lay bare the paradoxes of modernity and the new forms of differentia-
tion based on natural, individual attributes.
When Stolcke arrived in Cuba in 1967, she ended up in the Cuban
National Archives almost by accident, after she encountered problems
obtaining permission to continue the fieldwork that she had begun in
the Sierra Maestra mountain range. Her discovery of documentary ma-
terial labelled ‘marriage’ and other material on ‘abduction and rape’ in
the archive raised the possibility of studying marriage ideology, policy
and practice in nineteenth-century Cuba. In the archive, one of the most
rewarding strategies involved spending less time studying regulations
and more time looking at evidence related to abductions and practices
that violated the regulations (what other authors in other contexts have
called the study of ‘practices’). A key starting point was the 1776 Prag-
matic on Marriage, which limited freedom of marriage between peo-
ple of unequal social rank on penalty of disinheritance. The restrictions
were closely tied to the reproduction of groups, as indicated by the laws
aimed at curbing interracial marriage. These legal controls established
by the ‘white’ community tightened as the free community of coloured
people grew, and in fact, interracial marriage continued to be prohibited
until 1881 after the abolishment of slavery.
This type of research also challenges the ahistorical and simplis-
tic use of categories like ‘race’, which are highly problematic and
decontextualized:
[…] in nineteenth-century Cuba, physical appearance per se was

not the cause of prejudice and discrimination, but what physical
appearance represented, in other words, an individual’s situation
within an economic system that was based on the exploitation of
one group by another. […] and when the phenotype was not suffi-
cient, legal colour was used […] [Racism] was a pretext for economic
exploitation, rather than psychoanalytical or related to some type of
innate tendency in human beings to form exclusive groups.74
The documentary universe of that era requires particular attention. The

199 requests for interracial marriage licences received between 1810 and
1882 provide insight into official language and classification systems
for relationships, the movements and intentions of the participants – a
quarter of the cases were due to paternal dissent, although after 1830,
it is more often the couples themselves that submit the paperwork – and
the parents’ arguments against the mixed marriage, such as defending
purity of blood (until 1840) or the societal identification established for
children whose progenitor had a lower social status.
The importance of paying attention to the use of terms in their con-
text by the actors of the period is particularly notable in the case of the
concept of ‘race’. Indeed, the ‘attribute of colour did not clearly classify
people as black or white’.75 In many cases, the civil servants who judged
the relationships thought that the class status of the individual could be
more important than colour (or make someone from the upper classes
‘whiter’). Thus, as theories of intersectionality would later formulate,
‘there was, then not just one, but several complementary criteria for so-
cial classification’.76
The case demonstrates the need to connect economic and political
shapers to the different attitudes towards interracial marriage in Cuba,
also a product of the local context and the country’s position with re-
gard to transatlantic trade. In the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, these debates were common amongst landowning groups, who
self-interestedly preferred to curb slavery and foster interracial marriage
to produce manpower, in contrast to slave merchants for whom these
marriages represented the end of their business. This perspective on co-
lonialism structured around domestic tensions can also be seen in con-
flicts between the Catholic Church and the state over marriage, when the
curia preferred authorizing marriage and defending morals to promoting
common-law unions (although the lower clergy was more ambiguous),
contrary to the governing authorities, who largely preferred to prohibit
the marriages for reasons of ‘public order’.
As with the other monographs analysed in this book, the reading of
documents here also provides access to the ‘indigenous view’ of the phe-
nomenon despite some limitations, making it possible to reconstruct the
context surrounding marriage and the language used at the time, re-
flected in the arguments for or against marriage or common-law unions.
In the following illustration, the voice of a young foundling emerges as
he tries to demonstrate that his marginal social status should not be an
impediment to his marriage. To some extent, he recognizes his inferior
position in front of the authorities as a type of strategy:
[…] at first glance, the fact that a white man wants to get married
to a mulatta draws attention, but if this white man is a commoner,
with no family to cause problems, with no regard in society, and
used to associating with mulattos […]77
Therefore, analysing the indigenous view in documents requires a recon-

struction of the context of power around the person’s version. In many
cases, these versions may also reproduce dominant values or represent
an attempt to find common ground with the decision maker, with the
applicant invoking love, honour or gratitude towards their partner, their
children’s well-being or the desire to leave a life of sin.78 Another central
question is the distinction between legal colour and perceived (‘real’)
colour, which leads to the question of origin. Appearance is a key fac-
tor, but not the only factor in hierarchization. This can be attributed to
the introduction of the ideology of purity of blood from the Peninsula
based on origin more than on appearance.79 This criterion was coupled
with other factors like trades seen to be of low status, as in the case of
the Chinese brought to Cuba to supply manpower. Although their skin
could be whiter than the skin of the so-called whites, they were also
rejected as marriage partners and equated with brown people. In short,
the hierarchy of colours was highly ambivalent.
Although marriage guidelines were generally endogamic and aimed
at reproducing the boundaries between hierarchized groups, there were
many exceptions. In these cases, the parties had a number of ways to
control paternal dissent. They could obtain a marriage licence or engage
in abduction. The latter option could tarnish the family honour, but even
so, in the case of interracial abductions, the parents preferred dishon-
our to a marriage that would blemish their lineage. In the construction
of barriers, moreover, gender was especially important in combination
with social status and ‘race’. While white elite men were free to have
relationships with and abuse ‘women of colour’, who had no sexual hon-
our, relationships between ‘black men’ and ‘white women’ were much
more often prosecuted, as in other colonial contexts (Young, 1995).
Years after Stolcke’s foundational study, historian Ann L. Stoler pre-
sented a work of craftsmanship that engaged in similar questions but
in a different colonial context – that of the Dutch Indies. In Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (2002), the archive and memory work focuses on Java and North
Sumatra between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century under
Dutch colonial dominion. Stoler analyses private life in colonial homes
and the relationship with local male and female servants as well as the
boundaries between colonizers and colonized, paying attention to the
original aspects of power relations inscribed on bodies.
Upon opening the book, the reader is tempted to skim the 41 pho-
tographs of the main figures that comprise an important part of the
documentation. These visual sources are exceptional, because they are
not studio photos or standardized postcard pictures, but come from the
private photo albums of Dutch families. In most of them, blond children
are accompanied by a babu, their Indonesian nursemaid, and are a rep-
resentation of the dominant values of these families, their status, the ob-
jects that define them and, above all, the paternal relationship towards
the ‘indigenous’ nursemaids.
The study includes thoughts on the work of Foucault, applied to read-
ing the connections between knowledge and power, between ‘race’ and
sexuality. Stoler’s interest in the topic arises from a specific way of look-
ing at reality and selecting questions: why is what is evident of no inter-
est to historiography, but relegated to the private, to sentiments? Stoler
rightly challenges her peers to cross this divide into the domestic domain,
to demonstrate that the ‘intimate’ is a key sphere in power relations.
Stoler also shows how classification systems are transformed and go be-
yond specific dualist simplifications when contrasting the colonizers and
the colonized. In the 1880s, ‘being European’ meant basically being white
and Christian, but by the 1930s, other groups had been legally incor-
porated into this category, including ‘half-bloods’. In this respect, Stoler
abandons the routine exercise of overlooking the complexity of colonial
society, instead recognizing differences of class and status that exclude
some individuals, despite the fact that they are ‘colonizers’. In the field of
the ‘new’ colonial studies of the 1990s, Stoler challenges the concept of
tentacular power, laying bare its imperfections and, above all, its anxi-
eties, coinciding here with Thomas (1994). Because concepts like ‘being
white’ or ‘European’ are not always obvious, the anxieties of many colo-
nizers led them to construct new ‘evident differences’. Doubts and uncer-
tainties about belonging were even more important than expected. The
very question of skin colour that seems to play a central role in racial clas-
sifications becomes problematic due to the colour of mixed-bloods, who
despite ‘being white’ could be classified in another category. The objects of
the most commonly repeated fears were impoverished whites and mixed-
bloods, although for many years white women also caused anxiety. In
fact, until the 1920s, the Dutch authorities restricted marriage for white
men, preferring unions with local concubines. When this policy changed,
legislation began to focus on controlling non-indigenous women via, for
example, the 1926 White Woman’s Protection Ordinance. Another sign
of these anxieties and uncertainties was seen in the very concept of Eu-
ropean, which was also transformed as a legal category, to the point that
the term was no longer clearly identified with ‘colonizers’ because of the
presence of poor Europeans and the progeny of mixed relationships.
By situating sexuality as a central and not marginal historical source,
Stoler shows how the intimate constitutes a political driver of social re-
lations. Colonialism is seen as a space that reconstructed the world of
feelings, but capturing it requires breaking the separation between pub-
lic and private. In fact, historical anthropology helps to resituate the
context of these distinctions. Sexual stereotypes about alterity gave rise
to regulations, barriers and fears.80 However, the comparison of colo-
nial contexts indicates some differences, which Stoler does not address,
especially in the Arab-Islamic world. In the American colonies, black
Africa and Asia, relationships between white men and local women were
accepted, while relationships between white women and Indian or Afri-
can men were prosecuted and even punished. On the contrary, in places
like the Maghreb colonies, while relationships between Europeans and
Maghrebis were undesirable as in the other colonies, contact between
European men and local women was also considered an affront and be-
came a political issue; colonial directives themselves indicate the sensi-
tive nature of the matter, which was also tied to religious questions.81
In recent years, historians and anthropologists have analysed the pro-
cesses of violence against women – rapes, abductions, disfigurations –
not only as a phenomenon inherent to colonialism, but as one of the
consequences of what Stoler terms ‘imperial debris’.82 Today, a process
of social ruination affects millions of people, whose ancestors lived un-
der the yoke of genocidal European imperialism in the form of corrup-
tion, violence and misery.83 As Nancy Rose Hunt has observed, many
rapes of Congolese women in the early twentieth century in the Belgian
Congo reflected occurrences during the government of King Leopold II
of Belgium. The horrors of imperial domination have not disappeared,
but are quite alive today.84
Imperial eugenics is another example of the obsessions and ideologies
used to maintain systems of domination. Ideas about degeneration are
declarations of principles about class differences and racialized status.
Studies on eugenics fulminated against the degeneration of the European
lower classes while naturalizing the inferiority of those of mixed blood,
maintaining that their delinquency came from their local maternal
blood. It was for that reason that both in the Dutch Indies and in British
India, attempts were made to curb the migration of the poorer classes as
far back as the eighteenth century. This is comparable to the situation
in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, where the authorities feared
the immigration of lower-class individuals might call the superiority of
the colonizers into question and even spread ‘subversive’ working- class
ideologies.
The diachronic analysis of colonies reveals the ties between systems
of domination, the control of sexuality and racial boundaries between
groups. The control of prostitution, domestic service and types of mar-
riage are all different facets of this policy. Changes over time make these
connections more explicit. Between 1600 and 1800, the policy of the
East Indies Company, a true colonial parastate, was to restrict the pres-
ence of Dutch women and encourage concubinage and marriage with lo-
cal women. Around 1880, nearly half of European men lived with Asian
women in concubinage to prevent prostitution to the extent possible as
a measure to control sexually transmitted diseases.85 The Indies Civil
Code of 1848 did not grant these women any rights over their children
once they were recognized by their European fathers.
Along with regulations and directives, the categories used at the time
to refer to and, indeed, construct these groups merit analysis. However,
Stoler does not always clarify these concepts despite their centrality,
and when she refers to ‘half-bloods’, it is unclear whether this is a spe-
cific category from the period or a present projection used to discuss
mixing, a general problem in the study of ‘mixed people’.86 For exam-
ple, the term ‘Indisch’, used to refer to Dutch-Indonesian descendants,
classified them as European.87 In reality, these classificatory confusions
are the product of the problem of creating definitions: some ‘mixed-
bloods’ were recognized as French or Dutch while others were not.
Some descendants, in fact, were labelled white-haters. There is no ques-
tion that during the nineteenth century, the French, British and Dutch
colonies established institutions for mixed-blood orphans in order to
control resentment, prostitution and deviants. The significant presence
of mixed-bloods also generated public debates that really concerned
Europeanness, citizenship and nationality. One of the most interesting
conclusions with regard to rethinking the monosemous term of ‘race’
determined that the children of Dutch men and local women would be
classified according to their circumstances and that physical appear-
ance was not sufficient to determine legal belonging. The colonial ideo-
logues in the early twentieth century argued that cultural surroundings
(omgeving) determined character and whether an individual was Dutch.
For that reason, it was argued that the descendants of Dutch fathers
should be educated in Europe. Jus sanguinis, then, did not ensure moral
belonging. In 1898, J.A. Nederburgh, an architect of Indies colonial
law, wrote that the classic legal criteria of jus soli and jus sanguinis
were no longer applicable to ‘mixed-bloods’. Neither birth nor origin
guaranteed who was an echte (true) Dutchman. However, this should
not be interpreted as a softening of racialist criteria; on the contrary, the
argument was based on the conviction that Europeans were superior.
This rhetoric was then codified in legal codes. In 1884, access to Euro-
pean equivalence in the Indies required ‘suitability’ for European cul-
ture with regard to religion, mastery of the Dutch language and mastery
of European morals and ideas to be certified by the district authorities,
according to a policy that Stoler terms ‘cultural racism’. Candidates had
to state that they ‘no longer feel at home’ and had ‘distanced’ themselves
from their native being.88
The Mixed-Marriage Law of 1898 is another key source. Between
1617 and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a decree prohib-
ited marriage between Christians and non-Christians. The Civil Code of
1848 included a provision that native women who married Dutch men
could be subject to European law; local concubines could marry Dutch
men and their children’s legal status could be recognized. The term ‘ge-
mengde huwelijken’ informally referred to mixed marriages, but under
colonial law, it had two distinct meanings, according to whether the
customary indigenous law of the Indies, adat, or Dutch marriage laws
were being applied. Paradoxically, the descendants of these marriages
could be classified in either of the two categories. Gender and class be-
came important in the arguments devised by the jurists who dealt with
the question of mixed marriages, especially when Dutch women were
involved. As in other cases, marriage between a European woman and
a native was considered degrading, because the women became indige-
nous, if the principle that the wife follows the status and nationality of
her husband was applied. Although this was an intolerable affront for
some, many jurists accepted the fait accompli because they believed that
the women were of low class or had already lost their honour merely
because of their union with an inferior. They were no longer werkelijk
(actual) Dutchwomen.
The 1898 law allowed local women to marry Dutch men and acquire
Dutch status, but denied Indonesian men Dutch status through mar-
riage. Determining who exactly was Dutch became increasingly critical,
as part of the Dutch population became impoverished and resources in-
creasingly scarce. In short, the categories of the period were highly am-
bivalent and even today it is complicated to define them. The Indo-Dutch
or Indische Nederlanders included those of Dutch and indigenous meng-
bloeden (mixed blood), in addition to Europeans born in the Indies and
Europeans who considered Indonesia their second home. When Dutch
women began to arrive in the colony in larger numbers, control over
their sexuality, bodies and morality was extended in many ways through
institutions that disseminated hygienist concerns in their obsession to
isolate these women. In 1920, the Colonial School for Girls and Women
was founded in The Hague to provide instruction on domestic hygiene
and how to handle servants. Women also became not only a deposit,
but also a reproducer of national values, and stories spread about how
life in the tropics decreased the fertility of European women. At the
same time, the role of women as supervisors of their children’s educa-
tion was emphasized in the context of the feared influence of Indonesian
maidservants.89
The colonizers’ anxiety was particularly projected onto the education
of children, given the dangers that threatened their Dutch integrity as
they came into contact with local servants or the Indo-Dutch. In fact,
maidservants were identified as a source of corruption with regards to
children. Stoler contrasts this sociopolitical framework with the point of
view of former Javanese servants, based on an oral history and memory
study done in Yogyakarta in 1996–97 with former servants who had
worked between 1920 and 1950. The starting point was the contradic-
tion between the daily experiences of these servants and the idealized
longing of the Dutch as they remembered their relationships with the
servants as portrayed in novels and memoirs. However, in her study of
colonial memory, Stoler does not try to reconstruct facts or events, but
to rescue ‘colonial feelings’ through what she calls ‘tactile memories’ or
sentiments:
Colonial domestic relations were invoked through recollections of

the color and texture of clothes, the taste and smell of unfamiliar
foods, the sound of partially understood conversations and com-
mands, and reference to sweat, soaps, chamber pots, and fragrance.
Sentiments lay not outside of – or behind – tactile memories but
embedded in them.90
Stoler presents intriguing methodological observations about oral his-

tory and how to approach memory in colonial studies. She challenges
authors who see oral memory as a subaltern counterpoint to the official
version in documents that provide ‘real’ history. For Stoler, memory is
not a pure, unbiased warehouse of information to be rescued. Works like
Guha’s (1996) study of ‘small voices’ as counter-narratives to hegemonic
power that escape its intrusions constitute what Stoler calls the ‘hydrau-
lic method’. Subaltern histories are obscured in a type of hidden circuit
that ethnography identifies and uncovers. Society is divided into two
worlds: one of repression saturated by the colonial state and the other
which evades its intrusions and has its own circuits. According to Stoler,
these studies assume ‘the production of narrative and the prevalence of
telling’, although these circuits are not so clear in her work with the
servants.
This critical analysis of memory focuses on revealing not only the
thing remembered, but also how it is remembered. Remembering is not
mere repetition. The question concerns how the language of the past
is re-elaborated from the present. In short, Stoler calls for a history of
the everyday in contrast to a history of events. One former servant, for
instance, mentioned that her masters did not want her to touch their
children because they would smell like her. When asked about how the
Dutch smell, she said, “Dutch sweat smells worse, ‘cause they eat butter,
milk, cheese”. The servants’ memories stress their masters’ insistence on
discipline and, above all, cleanliness, which was especially tied to the
body and sweat. For their part, the Dutch from the colony remember
their feelings about their servants as a symbol of the local, controlled
and loyal. Many servants, however, did not share these sentimental
memories, but referred to their relationship with the Dutch as purely
work-related. In reality, memories of the colonial period are not a mere
‘remembering’, but a ‘retelling’ (Bloch, 1998) and stories about the past
do not come easily, but are rife with evasion and reticence.91 The present
imposes and shapes.
Even the presence of Indonesian interviewers could curtail the inter-
viewees’ criticisms of contemporary political leaders.92 At the time of
the interviews, anti-colonialism was seen as a radical Suharto-era po-
sition and, therefore, a nationalist mythology did not manifest itself as
in other postcolonial contexts or even in Indonesia itself at other times.
In some interviews, the Dutch period was isolated from the story, as
the interviewee feared being identified as a collaborator or traitor. The
time jump in the interviews was often a recourse used to recollect only
‘the remembered’.93 Some interviewees insisted on talking about the in-
dependence era, despite being asked about the prior period. Moreover,
participation in anti-colonial heroic acts conferred social capital in the
present, as in Morocco and the concept of ‘resistance’ (muqawwama)
there.94 Mentioning the Dutch period could lead to suspicions of trea-
son, and membership in nationalist movements like Sarekat Islam was
contingent upon not having any family member working as a servant
for the Dutch. Silences during the interviews indicated that the status of
servant suggested concubinage, prostitution or sexual abuse. Another
countering argument to those subaltern studies that emphasize heroism
is that several former servants agreed with the Dutch that they were
treated well and considered members of the family.95 This acceptance of
paternalism by some Indonesians, while still recognizing the discipline
imposed by the Dutch in domestic life, could be due to an idealization
of how they were treated when compared with postcolonial misery or
the fact that many servants who had no other ‘family’ found stability.
One highly interesting analytical resource is the photo albums, because
they shed light on a colonial representation that contrasts with practical
power relations. In their day, these photos were used by the Dutch to
demonstrate the good life in the colonies. In reality, in most of the pho-
tos, the Javanese are a background prop, servile and standing next to
families that are sitting, and sitting pretty.
4.4 Power, Resistance and Accommodation:

Diachronic Focuses
During the 1980s, the paradigm of power was reconsidered and atten-
tion began to focus on the study of resistance, a criticism of academic
approaches that were limited to the hegemony of the dominators. The
consideration of resistance highlighted the agency of the colonized actors
and of the dominated in general (subordinate classes, women). Thomas
(1994) framed the problem by underscoring the contradictions and
paradoxes of colonial action; in other words, the colonizers themselves
or the so-called colonial party personified different, often competing,
projects. Their power was not necessarily tentacular and their control
was neither perfect nor equal in efficiency across the colonized society.
Moreover, this power was limited by the agency and different forms of
resistance of the colonized. This approach became particularly wide-
spread in the field of so-called postcolonial studies (Spivak, 1995). How-
ever, as this paradigm spread, other voices responded, warning about the
simplification that can accompany the reification of resistance, noting
that the colonized seemed to act autonomously and with an awareness
that motivated this resistance. Some authors like Scott (1985) invento-
ried types of resistance in specific situations, adding the concept of daily
forms of resistance, like sabotaging machinery, to broaden the range of
the more informal types. From this perspective, resistance arises from
an awareness of domination and requires a conscious, shared ideology
against it. Other authors, like Jean Comaroff (1985), were not as con-
vinced that resistance is limited to purely conscious factors. Situations
also exist where conscious acts of open revolt can unintentionally con-
tribute to maintaining the very system being criticized. Furthermore,
neither the dominant nor the subaltern group can be considered homo-
geneous blocs, as demonstrated by conflicts in transversal alliances or
between subaltern groups and by other differences, whether ethnic, po-
litical or religious (Gutman, 1993).
These debates gave rise to a number of books written on colonial
situations that delved into the concept of resistance and made it more
complex, going beyond a mere opposition between colonizers and col-
onized and between ‘West’ and ‘East’. How to explain the accommo-
dations,96 the paradoxes of acculturation, the changing resistances, the
transversal alliances between colonizers and colonized and resistance
that was not motivated by conscious actions, but by unconscious ele-
ments or structural factors? The responses analysed below offer a dense,
deep and, above all, diachronic description of the processes of power.
Three studies are particularly useful when analysing dialectical power
relations from a diachronic point of view, combining a structural focus
and a consideration of the agency of the protagonists: Body of Power
(1985) by Jean Comaroff; Custom and Confrontation (1992) by Roger
M. Keesing; and the more recent Being Colonized (2010) by leading
Africanist, Jan Vansina.
In Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of
a South African People, Jean Comaroff follows a South African group
for 150 years to produce a complex, diachronic analysis of the social
practices and structural factors of the Barolong boo Ratshidi (Tshidi),
who live on the margins of the South African state. The thread that
runs through the study is the interaction between local and general con-
texts, particularly the pull of the labour market in the twentieth century,
when the Tshidi were still dependent on non-monetized agricultural
production. In the nineteenth century, Christian missionaries reached
the Tshidi, introducing new ways of thinking and new social practices.
Evangelical Methodism was not just a religion, but came with a series
of values related to the discipline of industrial society. All this was con-
structed around an overarching paradox and contradiction. Christian
symbolism introduced not only a new language that justified inequal-
ity, but also polysemic metaphors about the Old and New Testaments
that provided the Tshidi with a space for the critical imagination, where
submission could be transformed into a biblically validated challenge,
echoing Lanternari’s (1979) ‘religions of the oppressed’. However, the
existence of resistance did not lessen the impact of colonial agencies on
the local population. The Methodist missions achieved their primary
objectives, introducing a new work ethic and new conceptions of space.
Specific contexts would determine the limits and reach of the resistance.
Strategic alliances with British missionaries were made, for example, to
remain under British protection and avoid being absorbed by the Boers.
At the same time, these alliances undermined the local power required
to oppose the missionaries.97 Consequently, resistance was not only
defined in terms of conscious or collective strategies. In fact, forms of
opposition existed that were not conscious or verbalized, such as posses-
sion rites that symbolized the protest against particular systems of dom-
ination (colonial, male, etc.).98 The penetration of the capitalist system,
then, was not a one-way process, but was shaped by local systems. The
Tshidi combined their existence between capitalist production relations
and precolonial social relations defined by cultural concepts of being
human based on a continuity between humans, spirit and nature.99
One of the main challenges posed by Comaroff is how to break down
analytical units without relinquishing the observation of social systems
and the outside world. The study of the Tshidi also attempts to rise
above the limits of synchronic focuses that emphasize the reproduction
of social structures and teleological focuses that highlight ideologies of
modernization or dependency. And, indeed, this study is a magnificent
example of methodological management, starting with the historical
material used to observe the mundane practices of ordinary people. To
overcome the difficulties gaining access to the precolonial period, Coma-
roff turned to the first emissaries of imperialism (travellers, missionaries,
traders) who had gathered details about local ritual practices and myths
(as Varese, Keesing and Vansina also did). While these sources do not
allow investigators to reach the so-called ghost of objectivity, they do re-
veal the structures of thought and praxis of the social actors being stud-
ied. Their stories are then complemented by the numerous ethnographies
done throughout the twentieth century. The gaps in some areas are filled
with field observations, but always recognizing the dangers inherent in
reconstructing the past from the present.100
The study begins with an analysis of the Tshidi social order between
1800 and 1830 up to the expansion of the South African state and the
introduction of a racial and class system, distinguishing between a struc-
tural analysis of society and a presentation of an event history. The van-
guard of colonialism was the Methodist church, which came into conflict
with the local ritual authority. The missionary ideology brought ‘divine
legitimation to the reified and divided self, the value of private property,
and the “free” market in both labor and commodities’.101 However, the
development of a new independent local Christian movement produced
a second evangelization, led in part by representatives of the American
urban counterculture, which, in turn, gave rise to Zionist sects. The
message was antipathetic to the values of Protestantism and bourgeois
liberalism. Comaroff analyses these processes of change in three blocks:
1 An event history that presents the general framework of Tshidi soci-

