Memoria Americana. Cuadernos de Etnohistoria

Preliminaries: authorities, credits, and table of contents of Volume 32. 2

Comité Editorial Memoria Americana — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:31:33 +0000

Indigenous peoples and justice in Latin America: a historicalanthropological reflection on the concept of legal pluralism

Caroline Cunill, Rodrigo Llanes — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:22:39 +0000

This paper compares the theoretical justification, main characteristics, and -alleged- beneficiaries of systems of justice that developed during two moments of Latin American history: the colonial period and the period that runs from the constitutional reforms in the 1990s. During both moments, differentiated ways to accessing justice were implemented for different categories of peoples or social groups. Our goal is to analyze the arguments employed and the interests at stake when defending a differentiated access to justice; the conditions in which indigenous courts were created; and the recognition of autochthonous normative systems by the Spanish crown and the national states. We will develop this reflection, which entwines historical and anthropological approaches, along with historiographical considerations regarding the way in which the concept of legal pluralism has developed, in the last decades, as an analytical category to investigate Latin American normative systems in diverse moments of its history, and how alternative proposals have emerged.

An altar of “beheaded cultures”. Archaeology and sacrifice at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (Mexico)

Paulina Alvarez — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:36:06 +0000

The National Museum of Anthropology (Museo Nacional de Antropología) is key in the construction of an image of Mexico and of populations marked as the “other” to the national mestizo subject. The museum presents the progressive development of “archaeological cultures” from the first settlement to its climax in a central room dedicated to the “Mexica empire”, whose fall suspends the temporality of the narrative in the war of conquest in 1521. On the upper floor, the “ethnographic cultures” are arranged as another type of remnant in contiguity with the remains of the past, in dialogue with the archaeological cultures. The presentation of human remains displayed in sacrificial scenes furthermore insinuates a kind of “mimetic magic” conjured up with archaeological images and discourses, through which the contemporary state embodies the sovereign powers of the remote past and thus legitimizes the violence of the more recent past.

Cultural mediation, power and conflicts in Jesuit missions of Paraguay, 17th and 18th centuries

Mercedes Avellaneda — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:38:43 +0000

This article focuses on the cultural mediation of the Jesuits within the Paraguay and Río de la Plata missions. It analyzes the control mechanisms the Provincials and Superiors of the Society of Jesus employed to ensure the internal discipline of the Jesuits in the construction of a Christian/civilized society. It also explores the conflicts and indigenous resistance that the missionaries faced in the day-to-day life in the missions. We worked with private documentation produced by Generals, Provincials and Superiors fathers who wrote of or visited the missions, which allowed us to reconstruct a first-hand historical ethnography of its protagonists. We address the attempt of configuring a new social order within the missions and how interethnic relations between the missionaries and the reduced Indians were transformed.

Villages disputes in the borderlands of colonial Paraguay: the paradigm of conflict among Jesuit reductions

Rodrigo Maurer — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:41:35 +0000

This article contextualizes the province of Paraguay between the 17th and 18th centuries, taking as its main consideration historical narratives that, for some reason, indicate situations of conflict among villages. In practice, conflicts between two or more Jesuit reductions were recorded in order to claim property over poorly defined territories or important subsistence and commercial products of the time, such as heads of cattle. Ánalyzed in this way, and however unusual the outcomes may have been, the episodes of litigation
allow us to roughly measure certain regional characteristics, oppositions and defenses of local identities. In short, they reveal an incessant effort on the part of the Society of Jesus to interfere in the ancestral memory of the original peoples in order to “adjust” them according to the measures that the missionaries considered recognizable or necessary.

Indigenous strategies around salt commerce and Salinas Grandes control between 1808 and 1810

Carla Dátola — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:53:05 +0000

This article analyzes the arrival of three indigenous delegations to the city of Buenos Aires in June 1809. These delegations were distinguished because some leaders presented proposals to supply salt to the capital, contemplating the periodicity of the supply, the quantity and the price to agree. In the negotiations the caciques also expressed their positions on the hispano-creoles access to the salt of Salinas Grandes. These delegations took place after the expedition to Salinas Grandes in 1808, commanded by Juan Ignacio Terrada and, at the same time, constituted the prelude to the negotiations for the expedition to Salinas, under the command of Pedro Andrés García in 1810. This article compare the discourses and strategies of the caciques regarding the salt trade and the Spanish-Creole exploitation of Salinas Grandes in these three moments, in order to identify the participating leaders and analyze their positions in the diplomatic negotiations considering the field of alliances that these leaders built in the analyzed period.

Book review about: Cuerpos bajo vigilancia: las mujeres en las misiones jesuíticas del Chaco, by Beatriz Vitar (2022)

Lucía Outeiral Imposti — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:58:15 +0000

Historiography has traditionally dismissed the study of the practices and roles of indigenous women in the colonial Gran Chaco, replicating the arguments of Jesuit sources without questioning them critically enough. In her new book, Cuerpos bajo guardia: las mujeres en las misiones jesuíticas del Chaco, Beatriz Vitar presents the results of the research she has conducted on the subject throughout her career and analyzes the sources, beyond what they explicitly say, in order to retrieve the indigenous female reality hidden behind ecclesiastical pens. The purpose of this text is to review the abovementioned book.

Book review about: Sobre comunidades, archivos y fuentes. Experiencias y reflexiones desde un abordaje interdisciplinario (antropología e historia), by Roxana Boixadós y Lorena Rodríguez (eds., 2024)

Carina Lucaioli — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 12:59:53 +0000

This book, the result of a research project, reflects both the patient work carried out as a team and the individual contributions of the ten researchers who participate. It is composed of an introduction and nine chapters, one of them co-authored. Far from closing the issue-problem of communities, these authors accept the challenge of its polysemy, explore it from various angles, hint at some contours and, above all, invite us to contemplate new variables.