Current Historical Research
Between Magic and Medicine: Colonial Yucatec Healing and the Spanish Atlantic World
(an Ethnohistory of Medicine with the Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press)
Sickness, disease, and social disorder filled the colonial worlds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This work examines the history of cooperation in local practices of healing and the production of medical knowledge in colonial Latin America. Based on Spanish records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and Maya manuscript books of medicine, Between Magic and Medicine explores how distinct social and ethnic groups produced and exchanged ideas of sickness and the body in the context of longstanding indigenous knowledge systems and the early modern Enlightenment. From shared experiences, Yucatecos forged material and social networks centered on sickness and healing. Spaniards sought out African healers to treat the perils of everyday sickness. Castas looked to Maya herbalists for remedies for epidemic diseases. The infirmed, in spite of ethnicity or status, entered the unsanctioned realm of healing, where magic and medicine intertwined. This work brings attention to how social groups appropriated, re-fashioned, and employed local knowledge to develop a distinctive system of remediation that lay contrary to the prescribed political order of colonialism. By detailing these networks of healing, this work uncovers the everyday experiences of cooperation that were critical to the maintenance of colonial societies in the New World.
(an Ethnohistory of Medicine with the Omohundro Institute/University of North Carolina Press)
Sickness, disease, and social disorder filled the colonial worlds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This work examines the history of cooperation in local practices of healing and the production of medical knowledge in colonial Latin America. Based on Spanish records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and Maya manuscript books of medicine, Between Magic and Medicine explores how distinct social and ethnic groups produced and exchanged ideas of sickness and the body in the context of longstanding indigenous knowledge systems and the early modern Enlightenment. From shared experiences, Yucatecos forged material and social networks centered on sickness and healing. Spaniards sought out African healers to treat the perils of everyday sickness. Castas looked to Maya herbalists for remedies for epidemic diseases. The infirmed, in spite of ethnicity or status, entered the unsanctioned realm of healing, where magic and medicine intertwined. This work brings attention to how social groups appropriated, re-fashioned, and employed local knowledge to develop a distinctive system of remediation that lay contrary to the prescribed political order of colonialism. By detailing these networks of healing, this work uncovers the everyday experiences of cooperation that were critical to the maintenance of colonial societies in the New World.
The Morality of the Moon: Science, Fable, and Fiction in Enlightenment Mexico
(a Microhistory of Science in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic World)
From 1773 to 1777, Mexican Inquisition officials held and interrogated a Franciscan friar for his supposed "perverse doctrines, infernal language, and acerbic wit." The accused, a peninsular Spaniard by the name of Manuel Antonio de Rivas, outraged his colleagues for both his sharp tongue and interest in dangerous, unorthodox ideas. In particular, creole elites of the colony were outraged by his embrace of local, often Mayan, cosmographic perspectives and his celebration of Enlightenment ideas of physics and astronomy. Inquisition officials uncovered his numerous suspect works of his own creation in his possession, including a twenty-two page fable called the "Syzigias y quadraturas lunares." Set in the year 2510, the manuscript focuses on a French inventor's exploration of the moon, where he discovers a civilization organized and ruled by empirically driven science, but also rooted in ancient myths and traditions. Rivas' futuristic, fabilistic, and purportedly-scientific work perplexed Inquisition officials, who decried it as heresy and buried it in the legal records of the Holy Office. How did a Spanish friar write a work that blended unorthodox Mayan ideas and censored Enlightenment principles from an isolated province of the Spanish colonies? The Morality of the Moon looks at the localized understanding and production of knowledge in the early modern Atlantic world through a microhistorical examination of the works and worlds of fray Manuel Antonio de Rivas. Rivas, a peninsular Spaniard and a Franciscan, stood as an intense critic of the intellectual state of the Spanish Empire. Not only had creoles ignored the richness of local and indigenous knowledge systems related to natural history and philosophy, they rejected the discourse of discovery central to the Enlightenment.