ety and its features, including a description of the Barolong people
in the Tswana chiefdom; the establishment of missions beginning
in 1830; the advance of the Boers; the growth of industrial capi-
talism; and the installation of a new system of inequalities that ex-
ploited the local population. This is followed by an analysis that
passes from event to structure, identifying the precolonial system in
its dimensions of political economy and sociocultural order; a com-
plementary kinship system between a matrilaterality that bounded
domestic units without rank and an agnatic system that constructed
rank between social units; and an agricultural sector in the hands
of women and pastoral sector organized by men, which gave them
political or healing powers that excluded women.
2 An analysis of the process by which the precolonial system became
engaged with European industrial capitalism, represented at first
by the missionaries. This was not one-sided, in that the process of
domination entailed the recomposition of Tshidi social forms and
the generation of new social practices and was, therefore, not a mere
imposition. These novel modes of practice also ‘expressed resistance
to the self-image bred by proletarianization and subordination’.102
The new social order was reflected in cultural transformations that
affected the ways that time and space were organized. The colonial
encounter also activated the agency of the local population, which
led to the emergence of contradictions and discrepancies that made
‘participants aware of formal aspects of their own world previously
below the level of consciousness’.103
The study of the impact of the missionaries could not disregard
the local perspective. In this respect and as an example for other
studies of this nature in other contexts, Comaroff demonstrates the
importance of grasping indigenous consciousness with regard to
people, world views and ideologies. In other words, local responses
were actively based on conceptions about consciousness that con-
trasted with the concept of a person introduced by the mission-
aries. In the local precolonial perspective, there were continuities
between the material and the spiritual, between humanity and the
cosmos articulated in forms like magic and witchcraft, which the
missionaries insisted on rooting out. Literacy also had its effects,
as the introduction of the written text helped to construct a local
consciousness that began to diverge from the worldview of their
ancestors.104 Thus, resistance and interaction with the missions and
capitalist society engendered new forms of consciousness. Some
people objectivized their culture in relation to the outside world,
while others were attracted by the new ethics and, after converting,
came into conflict with the factions that defended the local rites.
One of the most important movements that synthesized these divi-
sions was the development of Zionist churches or dikereke in Af-
rikaans. These highly dynamic fission movements focused on rites
related to healing, dietary control and clothing, requiring a uniform
that parodied Western insignias.105 The body, then, played a central
role in this process, and the movement correlated in many ways with
other millenarian groups like those studied by Worsley (1980) and
Cohn (1981).
3 Finally, Comaroff examines the emergence of the modern Tshidi
sociocultural order in relation to the South African state, where a
contradiction arose between precolonial forms of subsistence and
the new labour market system. The response to this contradiction
on the part of the Tshidis did not manifest itself in direct rebellion
against the neocolonial order, but in everyday actions, particularly
in the dissident rhetoric of Zionist Christianity. As in other spaces
on the margins of the modern global system, this protest was artic-
ulated around rituals.
The origins of the Catholic Zionist movement lie in the poor late
nineteenth- century American urban classes, and the church was
founded in Chicago in 1896 by John Alexander Dowie. When it spread
to South Africa around 1904, it clashed with the orthodox Protestant
model based on Cartesian dualism, and its healing rituals recovered
the precolonial holistic worldview while offering worldly utopias for a
changing time with new emerging classes. Both in the United States and
in South Africa, this church offered a protest language to those dispos-
sessed by proletarianization.106 As in other revivalist cases, the church
called for the restoration of a native institution and reform in people’s
daily lives. New and old elements mixed, but control over the body was
central to the religion. These rites were, in effect, a somatization of so-
cial conflicts or physical disorder as an expression of social malaise. For
Dowie, healing the body depended on purifying society, in some way
similar to modern Islamism, which also looks to origin myths. This was
not, however, a matter of merely going back to the past. The movement
was motivated by ‘pain and desire that were products of the process of
alienation itself, a disjuncture between means and ends’.107 The fol-
lowers of Zionism did not openly oppose the dominant system politi-
cally and economically, but constituted a counterculture that challenged
dominant symbols.
For Comaroff, resistance did not necessarily involve ‘dramatic re-
sponses’ like public ideologies, organizations, encounters, protests and
strikes, especially in situations where these were impeded by rigid con-
trol and resistance was restricted to daily life. Ritual here is a key form
of protest centred on iconoclastic practices with dominant symbols:
The widespread syncretistic movements that have accompanied cap-

italist penetration into the Third World are frequently also subver-
sive bricolages; that is, they are motivated by an opposition to the
dominant system. While they have generally lacked the degree of
self-consciousness of some religious or aesthetic movements, or of
the marginal youth cultures of the modern West, they are never-
theless a purposive attempt to defy the authority of the hegemonic
order.108
At the end of this complex presentation, Comaroff asks whether the rit-
uals that supposedly subvert the dominant system do not really contrib-
ute to its reproduction, since they do not ever transform the structural
conditions of inequality.109 This question, which is also posed by Kees-
ing, centres around the debate over agency, consciousness and change,
and Comaroff’s study is, to some extent, disconcerting. In the end, it
recognizes that everyday, or religious, resistance does not challenge the
dominant powers, although it does alter their penetration into the struc-
tures of the ‘natural world’ (in terms borrowed from social phenome-
nology). Therefore, the resistance is implicit.110 Although there is still
some awareness of inequality, it does not generate explicit consciousness
or strategic class action. Additionally, it may well be that the supposed
resistance is producing the opposite effect, by keeping workers under
apartheid both dominated and docile, as several South African black
intellectuals have argued. Beyond this theoretical debate, one criticism
of this work concerns the lack of personal and biographical details that
could provide a less hypothetical view of the lives of the Tshidi, shedding
additional light on the debate about resistance and consciousness. In
this book, the debate is excessively theoretical or perhaps structuralist,
unlike Keesing’s work discussed below. However, Comaroff presents a
premonitory criticism of restrictive ideas about resistance and the polit-
ical that only understand direct action, especially in light of the contri-
butions from millenarianism.
In Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Au-
tonomy (1992), Roger Keesing documents the history of the Kwaio of
the Solomon Islands based on an exceptional fieldwork study that cov-
ers a thirty-year period beginning in 1962, complemented to a lesser
extent by colonial archive material. This long-term view allows him to
explain the determinants of the collective action of the Kwaio from the
inland of Malaita Island. Up until 1927, there was violent armed con-
frontation on the island, but after the colonizers imposed themselves
using brute force, confrontation took other forms such as the ancestral
revelations that began in 1930,111 which then transformed into politi-
cal confrontation after 1940. Keesing, however, is reluctant to restrict
these moments by categorizing them as phases, in the sense of con-
tinuous periods, since transversal elements, like the ancestral cult, are
found in all three cases.
Because of the exceptional length of the time that Keesing spent follow-
ing the society, readers are able to observe the author’s transformation
and his relationship with the group over time, with the anthropologist’s
work gradually taking shape alongside the Kwaio’s own political project.
Keesing presents a chronicle of the long relationship between the Kwaio
and the Europeans and their battle to preserve their autonomy and lands
over the course of 120 years. As the modern history revolves around
the local reaction to colonialism, Keesing deemed it necessary to issue
some caveats regarding the question of resistance, which was in vogue
when he was writing his book: (1) First, he asks, what is resistance? The
question is directly tied to the concept of consciousness. As with the
Tshidi analysed by Jean Comaroff, amongst the Kwaio, religious forms
developed that did not openly express any consciousness of resistance;
(2) What about the effects of symbolic resistance? If there is no change
in the structures of domination and the protest is purely symbolic, the
result is that the situation is accepted; (3) Keesing cautions about the bias
inherent in romantic views of resistance, which can obscure transitory
factors like the personal ambitions of some leaders; (4) He prefers to
avoid the use of essentialist dichotomies to refer to units like ‘capital-
ism’ and ‘the West’, focusing instead on specific groups or people, like
the missionary or the district official, actors on the ground; (5) Other
methodological problems materialize when the study of resistance is
based on oral sources that are representations of events, recreated from
the present. While Keesing advocates the incorporation of the voices of
the Kwaio in order to better understand the entire process, he also cau-
tions about indigenous (and colonizer) simplifications that use dominant
structural dichotomies and counterpoints for their counter-hegemonic
discourses. Here, Keesing uses the example of ‘black is beautiful’, a slo-
gan that continues to recognize and reinforce the importance of the he-
gemonic contrast between black and white,112 similar to what happened
with the category of mixed blood. The methodology used to reconstruct
these power relations is varied. To gather the oldest history, the author
drew on epic songs and stories about the past, while for events that took
place after 1920, he incorporated the testimony of men and women who
had been alive at that time. He also included the oral histories that he
had collected and translated from Koio, the Kwaio language, over the
course of 28 years.
Keesing rightly highlights the importance of not losing sight of what
the Italians phrased ‘traduttore-traditore’ (‘the translator as traitor’) in
ethnographic work, which is even further complicated by the historical
exercise. Translating the terms that the Kwaio used to describe the death
of Westerners at their hands, for instance, is not a trivial matter. Keesing
must choose how to translate the word ‘mae’ – ‘die’, ‘be dead’, ‘fight’,
‘battle’, ‘killing’ and more – aware that his choice colours the reading of
a text. This difficulty takes on special importance when analysing cate-
gories of resistance that refer to the act of killing and that can have very
different political nuances:
I use “assassination” when the victim held a publicly recognized po-

sition […] (If the Lord Mayor is killed by an angry pensioner, it is an
assassination; if he is killed by a jilted lover, it is a murder).113
In a somewhat joking tone, Keesing also establishes the need stressed

by postmodernists to interweave the story of the Kwaio without ven-
turing into experiments, novels or narcissism, although he recognizes
his role in the battles of the Kwaio and the choice of their narratives.
Additionally, in the Kwaio’s stories, the different voices that comment
on events ‘are squarely situated in the times and contexts of the telling,
not the times and contexts of the event’.114 In this collage, the informa-
tion gathered is ‘situational’. For example, in a context of litigation, a
Kwaio man will emphasize the patrilineal rights deriving from bride-
wealth, while in another, he will defend the rights of a mother’s brothers.
The ethnographer-historian also chooses his materials. The challenge
is clear: how to venture into the past if it is already difficult to describe
an observable society? Here, the anthropologist acts like a detective,
following the trail of memories, of how the Kwaio understand that some
things have changed, while others, like the ancestral cult, have remained
the same. The Kwaio past is not one of a society with static structures
that are reproduced, but is in flux, processing and changing. Keesing
traces an ethnography of what the Kwaio were like around 1880 from
the outside reports of travellers and local memory itself. In some pas-
sages, the author reflects that an excess of theoretical prejudice can end
up distorting the interpretation of social relations, as when observers ed-
ucated in classical anthropology use the term ‘descent group’ to describe
what is, for the Kwaio, ‘simply the visible component of a local social
universe that includes the living and the dead’.115
The past is also unique because the adalo, or ancestral spirits, is
present and, in fact, embodies ethics and the behaviour of the living
with regard to respecting taboos, such as contamination with men-
strual blood or urine. The ancestors, however, also serve a prophylactic
function, which is why the Kwaio who fought the colonizers consid-
ered themselves protected. Moreover, the articulation of memory ac-
cording to gender differences is significant. The main social tensions
related to blood vengeance, due to accusations of seduction, murder
or other factors based on questions of honour, were usually unloaded
on women. For that reason, men and women have differing memories
of those times, since the latter usually served as a scapegoat in many
conflicts.116
Around 1870, the first Europeans arrived to kidnap or recruit workers
for plantations in Queensland (Australia) and Fiji, as the Kwaio them-
selves describe, and it is estimated that one-third of them did not re-
turn.117 Other groups on the islands that were engaged in blood feuds
were also involved in the recruitment.118 Old testimonies spoke of resis-
tance on the boats and deaths on both sides, as well. Were these muti-
nies acts of resistance? In the case of some leaders like Maeasuaa, the
rebellion must be seen as the act of a warrior who increased his prestige
by defeating an external enemy, which confirmed ancestral support at
the same time.
In 1911, a missionary named Frederick Daniels was killed at the
hands of some Kwaio. Daniels belonged to the South Sea Evangelical
Mission, which entered the area in 1904. Keesing uses direct and indi-
rect testimonies to show that the motives for the murder were difficult to
determine: Was it unrest because taboos about contact between men and
women were being broken? Was it a premeditated act to create disorder
and distract attention from a problem concerning one of the aggressors?
These types of questions justify Keesing’s enquiries into the meaning
given to resistance. Another murder in 1927 is more evocative of the
social conflict resulting from colonialism since the British Protectorate
of the Solomon Islands had been proclaimed in 1893. W.R. Bell, the of-
ficial commissioner of labour, had begun to apply a now classic policy of
British colonialism: the introduction of a head tax to generate new forms
of monetarized labour. The reaction of the Kwaio to this imposition was
quite characteristic, and must be read from the perspective of their own
beliefs about political economy. While perceiving the tribute as an ex-
ternal imposition, they also understood it as reciprocal, and when they
did not receive any kind of gift in return, they rebelled. Warrior-leader
Basiana attacked Bell’s base and killed him. In response to the attack,
the colonial authorities sent a punitive expedition that massacred dozens
of Kwaio, men, women and children. The participation of other Kwaio
from the north in the colonial police force also explains the types of
symbolic punishments inflicted, which included destroying ritual objects
and throwing ancestral skulls into menstrual huts, thus depriving the
group of the protection of their ancestors.119 Here, the concept of resis-
tance is not ambiguous:
There can be few more dramatic and direct ways to express resis-
tance than to assassinate the agent of political domination while he
is in the process of exacting tribute and to massacre his armed force.
But, even here, the concept of “resistance” is somewhat clumsy in
its romanticization of action directed to a collective cause. Basiana
and the other warrior leaders had motives and agendas of their own,
were manipulating, withholding information, and scheming. They
were bent on self-aggrandizement and personal vengeance as well
as liberation.120
One of the principal political movements on the Solomon Islands was Maa-
sina Rule, which demanded an end to injustice and the re- establishment
of local customs. The Maasina movement contained a number of dif-
ferent revivalist elements, including ending – and demanding that the
colonial authorities put a stop to – abuse on the plantations, the payment
of tributes and the loss of autonomy. At the heart of the demands lay a
concern that continued to play a role into the late twentieth century: the
codification of their customs or kastomu. The paradox in this historical
process is comparable to that seen in other contexts with the generation
of an idea of ‘culture’ as self-representation and reaction.121 After the
imposition and adoption of new social forms and the abandonment of
the old ones, the Kwaio developed an interest (almost obsession) in estab-
lishing and codifying their customs,122 reflecting Favret-Saada’s (1967)
consideration of tradition as an excess of modernity.
Keesing ends his study by exploring debates related to resistance. The
resistance of the Kwaio did not necessarily operate from a logic of con-
frontation, but of compartmentalization. Indeed, the locals incorpo-
rated the Europeans, emulating or adopting external symbolic elements
such as the flag, paramilitary armies and the need to transcribe the
‘law’.123 Many analytical problems are involved in situating the context
of resistance, from what resistance is and what produces it to the possi-
bility that resistance was not conceptualized as such at that time, in its
later romanticized version. Are there continuities in resistance? Several
examples repeat, like the opposition to paying taxes from the Mela-
nesian perspective of reciprocity.124 Transgenerational inheritances of
versions of the past can also lead to resistance, as in the case of the
massacres of 1927 (in some way comparable to family memories of the
Spanish Civil War). Turning to theory, Keesing raises James C. Scott’s
considerations about daily forms of resistance and the existence of a
‘subaltern subculture’ (a phenomenon that Stoler did not see anywhere
with the Javanese domestic workers). In truth, the debate dates back to
Karl Marx’s classic The Eighteenth Brumaire and the idea of conscious-
ness in the dominated class. Keesing’s concern – echoing Comaroff,
Taussig and Ong – is that consciousness of resistance does not always
exist when the protest adopts other languages, such as possession by
spirits. This would constitute what Scott terms ‘hidden transcripts’, as
in the cargo cults, where the actors do not seem to be conscious of their
political motivation.
This then leads to another question: Is there one resistance in the
eyes of the observer and another in the eyes of the observed? When the
subjugation is powerful, to what extent is accommodation a latent form
of resistance? If passivity is also resistance, what, then, is resistance?
More confusion emerges when looking at the scope of the resistance
in terms of the human universe. Is collective resistance truly collective
or is it made up of actions performed in the name of a collective, like
some sort of group ventriloquism executed by actors with individual
motivations?
The third work analysed here is Being Colonized: The Kuba Experi-
ence in Rural Congo, 1880–1960 (2010) by Jan Vansina. In this book,
the Belgian author reconstructs the history of the Kuba in the Congo to
present their particular experience with colonialism, underscoring the
need to take the oft-overlooked viewpoint of the Africans into consid-
eration. At no time does Vansina attempt to make the Kuba experience
representative of the entire Congo, let alone the African continent. The
author emphasizes the importance of detail and proximity to the peo-
ple being studied, but also advocates the use of triangulated sources
to gain a better understanding of their perspective. Like Keesing with
the Kwaio, the great value of Vansina’s study lies in the comprehensive
overview that he was able to attain after a long relationship working
with the Kuba. Vansina himself reveals the limits of the British method
in vogue when he began his fieldwork in early 1953. The method of a
temporary stay based on participant observation was insufficient in his
eyes. At that time, he had the insight to bring together a group of local
young people, who he trained to collect information about their own
society, rescuing the memory (‘reminiscences’, in Vansina’s words) of
the elders and becoming, to some extent, improvised ethnographers.
Years later, Vansina used this collection to complete his monograph.
These rich sources were complemented by field notes and documents
obtained over time from colonial and private sources and photographic
archives. In order to incorporate the local perspective, Vansina bal-
anced the ethnographic photographs with documents produced by the
Kuba kingdom itself and the autobiography of a man of letters, Georges
Kwete Mwana. Some of his most original sources were the Kuba’s sto-
ries about dreams, which he used to reconstruct the desires, contradic-
tions and changes felt by common people when new objects or people
enter their dream worlds.
Vansina traces the history of the Kuba kingdom throughout the re-
gion, presenting the changes and dynamics generated by the colonial
impact on the population. Contrary to the dominant simplifications
representative of European sources, the consideration of reminiscences
and other local stories portrays the history of the Kuba kingdom in all
its complexity, considering its social structure, battles between factions
and the role of the kings with their own internal political logic, seen
in, for instance, the rivalry between the successor lines of King Kwet
aMbembeky. The king ordered powerful charms so that the other lines
would be infertile or die, with one of those lines eventually creating
its own countercharms. When King Kwet aPe came to power, it was
interpreted as a victory for this magic. These symbolic elements played
an important role in local interpretations of the colonial conflict over
the years.
The first rebellions occurred around the turn of century in some vil-
lages where state agents had been abusive.125 In the locality of Olenga,
the inhabitants joined a new group cult called Tongatonga around 1904
to cope with their misery. The spirit of rebellion in this cult extended
to other areas as a clear reaction to colonial exploitation; participation
in the cult required abstinence from European goods if the charm were
to work.126 In the framework of the debate about types of resistance,
Vansina insists that Tongatonga was not a nationalist movement, be-
cause it did not involve an elite spreading rebellion to gain independence,
but was more like a ‘primary resistance’ movement (Hobsbawm, 1974).
However, when pressure increased from the Compagnie du Kasai con-
cession company to exploit cork (backed by the Presbyterian missions
collaborating in the process), King Kuba himself ended up accepting the
massive exploitation of manpower. One example of the structure estab-
lished between the external and local was the pressure applied by the
company to produce more cork when the world market prices were de-
clining. The obligation imposed on the Kuba to collect cork often meant
that they could not attend to their basic crops, and the shortage led to
several conflicts between neighbouring groups to obtain food.
As in the other cases analysed here, after the armed uprisings were
repressed, other forms of response emerged and, again, when catego-
rizing the reactions of the colonized peoples subordinated to colonial
domination, the restrictive definition of ‘political’ can be deceptive. Re-
ligious and symbolic movements contained aspects of protest, rebellion
and adaptation, and the Kuba case is no exception. It is clearly essential
to foreground the local perspective of the conflict. The Kuba were aware
that something terrible was happening in their society. Their poloo
(peaceful social harmony) had been endangered, and phenomena like
low birth rates were attributed to witchcraft and envy. The only way to
re-establish social order was to invoke cults and practices that would put
an end to the chaos.127
The Kuba conceived of the world as inhabited by ngesh (nature spir-
its) that bestowed fertility or inflicted disease upon those who did not
observe their prohibitions as a punishment. The desires of these spirits
manifested themselves in trances and the dreams of priests. The system
is similar to that described by E.E. Evans-Pritchard amongst the Azande:
the existence of witchcraft, localized in bodily organs, the agent of evil;
and the production of charms and magic to counteract the witchcraft or
to make wishes. Upon their death, kings themselves could become ngesh
and cause all sorts of problems for those who displeased them. Indeed,
the deaths during the rebellions of 1923–25 in Kampungu and Misumba
were attributed to the previous king.
According to Vansina, the colonial effects were more devastating in ru-
ral areas, due to the economic exploitation of forced labour on the plan-
tations and public work projects and the payment of tributes. In 1917,
the peasants were forced to plant certain types of products like palm
and cotton, under pain of prison. In the 1940s, the plantation system
was encouraged, as it increased productivity. At times, these obligations
produced resistance, because certain products like cotton exhausted the
soil.128 Colonialism also brought about changes in subsistence forms.
The structure of forced labour, connected to salaries, was articulated
around innovative methods of social control like taxes. More subtle in-
novations, such as new forms of consumption that required money (and
paid work), also introduced external products, consequently creating
new tastes and new needs in order to imitate white society or distinguish
oneself from it.129 The androcentric European view also openly clashed
with the matrilineal kinship system, revealing the contradictions of co-
lonialism. The official rhetoric claimed to be introducing civilization and
development, although the effects were exactly the opposite: the intro-
duction of economic underdevelopment and burnout amongst peasants
forced to grow specific products, do public works or join the military.
Moreover, the Christian ideology of the missionaries aimed to transform
the power of women in Kuba society.130 The words of Prosper Denolf, a
Catholic missionary, are very clear:
the matriarchy is irreconcilable with the principles of a Christian

family because the man is put behind the woman and must often
reside in her and her family’s place, and because the father has no
authority over his own children.131
Colonialism threatened this balance of powers between the genders. Girls

were not schooled with boys and women were excluded from engaging
with the authorities and other public matters. Vansina also examines the
categories of tradition and modernity, wrongly used not only as a false
opposition, but also as a false linear process. The adoption of modern
objects like bicycles, clothing and gramophones cannot be confused with
the adoption of ways of life, which have a much greater impact and are
more transformative than objects per se: introducing a new concept of
time controlled by the clock, new conceptions of work as a form of mak-
ing money, new conceptions of kinship obligations and so forth.
Colonialism inevitably marked Kuba society. Following this case
closely not only yields a great amount of detail, but also makes it possible
to generalize about the impact of colonialism on Congolese society in gen-
eral.132 At the same time, experiences with colonialism obviously varied
internally according to status, given the existence of a well-established
local hierarchy, although that hierarchy does not prove that colonialism
left behind a history of winners and losers or that homogenous blocs
existed.133 The peasants emerged visibly damaged from the system of
forced labour. Without criticizing the colonial project, Vansina makes
it clear that colonial domination contained contradictions and changes
that could lead to some local groups being favoured or the failure of
colonizing projects. The Kuba case also highlights the challenge of how
to explain the consciousness of local people regarding their own colo-
nialism. According to Vansina, this was quite limited at first, and it was
only beginning in the 1950s that alternative positions appeared amongst
educated groups and the elites. The debate about consciousness, how-
ever, does not alter the importance of considering agency as the engine
of history, and in this case, the Kuba multiplied their responses to the
new situation from old reconstituted cultural forms. One of the main
obstacles when trying to piece together the colonial situation concerns
how present, postcolonial memories can reinterpret experiences, soften
domination or evaluate its effects from a catastrophic postcolonial situ-
ation. To demonstrate this, Vansina draws on other, equally important
forms of interpreting the colonial situation, using dream methodology
and the story of Elisabeth. She dreamt that she:
[…] received a gun from Maxi Schillings [the son of the administra-
tor]. I went with it to track a leopard that I had wounded earlier on.
My reason for killing this animal was to be invested with the title of
Cikl.134 But when I came very close to the beast I became afraid and
in its evil way the leopard killed my dog.135
Notes
1 Stolcke, 1992: 186.
2 For humanist Peter Martyr of Angleria, ‘dis-cover’ meant simply showing
what was once hidden. For this reason, Christopher Columbus ‘[…] boasts
of having given mankind this land, as being hidden he discovered it with
his industry and labour’, Martyr of Angleria, 1530: 55.
3 Taylor, 1985: 116.
4 On the question of the body in colonial contexts, see Martí, 2012.
5 Wachtel, 1993: 9.
6 In his Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590), Jesuit José de
Acosta created a hierarchization of human societies based on criteria that
included, in addition to the Christian religion, writing. See Mignolo, 1995.
7 Drawing on William H. Prescott’s fable (History of the Conquest of Mex-
ico, 1840), Todorov (1987) believed that the Spanish, at the hand of Hernán
Cortés, had a ‘superior technology of symbolism’ that allowed them to
cheat and lie, while the Nahuas were crippled by a culture dominated by a
cyclical understanding of time.
8 Robertson, 1997: 27; Gruzinski, 2014; Subrahmanyam, 2014.
9 Robertson, 1997: 27–8.
10 Fabre & Vincent, 2007: 1–2; Bailyn & Denault, 2009: 2; Elliot, 2009:
21–6.
11 A regular route that began in 1593 over which two 300-tonne ships per
year loaded with Eastern merchandise sailed to the American viceroyalty
in exchange for significant amounts of silver used to ensure Spanish control
of the Philippine archipelago (Schurtz, 1992).
12 Taylor, 1985: 122.
13 Some theoreticians like Anibal Quijano understand ‘coloniality’ to be the
right and self-assigned power of the Iberian elites to impose their image on
peoples they considered inferior (Quijano, 1992: 437–47, 2000). However,
this superiority, based on the Christian faith and the supposed purity of
their lineage, was not imposed mechanically, but based on tensions and
conflicts between the colonizers and the colonized.
14 Robertson, 1997: 25–44; Županov, 1999; Aranha, 2010: 79–83.
15 Diaz, 1993, 1995, 2010: 1; Gutiérrez Estévez, 2010: 121–2; Atienza de
Frutos & Coello de la Rosa, 2012.
16 Martínez Shaw & Martínez Torres, 2014: 1–32.
17 The term ‘frailocracia’ was popularized by Marcelo Hilario del Pilar’s pam-
phlet, La frailocracia filipina (Barcelona: Imprenta Ibérica de Francisco
Fossas, 1889), which emphasized the enormous influence that religious or-
ders had exerted in the political-social life of the Philippine archipelago.
He was a member of the ‘Movimiento de Propaganda’, which defended
the independence of the Philippines, still under Spanish control. In other
texts, such as La soberanía monacal en Filipinas (1888) and Filipinas en
las Cortes (1890), Del Pilar expressed the same ideas regarding influence in
the archipelago. Although it is true that the regular orders were an essential
element in maintaining peninsular domination in the Philippines, this does
not mean that the colonized societies were largely passive or apathetic. For
an analysis of the role played by local caciques in the network of colonial
power, see Inarejos, 2015.
18 Verlinden, 1994: 13–18.
19 Bishop Vasco de Quiroga was one of the first to condemn the contradic-
tions in the ‘civilizing process’. For more details on Vasco de Quiroga’s
thinking and his reformist policies, see Gómez, 2000: 101–21.
20 Canny (1976: 66, 133–6), especially Chapter 6, ‘The Breakdown: Elizabe-
than Attitudes towards the Irish’.
21 Canny, 1976: 124; Ellis, 2003: 28. In this respect, one Englishman con-
fessed that ‘we have Indians at home: Indians in Cornwall, Indians in
Wales, Indians in Ireland’ (Hill, 1974: 20).
22 On the religious objective of the Jesuit reducciones, see the briefs writ-
ten by Juan de la Plaza (1585) in Zubillaga, 1961: 181–244; Acosta, De
Procuranda, 1984: 303–12: II: 8. However, many of the new settlements
were located in areas of proven economic influence, like Huamanga and
Potosi.
23 In her dissertation, Irene Silverblatt provides important insights into the
alterations resulting from the reorganizational and tributary practices im-
posed by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo on native practices in general (Silver-
blatt, 1990).
24 Sempat Assadourian, 1992: 81.
25 In his Noticia General del Perú (approx. 1630), treasury official Francisco
López de Caravantes wrote that the viceroy ordered the ‘reduced’ Indians’
former houses to be burned so that they would not return to their place of
origin (Escobedo, 1979: 81).
26 Coello, 2006, 2007: 951–90.
27 Blanchoff & Casanova, 2016: 1–13.
28 Elliot, 2007. More recently, see Elliot, 2009: 21–6.
29 The barangay was the basic Tagalog political unit (Reed, 1978: 11–16).
Regarding these reductionist policies, see also Javellana, 2000: 428–30.
30 See, for example, the evangelizing strategies of the Italian Jesuits Alessan-
dro Valignano (1539–1606), Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) and Mateo
Ricci (1552–1610) in China (Standaert, 2000).
31 Coello, 2010, 2013, 2016.
32 Rubiés, 2005: 243.
33 Joan-Pau Rubiés has highlighted the role that this ‘Jesuit accommodation’
indirectly played in the process of secularizing European culture up until
the Enlightenment (Rubiés, 2005: 244).
34 Prakash, 1995: 3–4; Lockhart, 1999.
35 Sempat Assadourian, 1985: 83 y ss.
36 Thomas, 1990: 152.
37 Quimby, 2011: 24–6.
38 According to the reports (1887–89) written by French explorer Antoine-
Alfred Marche (1844–98) for the Museum of Paris, in 1830, the number of
mestizos had increased significantly (3,865) with respect to the Chamorros
(2,628). One of the reasons was to avoid paying taxes (Underwood, 1976:
208; Craig, 1982).
39 After the publication of the famous Memoria of 1828, the governors of the
Marianas distributed free land for cultivation to individuals. The aim was
to promote population on the islands and stop them from being gradually
abandoned (Brunal-Perry, 2001: 405).
40 In 1856, a violent measles epidemic reduced the population to 5,241 inhab-
itants (Marche, 1982: 5–6), which paved the way for the arrival of convicts
in the Marianas.
41 Deportation to prison on the Marianas Islands was a common practice.
The Spanish deportees of 1873 greatly expanded cultivated farmland and
hydraulic works, creating new towns and, then, family ties with the indig-
enous population (Martínez, 1886: 33).
42 Del Valle, 1979: 52–5; Rodao, 1998: 31.
43 Rodao, 1998: 27–35. Compare this codification process with the study by
Keesing (1992) on the codification of the kastomu of the Kwaio people,
discussed in the last section.
44 Keesing, 2000: 234–5.
45 Keesing, 2000: 235.
46 Stade, 1998: 184–200.
47 On the idea of narrative identity, see Somers, 1994: 621. We thank Dome-
nico Branca for the reference.
48 Ricoeur, 1996: 107.
49 At this time, what were once called aniti are known as taotaonomo’na
(Del Valle, 1979: 24–25; Haynes & Wuerch, 1995).
50 The OPI-R no longer exists, but other groups like Famoksaiyan, Nasion
Chamoru, Taotao Mo’na Native Rights Group and We are Guahan, among
others, continue to defend Chamorro culture, whether against past (Span-
ish) colonialism or present (American) colonialism (Diaz, 2010: 254–5).
51 Altez, 2012: 132.
52 Altez, 2012: 132.
53 Friedman, 1994: 15–42. One argument against reductionism in all its
forms is Stuart Hall’s (1932–) ‘radical contextualism’. In the words of cul-
tural studies scholar, Lawrence Grossberg, ‘an event or practice (even a
text) does not exist apart from the forces of the context that constitute it as
what it is. Obviously, context is not merely background but the very condi-
tions of possibility of something’ (Grossberg, 1997: 255).
54 Mintz, 1985: xxx. See also the obituary by Sarah Hill published in Bos-
ton Review (31 December 2015): http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/
sidney-mintz-in-memoriam
55 His fieldwork in the Caribbean served as the basis for his book Worker in
the Cane: A Puerto Rican Life History published in 1960.
56 Mintz, 1985: xviii.
57 Mintz, 1985: xvii.
58 Mintz, 1985: xvii.
59 In terms of salary, before the fifteenth century in Europe, sugar was a lux-
ury product that was 30 times more expensive than butter (a kilo of sugar
was worth one or two months of an unskilled worker’s salary), while in
developed Western countries in 1980, the price of a kilo of sugar was equal
to ten minutes’ salary (Bairoch, 1986: 285).
60 Mintz, 1985: 95.
61 Mintz, 1985: 95, 253.
62 In Turkey, Persia, India and other Islamic lands, some historians, like Mus-
tafa ‘Ali ibn Ahmad ibn ‘Abdullah of Gallipoli (1541–1600), the author of
The Essence of History, wrote histories of the world from the Ottoman
point of view. Others, like The History of the Western Indies, include in-
formation about American colonization in their accounts based on reading
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia General de las Indias, 1535 (Sub-
rahmanyam, 2005: 30–1; 2014).
63 ‘Le système de filiation comorien étant matrilinéaire, le statut de la mère
prévaut sur celui du père. Les enfants, issus de ces mariages, ne se recon-
naissent nullement hadrami mais comme waungwana, c’est-à-dire nobles
de par leur lignée maternelle. Le statut d’Arabe et encore mieux celui
de Sharif de leur ancêtre ne font que valoriser leur statut déjà élevé’ (Le
Guennec- Coppens, 1991: 153).
64 Ginzburg, 2015: 472.
65 Friedman, 1994: 147–66.
66 On the phenomena of imitation in African cults, see Stoller, 1995.
67 From a different perspective, Reynaldo Ileto emphasized the revolutionary
potential of native subaltern classes, analysing different Messianic revo-
lutionary movements, like that led by Andrés Bonifacio during the 1898
revolution (Ileto, 1979).
68 Sánchez Gómez, 2001: 145–72. De los Reyes was arrested in 1897 for revo-
lutionary activities. He returned to Spain, but this time to be imprisoned in
Montjuïc Castle, where he happened to meet some Cuban anti-colonialists
and the anarchists jailed for the bomb attack during the Corpus Christi
procession in Barcelona in June, thus expanding his intellectual networks.
He was released in 1898 and returned to the Philippines in 1901, after the
Americans had settled in (Bragado, 2002: 50–75).
69 Anderson, 2005: 14. For a study of Isabelo de los Reyes as a Filipino eth-
nographer and nationalist, see Loyré, 2001: 121–43; Mojares, 2006.
70 Anderson, 2005: 17. El Folk-lore filipino was published in 1889. See also
Loyré, 2001: 125–8. On the first indigenous self-ethnographies, see Fahim
(1982) and Howe (2009).
71 Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated that ‘race’ does not exist,
the abusive use of the term requires that we place it in inverted commas
to make it clear that this is a generalized concept and not an object like a
biological entity.
72 Stolcke, 2010: 327.
73 Stolcke, 1992: 15.
74 Stolcke, 1992: 31.
75 Stolcke, 1992: 57.
76 Stolcke, 1992: 58.
77 Stolcke, 1992: 108, from an original document.
78 Stolcke, 1992: 115.
79 The concept of ‘purity of blood’ is analysed in Chapter 5.
80 According to Stuart Hall, ‘stereotyping reduces, essentializes, natural-
izes and fixes “difference”’. It is a ‘form of symbolic violence’ that has the
power to ‘mark, assign and classify’ behaviours considered anomalous and
unacceptable (Hall, 1997: 258)
81 Clancy-Smith & Gouda, 1999; Mateo Dieste, 2003b.
82 Stoler, 2013: 9.
83 Bruneteau, 2006: 35.
84 Hunt, 2013: 44. See also Bruneteau, 2006: 31–58.
85 Stoler, 2002: 49.
86 Stolcke, 2008; Mateo Dieste, 2012a.
87 Stoler, 2002: 82.
88 Stoler, 2002: 99.
89 On the projection of women as a symbol of the nation in the Arab context,
see Abu-Lughod, 1998.
90 Stoler, 2002: 168.
91 Stoler, 2002: 175.
92 Stoler, 2002: 184.
93 Stoler, 2002: 178.
94 Mateo Dieste, 2003a: 40.
95 Stoler, 2002: 183.
96 The term ‘accommodation’ helps to explain the strategic adaptation of the
colonized to a new political situation, where collaboration may be one pos-
sible adaptation or the only one after a military imposition. The term is
taken from Levtzion (1978: 345). See also Robinson (1976) and Triaud
(1997: 13–14).
97 Gledhill, 2000: 137.
98 There is also a debate over the supposed role played by possession cults as
rites of social protest. Boddy (1994) criticizes the classic work by Lewis
(1989), which takes a functionalist position regarding the attribution of
this role to the most unfortunate.
99 Comaroff, 1985: 2.
100 Comaroff, 1985: 14.
101 Comaroff, 1985: 11.
102 Comaroff, 1985: 12.
103 Comaroff, 1985: 149.
104 Comaroff, 1985: 143.
105 Comaroff, 1985: 167.
06 Comaroff, 1985: 177.
1
107 Comaroff, 1985: 184.
108 Comaroff, 1985: 198.
109 Comaroff, 1985: 251.

112 Keesing, 1992: 8.
113 Keesing, 1992: 12.

115 Keesing, 1992: 25.

119 Keesing, 1992: 72.
120 Keesing, 1992: 72.
121 On the Kayapo, see the work by Turner (1991).
122 Keesing, 1992: 124.
123 Keesing, 1992: 200.
124 Keesing, 1992: 209.
125 The system in the Congo was unique in the history of modern colonialism.
Until Belgium took official control of the colony, it was literally the private
property of Belgian King Leopold II and, in the absence of a colonial state,
the king’s agents performed economic and military functions and also col-
lected personal commissions for their own benefit, which resulted in many
documented abuses.
126 Vansina, 2010: 94. This phenomenon is quite similar to other cases of
colonial resistance, such as those in Morocco. One form of protest there
consisted of rejecting the purchase or use of European – particularly
Spanish – products (Mateo Dieste, 2003a: 36–7). Some authors have
termed this practice ‘cultural resistance’.
127 Vansina, 2010: 244.
128 Vansina, 2010: 219.
129 Vansina, 2010: 230. Balandier also examined the impact of colonialism
and proletarianization in African society through the monetarization of
the economy, the appearance of paid labour and the transformation of the
forms of production and consumption, what Balandier termed a ‘social
inversion’ (Balandier, 1971).
130 The king’s mother possessed privileges and effective power. Kuba women
engaged in trade and had control over their finances, and elderly women
filled the role of treasurer in matrilineages, exercising considerable influ-
ence in marriage transactions and trials, with specific juries for women.
131 Vansina, 2010: 238.

133 Vansina, 2010: 327.

134 In her dream, the girl is playing with several power hierarchies. Not only
does she hope to receive the title Cikl, the second most senior title in the
Kuba hierarchy, but it is reserved for men. The paradox of her desire lies in
the fact that she is acquiring new ideas about social mobility through indi-
vidual merit, but uses them to reproduce a traditional hierarchical order.
135 Vansina, 2010: 320.
5 Systems of Classification
and Social Exclusion
We have given you, Oh Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor any

endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever
form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same
you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision.
The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws
which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restric-
tions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned
you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature […]. We have
made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor
immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your
own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your
power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able,
through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose
life is divine.
(Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1463–94)1
In a 1993 article, Verena Stolcke observed that if, as George W. Stocking

(1983) said, the intellectual undertaking of anthropology consists of re-
solving the problem of human unity in cultural diversity, then the be-
ginnings of the discipline can be found in the European Renaissance.
Stolcke was not suggesting that other cultural diversities would not have
intrigued human beings in different times and places on the planet. It
was the Renaissance, however, and more specifically after the conquest
of the Americas, ‘when Europeans came face to face intellectually and
politically with the overwhelming cultural diversity of the New World in
a way that was different and typically modern’. 2
Renaissance humanism originated in Italy and spread to other coun-
tries, constituting one of the defining elements of Western modernity.3
When the Renaissance rediscovered erudition and the art of the classical
languages, the horizon of understanding expanded beyond the Judeo-
Christian tradition. The humanists, as Stolcke observed, ‘exalted the
dignity of man and made him the measure of all things’.4 They envisaged
a new active conception of the individual, equal to his fellow man and
‘free from any natural or divine imposition, to forge his own destiny’. 5
156 Classification and Social Exclusion
In short, the fifteenth century witnessed the dissemination of a modern
universalist idea of the subject that defended the freedom of individuals
to determine their own lives. Although the Oration by the Florentine
humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94)6 attributed this
freedom to divine goodness, the conception of the autonomous individ-
ual suggested an intellectual curiosity that would pave the way for the
search for natural laws to explain individual freedom in another way
years later.
However, the idea of individual freedom implied that the individual
was responsible for his actions and, above all, for the differences per-
ceived in ‘others’ considered culturally odd because of their diversity.
Hence, understanding ‘novelty’ was not only a problem of accepting
strange cultural realities, but also a problem of identity.7 This is the par-
adox or irony of modernity. When the Europeans began to conquer and
colonize other continents, this modern conception of the free individ-
ual, equal to his fellows, contradicted the reality of colonial domination,
which was based on the domination of culturally diverse ‘others’ and
their moral and/or natural disqualification.8
There is no doubt that anthropology was born as a modern reflection
on human cultural diversity. In the sixteenth century, numerous chron-
iclers were incapable of identifying, describing or classifying diversity
in accordance with the spiritual and political system of the Old World.
In the beginning, they denied this multiple reality to then later try to
domesticate and assimilate it. In this respect, European expansion to
other continents fostered the appearance of an anthropological sensi-
bility that gathered new steam with nineteenth-century European colo-
nialism (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 126). During the medieval era, of course,
various marginal groups were classified, indoctrinated, monitored and,
subjected to forced labour, economic sanctions and to rules that regu-
lated all types of behaviour. Later, in a globalized context, European
‘civilization’ invented new racial categories to undervalue the ‘primitive
other’ based on biological and cultural criteria. However, as Talal Asad
has remarked, anthropology was not simply a discipline at the service
of the European colonial powers; rather, these powers, understood as
discourses and practices, were an indissoluble part of the reality that
anthropologists sought to understand.9
5.1 Marginalized, Heretical, Impure

