Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History (review)

Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History. By James Lockhart. (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2000. xxiv + 397 pp., preface, appendix, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth, $22.95 paper.)

This is a collection of essays by James Lockhart, a distinguished historian of colonial Latin America who has produced major studies of Spanish and Indian societies and cultures in both Peru and Mexico. Written over a thirty-year period, four of the twelve essays in the volume are new, and eight have been previously published, though the latter have been revised or expanded. Nine of the chapters originated as lectures, and some have a colloquial, even personal, tone. The emphasis throughout is not on primary research but rather on historiography, matters of craft, and the larger implications of the author's substantive work. The book is organized chronologically, beginning with Lockhart's well-known articles on "Encomienda and Hacienda" and "The Social History of Early Latin America," then shifting to analyses of Spanish life in sixteenth-century Peru and Indian (primarily Nahua) cultures and languages, and concluding with an intellectual memoir in which the author looks back on his formation as a scholar and situates his work at the intersections of history and the companion disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, and art history.

The cumulative result is a varied, yet also surprisingly coherent, set of writings. Not all chapters will appeal to all readers, but just about anyone with even a passing interest in colonial Spanish America will find something to appreciate here. Lockhart's oeuvre is wide-ranging, often crossing boundaries into other fields—such as linguistics—yet retaining a central conceptual and methodological core that gives it unity and coherence. The clearest statement of this comes in chapter 12, "A Historian and the Disciplines," where Lockhart reflects on his own work. Readers interested in intellectual biography should read this chapter first.

One characteristic of nearly all of Lockhart's research has been an abiding interest in continuity, from the time of the Spanish Conquest in the sixteenth century through the years of the late colony. Encomienda and hacienda, for example, while legally distinct, are found to share a number of social and economic dimensions that make it possible to locate the beginnings of the great estate in the Conquest period. Likewise, transatlantic Spanish business enterprises in Peru and Mexico were built on a persisting set of practices that are best understood as "a continuous social and economic history leading from the first moments of the arrival of the Spaniards among Indians unbroken into the following centuries" (147). Lockhart argues that the concept of indigenous resistance is of limited utility for areas like Mexico and Peru, and he finds ample evidence of receptivity to European culture based principally on the convergence of the societies in contact. Yet his well-known concept of Double Mistaken Identity and the language-based, three-staged model of culture contact, applied here to the Nahuas, Mayas, and Quechuas, place the accent firmly on the survival of pre-Hispanic cultural features, even if in new and sometimes culturally composite forms.

Methodologically, a hallmark of Lockhart's historiography is close attention to the lives, careers, and concerns of particular individuals through documents they themselves produced—either directly, as in the case of private letters, or indirectly, as in the wills, bills of sale, and other notarial documents recorded by local community scribes. Such common source material provides the link between Lockhart's first major study, Spanish Peru (1968), and his more recent The Nahuas After the Conquest (1992). Lockhart's approach to history is empirical, textually oriented, and sensitive to cultural meaning. He excels at cultural interpretation of the lives of ordinary people and the contexts of daily life, and much of his work is informed by a strong ethnographic sensibility. However, as he is the first to...