(a Microhistory of Science in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic World)
From 1773 to 1777, Mexican Inquisition officials held and interrogated a Franciscan friar for his supposed "perverse doctrines, infernal language, and acerbic wit." The accused, a peninsular Spaniard by the name of Manuel Antonio de Rivas, outraged his colleagues for both his sharp tongue and interest in dangerous, unorthodox ideas. In particular, creole elites of the colony were outraged by his embrace of local, often Mayan, cosmographic perspectives and his celebration of Enlightenment ideas of physics and astronomy. Inquisition officials uncovered his numerous suspect works of his own creation in his possession, including a twenty-two page fable called the "Syzigias y quadraturas lunares." Set in the year 2510, the manuscript focuses on a French inventor's exploration of the moon, where he discovers a civilization organized and ruled by empirically driven science, but also rooted in ancient myths and traditions. Rivas' futuristic, fabilistic, and purportedly-scientific work perplexed Inquisition officials, who decried it as heresy and buried it in the legal records of the Holy Office. How did a Spanish friar write a work that blended unorthodox Mayan ideas and censored Enlightenment principles from an isolated province of the Spanish colonies? The Morality of the Moon looks at the localized understanding and production of knowledge in the early modern Atlantic world through a microhistorical examination of the works and worlds of fray Manuel Antonio de Rivas. Rivas, a peninsular Spaniard and a Franciscan, stood as an intense critic of the intellectual state of the Spanish Empire. Not only had creoles ignored the richness of local and indigenous knowledge systems related to natural history and philosophy, they rejected the discourse of discovery central to the Enlightenment.
Ongoing Anthropological Research
Contemporary Lacandón Maya Ethnobotany and Medicine
(Ethnography among the Lacandón Maya) |
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Scholarly Editing
New Colonial Histories of Latin America
This book series showcases new scholarship on Spanish and Portuguese colonial history, from innovative approaches to transregional and transcontinental comparisons to original empirical studies of local history. Current research in the field has been enriched by new discoveries in the archival collections of national and especially regional repositories beyond the imperial centers, and informed by compelling conversations about world and global history that transcend any one geographical subfield. Particularly lively areas of comparative interest include: legal pluralism and local history; natural history and knowledge production; deep histories of borderlands; colonial commodities and the origins of world trade; material culture and everyday life; and geographies of urban and rural development.
This book series showcases new scholarship on Spanish and Portuguese colonial history, from innovative approaches to transregional and transcontinental comparisons to original empirical studies of local history. Current research in the field has been enriched by new discoveries in the archival collections of national and especially regional repositories beyond the imperial centers, and informed by compelling conversations about world and global history that transcend any one geographical subfield. Particularly lively areas of comparative interest include: legal pluralism and local history; natural history and knowledge production; deep histories of borderlands; colonial commodities and the origins of world trade; material culture and everyday life; and geographies of urban and rural development.
Medieval and Renaissance Latin America
The so-called New World was a repository of medieval hopes and mythologies and also a product of advances in Early Modern European cartography. But Native American civilizations were not simply waiting to be discovered. The peoples of the Americas, and those of Africa who were brought to the Americas, were impacted by European exploration and colonization. They had their own historical trajectories and both alternately adapted to, and were transformed by, the Old World. The Old World, in its turn, was impacted no less profoundly by the Americas. Western thought, economy, and art continue to be transformed due to their interaction with the indigenous and transplanted African cultures of what became known as Spanish and Portuguese America. This new book series focuses on that area as a source of creation, syncretism, historical confrontation and interchange. The late Medieval/Early Modern period in Latin America saw the rise of new nations, heterogeneous in every sense of the word.
The so-called New World was a repository of medieval hopes and mythologies and also a product of advances in Early Modern European cartography. But Native American civilizations were not simply waiting to be discovered. The peoples of the Americas, and those of Africa who were brought to the Americas, were impacted by European exploration and colonization. They had their own historical trajectories and both alternately adapted to, and were transformed by, the Old World. The Old World, in its turn, was impacted no less profoundly by the Americas. Western thought, economy, and art continue to be transformed due to their interaction with the indigenous and transplanted African cultures of what became known as Spanish and Portuguese America. This new book series focuses on that area as a source of creation, syncretism, historical confrontation and interchange. The late Medieval/Early Modern period in Latin America saw the rise of new nations, heterogeneous in every sense of the word.
