The Moebius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico - Hardcover

Amith, Jonathan D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804748934 ISBN 13: 9780804748933

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Möbius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jonathan D. Amith is an independent scholar who has been affiliated with Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Gettysburg College, and the University of Chicago. He has previously edited a volume on the politics and culture of indigenous art: The Amate Tradition: Innovation and Protest in Mexican Art (1995).

Jonathan D. Amith is an independent scholar who has been affiliated with Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Gettysburg College, and the University of Chicago. He has previously edited a volume on the politics and culture of indigenous art: The Amate Tradition: Innovation and Protest in Mexican Art (1995).

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The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Möbius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

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The Möbius Strip explores the history, political economy, and culture of space in central Guerrero, Mexico, during the colonial period. This study is significant for two reasons. First, space comprises a sphere of contention that affects all levels of society, from the individual and his or her household to the nation-state and its mechanisms for control and coercion. Second, colonialism offers a particularly unique situation, for it invariably involves a determined effort on the part of an invading society to redefine politico-administrative units, to redirect the flow of commodities and cash, and, ultimately, to foster and construct new patterns of allegiance and identity to communities, regions, and country. Thus spatial politics comprehends the complex interaction of institutional domination and individual agency. The complexity of the diachronic transformation of space in central Guerrero is illustrated through an analysis of land tenure, migration, and commercial exchange, three salient and contested aspects of hispanic conquest. The Möbius Strip, therefore, addresses issues important to social theory and to the understanding of the processes affecting the colonialization of non-Western societies.

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The Mbius Strip

A SPATIAL HISTORY OF COLONIAL SOCIETY IN GUERRERO, MEXICOBy Jonathan D. Amith

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4893-3

Contents

List of maps.....................................................................................................................ixList of figures..................................................................................................................xiList of tables...................................................................................................................xiiiAcknowledgments..................................................................................................................xvConventions......................................................................................................................xixOrientation maps.................................................................................................................xx1. Introduction..................................................................................................................1Part 1. Terrain and Territoriality: The Natural and Social Context of Land and Property..........................................292. The Lay of the Land...........................................................................................................313. The Law of the Land: Crown Policy and Iberian Custom in the Colonization of New Spain.........................................70Part 2. Eppur si muove! The Dynamics of Economic Transformation in Rural Central Guerrero........................................1174. Land Acquisition during the Early Colonial Period.............................................................................1195. Hacienda Formation and Market Structure: Landholding in North- and South-Central Guerrero.....................................1546. Place Making and Place Breaking: Migration and the Development Cycle of Community.............................................2177. The Politics of Economy and Space: Interjurisdictional Migration into the Iguala Valley.......................................2558. Spaces of Capital and Commerce: Rural Society and the Interregional Economy of Central Guerrero...............................2929. The Transformation of Rural Society: Commercial Capital and the Monopolization of Resources...................................386Part 3. Absolute Property and Spatial Politics: Struggles for Control over Grain in the Late Colonial Period.....................45710. The Political and Moral Economy of Subsistence: State Control of Grain Markets...............................................45911. Seeds of Discord and Discontent: Grain, Regionalism, and Emerging Class Conflict.............................................497Conclusion.......................................................................................................................54512. Conclusion...................................................................................................................547Reference Matter.................................................................................................................555Glossary.........................................................................................................................557Bibliography and abbreviations used in notes.....................................................................................569Index............................................................................................................................611

Chapter One

Introduction

We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. -George Eliot "The Natural History of German Life"

The Realist and the Romantic: Visions in Historical and Anthropological Writings

Literary realism-its critique of the quixotic epitomized by Eliot's spiny phrase-is associated with ideas not now in vogue. Contemporaries of Eliot saw it as a counterweight to a morally based idealism, in which the author would present "models of irreproachable excellence for readers to imitate." The Realist author, by contrast, would often distance him- or herself from moral authority and omniscient control by feigning cognitive (though not material) ignorance of the scene created. Yet this facade of a distanced and impersonal perspective was belied by a type of structural involution in which a complex series of narrative techniques would allow an offstage presence of authorial intentionality through which morality and commentary were reintroduced into the text by a backstage door. As the literary critic David Williams has noted, "one of the paradoxes of Realism is that the novelist's passion for the real results in a fuller exploitation of the expressive possibilities of the form and a more self-conscious craftsmanship. Once the novelist has bowed out of the novel, it is necessary for him to engineer 'an elaborate orchestral or suggestive structure whereby meaning emerges-as a function of the structure itself.'" Realist authors were certainly aware of their commanding role-Flaubert was able to discover, and then state, that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"-but they would insist on a discretionary voice that would (or should) disappear behind the text, at least in comparison with the intrusive narratives that had preceded their literary revolution. In this way the Realist movement offers a counterpoint to much recent social science, for, while Realist authors receded from view, leaving behind a structural foundation of authorial intervention, (post)modern anthropologists and historians often take an almost contrary approach by directly intervening in the text, and indeed recognizing this intervention as the sine qua non of reflexive, discursive social science. Such intervention is both celebrated as a personalized vision and, somewhat paradoxically, presented as the means to achieve a heteroglossic narrative, allowing other perspectives to pierce through the rhetorical fabric-giving voice to people without voice and history to people without history.

The question of the impact of authorship-of "subjectivity" on "objectivity," and therefore of both "factual accuracy in the art of the imaginary" and its mirror image, the impact of the imagination in the proffering of facts -is but one aspect of narrative that was brought to the forefront by the Realists (and "rediscovered," in the aforementioned mirror image, by those who assert that "the notion that literary procedures pervade any work of cultural representation is a recent idea in the discipline [of anthropology]"). A second question for the Realists was the nature and identity, as well as the most adequate representation, of the subject of any given text. Here the novel (along with the painting), increasingly sought the commonality of human existence. It found this in the mundane, shared experiences of everyday life, an initially shocking-at least for late nineteenth-century literary and artistic sensibilities-descent into the most quotidian of events: a rejection of both classical ideals and the Romantic "inner vision." In history a parallel movement turned away from the narratives of great men and their politics and wars and toward a new social "history without names," one of the early practitioners of which was Michelet, who aspired to write "the history of those who have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804748934
• ISBN 13: 9780804748933
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 688
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland