Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (review)

This book delivers much of what it promises so boldly in the title: a well-reasoned and richly documented argument as to how the Spanish Inquisition in the seventeenth century viceroyalty of Peru became the agent of the kind of "state-thinking" and "race-thinking" that were essential to the full fledged "modern" European nation-states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historical anthropologist Irene Silverblatt departs from Hannah Arendt's notion that the classificatory schemes of power and statecraft visited by European colonial empires upon colonized others during the nineteenth century created the type of totalizing control that modern, fascist states perfected in the twentieth. She pushes Arendt's paradigm back to the seventeenth century and places it in the New World center of the first modern colonial empire, Spain. She follows Foucault in portraying the seventeenth century as the watershed moment of engendering and envisioning the state as autonomous, regulating its subjects and creating entirely new social categories. Bourdieu is the source of Silverblatt's notion about the formation of bureaucratic cadres that create new procedures, forms of reasoning, and knowledge that would challenge dynastic procedures. She especially stresses Philip Abrams's idea—later flushed out by Corrigan and Sayer—that the modern state was a historical construct that became fetishized and naturalized, thus covering up its ideological base as a new tool kit for fields of power.

Silverblatt focuses her empirical exposition of these arguments on two groups that became the victims of this new state-thinking in the colonial Andes: the New Christians accused of secret "judaizing" and native Andeans. Both groups were racialized and recast as dangerous subverters of the God-given moral and political order of the modern colonial state. The first chapter traces the inquisitorial legal proceedings against several prominent victims of Lima's 1635 complicidad grande, in which more than one hundred New Christians were prosecuted for secret "judaizing" and more than thirty suffered the ultimate punishment of being burnt on the stake, accounting for about a third of all autos da fé in the nearly three centuries of Spanish colonial rule in Peru. Silverblatt here aims to reveal the subjective experiences of the victims. The "truth" of the judaizing practices of the accused was blurred by the very inquisitorial process with its reliance on torture, asthe victims/protagonists repeatedly changed their testimony from reaffirming their innocence and Christian faith to confessing. The following chapter outlines the "modern" bureaucratic procedures of the Inquisition, its adherence to rules and regulations, its hierarchical structure of decision making and bureaucratic infighting, and the central role the Inquisition played in the political construction of the empire and the definition of a Spanish state ideology (heavily imbued with a certain brand of Catholic orthodoxy). Subsequent chapters portray the mystification of state power—the portrayal of the Inquisition as omnipotent, saving the purity of the colonial body politic from racial and religious subversions—coupled to the fallibility of the bureaucrats revealed in reversals of judgment; the construction of a Spanish national identity that became increasingly racialized as the definitions of "Portuguese" (Jews) and Indians themselves converted rigid religious and political doctrines and fears into racialized categories in bureaucratic church and crown procedures; the growing preoccupation with a separate and seemingly uncontrollable indigenous cultural sphere often identified with Incaic traditions; and the rise of an "anticolonial ethos" among many indigenous groups in the Andes, rallying around a notion and practice of Indianness separate from and in opposition to the demeaning, racialized, and distrustful construct of the Spaniards. Silverblatt is eager to draw the arc to Western notions and practices of the state by emphasizing that these "subterranean" colonial processes form the blind spots of naturalized modern state powers.

Historians of the early modern colonial world and the Andean region in particular will welcome this well-researched and cogently argued work for placing the "periphery" at the center of...