Los rostros del honor. Normas culturales y estrategias de promoción social en Chile colonial, siglo xviii by Verónica Undurraga Schüler (review)

The “faces of honor” refer to a fundamental theme of Chilean cultural formation, announces the prologue written by Pablo Rodríguez Jimenez, from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Indeed, this volume leads us into a very intense period and a peculiar place in the history of Chile: the complex and highly hierarchical urban society of eighteenth-century Santiago. The work originated from a doctoral dissertation (2008), and the introduction and first chapter consist of a useful guide that allows us to follow Verónica Undurraga Schüler’s steps into the judicial archives of the city. It provides numerous methodological tools, bibliographic points of reference, and philosophical allusions that result in a sustained and accurate syntax all through the book.

The most recent cultural and social historiography about Chile has paid attention to the putting into perspective of the legacy of the Spanish Catholic period and its persistence through Republican times (Maria Eugenia Albornoz Vásquez, Victor Brangier Peñailillo, Carolina González Undurraga). Although Undurraga Schüler does not clearly set out in this direction, her contribution to this constantly renewed and reflexive historiography offers an outstandingly well-documented opportunity for reconsidering, for instance, the ruptures caused by the Independence, occurred in 1818. Moreover, it is worth underscoring that the author relies exclusively on local judicial files preserved in the National Historical Archives of Chile, and documents retained in the Archiepiscopal Archives of Santiago. Hence, deeply inspired by the cultural history fostered by Natalie Zemon Davis, Michel De Certeau, and Roger Chartier, among others, Undurraga Schüler weaves history from judicial narratives, while she gradually reveals the social tensions through the exploration of the “uses of justice.” The author’s interrogative challenge of the field in terms of social agency, strategies, manipulation, and redefinition of norms by the social actors is remarkably innovative in the ways in which it draws on perspectives from the judicial archives of the Real Audiencia and the Capitanía General of Chile. This volume equals Alejandra Araya Espinoza and Jaime Valenzuela Márquez’s well-known works.

In spite of a 30-page chapter dedicated to the “Honour of the Origins”, the purpose of the author is not to track the birth, formation, and spread over time and space of an ancient and imported notion, the “original honour” of the Spanish Golden Age. Instead, it meticulously grasps and examines the many ways in which men and women of colonial Chile perceived and depicted their daily dissensions around the very specific and arguable notion of honour and its vast semantic. The various chapters deal successively with the scarcely translatable words honor and honra, the use of don and doña, the colonial meaning of limpieza de sangre, and the “rites of violence.” The book definitely captivates the reader, whether or not a specialist in the history of Hispanic America. With her writer’s talent, Undurraga Schüler highlights the subtle moves of a colonial society and translates them in light of the judicial records of the inhabitants of what was then a remote overseas territory.

As the author states, individuals themselves define their personal conflicts and identities when they resort to various “horizons of possibilities” in honor-based proceedings: slanders, assaults, calumnies, injuries, and homicides. Through these judicial instances, the notion of honor appears more a subjective, dynamic, and negotiated process than a mandatory and unchanging precept. The author’s precise and valuable investigation of several identities recorded in the documents aims at disclosing the constraints and movements of these communities and individuals, and becomes a central point of the book. Besides, Undurraga Schüler’s work shows that honor is a transversal issue in the colonial society of the General Captaincy of Chile and its capital city. The notion appears as...