Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru - Softcover

Burns, Kathryn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822348683 ISBN 13: 9780822348689

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth?

Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kathryn Burns is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru, also published by Duke University Press.

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"Kathryn Burns leads us into the archive through a fine-grained historical ethnography of notarial practice and its social context in colonial Cuzco. Gracefully-written and engaging, yet rigorous in its use of historical materials and its social analysis, "Into The Archive"'s reading of the colonial notarial office as a space of political and social negotiation and intrigue will transform our appreciation of these repositories and our understanding of the colonial Latin American 'lettered city.' No longer transparent, the very production of archival documents becomes a space in which colonial society is revealed."--Joanne Rappaport, author of "The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes"

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INTO THE ARCHIVE

Writing and Power in Colonial PeruBy Kathryn Burns

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4868-9

Contents

Illustrations............................................ixPreface..................................................xiAcknowledgments..........................................xiiiIntroduction.............................................11. Of Notaries, Templates, and Truth.....................202. Interests.............................................423. Custom................................................684. Power in the Archives.................................955. Archives as Chessboards...............................124Epilogue.................................................148Notes....................................................153Glossary.................................................205Works Consulted..........................................209Index....................................................239

Chapter One

OF NOTARIES, TEMPLATES, AND TRUTH

* * *

Los libros y letras andan por todo el mundo. -B. de Albornoz

La Edad de Oro, the Golden Age: this resonant phrase names a time when Spanish imperial might reached its apogee. Galleons full of American silver sailed the seas, from Mexico and Peru to Manila and Seville, giving ballast to the Spanish monarchs' heady sense of themselves as "lords of all the world." Spanish arts and letters flourished, and fashionable people throughout Europe wore severe black garments so as to look more Spanish. When in 1584 workers put the finishing touches on the monumental monastic palace of El Escorial, the power of the Spanish Habsburgs had never seemed greater. But this was also an age of notorious extremes and tensions. Visitors to the peninsula saw deepening poverty, haughty aristocrats, and a virulent "religious racism" that made life especially dangerous for the descendants of Jews and Moors. Rapid price inflation quadrupled the cost of basic commodities. Disease and famine carried off thousands, especially in Castile. Litigiousness increased dramatically; so, too, did the presence of beggars.

Into this world of sharpening contradictions a new literary antihero was born: the rogue, or pcaro. Like the biblical Lazarus, the picaresque narrator of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) revives after being laid low, not once but several times. His first-person immediacy instantly draws the reader in. Fatherless young Lzaro goes out into the world to live by his wits, and proceeds to serve a series of masters. These include a beggar, a priest, a petty nobleman, and a seller of papal indulgences, each of whom turns out to be an artful con man, worse than the last. Lazarillo succeeds brilliantly as a send-up of the supposed pillars of Spanish society while posing deeply troubling questions: Can anyone be taken at his word? Behind the faade of appearances, who or what is true?

This was the perfect literary expression for an age of anxiety. And Lazarillo had many literary progeny, including the enormously popular two-part Guzmn de Alfarache (1599, 1604). Its eponymous narrator must also make his way in an uncertain, unstable world, without benefit of family ties or wealth. Guzmn is the son of a shady merchant, and pursues one dubious get-rich-quick scheme after another (all the while denouncing the pervasive influence of money, and the arrogance and power of the rich). He attaches himself to a series of masters and learns to beg, borrow, and steal. Along the way, he sees much greater rogues than himself-merchants, clergymen, captains at arms-engaged in the large-scale equivalent of begging, borrowing, and stealing. Guzmn constantly gets into trouble, but they do just fine, even though from Guzmn's perspective they are the true leeches of society's lifeblood.

Everything is potentially for sale in the pcaro's world-even the sworn, documented truth produced by notaries. The figure of the notary makes only a brief walk-on appearance in Lazarillo, but appears early and often in Guzmn. He is a particular kind of merchant, a word merchant. And he is most emphatically not to be trusted. "Before it slips my mind," Guzmn narrates in the novel's opening pages, "listen to the Good Friday sermon preached by a learned priest in the church of San Gil in Madrid." The priest (in Guzmn's reported speech) inventories the many different kinds of sinners he has steered toward reform in the course of his long career. All showed signs of true redemption, except for notaries.

I really don't know how they confess or who absolves them-those who abuse their powers, that is-because they report and write down whatever they please, and for two coins or to please a friend or lover ... they take away people's lives, honor, and property, opening the way for countless sins. They are insatiably greedy, with a canine hunger and an infernal fire that burns in their souls, which makes them gobble up other people's assets and swallow them whole.... So it seems to me that whenever one of them is saved-since they can't all be as bad as those I've described-the angels must say joyfully to one another as he enters paradise, "Laetamini in Domino. A notary in heaven? That's new, that's new."

With Guzmn, the picaresque took off in popularity, along with the stock figure of the greedy, conniving notary. In Francisco de Quevedo's Vida del buscn llamado don Pablos (1626), another highly successful contribution to the genre, the protagonist Pablos falls into jail and bribes a notary to help him. First Pablos gets an earful of the man's boastful omnipotence:

"'Believe me, sir, it all depends on us.... I've sent more innocent men to the galleys for pleasure than there are letters in a lawsuit. Now trust me and I'll get you out safe and sound.'" Next the notary makes sure entire clauses are expunged from the trial record, and gets his man released on probation. But Pablos immediately falls into the clutches of another notary, whose roof tiles he has accidentally broken. He is thrashed and bound by the man and his servants. Then the notary starts drawing up a written indictment of Pablos: "There were some keys rattling in my pocket, so he said, and he wrote down that they were skeleton keys, even though he saw them and it was obvious they weren't.... All this was happening on the roof. It didn't matter that they were a little nearer heaven; they still told lies." Pablos spends a sleepless night considering his cruel fate. Recalling the notary's "pages and pages of indictment" of him, Pablos concludes that "nothing grows as fast as your guilt when you're in the hands of a notary."

Nor was the stereotype of the bad notary limited to high cultural products. Notaries were the butt of dozens of common sayings, as picked up in early modern compendia of popular adages. They gave people a close shave: "Escribano, puta y barbero, pacen en un prado y van por un sendero" (Notaries, whores, and barbers: all pasture together and follow the same path). They had no souls or human warmth: "Escribano y difunto, todo es uno" (Between a notary and a dead man, there's no difference). By their pens they could make black appear white, then turn it back again: "Pluma de escribano, de negro hace blanco; y a la vuelta de un pelo, de blanco hace negro." You couldn't hope to win a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822348683
• ISBN 13: 9780822348689
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland