The Middle Period in Latin America: Values and Attitudes in the 17th-19th Centuries 9781685855949

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The Middle Period in Latin America

The Middle Period in Latin America Values and Attitudes in the 17th-19th Centuries edited by

Mark D. Szuchman

Lynne Rienner Publishers

•

Boulder & London

Published in the United States of America by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 1989 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-55587-138-3 (hc : alk. paper) Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

To

Lenore a habit of heart and mind

Contents

List of Tables and Figures

ix

The Contributors

xi

Preface

xiii

1 The Middle Period in Latin American History: Values in Search of Explanations MarkD. Szuchman

1

2 From Mentalite to Mentality: The Implications of a Novelty Howard Kaminsky

19

3 The Triumph of Colonial Christianity in the Central Andes: Guilt, Good Conscience, and Indian Piety Manuel Burga

33

4 Death in Western Colonial Mexico: Its Place in Village and Peasant Life Murdo J. MacLeod

51

5 The Raw and the Cooked: Elite and Popular Ideology in Mexico, 1800-1821 Eric Van Young

15

6 Between the Kingdom and the Wilderness: The Mentalite of Settlers in Colonial Sao Paulo Alida C. Metcalf

103

7 Trouble Between Men and Women: Machismo on Nineteenth-Century Estancias John Charles Chasteen

123

vii

viii

CONTENTS

8 A Challenge to the Patriarchs: Love Among the Youth in Nineteenth-Centmy Argentina Mark D. Szuchman

141

9 The Liberal Concept of Charity: Beneficencia Applied toPuertoRico,1821-1868 Teresita Mart(nez-Vergne

167

Index

185

About The Book

193

Tables and Figures

TABLES

3.1 Regional Distribution of Capellanfas

37

3.2 Amounts Invested in Capellanfas per Designated Period

42

3.3 Average Capellanfas Investments per Decade, Seventeenth Century

43

4.1 Burials in Guadalajara Villages, Eighteenth Century

60

6.1 Settlement Patterns of the Known Descendants of the Original Founders of Paxruu'ba

111

6.2 Settlement Patterns of the Descendants of Mariana Pais, Great-Great-Granddaughter of Susana Dias and Manoel Fernandes Ramos, Founders of Paxruu'ba

116

8.1 Average Age Differences Between Married Heads of Households, Buenos Aires, 1810-1860

144

FIGURES

3.1 Chaplaincies in Archdiocese of Lima, 1550-1689

35

3.2 Distribution of Chaplaincies, Archdiocese of Lima, 1550-1689

36

3.3 Indian Chaplaincies, 1550-1689

51

ix

The Contributors

MANUEL BURGA is professor and director of the School of History at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru. He took his doctorate at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) in 1973. He is the author of De la encomienda a Ia hacienda capitalista (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1976), Apogeo y crisis de Ia repUblica aristocrdtica (with Alberto FloresGalindo), and Nacimiento de una utopia. Muerte y resurrecci6n de los Incas (Lima, 1988), among other works on economic and social history of the Andean regions. JOHN CHARLES CHAS1EEN is assistant professor of history at Bates College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1988. He has delivered several papers intetpreting nineteenthcentury politics and insurgency within the Brazilian and Uruguayan regions and is the author of articles that have appeared in South Eastern Latinamericanist, Hoy es historia, and The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, eel. Lyman Johnson (University of New Mexico Press, 1989). HOWARD KAMINSKY is professor of history at Florida International University. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1952. He is the author of A History of the Hussite Revolution (University of California Press, 1967), Simon de Cramaud and the Great Schism (Rutgers University Press, 1983), and Simon de Cramaud. De substraccione obediencie (The Medieval Academy, 1984). In addition, his articles on the medieval polity and the Church have appeared in Speculum, Church History, and other journals. MURDO J. MACLEOD is professor of history at the University of Florida, where he took his doctorate in 1962. He is the author of Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (University of xi

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THE CONTRIBUTORS

CalifOrnia Press, 1973), and his numerous articles have appeared in the Latin American Research Review, Peasant Studies, and other joumals. TERESITA MARTINEZ-VERGNE is assistant professor of history at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. She received her doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985. Her work on nineteenth-century Caribbean history has appeared in the Journal of Caribbean History, and The Modern Caribbean, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). ALIDA METCALF is assistant professor of history at Trinity University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1983. Her research findings on eighteenth-century Brazil have appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review, Estudos Economicos, and elsewhere. MARK D. SZUCHMAN is professor of history at Florida International University. He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1976. He is the author of Order. Family, and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810-1860 (Stanford University Press, 1988) and Mobility and Integration in Urban Argentina: C6rdoba in the Liberal Era (The University of Texas Press, 1980), and his articles have appeared in various journals, including The Latin American Research Review, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and the Journal ofInterdisciplinary History. ERIC VAN YOUNG is associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978. His works include Hacienda and Market in

Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region,1675-1820 (University ofCaliforniaPress,l981), and his articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Hispanic American Historical Review, and the Latin American Research Review.

Preface

This book is the end product of a conference I organized around the theme of historical mentalities in Latin America during the period following the sixteenth-century conquests and prior to the export-led boom of the late nineteenth century. Entitled "The Hidden Engines of Change: Values and Attitudes in Latin American History," the conference took place on the campus of Florida International University in the spring of 1987. Its goal was an exploration of the potential of mentalite as an explanatory variable of change and continuity in the Latin American past The participants at that conference included Eric Van Young, Murdo MacLeod, Howard Kaminsky, Teresita Martinez-Vergne, Alida Metcalf, and myself, while Robert M. Levine provided insightful comments. It turned out to be an exciting and rewarding experience -yet we realized that, for the sake of testing and enhancing the findings of the original presenters, opportunities had to be sought to incorporate additional case studies of regional and temporal areas. I was fortunate in having colleagues who shared freely their suggestions in this regard and who provided me with information regarding scholars whose research would fit the thematic emphasis and paradigmatic design of the original conference. I would like to single out for special acknowledgment two colleagues. Professor Jose Deustua, a visiting professor in the Department of History at FlU, exchanged ideas with me and provided fascinating comparisons between the Andean and Pampean experiences. His interest and energy resulted in the collaboration of Manuel Burga, thereby broadening the thematic and spatial coverage of the book. Similarly, my discussions with Joe Tulchin on the topic of mentalite and the applicability of attitudinal approaches to Latin American history yielded the fine work of John Charles Chasteen for inclusion here. The research area of mental dispositions borrows heavily from other disciplines, of course. It is also a field of inquiry that always leaves us asking xiii

xiv PREFACE

questions. Friends and colleagues who patiently listened to mine, and who provided me with new ideas (and salutary doubts about my own), include Stuart Voss, Brad Bums, Howard Kaminsky, Fritz Schwaller, Carlos Mayo, and Jaimie Melton. Finally, the financial and human resources of Florida International University were put at the disposal of the conference and the subsequent manuscript preparation. I am grateful to the individuals who provided the essential funding, including Mark B. Rosenberg, director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center, James A. Mao, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Vice-President Paul Gallagher. Elena Maubrey tackled manuscript preparations with perfection and diligence, a rare combination.

-Mark D. Szuchman

1 The Middle Period in Latin American History: Values in Search of Explanations MARK D. SZUCHMAN

The ancient Romans thought that the power of speech distinguished humans from other forms of life and made us superior to them all. By such formuJations they meant that in addition to the obvious advantages of human thought and sensibility, language gave us the ability to ttansmit the culture. The classical concept of human leadership as expressed in rhetoric was of comse central to the ancient Greeks and Romans, both of whom emphasized it as the basis for public action and discourse: Thought and speech, in other words, provided the sensory medium of citizenship.l This was as it should have been in a society in which the participants in public action were reJatively few and at a time when the circles of power were intimately or at least sufficiently known to all participants in the political and social games. By the late nineteenth century this was no longer possible, and the "sciences of man"-particularly sociology, anthropology, and psychology-were pointing to other means of communication through which we could anive at an understanding of human action, albeit tentative and sometimes in contradiction to the rhetoric that had been trusted by so many generations of historians to be the reliable representation of thought Action, not only rhetoric, was being established as the informative source for analysis. By the start of the twentieth century, sociologists had begun to contribute to our understanding of humanity by focusing on issues bearing on group interaction, including class solidarities and conflicts, which ultimately raised questions regarding collective behaviors. Oasses, nationalities, local bases for group affinities, the powerful and the powerless-in general, social sectors brought together on the basis of quite different and even ttansitory conditions-became subjects for description and investigation. The "ideal types" of Max Weber facilitated the detailed observation of groups by focusing on representative individuals whose own behaviors codified the ideals and value systems of the many.2 Here cognition was based on the observation of human action, which complemented-rather than substituted for-the written record. In Parsonian terms, one could speak of written, oral, and behav1

