State Magic and Colonial History

There is a room in Lima's Museo del Congreso y Antiguo Tribunal de la Inquisición (Museum of the Congress and Inquisition) where one can witness the ironies that arise when modern legal measures are merged with religious symbolism. Christ is on the cross, seemingly frozen in bloodied agony; and yet, through the trickery of ropes and hinges, he is able to move his head in judgment. During a trial, this trick Christ was placed before a curtain, behind which an inquisitor would manipulate the head in answer to the question of the accused person's status. In the most extreme dramatization of bureaucratic judgment imaginable, the religious terms of "old" Europe were exploited by new kinds of testimony and adjudication. No sooner had colonial Spain pioneered the racist and bureaucratic procedures of the modern state's pursuit of useful legal truths, than it had rendered the same, to our contemporary sensibilities, deeply absurd.

Though it does not cite that particular scene, Irene Silverblatt's fascinating book on the Spanish colonial origins of the modern state thrives on characteristically ironic emblems of "state magic," urging us to see such spectacles as not so absurd. Locating the birth of modernity in the Spanish viceroyalty, and relying heavily on a theoretical drumbeat to keep the historical rhythm, Silverblatt offers Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault as two of many authorizing theorists. Bourdieu in particular shows how "bureaucratic claims jostled with dynastic privilege during state-making's early stages, and . . . suggest[s] that this conflict accounted for ideological changes both accompanying and spurring the autonomy of state institutions"( 10). Although the Spanish Inquisition had a hybrid genealogy that defined the burgeoning Spanish state to its core—joining modern bureaucratic procedures with religious and custom-driven raisons d'etre—the eventual triumph of modernity is, for Silverblatt, not hard to discern. Silverblatt contends that the Inquisition bore all the markers of Bourdieu's "jostling," indicating the birth pangs of the incipient autonomous modern state. Even more interesting, Silverblatt writes of the Inquisition as a "state structure in the making," a distinct organism, encoded with modernity's DNA, rather than a precursor or historical anti-type against which modernity would later be designed (a view traditionally held in Anglo-America): "As an institution it was developing a structure and logic apart from dynastic boundaries; it was formally organized according to principles of rationality; it was imagined as being greater than the sum of its individual officeholders; and it was careful to legitimate its practices through an appeal to public welfare" (10–11).

It should not be surprising that this book is as much a meditation on the theory of the modern state as it is a history of the Inquisition. And when seen in this light, it is startlingly insightful. In the book's prologue, Silverblatt's theoretical overture involves a series of pronouncements on the modern nation we speak incessantly about, but rarely articulate clearly. Clarity is often lost in analytical contradictions. We fetishize the state as supremely benign because it is rational, but in the process, "deny history"( 16) and isolate the sources of the modern European state's assumption of global superiority (relying on Fernando Coronil's notion of "Occidentalism" and Michael Taussig's excavation of the logic of violence at the core of state coercions). Through this historical and theoretical heuristic, Silverblatt delivers us to the matter of race as it figures in the rise of the modern state—in particular, to Hannah Arendt, and her invaluable notion of "race thinking." It is Arendt, after all, who most effectively points to the fused interests of race thinking and bureaucracy, consolidating a theory of nationalism around social and cultural knowledges that were rooted in stories about biological superiority.

This is the clinical way to put it, of course, what with the brutal reality of racism in the promotion of the Spanish empire. The dutifully theoretical scaffolding Silverblatt erects in the prologue functions as a logical prelude to the compellingly fleshed out...