One of the fields that caught the attention of a number of true pioneers in
this discipline like Julio Caro Baroja, Alan Macfarlane and Carlo Ginz-
burg appertained to the groups excluded by the Tribunal of the Holy Of-
fice of the Inquisition, established in 1478 by the Catholic Monarchs to
preserve the Christian faith in their kingdoms. The works done by these
authors provide guidelines for how marginalized groups can be studied
Classification and Social Exclusion 157
using repressive sources that are the construct of marginality itself. In
fact, their strategies would be used in the study of colonial societies and
the state.
Thanks to these works, it is possible to observe the process of creating
exclusion, with all its problems and contradictions, and how dominant
institutions produce systems of social classification. As French anthro-
pologist Jean Pouillon noted, classifying consists of making groupings
and distinctions and introducing differences and relations to be able to
observe what would otherwise be uncontrollable.10 This is a promising
analytical perspective, since it makes it possible to compare different
periods and contrast the existence of different exclusion and legitima-
tion criteria, whether from dominant theological worldviews or from the
budding scientific worldviews that generated new categories existing in
cultural discourse like ‘race’,11with all its varieties and paradoxes, until
it was progressively replaced by other categories like ‘ethnicity’ or mod-
ern identity fundamentalisms.12
The historical anthropology studies discussed here demonstrate the
value of a dense analysis of these changing and transforming classifica-
tion systems. One of the most popular works of the 1970s was Emman-
uel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, a study
of Cathar persecution in the Occitan village of Montaillou. In his book,
Le Roy Ladurie reconstructs the life of the inhabitants like a classic eth-
nography, using Inquisition materials collected by Jacques Fournier, the
future third Avignon Pope, which included 578 interrogations and 98
cases involving 114 people (48 women), largely humble folk. The mate-
rial from the court at Pamiers reopened the interrogations done by Do-
minican Friar Bernard Gui about the population of Montaillou. Le Roy
Ladurie used the documents from the trials that survived the passage of
time to reconstruct various aspects of daily life: the ecology of a trans-
humant pastoral society in the Pyrenees and its social dynamic regard-
ing authority and relationships. Above all, however, the work presents
a study of the local worldview, conceptions of time and space, the rites
of childhood, marriage and death, the view of fate, magic and salvation
and the townspeople’s religious practices.
In this case, the Inquisition documents made it possible to reconstruct
the process of denunciation, arrest, violence (whether physical, like tor-
ture, or symbolic, like the threat of excommunication) and punishment
(execution, imprisonment and stigmatization by stitching a yellow cross
on the accused’s clothing) as well as to conjecture about aspects of daily
life. In fact, this exercise was feasible partly because of Fournier’s desire
(or perhaps, anxiety, to borrow from Stoler) to know what the people
were thinking and then impose his view of reality. The process of ferret-
ing out and imposing the truth, however, passed through an important
linguistic procedure related to the exercise of anthropological transla-
tion, which highlights an epistemological problem about the production
of knowledge used as a source. While the accused made their declara-
tions in Occitan and Gascon, the scribes translated them into Latin,
simultaneously or after the fact. Then, during the reading of the dec-
larations to the accused, the Latin text was re-translated into the local
languages, causing much confusion.
The everyday details that were recorded concerned clothing styles,
sleeping, eating and expressing emotions. Descriptions popped up of
homosexuality practiced being teachers, ecclesiastics and disciples,
along with other sexual practices engaged in by the clergy (which could
explain this book’s unusual success internationally and amongst the
non-academic public). This focus in Le Roy Ladurie’s work shows the
progressive influence of anthropology on the historian and a shift from
the political economics that dominated his earlier work (The Peasants of
Languedoc, 1966) in the use of categories of ethnographic description.
In a 1976 article, he explored this topic further, contending that histori-
ans had come to the realization that modern political economic catego-
ries and concepts were not applicable to times and places far away from
Western capitalism. He added that anthropology posed new questions
for history and offered interpretative models that opened new and un-
expected avenues.13 History and anthropology working together could
exchange and interweave ideas useful for both the study of the past and
cultural diversity. Le Roy Ladurie understood that the study of distant
societies could be harrowing, given that Western sociological categories
like class or the bourgeoisie were as unsuited to such a study as economic
concepts. This required the use of the more systematic analytical tools
and techniques of ethnology, both when gathering and when reading
material.14
In his chapter on ‘Marriage and Love’ in Montaillou, Le Roy Ladu-
rie applied Lévi-Strauss’s theory of marriage exchange to present the
cases from Montaillou – such as the widow Raymonde d’Argelliers, who
married after group negotiations – and the work by Pierre Bourdieu on
Bearn to discuss limited partner choices and, thus, cast doubt on the
concept of love marriages. This rich depiction of Albigensian heresy,
which was harshly repressed by the Inquisition, stimulated interesting
debates on the use of Inquisition sources, beginning with Renato Rosal-
do’s (1986) criticism of the ‘anthropologist as Inquisitor’ and then with
Ginzburg’s (1989) indirect defence of the ‘Inquisitor as anthropologist’.
Finally, the study of forms of exclusion in the medieval period found a
transdisciplinary revival with the historian David Nirenberg, who con-
sidered materials in view of factors related to symbolism, sexuality and
marriage for his 1996 work Communities of Violence: Persecution of
Minorities in the Middle Ages.
Amongst the precedents for this type of analysis, the work of Julio
Caro Baroja on Moriscos and Jews once again comes into the spotlight.
For this author, the exclusion of groups like Jews or Moriscos was both
situational and contextual. The contexts varied and several patterns
repeat themselves in exclusion processes, despite surrounding changes,
as evidenced by other authors who have explored the theory of per-
sistence.15 Rites excluded throughout history have accepted structures
that exist in relation to a type of ‘counter-structure’, beginning with the
gullible pagan of the imperial Roman world, followed by the Inquisitor
and then the parapsychologist.16 In these relations of power and conflict,
Caro Baroja did not view social dynamics as Manichean, despite dis-
tinguishing between dominators and dominated. The Inquisition was a
repressive institution, but it included some ‘fair’ judges at times, and was
also occasionally manipulated by people, like some conversos, who used
it to survive and foment rivalries. This exercise of revealing the entrails
of power was certainly provocative, and they remain on view, above all,
in the book Mr Inquisitor, which draws attention to the biographies
and humanity, broadly speaking, of the inquisitors, whose actions were
based on personal motives, protocol and ceremony.
In this context, Caro Baroja observed the mechanisms of power used
against minorities, but also tried to show how the parties involved re-
acted to these measures and perceived of themselves in this situation,17
what years later would characterize the anthropology of agency and
even later, the anthropology of subjectivity or subalternity. In his classic
text, The Moorish Kingdom of Granada (1957), Caro Baroja told the
story of the Morisco uprising (1568–71) that began in the Alpujarra
Mountains and spread to other parts of the Spanish region. The revolt
unleashed an armed conflict that involved the abuse of Christian in-
stitutions and their clergy, until the definitive defeat of the Moriscos
and their later expulsion by royal decree. In this work, Caro Baroja
creates a social history of the Moriscos, at times drawing on E.E. Evans-
Pritchard’s ideas about the turn required by anthropology in order to
stay mindful of history and change. The book was written in the form
of a classic ethnography, presenting the history of this collective and its
particular constitution during the sixteenth century, from the forced
conversions of all the Muslims in Aragon and Valencia in 1525 to the
definitive expulsion of the Moriscos decreed by Philip III between 1609
and 1613. In doing so, he presented the classic fields of ethnography,
describing the material context of Granada, the social structure, the role
of lineage and the intra-group variations, marked by ethnic factors.18
He then analysed the differences between urban and rural professional
conditions and, finally, examined cultural factors, focusing on the defi-
nition of a particular Islam, although here research was in an embryonic
state and he remarked on the need to explore the Inquisition archives,
which later works would do.19 Last but not least, Caro Baroja presented
the context and causes of the rebellion, its development and the con-
sequences of the repression, expulsion and diaspora of the Moriscos
around the Mediterranean.
Years later, Caro Baroja would undertake a reconstruction of the
experience of the Jews in Spain, 20 a work reconsidered by Mercedes
García-Arenal in light of the problems related to ‘creating conversos’. 21
García-Arenal suggests that Caro Baroja’s work was based on an ex-
amination of his conscience after being influenced by the events of the
Second World War. However, he was joining a dangerous game, just
like other historians who debated whether ‘Jewish’ is excluded from or
included in ‘Spanish’.22 Caro Baroja made a mistake, which he himself
reconsidered years later, about the existence of a nation or people having
an innate character (The Myth of the National Character, 1970). These
observations are indicative of the epistemological – and conceptual –
difficulties that plague all studies of the past and the use of analytical
concepts that are loaded with political connotations.
Scholars around the world have presented intriguing solutions to
these methodological problems, one such response being Carlo Ginz-
burg’s classic The Cheese and the Worms, a daring work that defends
the possibility of entering the subaltern world and understanding how it
came to be. Is it possible to learn about the dominated culture from the
dominant culture and its sources? Due to the predominance of sources
from the dominant culture, information about the dominated culture
is deformed and filtered; but does that mean that no attempt should be
made to read the historical material? Even if it is not possible to study
the dominated culture directly, perhaps the culture that imposed itself
upon the dominated culture can be studied. For Ginzburg, the bias cre-
ated from using intermediate sources (i.e., sources that are not the direct
expression of the social group being analysed) does not invalidate the
use of sources that are not completely objective: ‘A hostile chronicle
can furnish precious testimony about a peasant community in revolt’. 23
With regard to the problem of representativity, the author argues that it
is impossible to extrapolate the mental coordinates of an entire era from
one individual, as Lucien Febvre tried to do in his study of Rabelais and
atheism in the sixteenth century. In his study of the miller Menocchio,
Ginzburg prefers to speak of ‘popular culture’ instead of ‘mentalités’,
but that term does not completely satisfy him either. What is important
is understanding the existence of different viewpoints between the so-
cial classes.
The focus of the book is Domenico Melchiori, a miller known as
Menocchio, who was born in 1532 in Montereale in the Friuli region
and accused by the Holy Office in 1583 of spreading heretical ideas.
The transcribed trial makes it possible to reconstruct a great number
of details related to the event, including who accused him and who
was more or less neutral. The parish in his town, which had openly
clashed with him, was at the forefront of the accusation. Menocchio
questioned the authority of the church and legitimacy of its representa-
tives and, above all, publicly described a version of Christianity mixed
with particular, naturalist elements that elicited a predictable reaction
from the Holy Office. Ginzburg summarizes the miller’s particular cos-
mogenesis thus:
all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together;
and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of
milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The
most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the an-
gels, and amongst that number of angels there was also God, he
too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he
was named lord with four captains, Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, and
Raphael. 24
Ginzburg accompanies the story of the trial with discussions about the
social context of the time. In particular, he presents a society in conflict,
with factions of nobles, and a system of exploitation based on Church
influence. It is not surprising that Menocchio, who classified himself as
a member of the dominated classes, was critical of a system that he saw
as oppressive, and delegitimized its ecclesiastical institution, describing
the sacraments as merchandise. At this point, Ginzburg begins a thrill-
ing, profound investigation to determine whether Menocchio took his
ideas from movements of the era, if he participated in some group or if
he was simply inspired by ideas that were circulating around the region,
appropriating them to create his own synthesis to criticize Church rit-
ual and argue for a more egalitarian Christianity. Ginzburg proposes a
detective-like hypothetical game to determine what influences can be
discerned in the words said during the trial. Menocchio’s use of the term
‘Lutheran’, for example, thoroughly challenges the use of concepts in
terms of the anthropological emic-etic dichotomy. The miller elaborated
his own version of ‘Lutheranism’ (a sort of network of critical ideas) that
did not necessarily correspond to the definition provided by Lutheranism
itself or by the canonical definitions of other authors. On the contrary,
Ginzburg finds another explanation to explain the miller’s motivations:
the existence of a set of ‘pagan’ ideas that were more or less reproduced
orally amongst the peasants that had already existed before the Refor-
mation and that at times served as a framework for radical criticisms of
the social order.
The inquisitors, in turn, seemed to want to find some ‘rationality’ in
his discourse. They wanted to identify the heterodoxy that had inspired
him and what colleagues had encouraged him. The miller’s arguments
that he had come up with his ideas on his own, then, upset the inquisi-
tors. Ginzburg analysed the list of main texts that Menocchio said he had
read. It is not easy to establish a tie between his ideas and the contents
of the books. In some cases, they clearly overlap, but in many others, the
connection between the text and the miller’s interpretation is strange.
This underscores the fact that it is a mistake to transplant the contents
from a text to the mind of the person who interprets and reads it. The
miller was inspired by both his own ideas and those of others, but in any
case, he adapted certain ideas to his own general interpretative system:
apocryphal gospels, criticisms of the image of Christ as God, doubts
about the virginity of Mary. He was also inspired by travel literature,
like the 1371 work Travels of Sir John of Mandeville (ca. 1300–72); the
book’s fantasies about pygmies intensified Menocchio’s relativist doubts.
There is a crucial passage in which Menocchio deduces that the soul also
dies with the body. From reading Mandeville’s words about cannibals,
the miller decided that there could be no afterlife, because other societies
did not share that belief: ‘from there I got my opinion that, when the
body dies, the soul dies too, since out of many different kinds of nations,
some believe in one way, some in another’. 25
The study of the interrogations also reveals the inquisitors’ ratio-
nalization processes. They demanded that the miller justify an entire
complex system of theological thought and make it coherent, explaining
whether God preceded the chaos or came after. The inquisitor’s concerns
focused on deciphering whether other superior beings with more power
than God existed in Menocchio’s mind; hence, the questions about the
role of angels (whether they were assistants or equals). These passages
foretell Ginzburg’s later thoughts when he defines the ‘inquisitor as an-
thropologist’, an ironic response to the text by Renato Rosaldo criticiz-
ing anthropologists who act like inquisitors. In this back and forth of
questions and answers, the inquisitors become obsessed with trying to
discern the basis of Menocchio’s thinking. However, they failed in their
attempt, because the references were too diverse and lacked the internal
coherence that the inquisitors expected.
The questions and answers about the body, the soul, the spirit, par-
adise and what comes after death reflect the distance between the two
sides. The inquisitors were disoriented by ideas that should have coin-
cided with orthodoxy, but they rejected as heretical, without really un-
derstanding their source. At stake were the idea of God and especially
the legitimacy of the Church, as constantly demonstrated by Menocchio.
At stake was the social order. The sentence, which was three times as
harsh as the usual punishment, highlighted the inquisitors’ viciousness.
The miller’s challenge to the hegemonic ontology and disrespect for the
Church, God and Jesus Christ was intolerable and merited constant stig-
matization. He was initially condemned to life in prison and then forced
to wear a penitential garment embellished with a cross. After early re-
lease, he was accused again and called before the Inquisition in 1599.
In the new auto-da-fé, Menocchio once again described his naturalist
vision, arguing that there is no distinction between the creator and the
created world, and God is everything. Consequently, all beliefs were ac-
ceptable, whether heretical or Turkish. To some extent, he was justifying
his own position, regardless of what his interrogators said. Menocchio’s
rhetoric was certainly modern and presented a universalist relativism:
we are all equal despite our differences.
Persecutions against heretics and relapsos took place across the conti-
nent, and the production of heresies emerged as a mechanism of knowl-
edge and power. The voluminous amount of material coming out of these
persecutions is comparable to the enormous mass of documents produced
by phenomena like colonialism that make it possible to reconstruct past
societies today. Ginzburg’s approach, like many later authors, 26 advo-
cated not only visiting these documents, but reinterpreting other sources
that may seem to be exhausted, but actually merit a re-reading from the
perspective of new questions. One example of the possibility of interro-
gating historical sources with an anthropologist’s eye is Enric Porqueres’s
study of the Chuetas of Majorca and, in particular, the mechanisms of cre-
ation and reproduction in social groups. In this case, endogenous factors
interact with external processes of social stigmatization and exclusion.
The construction of boundaries between groups was not only articulated
around the formulation of policies of forced conversion and persecution.
Rather, multiple symbolic mechanisms establish powerful, unquestioned
systems that extend, for instance, to the concepts of purity and impu-
rity that would lead to purity-of-blood statutes,27 in addition to kinship
and marriage mechanisms related in part to symbolic concepts that shape
group construction dynamics. The question of alliance as a constructor,
reproducer and transformer of groups has received considerable scholarly
attention in different historical and geographic contexts.28
Enric Porqueres’s (2001) work on endogamy, identity and marriage
amongst the Chuetas, Jews in Majorca who were forced to convert be-
ginning in 1391, synthesizes all these complexities. Porqueres did an
ethnography of the group using documentary material dating from
between 1435 and 1750, to which he applied anthropological theories
about alliance and symbolic exclusion, producing a rich interpretation
of the sources. His book contains an intriguing comparison of various
excluded groups like the Cagots, the Vaqueiros de Alzada, the Moriscos
and the Roma. In his study of the Chuetas, the author demonstrates the
importance of constructing grounded questions to read the sources in a
distinctive way, in this case, applying theories about the reproduction
of groups and marriage strategies, ranging from Lévi-Strauss and his
structuralism to Bourdieu (1988). Porqueres, however, added a series of
questions that correlated social structure and alliance to pose an origi-
nal question that can be applied to other historical case studies: do the
Chuetas marry each other because they are Chuetas or are they Chuetas
because they marry each other? Identity here is not a primary driver of
behaviour, but an effect of alliance strategies, evidently shaped by very
clear political limits, responses to pressure and religious repression based
on criteria of inheritance, or purity of blood, that defined the person.
Porqueres’s primary analytical source are the autos-da-fé of the Holy
Inquisition, which gave him insight to the group locally known as ‘the
people of the Street’ (specifically, Sagell Street), where most of, although
not all, the group was concentrated. The patronymics of converts to
Christianity and, above all, marriage guidelines indicate, to some ex-
tent, the amount of endogamy and exogamy. The main body of marriage
documents that Porqueres analysed came from between 1565 and 1600
and were related to 365 marriages, of which a quarter involved someone
from outside the group.
However, it was not easy to find an ‘identity’ based on religion, di-
etary habits, residency or names, since the patronymics acquired after
conversion were not exclusive to this group. 29 Despite the lack of cultural
markers or identifiers, however, the Inquisition and notarial documents
are perceptibly different and the tragic consequences of this differentia-
tion will play out in the autos-da-fé of 1679 and 1691. For Porqueres, the
real element that explains the existence of the group is marriage as the
engine of reproduction.30 Endogamy explains the identity of the ‘people
of the Street’. However, they do not marry each other because they share
a common ancestry as Jews in Majorca; they are descendants of Jews
because they marry each other.31
Identity, then, is not a mere reproduction, but an acquisition, the
product of a process in which alliance is more powerful that filiation.
Porqueres analyses the data about the Chuetas from a critique of both
the matrimonial strategies that Bourdieu applied in Bearn and other
scholars of the history of the family in Europe, who stress the repro-
duction of the social system. Porqueres counters that with a model that
focuses on social creation and recreation, intended to break away from
the economic reductionism of marriage strategy studies and the deter-
minism of Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, in which the social actor as player
can never change the rules of the game.
In his analysis of marriages and genealogies, Porqueres proposes to
begin with an analysis of the social consequences of marriage more than
its cause.32 From a theory of Weberian connotations, the author does
not repudiate the study of intentions, which he deems to be an extremely
complex activity when using documents, but rather insists that inten-
tions do not necessarily correspond to the subsequent consequences, in
accordance with the concept of undesired effects. He grants that the
members of the Sagell group were obviously intentional beings, but ar-
gues that they should not be redefined by the effect of their intentions.33
Indeed, the context of the intentions clearly shapes their consequences.
For example, he notes that a sixteenth-century mixed marriage could
have had consequences far different to a seventeenth-century union.
While the former could bring the couple’s children one step closer to be-
ing natural Christians, the latter could merely ‘contaminate’ the Chris-
tian spouse.34
According to this logic, religious identity is not necessarily the effect of
a transference, but of marital alliances. In the analysis of the statistical
matrices of marital practices, endogamic patterns emerge related to pat-
ronymics that are also associated with factors of class, since the wealthiest
lineages almost always intermarried.35 This does not, however, mean that
there were no changes in class or patronymics. Regarding kinship endog-
amy, Porqueres also observes that the data can be interpreted in differ-
ent ways. Endogamy cannot only be seen as determined by belonging or
by genealogical lines, but by the fact that people become related because
marriages occur. This is true of successive marriages, of reconnections
between lineages, something very common amongst the Chuetas.36
This practice was recorded in marriage dispensations, an interesting
documentary source used by other kinship anthropologists like Joan Be-
stard, which allowed him to reconstruct the history of the family on the
island of Formentera beyond oral genealogical memory. Bestard found
numerous cases of endogamy on the island in the papers kept by some
families, including marriage dispensations.37 For a traditional, peasant
society like the Balearic society, the continuity of the home as a struc-
tural element of the kinship system revolved around the two principles
of social reproduction: descent and alliance. Consanguineous mar-
riage as defined by canon law formed part of their matrimonial strate-
gies.38 Indeed, between 1872 and 1888, almost half of the unions were
consanguineous.
In the late sixteenth century, 378 out of 1,000 marriages required a
dispensation, and there were other connections with more distant de-
grees of relatedness. One indicator of these endogamies was the con-
tempt expressed towards mixed marriages, also amongst the Chuetas,
which appears in declarations made to the Inquisition in 1673, where it
is said that the Chuetas referred to those who married Old Christians as
‘badly mixed’ (‘mal mezclados’) and their descendants as apple-peaches
(‘poma presech’).39 One example of the model proposed by Porqueres
to explain the character of recreating dynamics is that, in light of the
hostility they faced, these ‘apple-peaches’ ended up marrying each other,
and those alliances were once again affected by political factors. Af-
ter the autos-da-fé of 1691, mixed marriages ceased to occur, especially
amongst the wealthier Christian classes.
As in other situations studied, the concepts of body and the exclusion
criteria affecting the Chuetas have generated debates about the chrono-
centrism of the concepts used. What did the words mean in their time?
In the accusation against Úrsula Forteza, for example, the inquisitor
writes, ‘all the more so because of the nature of her infected blood and
for being a descendant of Jewish conversos’.40 The idea remained in
oral culture, like popular songs that speak of Chueta blood as dirty or
mention the outer physical attributes that identify them, in a recourse to
animalization (calling them ‘rabuts’ in reference to their alleged tails).
In the final part, the study makes an intriguing comparison between
the Chuetas and other groups that have been marginalized for similar
reasons, and where the engine of endogamy has structured the produc-
tion, segregation and redefinition of the group. Porqueres stresses, addi-
tionally, that this endogamy by exclusion was also supported by symbolic
rhetoric and unquestioned concepts about, above all, the body, or that
used the body as a metaphor for difference: corporal attributes of impu-
rity and infection, where blood played a central role in many of the cases.
The transmission mechanism for belonging was not exclusively by blood,
however, but also by mother’s milk, when a defect would be attributed
to a person because they had been fed by a wet nurse from another social
group.41 The question of milk is particularly compelling,42 especially be-
cause it transmitted status in some cases, but not in others. For instance,
the slaves in the southern Moroccan oases lived in the same houses with
their masters to prevent sexual contact between milk siblings. Milk did
not always transmit status, but it could pass on certain qualities, as in
the cases studied by Soler (2011) in an original historical work on the
relationship between wet nurses from the Pas region of Cantabria, the
Catalonian bourgeoisie and in some cases, the Spanish royal family.
5.2 From Blood to ‘Race’

The preceding pages have stressed the importance of historical anthro-
pology as a reflexive anthropology. From this perspective, it is clear that
the interpretation of systems of exclusion has led to numerous debates
and misunderstandings, especially when it comes to characterizing
these classification systems as ‘naturalist’ or categorizing them as racial,
merely because they are based on corporal substances. The question was
broken down by Nirenberg (2000) and Heng (2011a, 2011b), who situ-
ated the debate about the application of racism to medieval classification
systems like the first purity-of-blood statutes in Spain in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. According to Robert Maryks, the purity-of-blood
statutes of Pedro (or Pero) Sarmiento (Toledo, 1449) marked the birth
of modern racism, which developed in Spain and was then exported to
the rest of the world.43 In this exercise, the mentality of the defenders of
‘religious racism’ in the Late Middle Ages as they projected the category
of ‘race’ as their ideological support was chronocentric or presentist.44
The problem, as will be discussed below, is that this is a later concept
that does not necessarily correspond to the era under discussion.45
In the mid-fifteenth century, the purity-of-blood doctrine moved from
religion to society, from proving the absence of heretical ancestors to
proving nobility.46 According to this doctrine, non-Christian religious
faith was no longer a matter of choice and became an inherent stain,
inherited through ‘blood’. By converting religion into a quasi-hereditary
attribute, a close tie was established between an essentialist concept
of purity of blood, endogamic marriage and a consequent legitimate
birth.47 Without ‘blood’, lineage and social order could not be under-
stood.48 The term ‘raça’, or race, referred to family lineage as the way to
conserve and transmit the ethno-religious calidad – or, on the contrary,
degeneration and impurity – of people in unequal marriages.49 Here, ab-
solute cleanliness or nobility, amongst other social factors, denoted what
was termed ‘calidad’ or ‘quality’ and was justified by ‘raça’.50
However, in the early sixteenth century, ‘race’ also referred to tainted
lineages and, consequently, evoked the impurity of blood.51 The 80,000
Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 are a clear example
not only of the importance of blood, but also the beginning of the uni-
tarianism and uniformity that defined the construction of the modern
state on the basis of racial purity.52 During the Middle Ages, Jews were
treated somewhat benevolently by the Crown, working as tax collectors,
treasurers and administrators. In the late sixteenth century, however,
the hatred of the poorest and most miserable classes was directed at
the Jews and it was demanded that they convert.53 The absolute royal
power of the Catholic Monarchs opened the way and they imposed
their authority through the assimilation of minority communities (Jews,
Muslims) into the dominant Christian culture, considered an inherent
characteristic of Spanish national identity. The cohesion of the social
body required the assimilation of minorities or their disappearance, and
Ferdinand and Isabella enforced a unity that transcended the linguistic
and cultural barriers of the administration, uniting all the inhabitants
of Spain in the late fifteenth century in a holy crusade (later termed the
Reconquest), from the mountains of Asturias to the southernmost part
of the Peninsula.54 The Christians fought to achieve political hegemony
through religious universalism. The Catholic Monarchs used different
mechanisms of repression like the Inquisition, whose stated aim was to
persecute heresy amongst the conversos, but which in practice became
an ideological apparatus at the service of the Crown. The hegemonic
corporative identity was constructed through the demand for religious
purity and homogeneity, which really integrated religious, cultural and
racial identity. This common faith compensated for a real administrative
and cultural division and the dispersed nature of the state. 55 Like ‘many
religious, ecclesiastical and secular people’, the inquisitors observed:
that great injury has resulted and still results, since the Christians
have engaged in and continue to engage in social interaction and
communication they have had and continue to have with Jews – who,
it seems, seek always and by whatever means and ways they can to
subvert and to steal faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith
and to separate them from it, and to draw them to themselves and
subvert them to their own wicked belief and conviction […]
(The Edict of Expulsion of the Jews, 1492)
Purity of blood symbolized a genuine and unshakeable faith in God.
The gradation between purity and impurity was, above all, a moral
problem. Despite converting to Christianity in the mid-fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, Jews continued to be seen as the enemy, leading to
a new way of conceiving of them. According to Porqueres, the Bible told
how Pontius Pilate offered to free Jesus, but the Jews refused, exclaim-
ing that ‘his blood shall be upon you and your children’. The Jews were
thus still guilty, even if they converted. As Porqueres notes, at issue was
a new, indelible genealogical element that was added to the religious cri-
terion. In this respect, the Renaissance intensified the social importance
of kinship instead of lessening it. 56 The extensive kinship group was
replaced by linearity, creating deep genealogies. While kinship in the
fifteenth century meant, above all, the flesh, beginning in the sixteenth
century, people spoke about blood and fluids. The argument was based
on very strong rhetoric that reinforced old genealogies, blood ties and
the ‘accursed races’ (the Cagots, Vaqueiros, Moriscos, New Christians,
Roma, etc.) marked by their impure ancestry. This indelible genealogical
logic, which was connected to a modernity that subdivided humanity
into a hierarchy of ‘races’ endowed with unequal moral and intellec-
tual qualities, was later reinforced in the nineteenth century by scientific
discourse, laying the bases for nineteenth-century racism. According to
Porqueres, the ‘accursed races’ were systems of social classification that
manipulated the concept of a person in the Western Christian kinship
system.
The insistence on the purity of Old Christians contradicted the Span-
ish Crown’s policy of Christian integration. In theory, it was a tool to
make genealogical differentiations through ‘proofs of merit’ (‘probanzas
de mérito’) and purity-of-blood reports that had less to do with skin co-
lour than the ‘calidad’ – that is, reputation, nobility or purity of blood –
of a person. In practice, this became a system for social classification
that excluded neophyte Christians on the grounds of the impurity of
their blood (in other words, for being descendants of Jews, conversos,
Muslims or some other ‘recently converted sect’). 57 What was novel here
was the fact that a recognizable mark was inscribed on the body of the
marginalized person. Jews were suspected of transmitting heresy or dis-
honour based on their hidden humoral pathologies like circumcision and
menstrual flows that could contaminate other Christians.58 Dirtiness,
impurity and filth were used as discursive and moral categories to justify
certain ethnic-social categories, such as Judaizers and crypto-Jews.
Although there were officially no Jews in Spain after the expulsion of
1492, they continued to be identified with conversos, also referred to
by a variety of derogatory terms (marranos, notados, confesos, torna-
dizos and neófitos).59 This is evidenced by the purity-of-blood statutes,
which established a stratified classification system of ‘Old Christians of
clean blood without raça or the stain of descent from Jews, Moors or
conversos or any other newly converted sect’ (Inquisition Report, 1626).
Historians and anthropologists like Albert A. Sicroff, Verena Stolcke,
Francisco de Borja Medina, Enric Porqueres, Jean-Paul Zúñiga, Max S.
Hering Torres, Robert Aleksander Maryks and Tamar Herzog have all
studied the supposed defects contained in mixtures of ‘bloods’ and the
implications for the construction of races or pure ethnic-social catego-
ries. As a factor of integration, honour and quality (sometimes referred
as condición) reinforced hereditary ties between family and lineage.60
At the same time, however, it was a primary discriminator of behaviour.
Inherited blood was a symbol of the continuity and integrity of Chris-
tian lineages.61 Any mixture with heretics or apostates implied a loss
of honour, which impeded the social rise of New Christians (or Jewish
conversos).62
After the ‘dis-covery’ of America, purity-of-blood statutes were ap-
plied not only to Jews (1492) and Moriscos (1609–14), who rejected the
opportunity to assimilate into the new religious order, but also to ‘chil-
dren of the land’, those of impure blood who were mistrusted for being
‘mixed’, whether with blacks or Indians. The Indians were proud of their
purity of blood, but many Spaniards considered them descendants of the
ten tribes of Israel.63 In a legal sense, colonial law posited a formal sepa-
ration between the ‘republic’ of Indians and that of Spaniards. In actual
practise, this actual division was not so strict. The rapid appearance
of mestizos in every part of the New World blurred the lines of lineage
and phenotypes as bases for the notion of ‘race’ or racialism (Konetzke,
1946; Mörner, 1967; Wade, 1997). Thus, the Spanish were wary of the
Indians for belonging to inferior lineages, identifying them more with
their place of residence (reducciones, repartimientos), type of work
(the encomienda labour system) or the payment of tribute than with
any specific physical characteristics.64 In the mid-seventeenth century,
American criollos assumed a larger economic, political and social role in
the American viceroyalties, affirming their dignity, wealth and rights.65
Faced with the reality of a grim climatic determinism that subordinated
them to better equipped peoples, they began to write laudatory poems,
treatises and chronicles that praised the American capitals like Mexico
City and Lima and their criollo inhabitants,66 equating them with Span-
ish cities and towns in moral and ethnic terms.
The legal tradition of the Ancien Régime served as a mechanism to
preserve the hierarchical social order. The Bible, legal Roman and canon
law texts and custom legitimized these hierarchies.67 To protect the priv-
ileges of the peninsulares, the mezclados were accused of being low,
ordinary and lacking lineage.68 There was, however, more convergence
than divergence between the children of the land (criollos)and those
from the Peninsula. While a legal definition of the criollos as Spaniards
was necessary, the mestizos were relegated to an inferior social category
as being of lesser quality, which established sociocultural barriers with
respect to the other categories of Spaniard and criollo.69 Additionally,
the ideal of purity of blood inevitably required that female sexuality be
controlled.70 The objective was none other than to prevent the infiltra-
tion of impure blood into the family lineage, meaning that any ‘racial’
discourse was crosscut by ideas about gender. Any individual born out-
side marriage was immediately suspected of being the ‘mixed’ progeny
of Indian or black women. Concern about clandestine or inappropriate
marriages in terms of prestige, rank or status also became more wide-
spread after the Council of Trent.71 However, marriage to a mestizo or
‘common’ (tribute-paying) Indian constituted an example of an unequal
union that, in some way, could be compared to other marriages, like
the one between the conquistador and nephew of Ignatius de Loyola,
Martín García Oñez de Loyola, and the Inca princess (ñusta) Beatriz
Clara Coya, especially if the marriage came with a rich encomienda as
a dowry.72 As Berta Ares has written, the status of hidalgo – or noble –
was transmitted by the father even to illegitimate children born outside
of marriage.73 Unlike the illicit, asymmetrical or impure relationships
between the first conquistadores and ‘their’ Indian women, unions be-
tween hildagos and women from royal Inca families (panakas) or local
elite families – and the other way round, between members of the Inca
aristocracy like Cristóbal Paullu, and Extremaduren women like María
Amarilla de Esquivel – served as a guarantee of political and religious
fidelity.
Information about purity of blood in this respect did not only serve as
a prophylactic mechanism for the quality of the members of the Catholic
community, but was also a tool for ethnic and social discrimination. The
construction of the modern state of Peru, according to Irene Silverblatt,
cannot be separated from the invention of a whole set of racial catego-
ries, and she suggests that the inquisitors, defined as the first modern
bureaucrats, assigned these racial categories to colonial subjects in order
to better dominate them.74 Thus, a crucial question is: to what extent
racism should be treated more as an European and North American
pathology rather than a Latin American affliction?75
To counteract their supposed inferiority related to their place of birth,
Peruvian criollos promoted their somatic features or phenotypes and
their genealogies, whether real or fabricated, as indicators of an individ-
ual’s purity of blood. Not only did they thus surmount their physical and
intellectual weaknesses, but they passed those traits on to the mestizos
in an attempt to exorcise the negative components of their raça.76 Sexual
limits became moral limits. The supposed deficiencies of the plebeian
mestizos and Indians, such as barbarism, ugliness, dirtiness and per-
verse customs, were not applicable to the criollos, because their origins
were supposedly linked to the dominant group.77
The problem of (self-)marginalization – the Spanish-criollo rivalry that
Bernard Lavallé spoke of78 – revolved around the degree of separation
that could be maintained with respect to mestizos and Indians in the
New World.79 Within a context of power and more specifically politi-
cal power, common-law unions, morganatic marriages and mixed mar-
riages violated the seniority and purity of family lineage structures.80 To
preserve social boundaries between criollos and mestizos, it was essen-
tial to prevent illegitimate unions that would result in unequal relation-
ships, because they, in turn, spawned third groups suspected of heresy.
However, the increase in the number of new mestizos and the dynamic
nature of their activities made them a fluid and heterogeneous social
category.81
With the spread of colonization, mestizos were seen as the result of il-
licit sexual relations between Spanish Christians and indigenous peoples
that altered the established colonial order. Indians voiced many of the
hostile and derogatory views of mestizos. They were accused of being
prone to violence, of having licentious customs and their presence threat-
ened criollo status based on discourses of moral and ethnic-racial purity,
bathing the mestizo in an aura of sin and contamination that needed to
be exorcized.82 For the Jesuit Father Acosta, the blood purity criterion
seemed not to be of great importance to allow mestizos to receive and ac-
cept evangelization.83 The problem arose when the increase in the mes-
tizo population forced the pure Christians to differentiate themselves by
appealing to the purity of their lineages. Obviously, mestizaje focused on
sex and not on other types of relationships, whether consensual or illicit,
because it challenged the reproduction of the hegemonic social catego-
ries of Spanish and criollo.84 To prevent their proliferation, the colonial
oligarchies thought of themselves in terms of a criollo civilian corps,
whose social purity had to be defended. The criollo predominance was
based on family alliances that reinforced the reputation of their lineages,
while at the same time defending them from illicit intrusions. At stake
were both economic and social reproductions. Beginning in the seven-
teenth century, the Lima Indians moved to rural areas, while blacks and
mulattos became the new urban majorities.85 In this situation, mixing
became a symbol of contamination for all the distinguished criollos
competing with the Spaniards for the civil and ecclesiastical positions in
the viceroyalty. Genealogy gave way to a discourse about ethnic purity
that ensured the absence of Indian, black or mestizo blood in the princi-
pal criollo families, while legitimizing their right to settle in urban areas
like Lima, Cuzco and Arequipa.86
In the eighteenth century, the social demarcation in the American vice-
royalties reinforced the unity of different groups in which ‘whiteness was
understood as an ordering factor in the system of differences’.87 Spanish
and criollos were not supposedly mixed, while mestizos and mulattos
were considered impure. They were accused of being ‘unknown peo-
ple’, from low social backgrounds, whose cleanliness was questionable.
However, while the metropolitan discourse pointed a finger at them,
the local ecclesiastical and civil authorities – the ‘organic intellectuals’,
to use Gramsci’s term, of the criollooligarchies – invented the mestizos
on America land as social categories opposed to the criollos. While it
was determined that mixed or ‘stained’ origins were an insurmountable
obstacle to gain access to the best administrative, ecclesiastical and mili-
tary positions in the viceroyalty capitals like Mexico City and Lima, the
colonial authorities allowed mestizos to preside over rural Indian par-
ishes, where the Spanish were scarcely distinguishable from the criollos
and mestizos, who constituted the government elite in an area largely
inhabited by Indians.88 Thus, the accusation of belonging to a ‘dirty’
or ‘impure’ lineage was always a powerful weapon to take an adversary
down and out of the spheres of political and economic power.
Authors like Tamar Herzog and Kathryn Burns have argued that
practices of exclusion cannot only be explained by classification systems
based on Spanish, American or African ancestry (or ‘race’), but involve
other discourses based on Weberian concepts of belonging or not be-
longing to local political communities.89 Legal categories like vecinos
(neighbours) and naturales (natives) could be applied indiscriminately to
Spaniards, criollos, mestizos and Indians, regardless of their ethnicity,
as opposed to those considered extranjeros or foreigners. This would ex-
plain why the cleric from Cuzco, Juan de Espinosa Medrano (1628/30?–
88),90 better known as Lunarejo (‘spotty-faced’), became one of the most
renowned exponents of culteranismo at the Cuzco Cathedral, despite his
quite obvious mestizo origins.91 The Spanish-Andean duality contrasted
with the religious criollos of Lima, who celebrated their Spanish origins
in exclusive terms, without stain or mixing with other Peruvian nations.
In this respect, the Dominican friar Juan Meléndez (ca. 1640–90) wrote
that ‘we call ourselves criollos, and not Indians, to indicate the singular
estimation and appreciation that we have for having descended from
Spaniards and for preserving pure Spanish blood in the Indies without
mixing with another nation’.92 This criollismo was underpinned by a
powerful sense of self-worth and the denigration of mixed groups (Indi-
ans, mestizos, blacks, mulattos and ‘other castes’), evoking blood as the
transmitter of the calidad – or impurity – of a people.
In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the American viceroy-
alties were made up of a majority criollo population, in addition to the
indigenous population. These criollos included both the children of
first-generation Europeans and individuals mixed with Indians, who
could be included in the category of mestizo. Unquestionably, the ‘chil-
dren of the land’ did not constitute a clearly defined group, making it
difficult to discern how these people channelled their interests within
their society by delimiting the social margins. Some Spanish bureau-
crats, like Antonio de Ulloa (1716–95), did not hide their contempt for
the criollos, who he believed to be degraded by their environment and by
mixing with Indians and blacks (the so-called brown castes).93 In Secret
News of America (c. 1749), written in collaboration with Jorge Juan y
Santacilia (1713–73), Ulloa echoed the words of General Girolamo Car-
affa (1564–1633), stating that ‘those societies are deposits of subjects of
all the nations, with Spaniards, Italians, Germans, Flemish, and they all
live in union, except for the Europeans and Criollos, which is the critical
point where there can be no tolerance’.94
A colonial society that was aware of its own fragility needed to reflect
the racial and socioeconomic hierarchy of its members according to the
proportion of Iberian blood.95 As R. Douglas Cope has observed, ‘all
elites were Spaniards, but not all Spaniards were members of the elite’.96
The first caste paintings (‘cuadros de castas’), done by Juan Rodríguez
(1715) in New Spain, corresponded to the zeal for classification that
characterized eighteenth-century scientism.97Castas or castes (castizos,
Moriscos, mestizos, mulattos) were a graphic reflection of new genera-
tions of mestizo bodies – individuals who descended from parents with
different phenotypes – beginning to overrun the official documentation
of the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain.98 While castes usually re-
ferred to those ‘mixed’ people who disarranged the three New World
categories of Spanish, black and Indian, caste paintings rearranged the
prevalent racial hierarchy of the colonial period, where ethnic origins
and physical appearance determined a person’s position, prestige and
rights (so-called pigmentocracy).99 This was, then, a matter of arranging
not a racial disarrangement, but a terminological one based on the con-
ceptual triad of colour lines, calidad and race.100
In the meantime, the colonial authorities had to control (and protect)
the genealogy of the Spanish elites. Purity of blood was partially secular-
ized, although not completely, to stigmatize mixing with Indians in part,
but especially with Africans and their mulatto progeny (the so-called
brown castes), who might contaminate Old Christian families (the Span-
ish, criollos) if strict genealogical control was not established.101 There
was widespread belief that the Africans were descendants of Ham and
bore the stigma of slavery due to the curse that God put on Noah’s son
Ham as a punishment for mocking his father. Their uncertain origins
made it impossible to trace the genealogy of their faith since, in many
cases, slavery severed kinship relationships and their ancestors could not
be identified.102 For this reason, it was necessary to oversee marriages
to ensure the calidad of the bride and groom.103 In this context, King
Charles III’s Pragmatic Sanction of 1778 was issued to protect the so-
cial and racial hierarchy of the Spanish-criollo elites by giving family
patriarchs more control over their children’s betrothals and marriages to
secure the socioracial class endogamy that was being threatened by an
increase in unequal marriages within the social hierarchy.104 Marriage
thus became a process that produced or transformed racial identities.105
At the same time that a racial segregation policy was being developed,
the Crown fuelled the illusion of upward mobility with the first sales of
royal edicts, the Reales Cédulas de Gracias al Sacar, in 1795. For centu-
ries, the Spanish monarchs had exempted Jewish conversos, commoners
and illegitimate children from their ‘dark origins’. The Bourbon admin-
istration organized and systematized this practice, establishing uniform
fees across the empire. Thus, any commoner who could pay between 500
and 800 reals could ‘erase’ the supposed defects or stains that set them
apart from decent people (gente decente) and people of reason (gente de
razón).106 However, as María del Carmen Baerga has noted, the 1795
racial clauses were added at the end, which seems to indicate that the
goal was never to bring about racial reform, but to raise one particular
(brown or mulatto) person from a lower ‘calidad’ to a higher one.107
At this point, one wonders: what were the indicators of purity of
blood of the time? How was the ‘calidad’ or ‘quality’ of a person estab-
lished? What did ‘notable inequality’ really mean in the eighteenth cen-
tury? What about being ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘brown’? What made blood
decisive as a system of social classification? Did caste paintings, as the
expression of a type of colonial knowledge, inform the emergence of the
‘races’?108 At the base of the debate lies the origin of different human
species and the determinism of the culture of blood. As Jean Paul Zúñiga
observed, the caste paintings very clearly exhibit the idea of returning to
the origin story.109 Monogenists like Benedictine friar Benito Jerónimo
de Feijoo y Montenegro (1676–1764) aligned themselves with the Judeo-
Christian tradition of history based on the unity of the human race.
They vehemently attacked polygenist theories that situated American
Indians and, hence, their criollo descendants in a stage that predated the
Great Flood.110 In his monumental Universal Critical Theatre (1730),
Father Feijoo objected to the idea of the hidden influence of blood and
the immutability of the cradle, which led people to believe that children
inherit the temperament and attitudes of their ancestors.111 However,
his opinions did not constitute a break with the existing social order.
The origin and quality of blood did not disappear from the world of rep-
resentations, but were maintained as an element of social cohesion.112
In the late eighteenth century, caste paintings gave philosopher Im-
manuel Kant (1724–1804) the proof he needed about the existence of
human ‘races’, which were naturalized in scientific terms as the natural
sciences rose and developed under the influence of the Enlightenment.113
Theorizing about the ‘races’ naturalized ethnic-social inequality. Jean-
Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) rejected the idea of a connection between
physical and social inequality in his Discourse on the Origin and Ba-
sis of Inequality Among Men(1755). On the contrary, François-Marie
Arouet, better known as Voltaire (1694–1778), justified the inferiority
of savage peoples on the principle of the differentiation in nature. A
divine natural determinism established the principle of inequality that
governed human evolution. Thus, the hierarchization of societies and
cultures derived, in his opinion, from the characters of nations, which
rarely change (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, 1756). In
contrast with the postulates of Rousseau, the history of humanity is
nothing other than the slow emergence of the species, epitomized by the
appearance of civilized man as opposed to the ‘barbarian’ or ‘savage’,
who lived fully in his animal nature, passive, indolent and subject to the
laws of a universal mechanism.
The scientific and industrial revolutions and Western imperialism
brought a new economic technology, in addition to a new technology of
knowledge that overtook both Newtonian physics and Kant. The inabil-
ity of these thinkers to develop a system of superorganic causality was
revealed when intellectuals began to ask about the process that gener-
ated the various species. In the early eighteenth century, some curious,
enterprising minds tried to explain the relationship between the physical
and social environment. The naturalist Jean-Baptiste Monet, chevalier
de Lamarck (1744–1829), formulated a complete, coherent evolutionist
theory. His Zoological Philosophy (1809) suggested that the hierarchical
order of the different types of organisms reflected a kinship relationship.
The species that had not been able to evolve to the human form were
explained by a set of habits acquired in their local environment, result-
ing in genealogical classification systems. Lamarck thus established an
evolutionist hypothesis for different animal groups based on a modify-
ing principle, which corresponded to a progressive conception that went
from inferior to superior, from simple to complex, and that inevitably led
to the transformation of one species into another.
However, this thesis did not arouse much interest, due in part to the
criticism directed against it by Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), a man of
enormous prestige in his time, despite his role in the unfortunate case of
Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus.114 Cuvier was critical
of theories of evolution, despite recognizing the biological nature of fos-
sils. As a faithful representative of Christian traditionalism, he offered
the alternative of catastrophism, which postulated that the Earth, while
ancient, underwent periodic catastrophic events that wiped out all life.
Cuvier also used this emphasis on the forces of nature to justify the in-
ferior ability and status of ‘savages’, who were more susceptible to those
forces.115
On the contrary, the geological uniformitarianism of Charles Lyell
(1797–1895), a staunch critic of biblical messianism, tried to reconcile
the role of men with nature, laying the grounds for the establishment
and development of theories of evolution with his Principles of Geology
(1833). In 1859, one of his most outstanding disciples, Charles Darwin
(1809–82), published a revolutionary scientific text On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection. Using irrefutable evidence, Dar-
win argued, amongst other things, that the adaptation of living beings
to the environment constituted the foundation of the reproduction of life
and that through the struggle for life, a process of natural selection took
place that translated into the survival of the fittest. A series of random
variations occurred in living organisms that were passed on hereditarily.
This new natural economy, based on the competitive relationships be-
tween living beings and the natural environment, proved the existence of
an unstable, dynamic order. Evolutionism thus became an explanatory
synthesis for reality that swallowed the empirical knowledge acquired by
the other sciences in order to provide them with a positive teleological
fundamentalism. The temptation to insert Darwinian concepts into the
social sciences and the very conception of human history is reflected in
the following passage from On the Origin of Species:
As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those
which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that
the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken,
and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may
look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inapprecia-
ble length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good
of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to
progress towards perfection.116
Thus, a philosophy that French anthropologist Philippe Descola char-

acterized as ‘naturalist’ took hold (Descola, 2005). The evolution of
society began to be integrated into a general evolutionary framework,
obeying the same laws and rules of the natural sciences, although more
complex processes were accepted that in some way obscured the poly-
genist approaches that were strongly rooted in the cultural universe of
the West, like materialism and providentialism.117 It was after the sec-
ond half of the nineteenth century, above all, after the appearance of
the famous section in The Descent of Man (1871) entitled ‘On the Ex-
tinction of Races of Man’118 that a positive sociology developed based
on evolution that would reconstruct the sequences of cultural change
and racism.119 The genealogical concerns of traditional societies trans-
formed definitively into a bourgeois obsession about biological legacy
and inheritance.120 In this respect, an interpretation of history based on
scientism instrumentalized formal logic and observation to discover the
fundamental laws of human evolution, that is, the concept of ‘race’ and
its articulation through cultural processes.
Earlier, classics likeDas Mutterrecht (Mother Right, 1861) by Johann
Jakob Bachofen, Ancient Law (1861) by Henry Maine and E.B. Taylor’s
Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of
Civilization (1865) and Primitive Culture: Researches into the Develop-
ment of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom
(1871) applied this concept of evolution to the study of sociocultural
phenomena, demonstrating that evolutionist theories were not the re-
sult of a domino effect that accelerated after the publication of On the
Origin of Species. In mid-nineteenth-century England, ethnology quite
quickly became the perfect framework for the study of the physical and
cultural diversity of so-called primitive peoples. The accumulation of
empirical data, especially archaeological and ethnographic data, height-
ened the need to formulate a general extrapolatable principle that could
be used to explain evolution and the progress of culture.
At the same time, social evolutionism was gestating. In 1877, Michi-
gan railroad lawyer and anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–81),
one of the most notable representatives of this current, published a semi-
nal text, Ancient Society; or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress
from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. In the first chapter of
The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), Friedrich
Engels frankly recognized that ‘Morgan was the first person with ex-
pert knowledge to attempt to introduce a definite order into the history
of primitive man’ in order to shed light on the mystery of the different
contemporary forms of primitive social organization.121 In his study,
Morgan popularized a new tripartite division based on a pyramidal
technological sequence: savagery→ barbarianism→ civilization. Mor-
gan established these three ‘ethnic periods’, of which the first two were
divided into three subperiods – early, middle and late – after becom-
ing familiar with the work Danish archaeologists Christian Thomsen
(1835) and his student J.J. Worsae (1849) and their three-age system
based on stone, bronze and iron. The aim was to trace human history
through the ‘primitive’ ages as a continuum within a series. However, as
a kind of mechanistic determinism, unilinear evolutionism denied the
dynamic nature of social processes and history itself. Moreover, accept-
ing an identical scaled process for all societies rendered the study of each
particular social group meaningless. Traditional cultures were generally
seen as having been stable long before European contact. They had done
nothing notable and had produced nothing long-lasting before the ar-
rival of the Europeans. This was interpreted on a racial level as evidence
of the lack of creative intellect amongst ‘modern savages’ as well as an
example of the perfect adaptation of these cultures to an environment
with a low productive level.122
The perverse nature of evolutionist analyses stipulated an underlying
order below the apparent disorder of cultural diversity. The historical-
comparative analytical method used by Morgan tried to reconstruct the
progressive phases of human development using data from the observa-
tion of different social groups in specific geographic areas, looking at
regularities in their distribution and defining elements – promiscuous
exchange, tribal organization, the lack of property and more – as well
as the evolution and changes observable in a natural framework. This
analytical perspective, put into practice by John Lubbock in Prehistoric
Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Cus-
toms of Modern Savages (1865) and by J.F. McLennan in The Early
History of Man (1869) some years earlier, was based on the atemporal
instrumentalization of different sociocultural systems used as equiva-
lent examples to determine the origin of lost cultures. This ethnographic
present – or historicized history – was considered a baseline from which
to generalize about variations in cultural models and human behaviour
through a series of laws that had to be discovered.123 These analyses
demonstrated the need to replace the experimental and laboratory tech-
niques of the physical-natural sciences, and establish a parallel evolu-
tionary line that would explain the psychic oneness of the human race
within the dominant cultural diversity. From this point of view, ‘modern
savages’ were definitively incorporated into the current of civilization
according to their perfection and growth.
In the search for an objective and controllable reality, nineteenth-
century anthropology presented or rather, invented the backwardness
and primitivism of some peoples as part of a functional-organicist com-
plex that placed them at a lower stage of development.124 Functionalist
sociology, as developed by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), also defined
society as a giant system that evolved linearly, like a living organism
that includes both the organic and the inorganic (First Principles, 1862).
The study of history showed that society passed through a series of con-
tinuous stages from heterogeneous to homogenous, folding upon itself
in a process of integrating matter.125 The central idea of this synthetic
philosophy is a single ontological postulate: the law of material unity.126
For example, families integrated, creating clan societies which, in turn,
gave rise to a tribal society, and the integrated tribes then produced the
birth of the national society. Morgan had reached similar conclusions,
establishing a genealogical connection between all the nations that pos-
sessed (or, rather, seemed to possess) the same classification system. In
fact, the dichotomy of societas – a savage, barbaric tribal organization –
and civitas–a political organization of civilized nations – was not that
different to the lucubrations of his peer, Spencer, who also identified
progress with the appearance of more perfect institutions that facilitated
the rising march of society: reproductive institutions, like the family;
institutions to explain death, like churches; institutions to coordinate all
the parts of the social organism, like the state; and institutions to create
wealth, like capitalist companies and so forth.
Morgan, along with British anthropologist Edward Taylor, was es-
sentially a social anthropologist. The two men were mainly interested
in establishing the successive stages of human intellect, in charting an
organizational-temporal structure that would explain, first, the diversity
of different human types in physical and cultural terms and, second, the
mental evolution of humanity over the course of its history. For Spencer,
however, the decisive factor consisted of finding the connections between
the primitive, savage mentality and the physical environment, linking
mental processes and cultural behaviours that were viewed as being in
an early stage. All this had a profoundly moral content. Human history
irrevocably secularizes, revealing itself to be a balance of two antitheti-
cal principles: civilization, on the one hand, evoking a positive principle
of adaptation or the triumph of perfection and moral advancement and,
on the other hand, the existence of human species or ‘races’ (confirmed
by the racialist doctrine of Ernest Renan, Arthur de Gobineau and Gus-
tave Le Bon)127 that were perfectly adapted to live in different geograph-
ical areas, although incapable of reaching an optimal level.128
Spencer designed a famous biological simile: society is an organism
in which intellectuals represent the head, industrialists the heart and
workers the hands. This organism can only be perfected through evolu-
tion, but its survival depends on the functional interaction of each part
with the social entirety. The obsession to preserve internal order took on
metaphysical and almost religious connotations. In a context in which
confidence in perfecting and improving society came from the convic-
tion that scientific progress and moral progress were closely related, any
type of alteration could prove fatal. It goes without saying that the so-
cialist revolution was lethal, but so was state interventionism, excessive
religion and the segregation of a social group from the general norms
of the system. It is no accident that racism as an ideology emerged in
nineteenth- century Europe and in the racist society of the United States
once slavery had been abolished, in the interest of ‘natural’ privileges
that favoured European colonialism and white supremacy.129
According to Abdul R. JanMohamed, the opposition between the col-
onizers, both British and French, and the colonized, heirs to the old,
silenced civilizations, is a Manichean allegory based on hierarchical
and often repressive relationships.130 Defined as imperial, these rela-
tionships characterized the reality of a modern world in expansion with
various nodal centres competing with each other.131 Discovering the dif-
ference between the Western powers and non-European societies was
the main task of the scholars who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt and
the Asiatic Society founded by William Jones in Calcutta.132 According
to Edward Said (1935–2003), one of the challenges of modern culture
consisted of knowing how to compare different cultures and societies
(‘civilizations’). His highlyacclaimed Orientalism (1978) represented an
implacable criticism of the imperialist mechanisms behind the discursive
fabrication of the ‘other’ forged by the colonial powers beginning in the
late seventeenth century.133 While eighteenth-century Enlightened intel-
lectuals saw the ‘East’ (worlds beyond Europe, the ‘Orient’) in terms of
cultures that were unable to evolve and existed outside modern time, the
‘West’, understood as inexorable Western progress, justified its colonial
domination through the construction of exotic, static cultures worthy
of admiration. The relationship between the East, characterized by its
cultural immobility, and the West, defined by social change, reproduced
dichotomous (dominator vs. dominated) concepts of power as well as
different degrees of hegemony. However, Said conceived of the East and
West as overlapping and interdependent, separating himself from Fou-
cauldian pessimism and advocating political action by the subalterns
whose voices had been excluded and marginalized.134
Culture and Imperialism (1993) presents a study that complements
Said’s earlier work. On the one hand, he expanded the geographical
framework of Orientalism (whose ideas largely concerned the Middle
East), analysing various European texts on Africa, India, the Far East,
Australia, the Caribbean and Ireland. On the other hand, Said also
included the response of African, Asian, American and European (par-
ticularly Irish) intellectuals to the Western – essentially Anglo-French –
domination that culminated in the decolonization processes in the
so-called Third World. This ambitious work does not only analyse the
hegemonic logic of imperial culture, but also the response of the colo-
nized to the colonizers’ projects, a response that James Lockhart later
defined as a combination of receptivity and resistance.135 Said’s anal-
ysis of some of the great works of the Western canon (André Gide, Jo-
seph Conrad, Albert Camus, Rudyard Kipling) pays special attention to
their specific historical contexts and political backgrounds (in a broad
sense),136 both as great narrative products of the creative, interpretive
Western imagination and as a framework for the historical, particular-
izing relationship between culture and empire. Here, one of the axes
of British colonial power was the sense of duty and responsibility ex-
hibited by the Victorian elites in the nineteenth century.137 Kipling’s
poem, The White Man’s Burden (McClure’s Magazine, 1898), was a
clear ideological justification for colonial domination, understood as
a noble and altruistic enterprise that served to legitimize British impe-
rialism and Western racism. However, in opposition to these different
imperial projects and the particular applications of racialism in various
colonial contexts, some anti-colonial and anti-military voices could be
heard, although in the minority, coming from European leftist sectors
that were opposed to colonial domination and racialist rhetoric.138 In-
dividual expressions from artists also surfaced, such as French carica-
turist Gustave-Henri Jossot and his attacks on the ‘sauvages blancs’
(Jossot, 2013).
Without any doubt, racism and xenophobia were some of the most
dramatic consequences of the construction of Spanish and European na-
tional identities. Racial models of Hispanicness took on a new form with
the scientific racism of the nineteenth century. In the Philippines, racial
categories represented access to and control over municipal power. ‘Race’
was not a monolithic concept, but a conventional category through
which the position of each individual was determined within the pyra-
mid of power in the Asian colony. In principalities where the positions
of gobernadorcillo (municipal governor) or barangay leader were sought
after, the local elites used racial identities, such as native or Sangley (of
mixed Chinese and indigenous ancestry), to their own benefit to prevent
Spanish mestizos and Spaniards from stealing their positions. On the
contrary, in the principalities where municipal positions were neither
desired nor interesting, racial categories were used to avoid having to fill
these posts.139
In twentieth-century National-Catholic Spain, the regime of General
Francisco Franco (1939–75) did not exterminate the Jews as the Nazis
did, but it did deprive them of their citizenship rights. In his Defensa
de la Hispanidad (1934), Ramiro de Maeztu (1874–1936), a great ad-
mirer of Adolf Hitler, defended casticism and the Catholic religion in
the ‘racial’ composition of the Spanish people, viewed in opposition to
Judaism and Islam.140 This model produced some striking paradoxes in
Spain’s most recent colonial adventures in the Moroccan Protectorate
(1912–56), Western Sahara and Guinea.141 As an evolutionist discourse,
‘race’ was not the only classification criterion in the colonies, and the
concept varied according to country and colony.142 In Morocco, Spanish
colonial rhetoric was applied to polysemic racial categories. On the one
hand, it shared the raciological theories common to other colonial con-
texts, which put Moroccans on a lower level of civilization. On the other
hand, the proximity between Spain and Morocco and the emergence of
various theories that spoke of a racial community of peoples on the two
sides of the Mediterranean in the late nineteenth century (due to north-
south/south-north migrations; Boëtsch, Ferrié, 1993) were used by Af-
ricanists to legitimize the colonization of Africa by Spain, according to
a supposed Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood and to the evangelizing last
will and testament of Isabella I of Castile (Mateo Dieste, 2003a, 2012b).
Thus, this particular rhetoric mixed racialism with the Catholic religion
to formulate a ‘Spanish spiritual race’.143
In the same way, the superiority and inferiority of the races first,
and then the degeneration of ‘mixing’ justified moral and political in-
equalities in the new republics of Latin America. These inequalities,
however, were not based on differential traits, but on discriminatory
and essentialized sociopolitical desires. In Conflicto y armonía de las
razas (Conflict and Harmony of the Races, 1883), Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento (1811–98) defined the discovery of America as the contact
between two races: the Caucasians, who represented the embodiment
of ‘superior forms of intellect’, and the indigenous people, viewed as
a passive and prehistoric race, incapable of developing any kind of
civilization. However, the Spanish compared to the English were also
seen as a backwards ‘race’, because of the vices they had acquired like
sloth, indolence and absolutist traditionalism and, especially, because
of the ‘mixing between the races that had hindered progress’.144 Simi-
larly, other nineteenth-century Argentinian politicians and intellectuals
like José Ingenieros (1877–1925)145 and Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875–
1918)146 adopted positivist, Lamarckian and social Darwinian positions
to free Argentina from ‘racial degeneration’, while others began to focus
increasingly on scientific bases to justify the pre-eminence of the more
suitable ‘races’ over ‘weaker ones’. Newer and more modern arguments
took the place of the racial prejudice of the theory of ‘types’, posing
questions related to psychological, intellectual and moral differences
that justified racial supremacy and, consequently, the total extinction of
inferior ‘races’.147 While ‘race’ in the eighteenth century was the main
term used to connect nature with savagery, in the nineteenth century, the
concept of civilization unleashed a hierarchy of values through which
European culture, which was considered superior, defined itself in rela-
tion to ‘others’, situating them on the lower rungs of the ‘great chain of
being’ (Lovejoy, 1936). Although Charles Darwin had anticipated this
in The Descent of Man (1871), the correlation between racialist theories
that legitimized white supremacy and the ideological justification of Eu-
ropean colonialism required investigation.
Contrary to explanations of racism as a premodern or irrational phe-
nomenon, in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
(1993), David Theo Goldberg analysed racialization (or the naturaliza-
tion of social inequalities) according to historical variations and discon-
tinuities that spread from Western societies to overseas lands. Once it
was accepted that ‘race’ was not a natural attribute, but socially and his-
torically constructed, racism – understood as an ideological doctrine of
inequality – would not be a pathology of the hegemonic liberal ideology,
but its necessary consequence.148 If the concepts of nation and sexism
arose as a result of nationalist and gender discourses, concepts of ‘race’
and racism are also part of a racialized discourse that is in no way fixed
in time.149 On the contrary, discursive formations are always dynamic
and depend on cultural, legal, political and economic circumstances.150
Methodologically, Goldberg situates the origin of this discourse during
the social and intellectual formation of modernity, going back in history
to understand how this racialized form of representing social configura-
tions became consolidated over the centuries.
Although premodern thinking did not see the differences between
human beings in terms of temporalities, it did create exclusive classifi-
cation systems. However, European colonial expansion brought a new
rationality focused on explaining the origins of other peoples from the
perspective of an unequal evolution. Racism, defined as a metanarrative
of Western thought, was the consequence of a scientist, epistemic con-
text that developed beginning in the sixteenth century.151 In a context
of colonial expansion, racial discourse was an extremely efficient way
to institutionalize an economic, racial and cultural hegemony in non-
European regions.152 Racially classifying human beings according to
taxonomic and biological categories was the structural characteristic of
modernity.153 In the early nineteenth century, polygenism replaced the
predominant monogenism of the previous centuries, while at the same
time, a social hierarchy based on categories of racial superiority and in-
feriority began to take shape in modern discourse through the ordering
of human data according to existing phenotypic variations.154
One of the strengths of Goldberg’s work is its identification of the ori-
gins of racial dynamics with the expansion of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, secularism and possessive individualism overseas.155 Liberalism
and the scientific revolution modified the political understanding of the
concept of ‘race’, and beginning in the eighteenth century, the European
imagination began to consider ‘inferior others’ in utilitarian terms. At
this point, human bodies entered into the logic of the market: ‘they are
classified, ordered, valorized, and devalued’.156 Guided by growing glo-
balization and the racialized discourse of the modern state, classification
technologies operated as devices for disciplinary control.157 Scholars like
Michel Foucault and Thomas W. Laqueur, amongst others, observed
that the egalitarian ideals of the nineteenth-century liberal revolutions
justified inequality between human beings as the foundation of a ‘nat-
ural’ inequality. If colonized peoples – women, blacks, Indians – were
going to be denied the rights of metropolitan, white citizens, it was nec-
essary to invent something to rationally justify the inequalities required
by the dominant bourgeois social order.
Modernity was always seen as positive, and in racial terms, it was always
white and European, relegating the African ‘other’ to slavery.158 Rational-
ized in this way, the primacy of racist discourse consisted of thinking of
‘non-European others’ in terms of asymmetrical power relationships. The
superiority or inferiority of the ‘races’ and, then, cultural fundamentalism
seemed to naturally justify moral and political inequalities between hu-
man beings.159 For Howard Winant, the term ‘race’ cannot be understood
as a phenomenon outside of a historical-social context. What are the con-
ditions in which racialized social formations are created?160 Evidently,
other social categories like class, gender and nation seeped into the social
and pseudoscientific construction of the concept of ‘race’.161 The first clas-
sification, according to Goldberg, was always ethnic-racial, which seems
to suggest the existence of a universal racialized discourse.162 In his opin-
ion, the idea or concept of ‘race’ was a sociocultural category that pro-
gressively drifted towards a phenotypic discourse.
However, while these classification systems were largely created in the
academy and by the scientists of the era, their dissemination and recre-
ation was vulgarized by means of a wide range of tools available in the
new mass society, from advertising, travel literature, photography and
postcards to fairs and the colonial exhibitions organized in Europe and
America beginning in the nineteenth century (Bancel et al., 2002). In
these settings, the colonized acted as ‘natives’, observed by the people
of the metropole, who attended a spectacle created to legitimize colo-
nialism while also constructing an everyday, perverse understanding of
human diversity, classified in terms of naturalized racial hierarchies.
Were racial classifications a historical experience that was exclusive to
Western empires? For Edouard Conte and Cornelia Essner, the concept
of ‘race’, like racial categories, varies considerably from one sociocul-
tural space to another. Each culture creates its own system of thought
and its own concepts of ‘race’, as well as its own way of resolving the am-
biguities, like mestizaje and criollismo, that may appear.163 Peter Wade
emphasized that ‘races’ exist not so much as monolithic concepts of so-
cial ascription, but as conventional categories through which individuals
continuously compete for legitimacy. Instead of analysing racism as a his-
torical and philosophical paradigm ‘from above’, Wade (1997) engages
in a comparative analysis in order to understand race relations in their
specific contexts of social production. From a historical-anthropological
perspective, Wade analyses racial behaviour as a relational field through
which ethnic groups define themselves by their real or imaginary ori-
gins. Racial identification, then, is not the result of a hegemonic racial
discourse, because other factors are at play like economic tensions, gen-
der and political interests ‘from below’. From this point of view, racial
identity is not fixed, but is characterized by its malleability and fluidity.
As María del Carmen Baerga says, racial identities are not imposed by
the powers-that-be, but are unstable, contextual and negotiated.164 Of
course, racial categories are ambivalent and can change depending on
social and economic circumstances. They are not static, but dynamic
and depend on how individuals define themselves in specific colonial
situations.165 In this respect, the racial status of an individual is always
negotiated.166
The lines of research remain open, with their varied, not always
shared, perspectives. Every approach, however, points in the same di-
rection: the societies involved need to be given more autonomy; the
question of colonization requires a broader perspective that makes it
possible to reformulate concepts like identity and ethnic and/or racial
categories, globalization and modernity. Some historians, like Fred-
erick Cooper (2005), have expressed doubts about the analytic value
of these categories, cautioning that if they are not closely examined,
they could severely distort social analyses.167 In the words of historian
Dipesh Chakrabarty, postcolonial studies have tried to ‘provincialize
Europe’ from a simplification of the concept of enlightened moder-
nity.168 However, in contrast to the postmodern vulgate, Cooper’s
deconstruction of modernity is more closely related to Talal Asad’s
proposal with regard to writing an anthropology of the Western pow-
ers, trying to understand ‘the radically altered form and terrain of
conflict inaugurated by [Western imperial power] – new political lan-
guages, new powers, new social groups, new desires and fears, new
subjectivities’.169And, of course, all this must be done from a com-
parative perspective to incorporate the specific contributions of both
anthropology and history.
Notes
1 Pico della Mirandola, 1996.
2 Stolcke, 1993a: 177. Hodgen (1964) expresses this in similar terms.
3 Following David Theo Goldberg, ‘by modernity, I will mean throughout
that general period emerging from the sixteenth century in the historical
formation of what only relatively recently has come to be called “the West”’
(1993: 3). For Baudrillard (1990: 552),
la modernité n’est pas seulement la réalité des bouleversements tech-
niques, scientifiques et politiques depuis le XVIe siècle, c’est aussi le jeu
de signes, de moeurs et de culture qui traduit ces changements de struc-
ture au niveau du rituel et de l’habitus social.
4 Stolcke, 1993a: 177.
5 Stolcke, 1993a: 177–8.
6 Pico della Mirandola, the author of 900 theses that would serve as the
introduction to his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), put the
Catholic Church under genuine pressure. Pico decided to interpret certain
Christian dogmas in light of a new perspective enhanced by diverse sources.
Pope Innocent VIII condemned 13 of the theses as heretical, forcing their
author to take refuge in France. Some years later, Pico returned to Florence
to complete his most important work, the Heptaplus, which interpreted
Christian doctrine through the Kabbalah, further irritating Innocent VIII.
In 1493, Lorenzo de Medici persuaded his nephew, Pope Alexander VI, to
absolve Pico della Mirandola of the accusation of heresy.
7 German historian Horst Pietschmann (1990: 3) argued that the view of
the Indian in Europe always replicated European self-understanding, with
the Indian seen as different to the European and what was understood as
European culture. The myth of the savage, which has deep popular roots,
spread after the Renaissance era, becoming a mirror in which Europeans
saw their own image (Bartra, 1996: 18).
8 Stolcke, 1993a: 179–80. As Goldberg has noted, ‘the more explicitly uni-
versal modernity’s commitments, the more open it is to and determined
it is by the like of racial specificity and racist exclusivity’ (Goldberg,
1993: 4–5).
9 Asad, 1973, 1991: 315.
10 According to Pouillon (1998: 20), it is not ‘natural’ differences that create
inequalities, but discriminatory policies that invent these differences to jus-
tify the hegemonic desire to disqualify.
11 As we noted in Chapter 4, despite the fact that it has been demonstrated
that ‘race’ does not exist, the abusive use of the term requires that we place
it in inverted commas to make it clear that this is a generalized concept and
not an object like a biological entity, which clearly makes no sense.
12 While racism justified the exclusion of the ‘inferior others’ by appealing to
biological criteria (blood, race), cultural fundamentalism does this by ap-
pealing to cultural criteria: ‘a cultural “other”, the immigrant as foreigner,
alien, and as such a potential “enemy” who threatens “our” national- cum-
cultural uniqueness and integrity, is constructed out of a trait which is
shared by the “self”’ (Stolcke, 1995: 7–8).
13 Valensi&Wachtel, 1976: 136. See also Pierre Clastres’s critique of the
Marxist anthropology of Claude Meillassoux and Maurice Godelier (Clas-
tres, 1980, Chapter 10, ‘The Marxists and their Anthropology’).
14 Valensi&Wachtel, 1976: 137.
15 Nisbet, 1979.
16 Caro Baroja, De la superstición al ateísmo, in Castilla, 2002: 140.
17 Castilla, 2002: 144.
18 Caro Baroja uses ‘ethnic’ and ‘racial’ interchangeably in his line of
argument.
19 García-Arenal, 1978.
20 Caro Baroja, 1962.
21 García-Arenal & Rodríguez Mediano, 2013: 10–12.
22 Maite Ojeda-Mata’s book Modern Spain and the Sephardim draws from
the conclusions of Haim Avni (1972), when postulating that much more
important than Franco’s protection of ‘Spanish Jews’ (nationalized Sep-
hardim) was the fact that he deprived them of their citizenship rights. To
understand this ambivalence, the author rejects the monolithic, ahistorical
and acontextual conception of anti-Semitism. Instead, she advocates a re-
lational, fluid and changing construction of the sociopolitical categories of
‘Jew’ and ‘Sephardi’ in modern Spain and its legal-political consequences
from a historical-anthropological perspective (OjedaMata, 2012).
23 Ginzburg, 1980, xvii.
24 Ginzburg, 1980: 6.
25 Ginzburg, 1980: 47.
26 García-Arenal and Pereda, 2012.
27 Sicroff, 1979; Lira Montt, 1995: 33–4. More recently, see Hernández
Franco, 2011.
28 Extremely interesting methodological examples include Sabean (1990) on
marriage norms amongst German preindustrial elites; Ferchiou’s (1992)
study of Tunisian elites over time; and MacDonogh (1986) on the ‘good
families of Barcelona’.
29 Porqueres i Gené, 2001: 59.
36 Porqueres i Gené, 2001: 143. This type of reconnected marriage was also
important in the Tunisian case analysed in Hasab wa nasab and much
more important than so-called Arab marriages between patrilineal parallel
cousins (Ferchiou, 1992).
37 Bestard, 1986: 142.
38 Bestard, 1986: 10–11.
41 Martínez, 2008: 55; for a study of mestizo Jesuits in Peru in the sixteenth
century, see Brewer-García, 2012: 365–90.
42 Parkes, 2004.
43 Maryks, 2010: xxii. Pope Nicholas V immediately responded with a papal
bull, Humani generis inimicus, in 1449 that declared that the conversos were
fully equal to the Old Christians. As Jaime de Salazar Acha has observed,
it was at that time that the influential converso friar Juan de Torquemada –
the nephew of the future Grand Inquisitor – joined the College of Cardinals
(Salazar Acha, 1991: 292). On a reflection of the historicy of racism (or
racisms), see Martínez, 2008: 11–13; Hering Torres, 2012: 11–38.
44 Martínez, 2008: 58; Chaves, 2012: 40. As Geraldine Heng notes, ‘race
is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of hu-
man differences, rather than a substantive content’ (Heng, 2011b: 275).
This is not a matter of analysing racial differences from certain – bio-
racial – characteristics that are essentialized; rather, these characteristics,
according to Heng, share discriminations based on genetic, phenotypic
and/or cultural differences in distinct historical contexts and eras.
45 Sweet, 1997: 152; Stolcke, 2006: 371–92; Hering Torres, 2012: 13.
46 López Vela, 2009: 143–68.
47 Stolcke, 1993b: 35.
48 Hernández Franco & Rodríguez Pérez, 2013: 350.
49 This question refers to mixing between Spaniards and Indians (of pure
blood) and blacks (impure because of their servile status), which was seen
in a negative light because it led to the emergence of rebellious social groups
(‘mestizos’). Paul Gilroy (1993: 8) observed that ‘it is significant that prior
to the consolidation of scientific racism in the nineteenth century, the term
“race” was used very much in the way the word “culture” is used today’.
50 For an analysis of the connections between the terms ‘raça’, nation and lin-
eage (as a manifestation of one’s ethnic identity or origins) in the sixteenth
century, see Hodgen, 1964: 214; Stallaert, 1998: 13–69; Hering Torres,
2003, 2012: 18–19.
51 Hering Torres, 2011: 10.
52 In a genealogical sense, raça has nothing to do with the biological deter-
minism of race (19th c.), but refers to the purity/impurity of the blood that
is inevitably transmitted from generation to generation through lineagein
order to establish social limits between religious majorities and minorities.
See Hering Torres, 2011: 11; Hering Torres, 2012: 23–30.
53 Salazar Acha, 1991: 290–1; Hering Torres, 2012: 15–17.
54 Elliot, 1963: 75–6.
55 Rae, 2002: 55–81.
56 The author later developed a historical-anthropological approach to these
questions, presenting a journey through the system of European kinship, its
concepts of the person and the political implications of these interactions;
Porqueres, 2015.
57 Hering Torres, 2011, p. 11.
58 The New Christians were stigmatized because of ‘somatic anomalies’ that
justified their impurity with respect to the Old Christians. To that end, the
identity of the Jew as such was recognized as was a dissident constructed
body that had to be exorcised. First, it was believed that circumcision fem-
inized their bodies and reduced virility. Second, it was thought that Jewish
men had menstrual flows, which were toxic and impure as in the case of
women, and for that reason, they could not cease to be Jews. For an analy-
sis of the reification of Jewish dirtiness, see the talk given by Hering Torres,
2009a; Hering, 2008: 101–30; Hering Torres, 2009b.
59 While one of the original objectives had been to convert Jews into Chris-
tians, after the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, they began to be seen
as enemies and would always be so, even if they converted (Caro Baroja,
1961: 104–6; Porqueres, 2011).
60 Burns, 2011: 59; Hernández Franco & Rodríguez Pérez, 2013: 352.
61 Baerga, 2015: 24.
62 Maravall, 1979: 41.
63 Gliozzi, 1977: 49–110. Magali M. Carrera has observed that ‘Indian blood
was not blemished by infidel blood and, thus, was essentially a pure blood’
(Carrera, 2003: 12).
64 As Pilar Sanchiz notes (1997b: 183–4), in the mid-sixteenth century, the
Indians in the governorship of Guatemala were equal to or slightly higher
than black slaves on the social scale.
65 In the late sixteenth century, Jesuit Father Luis López argued the opposite.
In his opinion, the Peruvian criollos were inferior to the Spanish because
they had been weakened by the soil, the vegetation and the climate of the
New World. He saw them as lazy, work-shy layabouts. (Monumenta Peru-
ana, Vol. 1, pp. 327–9, cited in Ares Queija, 2005: 138).
66 The desire for self-affirmation amongst intellectuals born in Peru, like Pe-
dro de Oña (1570–1643), led them to exalt the greatness of their capital
cities in the early seventeenth century as civilized spaces (civilitas) not im-
mune to the destructive effects of nature (agros) (Coello, 2008a: 149–69).
67 Garriga, 2004.
68 In 1547, the first bishop of Guatemala, Francisco Marroquín, expressed his
concern about the proliferation of mestizos, indicating that one of the main
causes was ‘unequal’ marriages. For this reason, he wrote a letter to King
Charles V dated 20 September in which he recommended that young girls
marry ‘according to quality’ (AGI, Guatemala, 156, cited in Suñe Blanco,
1997: 372).
69 The Chilean doctor Alejandro Lipschütz (1944) believed in the ontological
reality of the races, but thought that the marginalization of mestizos was
not a racial question. Rather, he believed it due, above all, to social preju-
dice related to their spurious, adulterine and illegitimate origins. See also
Escobar, 1970: 155–6.
70 As Burns has noted, the first novices in Peruvian convents were largely the
daughters of mixed descent from the first conquerors and settlers who, as
‘mixed’ and ‘illegitimate’ females, could not reproduce their Spanish lin-
eage (1999).
71 As Dedieu has observed, it was during the Council of Trent that marriage
was clearly defined as one of the seven sacraments of Catholic dogma.
The presence of the priest along with two or three witnesses certified its
validity, making marriage a religious and sacramental act (Dedieu, 1981:
273–4).
72 Dumbar Temple, 1950: 117; Ares Queija, 2004: 15–39.
73 Ares Queija, 2005: 135; Zúñiga, 2002: 287–301.
74 Silverblatt’s book considers the relationship between the Spanish Inquisi-
tion and the emergence of the modern European state. She bases her ar-
gument on Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the connections between race
thinking, bureaucratic government and the rationalization of violence (as
the absence of institutional power) in nineteenth-century European imperi-
alism first, and then on the rise of fascism. Although the thesis is debatable,
chapters 5 and 6 in her book, which specifically address the transmission
and processing of the concepts of purity of blood, stains and the like, are of
interest. See Silverblatt, 2004: 55–75.
75 On this particular issue, see Thomson, 2011: 74.
76 For a discussion of the terms ‘raça’ and ‘lineage’, see Stallaert, 1998: 34;
Schwartz & Salomon, 1999: 443–78; Zúñiga, 1999: 425–52; Hering
Torres, 2007: 16–27.
77 As Jean-Paul Zúñiga emphasized, the Spanish ethnonym transmitted an
ontological quality or characteristic to the criollo descendants that was
considered immutable (Zúñiga, 2002: 149–68, 2007).
78 Lavallé, 2007: 352–53.
79 Coello, 2008c: 37–66.
80 Ares Queija, 2005: 123.
81 Escobar, 1970: 156–7

out of vicious and depraved customs’ (Acosta, De Procuranda Indorum
Salute[Salamanca, 1588], cited in Solórzano y Pereyra, 1972: 443).
83 Cited in Chaves, 2012: 50.
84 The Jesuit Diego de Torres Bollo and the Franciscan Bernardino de Cárde-
nas, amongst others, fingered ‘easy Indian women’ as responsible for the
proliferation of mestizos in Peru in the seventeenth century. The result of
this ‘bad sexual behaviour’amongst Indian women was the ‘contamination’
of their progeny. See Coello, 2008b.
85 Bowser, 1967: 114–15.
86 The Peruvian oligarchies were constituted, based on genealogies and cri-
teria of purity of family lineage, through the distribution of political and
ecclesiastical positions. These oligarchies formed around the formal attri-
butes of criollo status through marriages, the habits of military orders, the
purchase of public positions, titles of nobility and connections with the
Church.
87 Chaves, 2012: 52. See also Thomson, 2011: 78–81.
88 Rae, 2002: 55–81
89 Burns, 2011: 65–6; Herzog, 2012: 153–6. For Weber, race could only exist
if racial awareness was anchored to a sense of community belonging that
could culminate in an action like spite or segregation or the opposite, in
fear of the other (Wieviorka, 1992: 40).
90 Author of Apologético a favor de D. Luis de Góngora, Príncipe de los
poetas líricos de España, Lima: 1662.
91 Rodríguez Garrido, 1997: 120.
92 Fray Juan Meléndez, Tesoros verdaderos de Indias, cited in Pastor, 1996:
249–50. See also Bauer & Mazzotti, 2009: 398–403.
93 Stuart B. Schwartz and Frank Salomon, ‘New Peoples and New Kinds
of People: Adaptation, Readjustment, and Ethnogenesis in South Ameri-
can Indigenous Societies (Colonial Era)’, in Frank Salomon and Stuart B.
Schwartz (eds.),The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Amer-
icas, III: South America, Part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999, p. 444.
94 Juan and Ulloa, Noticias secretas de América, Cap. VI, p. 430. Here, the
lack of harmony and cohesion in colonial society is notable. See also Num-
hauser, ‘Sublevando el Virreinato’, pp. 73–124.
95 In a different context, Ângela Barreto showed that the Iberian concept of
purity of blood encountered analogous concepts amongst early modern
Goan elites. Indeed, ‘the adoption of purity of blood as an imperial tool
for social differentiation also served as a vehicle of empowerment for the
colonized’ (Barreto, 2012: 142–3).
96 Cope, 1994: 25.
97 Katzew, 1996, 2004.
98 New Spain was one of the first places where Spaniards, black slaves and
indigenous peoples coexisted. Between 1521 and 1534, there were 8,000
slaves in Mexico City. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the sex trade was active, which created new phenotypes and new mestizo
bodies. While races did not exist, the phenotypic characteristics contained
in genetic codes did. In the seventeenth century, popular terms popped up
that then appeared in administrative documents to racialize these pheno-
types (Peter Wade, cited in Baerga, 2015: 27–8). For example, the term
‘Morisco’ in New Spain was used to refer to skin colour and, therefore, its
meaning differed to the original meaning in Old Spain (Zúñiga, 2011).
99 Castro Morales,1983, pp. 671–90. For the construction of ‘colour as a
curse’ in the French West Indies, see Bonniol (1992).
100 Hering Torres, 2012: 29; Lewis, 2012: 99–123. As Zúñiga (2011) has ob-
served, considerable regional variety existed in the names and racial labels
applied according to the region. For this reason, it is necessary to use clear
taxonomies when discussing the chaotic and diverse reality of colonialism.
101 Martínez, 2008: 248; Chaves, 2012: 45.
102 Baerga, 2015: 170.
103 In the eighteenth century, it was thought that ‘mulattos, brown people,
zambos and other castes’ were contaminated from birth and had bad habits
due to their illegitimacy (Konetzke, 1962: 823–4). For nineteenth-century
Puerto Rico, see Baerga, 2015, pp. 155–96.
104 Marre, 1997: 223–30. Significantly, ‘mulattos, blacks, coyotes and persons
of similar castes and races’ were exempt from this decree, because none
had any social honour to protect from an unequal marriage (Stolcke, 2008:
49–50).
105 Baerga, 2015: 18.
106 Twinam, 2001: 16–20, 2005: 249–72.
107 Baerga, 2015: 92.
108 Katzew, 1996; Stolcke, 2006: 371–92.
109 Zúñiga, 2011.

112 Hernández Franco & Rodríguez Pérez, 2013: 357.
113 For a contrast with the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment and the
construction of ‘race’ as an expression of a new hierarchical universalism,
see Sebastiani (2013).

Museum in Paris where they remained until 1937, when the Musée de
l’Homme put her remains in its anthropology wing (Badou, 2000).
115 Wade, 1997: 10–11.

19
1 Graham, 1997: 2.
120 Baerga, 2015: 38.
121 Engels, 1972: 51.
122 This in no way means that any prior racial disqualification existed. In-
deed, Morgan was in no way indifferent to the sociopolitical ingenuity of
indigenous peoples. Just like the Jesuit José de Acosta with respect to the
Incas and the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún with the Nahuas, Mor-
gan was interested in the basic principles that regulated government, social
structures, descent laws and the religious systems of some groups, like the
famous League of the Iroquois, recognizing their place on the scale of his-
tory. What separated the ‘savages’ from ‘civilized people’ was the degree –
not the type – of their intellectual mental capacity, which placed them on
an unequal evolutionary scale. Morgan’s monogenist theses established a
common ancestor for all humans. This unique creation guaranteed that
all human beings shared the same mental and moral equipment. Updating
this potential depended, ultimately, on the greater or lesser perfection of
sociopolitical institutions. As he wrote in his famous The American Beaver
(1868), if some mammals, like the beaver, showed signs of intelligence,
imagine what could be expected of the savage Indian! (Valdés Gázquez,
1995: 129–54).
123 Stocking, 1968.
124 The so-called primitives were dis-considered living fossils of human an-
cestors, relics of the first evolutionary stages of humanity. They were peo-
ple without writing, whose oral traditions provided little and superficial
knowledge about their culture, although they did share a thinking principle
with their civilized namesakes(Valdés Gázquez, 1995: 10). See also Kuper,
1988.
125 Graham, 1997: 2.
126 Iglesiaset al., 1980: 484.
127 Racialism implied not only the existence of ‘historical races,’ but a sci-
entism that appealed to the inexorable determinism of ‘race’: Tzvetan
Todorov argued that individuals are impotent in the face of race, their fate
decided by their ancestors, and the efforts of educators are vain (Todorov,
1991: 186).
128 In the words of George W. Stocking,
the idea of race is built not simply on the notion of likeness but also on
the idea of consanguinity. A race is a group of individuals who share
certain characteristics by virtue of their common ancestry. As phys-
ical anthropology subjected these characteristics to more and more
measurement […] the racial ‘likeness’ became a statistical rather than an
individual phenomenon, and common ancestry became almost a gratu-
itous assumption.
(Stocking, 1968: 165)
129 Wieviorka, 1992: 80.

130 JanMohamed, 1985: 59–87.
131 Bayly, 2004.

133 Said, 1978.
134 Fradera, 2004: 6.
135 Lockhart (1999: 304–32) argues that the responses of the colonized to spe-
cific colonial policies differed according to diverse variables: the possibility
of assimilating the new directives into their conception of the world and
society, the degree of aggression represented by the Western policies with
regard to their traditional way of life, the negotiating skills of colonizing
agents and so forth.
136 Said, 1993.
137 In his most recent works, Niall Ferguson (2003, 2004) has stressed the
sense of ‘moral duty’ amongst Americans to emulate the British Empire in
forging the world order and playing a more active role in the reconstruction
of global stability.
138 On criticisms of colonial wars in the French case, see Liauzu (1993). For
Spain and the Moroccan wars, see López García (1976) and Martín Cor-
rales (2011).
139 Inarejos, 2015: 57; 70.
140 Ojeda-Mata, 2012.

144 Sarmiento, 1915: 310. Authors’ italics. After the military defeat of 1898,
Spanish eugenicist doctors like Felipe Ovilo y Canales and Luis Sánchez
Fernández attributed the weak resistance of Spanish soldiersto ‘deficient
mestizaje’ (Goode, 2009: 121–42).

146 In his essay, Nuestra América: Ensayo de psicología social (1903), Argen-
tinian lawyer and sociologist Carlos Octavio Bunge tried to demonstrate
that ethnic composition determines the ‘national character’ of the Latin
American peoples (Bunge, 1918: 153).

prominently as a health-based rationale for racialist theories in most West-
ern countries and was applied both in the countries themselves and in their
colonies. For this comparative exercise, see Bashford&Levinell, 2010.
148 Verena Stolcke (1992: 103–97) also observed that racism or the naturaliza-
tion of social inequality is an ideological doctrine aimed at reconciling the
illusion of equal opportunity with the reality of existing inequalities.

150 Peter Wade also called attention to the importance of examining con-
cepts of ‘race’ and ethnicity in their historical contexts. As their meanings
change over time, ‘we have to see both of them as part of an enterprise of
knowledge’ (Wade, 1997: 6–7).
151 This could also apply to Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of Nazism and
the extermination of the Jews, not as an act of collective insanity, but the
tragic consequence of a modern model of instrumental rationality in We-
berian terms that was applied to science and to an industrial logic of elim-
inating human beings (Bauman, 2008).
152 Walter Mignolo noted that ‘while class division was shaping the life and
institutions of Europeans, racism continued to shape the life and insti-
tutions in the colonies’ (Mignolo, 2005: 89). However, domestic racism
also existed amongst some European groups living on the margins of the
Enlightened bourgeois model, such as farming communities and urban
sectors that formed part of what De Martino would term subaltern cul-
tures. Additionally, some physical anthropologists like Italian criminolo-
gist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) also carried out research with different
‘minorities’, such as marginal groups of delinquents and prostitutes. In fact,
Lombroso also included anarchists in his classifications (Los anarquistas,
1894).
153 According to Goldberg (1993: 1, 70), ‘modernity can be characterized by
an increasingly personalized, self-conscious, and atomized individualism’,
through which racial thinking gradually becomes naturalized.
154 Despite comprehension problems during encounters with the indigenous
peoples of the New World (see the famous Valladolid debate between Ginés
de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1550), in the end, a mono-
genist interpretation of the origins of human beings prevailed in Europe in
the late sixteenth century (Goldberg, 1993: 63).
155 Goldberg, 1993: 1. Nicholas Thomas (1994: 13) also openly recognized
that racism had long been the common denominator in European colonial-
ism, ‘as a virtually built-in and natural product of that encounter, essential
to the social construction of an otherwise illegitimate and privileged access
to property and power’.
156 Goldberg, 1993: 54.
157 In his book The Racial State,Goldberg argues that the modern state is
racially configured; it naturalizes the inequality of ‘inferior others’ and
excludes them to construct homogeneity or negate heterogeneity. In this
respect, the racial state is characterized by the power to include or exclude
subjects (or citizens) in racial terms, categorizing them hierarchically ac-
cording to phenotypic patterns (Goldberg, 2002).
158 Baerga, 2015: 20–1.
159 Stolcke, 1995: 24.
160 As Howard Winant (1992: 178) notes, ‘the fact that 100 years after the
end of slavery blacks are still overwhelmingly concentrated in the bottom
strata certainly suggests that race is still a crucial determinant of economic
success’. See also Hall, 1980: 305–45.

162 As Young observed, the concept of race ‘has been always racially con-
structed. Culture has always been racially constructed’ (1995: 54).
163 Conte & Essner, 1995.
164 Baerga, 2015: 33–4.
165 The term corresponds to George Balandier’s classic article, ‘La situation
coloniale: approche théorique’, in which he defines colonialism as an emi-
nently historical process (Balandier, 1951: 44–79).
166 Baerga, 2015: 35.
167 Cooper, 2005: 7.
168 Chakrabarty, 1992, 2000.

Epilogue
The Dilemma of Multiculturalism
You’re not welcome here.

(Robert Ménard, mayor of Beziers, 2015)1
As this study has clearly demonstrated, numerous responses have been

offered to the problem of anthropology and history from very differ-
ent currents and at different times. These responses are not monopo-
lized by any one theoretical focus, national school or methodological
perspective. It is, moreover, imperative to draw on the different, varied
approaches available, allowing each researcher to devise their own syn-
thesis and create their own analytical model: the French Annales school,
ethnohistorical studies amongst the North American peoples, studies
in European religious history, the first critical colonial studies, the Ital-
ian contributions based on the idea of microhistory, pioneering studies
of ethnohistory and colonialism in Mexico, Peru, Brazil, as well as the
many authors who, like Julio Caro Baroja, have paved their own path.
After reading about the various proposals made over the years, it
should be clear that the solution does not lie in joining two different dis-
ciplines, but in asking why this disciplinary fragmentation exists. Once
again, the metaphor of mixing/mestizaje can be used to reinforce the
conception of two distinct entities that merge together. In the same way,
historical anthropology is not the mere sum of two different disciplines,
with their own methods (ethnography vs. documentary analysis, per-
haps), but a declaration of principles that draw the researcher’s spotlight
to human societies. Considering the brilliant text by Bernard Cohn in
which he discusses how anthropologists search for data to give meaning
to their hypotheses, while historians focus their questions on how to
obtain the sources, it would appear that these two concerns are perfectly
manageable in a single study, as we believe to have shown in this book. 2
An identical prophylactic spirit is discernible amongst the great mas-
ters of historical-anthropological thought, where there is almost a fear
of canonizing a method in historical anthropology. We understand these
concerns well and, in part, share them. It is not a matter of ‘being’, but
of ‘doing’.
196 Epilogue
After postmodern deconstruction, the social and human sciences
found themselves surrounded by doubt, with many possible paths to
take. We do not advocate theoretical relativism here, but rather an
eclecticism based on the power of the classics, renewed and rethought
to better understand our work with regard to social action and power
relations. In 1992, Jean and John Comaroff proposed some interesting
general guidelines for the diachronic analysis of social structures, tak-
ing into consideration the constructivist focuses of both social action
and agency. In truth, theoretical models that combine explanations of
social action and structural power relations are directly related to the
diachronic challenge: the study of these two dimensions (agency and
constriction) make it possible, in fact, to observe how these social net-
works are generated and transform throughout history.
Other propositions discussed in the book, such as those of the histo-
rian Ann L. Stoler, offer thought-provoking ideas about going to the ar-
chives with new approaches and questions. Although it is true that each
researcher tackles archive work in different ways, the considerations of
Stoler and others regarding their practices are extremely valuable; the
archive is not seen as a mere warehouse of documents, but a potential
object of study in and of itself and a subject of history through the peo-
ple who created it, the people who drafted the documents, the people
written about in the documents and even the people who speak in them.
By questioning the archive as a source resulting from the interaction be-
tween the written and the oral, as Carlo Ginzburg and Alan Macfarlane
have done, it becomes possible to reconstruct both the points of view of
specific people and power relations. This, however, requires some sharp
epistemological tools to make use of the very sources of domination, the
hegemony of Antonio Gramsci, to draw out the experience and perspec-
tive of those excluded from power structures. One of these tools is the
analysis of language, reconstituting words in the complex of meanings of
their own era, and not the researcher’s era. Anthropological alertness to
ethnocentrism, to the situated nature of words within a common mean-
ing, is brought to the archive to counteract any possible chronocentrism.
These words apply to the interaction between present and past. In
this dialectical tension, however, the time that links them has different
readings. The debate over concepts of time and history itself as a partic-
ular way of thinking about the world is not trivial. The false dichotomy
between tradition and modernity, projected onto different, distant coun-
tries, continues to pervade many analyses of modern reality.3 Moreover,
the centrifugal forces of other debates like relativism and universalism
emerge, as well.4 Is there one or are there several cultural ideas about
history according to the society? Are there historical societies, but with-
out any idea of history understood as an objective narrative in time, in
contrast to mythological concepts of time? Due to the significant cul-
tural variability of these concepts and in light of the debate between
Epilogue 197
Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere, the solution is not clear.
The key question revolves around the possibility of handling different
tools to reconstruct one’s own history and the histories of ‘others’ such
as, for example, the self-interested testimonies of missionaries and other
colonial agents from the modern era. The European imperial expan-
sion highlighted this tension between historicities and mythologies. The
paradox lies in the fact that even when a linear historical view of the
world is imposed upon local mythologies that same ‘stolen’ history, in
the words of Jack Goody, was really the local, mythical view of colonial
agents, comparable to Louis Dumont’s reflections.5
We do not intend to homogenize the reactions to colonialism using
some sort of hidden mechanism, but we do wish to demonstrate the
density of detail that results from considering cases where local society
interacts, in all of its complexity, with colonial intervention.
The consequence of meeting (or failing to meet) was, in many cases,
diverse and violent, which is why it is useful to introduce different para-
digms of power and counter-power into the study of colonial situations
that produced a destructive domination that continues to this day. As
astutely observed by Stoler in her recent book Imperial Debris: On Ru-
ins and Ruination (2013),6 domination complied with or accommodated
in different ways and dialectical reconstructions produced what many
other authors concur in describing as ‘multiple modernities’.
Despite the particularities of the different colonial situations and the
dialectics of power in the colonies, protectorates, colonized settlements,
plantations, direct or indirect governments, secular or more religious
models and so forth, comparing contexts as diverse as those analysed
by John and Jean Comaroff, Roger M. Keesing and Jan Vansina inspires
intriguing perspectives on the forms of counter-power that emerged
after armed revolts articulated around movements of revitalization,
recreations of ‘tradition’ and different types of accommodations. The
transformations in these scenarios over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury is clear proof that power relations are dynamic and pass through
different languages and interpretations. For an example that not only
academics are witnesses to these changes, one need look no further than
the words of the Ivorian singer Tiken Jah Fakoly (b. 1968), exiled from
his homeland because of his reggae protest songs. In one of these songs
called “Y’en a Marre” (“Fed Up”), he explains that the abolition of slav-
ery was followed by colonization processes, and when colonial systems
collapsed they were replaced by the ideology of cooperation and later on
by the so-called globalization.7
Since Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss drew attention to the power
of systems of classification, it has been known that societies organize
their thought processes by hierarchizing not only ideas, but also people.
We have illustrated the passage from classification systems like purity-
of-blood statutes to other systems dominated by ideas of ‘race’, with
198 Epilogue
its multiple meanings. History continues, and the twentieth century has
witnessed the recreation of formulas, many of them contiguous, new
transitions with new euphemisms for ‘race’ like ‘ethnicity’ and the emer-
gence of culture as the ‘measure of all things’.
The concept of culture, as Verena Stolcke would say, continues to be
as ubiquitous as ambiguous.8 In recent years, the economic globalization
that Brazilian lawyer and geographer Milton Santos (2000) spoke of
has become associated with a progressive cultural homogenization of
postnational societies, which has simultaneously been accompanied by
an explosion of local identities, whether cultural, ethnic and/or racial-
ized.9 The indigenous peoples of the Americas, Oceania and the South
Pacific claim political (ethnopolitical) rights, appealing to a native ethnic
authenticity – or, as Adam Kuper would say, a ‘primitive’ origin state –
mixed with a salvationist-style rhetoric.10 Transnational migrations
raise alarm bells in destination countries, whose natives fear that their
cultural identity and social cohesion will be eroded by the ‘different’
cultures of the recent arrivals. Other analysts see an antidote to iden-
tity fundamentalisms in cultural mixing, something like the tolerant,
friendly face of the culturalist boom. Finally, Terry Eagleton’s recent
arguments on culture shed a pessimistic light on the historic advance of
multiculturalism, arguing that far from producing citizens of the world,
transnational capitalism impels people to racism and chauvinism.11
The existing literature on so-called multiculturalism is overwhelming.
This phenomenon is related to state policies and ideologies that promote
interaction and communication between ethnic groups in the same soci-
ety.12 In his book Multicultural Dialogue: Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Con-
flicts (2010), Randi Gressgård looks at the question of multiculturalism
from the viewpoint of the coexistence of differences in a single national
political space. This debate (‘human beings are the same, but different’)
is not new. Unlike origin myths, the sweeping narratives of history (lib-
eralism, republicanism) are projected towards a (utopian) future that
dissolves the individual into an ideal of universal equality. Liberalism
(Locke, Smith) sought to humanize this through supposedly universal
qualities that define human beings as such.
Throughout the nineteenth century, modern European nation-states
were not neutral from an ethnic or religious point of view. They deliber-
ately came down on one side of the three pillars underlying the multicul-
tural enigma or national affiliation, which would weaken them.13 In the
first place, the nation-states failed in their attempt to create a universal
citizenry, transformed into a series of rights (jus sanguinis, jus soli or a
combination of the two), which became ‘the exclusive privilege of those
who were recognized as nationals of a particular state to the exclusion
of the nationals of any other state’.14 For this reason, on 11 Novem-
ber 2015, the far-right mayor of the French town of Beziers, Robert
Ménard, blurted out to three Syrian refugees that they were not welcome
Epilogue 199
in his city. To form part of the European Union, one must have kinship
links or a steady job. The status of economic immigrant or political ref-
ugee is in no way a universal ‘human right’.15
The second weakness of the state is its lack of neutrality vis-à-vis
ethnic identity.16 After the independence processes, the emerging Latin
American nation-states, particularly Argentina, Chile and Peru, invisi-
bilized ‘ethnic minorities’ in their national construction projects which,
in the mid-twentieth century, gave rise to processes of ethnic revital-
ization and ethnogenesis.17 Currently, Western democracies continue to
build barriers to protect themselves from the supposed threat of ‘ethnic
minorities’. Some immigrant ‘minorities’ or political refugees like the
Syrians, who are currently stateless, demand the same rights of citizen-
ship (social benefits, guaranteed rights etc.) as those who belong to the
nation-state. These new mobile populations (expatriates, refugees, im-
migrant workers) claim the rights and benefits associated with the cit-
izenry, based on the same universalist, (neo-)liberal criteria that place
white elites in leadership positions.18 Most of them, however, are not
welcome, as illustrated by the comment that opens this epilogue.
From this perspective, one could naively think that multiculturalism
provides an opportunity for minority groups to put an end to inequal-
ities related to class, race and gender, and enjoy the same rights and
opportunities as the ruling groups.19 In accordance with the legal the-
ory of jus naturale, all human beings are naturally equal and, therefore,
should enjoy the same legal-political rights. However, this theory does
not correspond to reality. Authors like Michel Foucault and Thomas
W. Laqueur, amongst others, caution that the egalitarian ideals of the
nineteenth-century liberal revolutions justified inequality between hu-
man beings as the foundation of ‘natural’ inequality. To ensure that the
colonized peoples – blacks, Indians – would not have the same rights as
metropolitan (white, property-owning, male) citizens, it was necessary
to ‘invent’ something to rationally justify the inequalities demanded by
the dominant bourgeois social order. As discussed in the preceding chap-
ter, first the superiority and inferiority of the ‘races’ and then cultural
fundamentalism seemed to ‘naturally’ justify the moral and political in-
equalities between human beings. 20 In the case of women, the inequal-
ity lay in the inferiority of their sex. In the case of nineteenth-century
racism, the ‘naturalization’ of gender inequalities was related to an in-
delible genealogical logic (‘the damned races’) linked to modernity and
reinforced by scientific discourse. These inequalities were not based on
differential traits, but on discriminatory and essentialized sociopolitical
determinations.
The third weakness of the state is its lack of neutrality vis-à-vis reli-
gious difference; the political culture of most states has historically been
configured on the basis of a religious belief. Gerd Baumann has observed
that states can be secular with regard to religion, but never with regard
200 Epilogue
to themselves. Neither a nation-state nor a multistate nation, he argues,
can act without its own, specific ‘civil religion’. 21 For Western elites, ref-
ugees or immigrants from outside the European Union, especially those
coming from Muslim countries like Syria, bring with them a culture that
will not yield to the hegemonic Western model. The discourse creates the
right climate for so-called universal, and fundamentally ethical, rights,
but paradoxically reinforces the binarism between ‘us’ and the ‘others’.
Multiculturalists offer a relativist discourse that supposedly recognizes
and protects culturally different ‘others’, but social classification systems
transform them into the negation of ‘our’ cultural identity. Instead of
analysing them as contextual and historical realities (anti-rationalism),
liberal democracies invent these ‘others’, according them an essential or
ahistorical status. They are, therefore, culturally determined when their
ability to adapt to Western public life is called into question, fostering
all sorts of prejudices.
However, the alternative to multiculturalism does not offer a better
solution. Cultural relativism reacts to multiculturalist ethnocentrism by
demanding the protection of what are seen as endangered cultural mi-
norities. Far from erasing differences, this tension reaffirms them, based
on what Randi Gressgård has defined as ‘planned pluralism’. The case
of Norwegian policies for the integration of ethnic minorities is highly
relevant here. Liberal-democratic rhetoric is measured on the basis of
the ability to integrate minorities – and their alleged impurities – into
the hegemonic cultural order. In this respect, recognizing them as equal,
but different, involves an inevitable process of assimilation and/or sub-
ordination, an act of incorporating their cultural particularities into an
existing normative model, which transforms immigrants from outside
the European Union into ‘diverse others’ in national integration and/or
exclusion policies. Cultural diversity and plurality must, then, be nor-
malized and rationally controlled to standardize the same cultural dif-
ferences that they purport to defend, turning a declared multicultural
dialogue into what is really a monologue. 22 At this point, the possibility
of a multicultural dialogue that does not pass through a ‘planned plu-
ralism’ that reifies class, race and gender differences is open to debate.23
Gressgård argues that the politics of recognition presuppose the config-
uration and universalization of the Western subject as a step prior to the
assimilation of ‘diverse others’ in a hegemonic cultural order. In Chapters
4 and 5, we showed that the objectification (and subjectification) of these
‘others’ into barbarians and savages, to a large extent, defined the history
of European colonialism. As Foucault noted, these categorizations make
it possible to reproduce the subjectivity of human beings, especially with
regard to concepts of purity and impurity (Douglas, 1994). The dynam-
ics between cultural order (purity) and cultural disorder (impurity, chaos)
are, according to Gressgård, related to liminal spaces. These spaces de-
limit what Mircea Eliade defined as the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ or, in
Epilogue 201
others words, a chaos that tries to dismantle the established cultural or-
der. Transnational movements and migrations raise alarms in liberal de-
mocracies, whose citizens fear that the recent arrivals may corrupt their
national social cohesion and cultural identity.24 Although ethnic minori-
ties clearly do not constitute a pathological impurity, liberal democracies
refuse to share their acquired privileges with these minorities. In this
situation, there are two ideal types of reaction. While British multicul-
turalism supports differences, French universalism defends the need to
absorb them into the Republic. In other words, these European govern-
ments prefer to integrate them, adapt them and assimilate them through
a process of cultural domestication – ‘culturalization’ – that blends their
distinctive characteristics into a new symbolic order.
As Manuel Gonçalves Barbosa has argued, a broad and deep recom-
position of the role of education in civil society is required.25 While the
educational policies of the global village are based on universal values
that allegedly guarantee integration, they really discriminate against mi-
norities who do not adjust to the established parameters. There are no
shared educational formulas that foster interculturality26 in pedagogical
terms, and consequently, ethnic minorities are categorized as traditional
and inferior. This ethnocentric fallacy is the result of a multiculturalist
paradox based on a modern ideal of natural equality that does not cor-
respond to the cultural and ethnic diversity of ‘other’ human beings. 27
To understand this foundational paradox between the French Republi-
can model (i.e., the supposed cultural homogeneity of citizens) and the
(poly)-ethnic diversity found, for example, in the new Latin American
republics, multiculturalism must be established as an undeniable prod-
uct of modern ideology. 28
The work done by Louis Dumont (1970, 1986), on the centrality of
the individual in Western ideology, is indispensable when attempting to
understand the limits of the ideological logic of modernity. The French
thinker argued that the idea we form about other cultures does not only
depend on the available information, but on how this information is
interpreted and on our general way of thinking. 29 By contrasting the
holism of traditional India with the individualism of Western society,
Dumont put modernity in perspective, comprehending the ideological
configuration of anthropology from the outside. Gressgård tries to do
the same with multiculturalism, agreeing with Dumont that the problem
of modernity ‘occurs when the holism is confounded with the egalitar-
ian principles, that is, when non-modern idea-values acquire meaning
within the modern political ideologies’.30
At this point, Gressgård considers the possibility of the heterogeneity
of the singular subject in a community model based on differences as
good, instead of a universal category of man/woman. The basis for this
approach is the Kantian concept of reflective judgement that seeks to de-
fine a universal moral character, trying to establish connections between
202 Epilogue
the idea of subjectivity and liberty. This is a theoretical solution to a real
problem – the tension between the guarantee of equal rights, on the one
hand, and the cultural differences between ‘we-Westerners’ and the ‘other-
immigrants’, on the other – that makes it possible to cast away tribalisms
and reach a high level of tolerance through open, constructive dialogue.31
Decolonialization and the ensuing counterculture movements, such as
feminism, pacifism, the struggle for civil rights and postcolonial think-
ing, challenged the primacy of the hegemonic Western model of the
white, European male as the sole subject of universal political thought.
Meanwhile, indigenous peoples were constructing their identities based
on intense political activism, although not without an essentialization
of their cultural differences.32 The internationalization of indigenous
movements has provided these groups with a forum that has produced
a re-ethnification of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania. The Dec-
laration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted on 13 September
2007 by the United Nations Assembly, revived the identity revitalization
of indigenous peoples (a common reference used in French ethnology)
and demonstrated something that was already known: identities are not
fixed or immutable, but are constructed and reconstructed according to
their own historical dynamics.33
In their book Ethnicity, Inc. (2009), John and Jean Comaroff argue
that ethnic-national construction cannot be separated from the corpora-
tization of ethnicity and the commodification of culture. For the Coma-
roffs, this commodification is universal and forms part of a neoliberal
model that, paradoxically, has allowed groups to reinforce and/or con-
struct their own ethnic categories (‘the Zulu’, ‘the San’) from scratch.
This is, simply put, the corporative management of their cultural heri-
tage through, for instance, the creation of theme parks like Shakaland,
which have popularized their image and commercialized it for their
own benefit. By exploiting their so-called traditions for the purposes of
ethno-tourism, these cultural industries do not cause the supposed eth-
nic authenticity of the minoritized peoples to disappear; on the contrary,
they reaffirm their ethnicities on another level, one that is not exclusively
economic, but also political, as it allows ethno-nations from polycultural
states to exist for themselves.34 In doing so, they do not appeal to pro-
gressivist, do-gooder multiculturalism, but to the language of the law.
Ethnicity, then, becomes not only something that can be bought and
sold, but also a legal language that applies to the allocation of rights.35
However, the capitalist enterprise, based on the law of supply and de-
mand, has transformed culture into merchandise, something which has
raised some concerns in the academic community. The case of ‘casino
capitalism’ provides a clear example of the transformation of ethnicities
into corporative holders of a territory and culture and of their leaders into
members of management boards that efficiently administer the material
and/or symbolic capital. The proliferation of these ethnic businesses has
Epilogue 203
generated a debate about the nature of the political and cultural inde-
pendence of some ethnic groups like the Navajos and Seminoles, due to
the control and supervision exercised by the federal government through
the National Indian Gaming Commission. Thanks to a North American
legal vacuum that allowed Indians to set up clubs and casinos on their
reservations, many tribes have become extraordinary powerful eco-
nomically. In 2006, for instance, the Seminoles bought the Hard Rock
Café chain for 965 million dollars (725 million euros), which raises the
question of whether the casinos are guaranteeing the preservation of
native communities or really only represent one way to better integrate
these groups into the capitalist system. Other questions related to ethno-
capitalism concern the criteria for belonging to an ethnic group – blood,
genealogy, property – or how an ethnic group is born – or, perhaps,
reborn – by joining the capitalist system (e.g., the cases of the Pomo and
Me-Wuk Indians in California). The recovery (or ‘rediscovery’) of their
native ‘traditions’ has been a posteriori, in other words, elements that
differentiate their identity in a dynamic social space.
For the Comaroffs, the historical perspective is an indispensable tool
when trying to understand the (self-)recognition dynamics of ethnic
groups living in multinational (or multi-ethnic) states, where ethnic revi-
talization projects are included within an idea of national identity unity
that excludes or limits any sovereignist temptation.36 Again, the Coma-
roffs present two telling examples of the legalization of identities and
its consequences in South Africa. The first, the San hunter-gatherers of
the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, managed to reconstitute their alterity
and group identity by exploiting the Hoodia gordonii (better known
as Xhoba), a cactus with slimming and invigorating (natural Viagra)
medicinal properties, on an industrial scale. The American talk-show
host Oprah Winfrey – who in 2013 publicly accused a Swiss handbag
shop of racism for refusing to wait on her because they questioned her
financial solvency – announced that the solution to obesity may be found
in South Africa.37 Many pharmaceutical companies quickly expressed
interest in marketing Xhoba, with the Phytopharm company being the
first to licence the rights under the name ‘P57’. However, the San did
not agree with the arrangement, claiming cultural property rights to
the product. In 2001, the San Council was established under the aus-
pices of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Af-
rica (WIMSA)38 to fight for the intellectual rights and a share of the
profits.39 Two years later, an agreement was signed that guaranteed the
San 6 per cent of the profits in the form of royalties. Thus, the disperse
and almost extinct bushmen of the Kalahari Desert became the proud
‘San people’ through the establishment of an ethno-corporation that
gave them group coherence. No longer ragged bushmen languishing in
Kalahari huts, the group now presents itself to tourists as a people with
an ethnic identity.40
204 Epilogue
The second example studied by the Comaroffs is a different case, since
the group identity of the Bafokeng, a Botswana nation, was already con-
stituted in the 1960s, when King Edward Lebone Molotlegi I began to
receive sizeable profits from the Bafokeng Minerals company, to which
the Bafokeng people had 25 per cent of the exploitation rights for the
enormous platinum deposits on their land. Here, the question did not lie
so much in the construction of an ethnic identity, as in the case of the
San, as in the introduction of the Bafokeng into modernity. The rituals
of the Bafokeng monarchy, now much more modern, were enriched by
traditional elements. As Oscar Calavia Sáez has observed, when the Eu-
ropeans invent a tradition based on the logic of the more ancient, the
more authentic, it is called the Renaissance. When, however, Africans or
Indians do this, they are accused of forgery.41 In any case, thanks to this
‘modernity,’ Bafokeng, Inc. has become a ‘rich nation of poor people’,42
underscoring the importance of taking the sociopolitical dimension of
ethnicity into account.
In any case, ethno-national construction clearly cannot be separated
from the corporatization of ethnicity and the commodification of a cul-
ture shared by thousands or millions of people, who become consum-
ers of national symbols outfitted with a copyright used to establish an
emotional identification; neither can it be separated from history, which
helps to explain the processes of constructing and resignifying what are
essentialized – and possibly authentic – ethnicities and cultures with a
notary registration.43 The recent nationalist demands in Catalonia are
a clear example of this ontological essentialization of culture, in which
certain rituals, languages and customs are canonized to the detriment of
others, which are considered less ‘ethnic’.44 The Comaroffs observed how
these feelings of national belonging are (re-)formulated inside neoliberal
policies that project a corporative image as the ideal human type and that
care little, or nothing, for social costs. Regarding the nostalgia for es-
sence and, consequently, the reification of ethnic identities, it is worth fol-
lowing Manuela Carneira da Cunha45 in asking: to whom does ‘culture’
belong? To what extent do new identities adopt the ethnic pluralism that
coexists in a single social space? And, more specifically, do ethno-futures
guarantee the integration of cultural differences or, on the contrary, do
they reproduce them, spawning new mechanisms of exclusion?
Notes
1 http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2015/09/28/actualidad/14434
51409_279006.html; www.huffpost.com/entry/french-syrian-refugees_n_
55f6f734e4b077ca094fbefb.
2 According to Cohn,
research in history is based on finding data; research in anthropology is
based on creating data. Obviously, the historian has to find the sources
Epilogue 205
on which to base his research. If he cannot find them, then no matter how
good his ideas are or how well thought through the problem is on which
he wants to work, he cannot do the research. […]. The anthropologist,
on the other hand, often is interested in a problem, descriptive or theo-
retical, and the question is then one of deciding what types of materials
he will need for pursuing the problem.
(Cohn, 1990: 6)
3 According to Löwenthal (1985), the past is not only in time, but also in
space, since the past was constructed not only as a distant time, but as a
faraway place. And conversely, coming into contact with realities that are
far-off in space enables people to take a trip to the past. See also Geertz,
1990: 323; Ingold, 1996a; Rakić, 2004: 231–2.
4 For a defence of universalist values and a criticism of relativisms, see
Todorov, 1988: 5–11, 1991.
5 Dumont observed that ‘we ourselves are made to look back on our own
modern culture and society as one particular form of humanity’, an excep-
tional one that denies its own universality (Dumont, 1986: 207).
6 Stoler, 2013: 1–35.
7 Footnote: From the album Françafrique, 2002.
8 Todorov, 1988: 7; Stolcke, 2011: 6.
9 Santos, 2000: 23–36; Comaroff, 2011: 222.

12 Baumann, 1996, 1999.

20 Stolcke, 1995: 24.

22 Gressgård, 2010: 11.
23 Gressgård, 2010: 11–12.
24 Stolcke, 1995: 1–24.
25 Gonçalves Barbosa, 2011: 477–92.
26 According to Walsh, interculturality signals and signifies processes of con-
struction of one knowledge another, of one political practice another, of one
social and (state) other power and of one society another; one form another
of thought related to and against modernity/coloniality, paradigm another
that is thought through political praxis. (Walsh, 2007: 47).

28 The new ‘multiethnic’ constitutions in Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador represent

an attempt to resolve this problem, albeit while reifying ethnicities (De la
Cadena, 2011: 397–430).
29 Dumont, 1989: 13, cited in Stolcke, 2001b: 3–37.
30 Gressgård, 2010: 52.

206 Epilogue

34 Comaroff & Comaroff, 2009: 46–8.

36 Carneiro da Cunha, 2009: 330–2; Calavia Saez, 2011.
www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/video_fotos/2013/08/130809_oprah_winfrey_
racismo_tienda_suiza_jp.shtml

40 Calavia Sáez, 2011: 375–6.

4 4 On the multicultural question applied in Catalonia, see Delgado Ruiz, 1998.

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Index
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.
academic national traditions: impact Chamorro 117, 119; (neo)-Chamorro

on theories 6, 11; interdisciplinarity identity 118, 119–120, 151n50;
40, 84n64; and power 41, 103, 104 way of life 119
acculturation 18, 23, 27, 136 change 63; space 112, 136
adaptation: Darwinism 175; classification system 128, 130,
evolutionism 177, 179; of ethnic 157, 172, 178, 182, 183, 197,
groups 18, 64; of modernity 65; 200; civilized vs. barbarian 112;
sociocultural 118, 146; strategic cultural 8, 175; medieval 166;
152n96; theories 58 naturalist 166; racial 26; religious
agency: consciousness 140, 148; 168; stereotypes 97–98, 126, 131,
constraints of 67–68, 73, 136; 152n80; stratified 168
historical action 118; and resistance Christian, William Jr., 74–82
135, 136; social 12, 135, 138, 196; Christian: classes 165; ethos 112, 114,
strategic 30 117, 130, 137, 147, 149n6, 155–156,
anthropology: of change 65; 167–168, 174, 175, 185n6; God 35;
diachronic 121; of history 103; institutions 159; kinship, lineages
holism 74; of subjectivity 159 168–169, 173; missionaries 137;
(see also subalternity) saints 94; Spanish reconquest 112;
archive: secrets as power 90; as spouse 164; time 107
a source 85–94; as a system of chronocentrism 4, 56, 59, 103,
domination 89–91 104–107, 166, 196; and
Asad, Talal 3–5, 10n22, 15, 20, ethnocentrism 105
45n45, 68, 72, 76, 84n57, 93, colonial: anxieties (as formulated
101, 109, 156, 185n9, 194n169, by Ann L. Stoler) 90, 130, 133;
209, 245 contradictions 148, 156; critique
148; domination 29, 32, 49n118,
Brazil 39–44 63, 117, 146; ethnography 121;
ethos 68; identity 35; inheritance
capitalism 16, 64, 68–69, 71–72, 34; knowledge 174; legitimation
158; ethno-, 203; global 101, 198; 179, 180; policy 92, 192n135; and
impact on indigenous populations postcolonial 3, 33, 39, 40, 101,
42, 73, 101, 153n117, 202; 120; power 29, 34, 118, 149n17,
industrial 138; and modernity 107; 156, 179, 180; process 38, 90, 120;
Protestant ethic of 68; rise of 24 projects 19, 85, 113, 117, 153n132;
Caro Baroja, Julio 54–59, 74 resisting 18, 180; situations 5,
Catalonia: Àngel Palerm i Vich 70; 8, 92, 113, 136, 148, 184, 197;
anthropology 89; industrial colonies society 32, 36, 40, 45n39, 98, 130,
95; multiculturality 206n94; 173, 189n94; studies 9, 89, 130,
nationalism 204; spiritism 76 134, 195; subjects 47n80, 170;
256 Index
system 95, 112–147, 197; war 93, conquest: of America 18, 29, 34,
192n138; see also colonialism 50n153, 89, 107, 112, 149, 155;
colonialism: against 135, 141; of Brazil 39, 40; as narrative 5,
agents of 138; American 151n50; 49n109; spiritual 114
Belgian 145–148; British 62, conversion 5, 159, 163, 164
92, 110n78, 143; competing cosmopolitanism 123, 133; see also
views of 68; consciousness of 68; knowledge
contradictions 69, 128, 147; as court records 45n31; as socio-
cultural process 118; decolonization historical source 75, 86, 87, 92
110n72; diversity 148, 190n100; Criollos 31–33
in domestic space 131, 136; Dutch Cuba 126–129; cubanidad 48n94
20, 90, 129–135; effects 147–148; culture: and nature 126; appropriation
European 15, 28, 156, 179, 182, 61, 63, 114, 118, 124, 125, 147,
193n155, 200; and Enlightenment 154n134, 161; dominant 5;
103; as historical process 194n165; diversity 13, 155; essentialization 8,
Iberian 92; legitimizing 182, 183; 40, 202, 204; fundamentalism (as
modernity 124; missionaries 68; defined by Verena Stolcke) 9, 157,
Portuguese 40; and postcolonialism 183, 185n12, 199; mimesis 84n75,
3, 101; and power 4–6, 143; 124; popular 160; syncretism 9n6,
settlement 68; and social structures 114, 140
10n22; Spanish 151n50, 192n141; custom 16, 25, 40, 72, 115, 119, 144,
studies 2, 8, 97, 131, 195; see also 169; adat (colonial Indonesia) 133;
colonial customary law 113, 141; kastomu
coloniality 114, 149n13; and (see also Kwaio) 144
modernity 205n26
colonization: local responses 40 Declaration of Barbados 28
colonized 19; accomodation 152n96; democracy: racial 27
anthropology 39; as a dynamic dialogic ethnography 30
society 153n132; ethnographers diffusionism 55, 98, 106
103; excluded from history 93; discourse: anthropological 106, 184;
exclusion 183, 199; exhibitions colonial 33, 118, 119; counter-
183; incorporation into history colonial 119; public 30; racist
23; Indians 26; management 113, 25, 183
136; resistance 72, 114, 117, 135, documentary sources: colonial
136, 146, 189n95; responses to 58; hegemonic sources to study
colonialism 192n135; see also subaltern populations 87, 89, 104;
colonizer used by anthropologists 29, 85–94
colonizer 26; Algeria 101; anxieties dualisms 3, 65; agency/structure 12,
130, 131, 133; Captain Cook seen 61, 67, 99–100; colonizer/colonized
as 61–62; and colonized 101, 130, 33; conscious/unconscious
136, 149n13, 179; contradictions 103; diachronic/synchronic 58;
118, 136; internal differences 130; ethnology/history 22–23; event/
Spanish 35; resistance to 117, structure 22; going beyond 16, 77;
143, 180 history/structure 61; micro/macro 8;
comaroff, Jean and John 2–3, 7, watershed theory 12
63–69, 9n5, 12, 42, 46n53, 52n200, duress 105
54, 63–64, 83n31, n34, n35, n39,
100, 196–197, 202, 206n34, n35, epistemology: of anthropology 102;
n38, n42 of the archive 91; anxieties 90;
comaroff, Jean 8, 64, 136–137, 141, contiguities 4; determinants 62, 65;
145, 152n99, n100, n101, n102, patriotic 33; problems 7, 12, 22, 85,
n103, n104, n105, n106, n107, 95, 104, 105, 157, 160; relativism/
n108, n109, n110, 205n9, 206n32 universalism 62, 63, 65, 102;
complex societies 9, 57–58 surveillance 58, 94; tools 196
Index 257
ethnicity 33, 36, 42–43, 70, 94, 104, 121, 151n53; processes 64, 70, 71;
126, 157, 172, 198, 202, 204 slave labour 40, 121, 123, 189n86,
ethnocentrism 15, 62, 65, 105, 112, 193n160, 197
196, 200 Great Britain 13–16
ethnocide 28, 49n111; assimilation
of Indians 25, 28, 35, 40, 48n89, Hadrami Yemenis 123–124, 151n63
49n117, 52n184, 156; assimilation heresy 22, 167, 168, 171, 185n6;
of Jews and Muslims 167, 169 Albigensian 158
ethnography: diachronic 58, 64, 136; historical anthropology: attempts
of the archive 20, 34, 85–94; of the of definition 54, 62–63, 64–68,
colonial archive 89–94, 127; rescue 195–196; doing 7, 195; false
34; as translation 104; transoceanic separation 3, 55; history and
123–124 anthropology 3–4, 9, 11, 14,
ethnohistory 17–18, 27, 29, 31, 34; 38–39, 158; pioneer research 7, 8,
critiques 19, 36, 38 16, 19, 54, 89, 95, 101, 107n14,
ethnology: as technique 158 126, 156, 195; religion 74–82;
eugenics 26, 48n92, 192n144, reluctance to canonize 12, 55, 58,
192n147; imperial 131 64, 73, 77, 195
evolutionism 6, 11, 13, 14, 17, Histoire des mentalités 6, 21–22, 75
22, 45n28, 56, 59, 69, 98, 106, history: and historicities 36, 51n168,
175–177, 181; neo-evolutionism 59, 67, 102, 103, 197; conflicting
63; racialist 125 views of 102; in different cultural
excluded: dehistoricization 31; contexts 18, 67, 102, 103, 196;
as historical subjects 40, 66; ethnocentrism 93; of history 6; and
indigenous view of history 28, myth 63, 67, 197; of sentiments
30, 39, 66; recognizing the 104; 130–131, 134; societies with/
subaltern groups 5, 34; see also without 19, 93, 112; theft of
subalternity (formulated by Jack Goody) 92,
102, 107, 123, 197
family history 16, 99 homosexuality 158
Fiji Islands 13, 59, 62, 143
Foucault, Michel 4, 23, 64, 116, 130, Ibn Khaldun 55, 56, 97, 98
183, 199, 200, 221, 223 ideology 25, 40; as false conscience
France 21–24 25, 73; racist 27, 179, 192n147; as
functionalism 13–14, 55–58, 67, 70, system of ideas 87, 97, 127, 129,
75, 108n34, 152n98, 178 136, 138, 147, 182, 197, 201
independence movements 23
gender 8, 10n20, 35, 95, 110n78, Indies: French West Indies 189n99;
129, 143, 147, 170, 182, 183, 184, Netherlands (Dutch) Indies 90, 129,
199, 200; rape 127, 131; and social 131–132, 133; Spanish chronicles
structure 126; sexuality control 18, 107; Spanish Indies 113–115,
127, 133–134 172, 190n110
genealogy: as a classification system indigenism: from Indian to peasant
164, 173, 175; and marriage 34; as state policy 25, 27–28, 30,
164–165; as power 56, 96, 97, 38, 41, 43; territoriality 43–44
110n80, 124, 171, 173, 203; see Inquisition: Chueta’s case 164–165
also purity of blood (see also Jews); defining group 75,
genocide 95, 104; see also ethnocide 86, 88, 95, 168–169; history 156;
global: consumption 122–123, Menocchio’s case 160–163; power
124–125; division of labour 78, 88, 158, 167, 188n74; as source
122; history of sugar 121–123; 7, 57, 87, 88, 96, 156–159, 164,
inequalities 101, 120; insertion 165; see also purity of blood
of local groups 113; vs. local Intersectional approach 8, 126–128;
120–126; non-western expansions gender, class and race 126–136
258 Index
Jesuits: and accomodation 117; and 196, 197; historical structuralism
colonial projects 26, 33; global 57; interpretative 20; morphological
order 116 56; quantitave vs. qualitative
Jews 57, 58, 69, 73, 92, 158, 160, 16; reluctance for 12, 55, 58,
167–169, 181, 186n22, 187n58, 64, 73, 77
n59, 193n151; chuetas 163–164 Mexico 24–30, 70, 71, 73
microhistory 5, 10n15, 21, 75, 88,
kinship: colonial clash 147; 109n53, 195
transoceanic 123–124 millenarianism 7, 35, 50n156, 76, 79,
knowledge: as (colonial) discourse 81–82, 115, 139–140
23, 92; cosmopolitan 113; as minorities: persecuted 7, 33, 42, 55
doxa 108n30; ethnographic 95; missionaries 68; Evangelical
indigenous, traditional 30, 34, 43, Methodism (South Africa) 137;
68, 103, 112; and power 20, 59, 64, Evangelical Mission (Salomon
69, 90, 101, 106 Islands) 143; evangelization 83n24,
Kuba (Congo) 19, 145–148, 153n130, 114, 116, 117, 137, 138, 143,
154n134 150n30, 171, 181; Dominicans 114,
Kwaio (Salomon Islands) 56, 157, 172; Franciscans 114, 115,
141–145, 150n43 189n84, 191n122; see also Jesuits
mixture 4, 51n161, 169; see also;
Lutheranism 161 marriage (mixed); race
(half-blood)
Maghreb 55, 56, 94, 98, 131 modernity: ambivalences 76, 127,
Marian apparitions 77–81, 96 156; and Cartesian dualism 5;
marriage 164–165, 170; concubinage appropiaton of 63, 65, 125,
132; endogamic 100, 167, 173, 204; critiques to 15, 184, 201;
186n36, 189n86; interracial 127, definition 185n3; emergence 3,
128; mixed 128, 133, 164, 165, 182; Eurocentric axioms about
171; patterns 129, 131, 158, 163, 113, 125; European 113, 155;
164, 186n28, 188n71; strategies forms of repression 87; global
99–100, 158, 164; unequal 173, inequalities 23; hierarchy of races
188n68, 190n104 168, 182, 183, 185n8, 193n153,
Marxist approaches 4, 15, 58, 63, 199; imposed 124; Latin American
64, 67, 69–72, 74, 101; critique 38; modernization 23, 27, 30, 137;
of French neo-Marxists 185n13; multiple modernities 38, 197; vs.
critique of imperialism 23, 101 tradition 3, 12, 65, 144, 147, 196;
memory: of the ancestors in transition to 11; ‘unbelief’ of 75;
indigenous people 36, 40, 41, universal rights 41
43, 47n80, 120, 143–144; of the monetarization 68, 118, 124, 137,
ancestors in the academy 2, 70; 147, 153n129
biased 134; colonial 134; collective monogenism 182; Feijoo’s 174;
30, 43, 119; genealogical 165; Morgan 191n122; Sixteenth-
gendered 143; hidden 80; as Century 193n154
historical narrative 44n4, 50n154, Moriscos 57, 58, 87, 158, 159, 163,
96, 129, 134, 142; lieux de la 168, 169, 173
mémoire 20; politiziced 95, 104; multicultural turn 30, 41; cultural
preserving 19; remembering vs. assimilation 200–201
retelling 134, 135; reminiscenses
145, 146; selective 2, 104; tragic 31 narratives: of conquest 5
Menocchio 7, 160–162 national state 42, 49n115, 125, 198,
Mestizaje: Brazil 42–43; Mexico 199, 200; construction 24–25
24–28; Peru 31–32, 35, 38
methods 3–4; biography 59; detective- oral: history 5, 19, 34, 68, 79, 95,
like 80, 142, 161; dialectical 3, 5, 134; tradition 19, 27, 34, 95, 96,
8, 23, 63, 64, 78, 92, 96, 124, 136, 191n124; and written 96–97
Index 259
plantation system 20, 69–70, 121, degeneration 181–182; determinism
122, 147, 153n117 48; ‘half-blood’, 27; problematic
past: as an ethnographic problem 2; classifications 35, 48, 130–132;
indigenous ideas about the 41; and racialization processes (Mexico)
present 104, 196 25, 26, 28; vs. social status 128; see
persistence 5, 27, 60, 61, 159; see also also eugenics; marriage (mixed);
reproduction purity of blood
peruanidad 31 reducciones 38, 43, 114–117,
Peru 31–39 149n22, 169
polygenism 182 religion 74–82; and science 75
postcolonial: context 8, 9, 98, 135; renaissance 155; humanism 155
intellectuals 110n78, 194n161; Reproduction: as alteration (Sahlins)
landscape 2; memories 148; society 61; categories 171; economic 67,
47n89, 49n108; state 23; studies 171; of life 175; marriage as social
46n70, 104, 118, 136, 184, 202; 99, 100, 163–165; as order 58,
subalternity 120; unequalities 101, 65; persistence 61; of power 92;
135, 148; world 64 social 12, 64; of social groups 163;
postmodernism 2, 7, 20, 24, 63, 64, of social structures 14, 137, 140,
65, 67, 88, 93, 102, 104, 106, 142, 164–165, 171; theories 7
184, 196 research techniques: dreams as source
power 69, 135–148; archives of 148, 154n134; rumours as source
repression 87; conflict 23, 39, 56, 92; songs as source 142, 165, 197;
58, 86, 87, 92, 95, 96, 98, 104, 128, triangulation 79, 81, 94–98, 145;
136, 138, 139, 143, 146, 149n13, see also archive; inquisition; oral
159, 161, 184; government policies resistance: accommodation 8, 117,
28, 116; hegemony 64, 115, 116, 135, 136, 145, 150n33, 152n96,
121, 135, 167, 180, 182, 196; 197; adaptive 118; agency 73;
inscribed on bodies 130; intimacy alliances 33, 34, 35, 99, 113, 118,
as politics 130–135; legitimation 136, 137; anarchism and anti-
4, 74, 97, 138, 157; meanings 4–5; colonial movements 125, 180;
negotiation 30, 33, 118; peasant causes 147; collaboration 152n96;
revolutions 71; political violence consciousness of (awareness) 136,
39; population control 115–117; 139–140, 141, 145, 148; changing
religious repression 163, 167; forms 141, 144; cultural 49n119,
repression 86, 96, 134, 159; rituals 114, 138, 153n126; daily forms
73, 76, 81; space 68, 115–117, 137 of 34, 136, 140, 144; forms of 30,
(see also reducciones); statistics as 34, 72, 97, 136, 146; Gramscian
20, 24, 91, 93, 94; technologies 8, concept 117; hidden transcripts of
24; theories (Foucault) 23–24, 130; resistance 145; ideological 50n156;
see also resistance; violence indigineous movements 18, 28, 39;
praxis: historical 23; mytho-praxis Kuba 146–147; Kwaio 143; leaders
61–62; normativiy and 88, 91, 92, 119; local/external categories of
101, 102; theory of 59, 92, 137 142, 144, 145; Maori 60; Moriscos
presentism 166 of Granada 159; muqawwama (in
processual approach 14–15, 23, 42, Morocco) 135; paradoxes of 137,
64, 67; person and health 37, 42 140, 144–145; peasant 30; Philipine
purity-impurity 8, 166; purity intellectuals 125–126; possession
of blood 58, 127, 163, 197; as 145; primary (Eric Hobsbawm)
transmission mechanisms 166, 171 146; rebellion 10n18, 34, 36, 92,
139; reification 136; religious 137,
rabuts see chuetas 140, 141; symbolic/mythology 60,
race: as a classification system 8, 105, 141; theory 135–136, 141, 144;
156, 166–167, 170, 173, 180–181; Tupa Amaru II 31; unconsciouss
colonial Cuba 126–128; colour 136–137, 141, 143; Zapatista 30;
41, 128–130, 168, 173, 189n98; see also colonizer; power
260 Index
Sahlins, Marshall 59–63; Sahlins/ 157; end of 82; historical 22, 102;
Obeyesekere debate 61–62 imposing notions of 107, 111n94,
saints 12, 35, 80, 83n24, 84n66, 148; jump in interviews 135; linear
94, 124 views of 11, 106, 197; mechanical
shamanism 52n187, 88 12, 66–67; modern 179; mythical
social history 16, 39, 58; from 67, 196; as an object of study 17,
below 35 59, 63, 105, 196; organizing 122,
Spain: anthropology 76, 89–90; see 138; as a process 14; social 60; and
also Caro Baroja space 205n3; use of 68; see also
social classification 128, 157, chronocentrism; millenarianism
168, 174, 200; genealogical tradition 36; academic national 6,
differentiations 164, 168, 173, 11; authentic culture 10n17, 43,
175; hierarchical social order 169; 105, 198, 202, 204; as a defense
marginalization 106, 170, 188; mechanism 56; essentialization
performative power 8, 81, 109; 40; as an excess of modernity 144;
stigmatization 87, 157, 162, 163 folklore 36, 55, 125, 214, 250;
sociological imagination 2, 3, 99 invention of 105; political uses of
Stolcke, Verena, ix 1, 3, 8, 11, 13, folklore 10n20, 25, 36, 125–126;
44, 51, 106, 108–109, 126–127, see also costum
148, 152–153, 155, 169, 185, 187, transnational 113, 198; capitalism
190–191, 193, 198, 205, 217, 198; movements 201
247–248, 251 Tswana 64, 68, 138, 204
Stoler, Ann. L. 8, 68, 90–91, 93, 105,
108n19, n20, n27, n28, n29, n32, United States 16–21
110n74, n81, 118, 126, 129–132,
134, 144, 152n82, n85, n87, n88, violence: against women 131; daily
n90, n91, n92, n93, n95, 153n157, 35; Inquisition 157; political
157, 196–197, 205n6, 218, 39, 64, 101; rationalization
229, 248 188n74; symbolic 152n80;
subalternity 71, 103, 104, 110n178, theories 46n65
120; before postcolonial studies visual anthropology 80, 97–98, 130,
104, 159; subaltern studies 110n78, 135; iconography 79, 97, 98
135; subaltern subjects 5, 34, 73,
84n54, 87, 134, 136, 144, 151n67, Westernization 113
160, 180 witchcraft 15, 56, 57, 58, 74–75, 76,
86, 88, 125, 139, 146–147
theory: as a challenge for historians Wolf, Eric 69–74
4; as conformed by history 11; and world anthropologies (peripheral,
history 98–100 second anthropologies) 13, 29, 39
time: cold/hot societies 12; as a worldviews: as ethos 119, 125,
collective representation 7–8, 139; competing 80; holistic 139;
10n23, 12, 59, 73, 102, 103, 149n7, scientific 157; theological 157

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IN PRAISE OF HISTORICAL

Alexandre Coello de la Rosa and

In Praise of Historical Anthropology is based on a fundamental con-

Alexandre Coello de la Rosa is Senior Professor of Asian and Latin

Josep Lluís Mateo Dieste is Serra Hunter Associated Professor in the

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

ISBN: 978-0-367-86223-7 (hbk)

1 Anthropology and History: Uncomfortable

2 Historical-Anthropological “Masters of Thought” 54

3 Epistemologies and Methods 85

4 Colonial Systems of Power and Domination 112

5 Systems of Classification and Social Exclusion 155

Epilogue: The Dilemma of Multiculturalism 195

any substantive relationship between disciplines is determined not

3 Power and Colonialism

[…] research in history is based on finding data; research in anthropol-

1.1.1 Great Britain

Leach presented myths as living elements of history instead of the fixed,

1.1.2 United States

There is a mixing of blood, ideas, and industries, of virtues and

The book La Raza Cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (The

8 Amodio, 2010: 380, 383.

12 Krotz, 2008: 44; De la Peña, 2008: 175–7.

48 Rowe, 1964: 1–19.

72 Fernández Juárez, 2000b: 176.

96 Ventura, 2015: 53–65.

99 Turner, 1992: 5–16; Altez, 2012: 137.

I mean, whatever anthropology is, I think it is most fruitful to think in

This chapter reviews the work of a number of anthropologists whose

2.1 Julio Caro Baroja: A Modern Classic

2.2 Marshall Sahlins: Culture, Practical Reason

[…] where Western thought struggles to comprehend the history

According to Sahlins, the natives developed a mythical-practical ra-

From there it is only a small logical step to the confusion of history

2.3 Jean and John L. Comaroff: Ethnography and

• Rethink the method. At no time do the authors declare an intention

Faced with the ‘postmodern drift’, which reduced anthropology to a

Ethnography […] is not a vain attempt at literal translation […] It is

2.3.1 A Proposal for a Provisional and Reflexive Historical

• The mechanical analysis of structural time: society functions based

2.4 Eric Wolf: Anthropology and Power Anew

2.5 William Christian: Visions of a Religious

2.5.1 Observing Divine Presences

2.5.2 Ezkioga and the Republican Apocalypse:

From a methodological point of view, Christian’s work with visual an-

48 Contreras et al., 2000: 324.

I became aware of the potential offered by local archives, whose humble

In 1950, French ethnographer Michel Leiris wrote that the appearance

3.1 Interrogating the Archive

[…] the documentation they analysed shows that in English towns

Macfarlane and Thomas explained the stigmatization of old women as

3.2 Ethnography and the Colonial Archive

The application of an anthropological approach to the archives has been

Students often ask what and where is ethnography in the colonial

This distinction between prescription and praxis allows for different

This obscurity may be resolved if by the ethnographic gaze we take

Once the political role of statistics is established, however, they are

3.3 Dialogues between the Oral, the Visual