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MARK D. SZUCHMAN

ioral records as containing symbolic value, levels of which could be found not only in formal language but also in "beliefs, sentiments, and in various modes of overt action." This matrix of conscious and subconscious matters provided the blueprint of meaning that Parsons tenned the cultural system.3 The behavioral analysts and social theorists consider culture to be manifested by what groups of individuals say they think and believe, how they relate socially, and how they interact with their material surroundings. Sometimes termed mentifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts, these manifestations are all behaviors that are socially learned and that-when socially ttansmitted-are capable of being reconstituted along different lines over the comse of long periods of time.4 Much the same can be said for the anthropologists' articulation of cultural problems. In addition to observing social intemction, anthropologists look closely at collectivities in a search for expressions of cultural meaning in rituals that can engage the attention and calculations of groups (such as the configmation of hunting and gathering expeditions) or of a single, culturally representative individual (such as the artisan and the status derived from his superior craftsmanship, or the shaman and the power afforded by his extrapoliticalleademhip). Anthropology has provided important advances in cognitive pamdigms by introducing the methods of participant observation and by focusing on the rich informative potential hidden within a sort of social semiotics. The attention given by the first generation of social scientists to the subject matter of collective behavior was the unavoidable consequence of the heightening of political disturbances that the burgeoning European cities experienced toward the end of the nineteenth century. Gustave LeBon's writing represented the attempts to codify the beliefs shared by the urban crowd on the basis of observing collective action. LeBon was deeply affected by the turbulence that was part of the growing urban anomie the disaffected classes were undergoing in France and by the decay in social relations that accompanied the maturation of industtialization and large-scale geographic mobility. He wrote a short, incisive, and bitter analysis of collective behavior in the 1890s, entitled The Mind of the Crowd.s He described the "law of the mental unity of crowds," frequently reminding his readers of the fundamentally amoral, opportunistic, violent, and conservative nature of crowds, and said that conscious personality disappears, to be replaced by feelings and thoughts that take entirely different directions from the self. LeBon brings us to the world of mentalites-"mental constitutions" in the language of the era- the subconscious formulations that drive individuals to action. In regions of Latin America where industrialization and commercial capitalism had also occasioned significant geographic mobility and changes in the composition and condition of the labor force, one can find echoes of LeBon's concerns in the contemporaneous sociologicallitemture. In the case of Argentina, LeBon's pessimism and concern for the maintenance of the

THE MIDDLE PERIOD

3

social order-put at risk by particular types of thinking-found reflection among a group of positivists, including Francisco Ramos Mejia, his brother, Jose Maria, Carlos Baire, and Octavio Bunge, among others.6 Jose Maria Ramos Mejia was especially receptive to LeBon's theories regarding collective behavior. In a Buenos Aires teeming at the turn of the century with European immigrants and challenging both the country's social traditions and political elites, Ramos Mejia saw the possibilities for the end of the Argentine ethos. He warned about this in Las multitudes argentinas, first published in 1899, which echoed similar preoccupations as LeBon had expressed regarding the mass of Parisians, but here applied to the urban centers of Argentina. Ramos Mejia outlined the character and role of the crowd in Spanish America, and specifically of the region of the Rio de la Plata, beginning with the colonial period. He identified the "inexplicable sense of being" that accumulated among the peoples of colonial Argentina and that culminated in the development of the self as part of a folk- as a distinct nationality.7 This was the subconscious, emotional fuel that drove the engine of independence and the creation of the nation-state. In a transparent allusion to the rising militancy of working class consciousness and of foreign mores, Ramos Mejia considered the end of the nineteenth century as an era when the salutary potential of the crowd had been arrested; multitudes had become dangerous, corrupted by those who saw themselves as "stirrers" of political passion and as architects of anarchy. The methods used by analysts of the collective mind were largely rejected by medical professionals, whose studies of behavior instead focused on individuals' traits and the subconscious matter. These analysts, including Sigmund Freud, considered the ideas of LeBon and his colleagues on the subjects of attitudes and behaviors to be more informative at the descriptive level than analytically valid or theoretically advanced. Freud, for example, opposed LeBon for failing to identify the construct that replaces individuality-if indeed individuality is lost among people in crowds-and that acts as a bond to unite the crowd's individual components.s Despite the fundamental differences between the social psychologists and the psychological analysts, both groups of observers shared a view of behavior that can be said to operate at the level of the unconscious, and it is this that brings them close to the agenda of the original proponents of histoire des mentalites. The sociologists' interest in group interaction fused with the social and cognitive psychologists' concern for the explanatory power that lies below the level of consciousness, and this synthesis joined with the anthropologists' questions regarding cultural traits and behavioral manifestations to pose an attractive paradigm to historians who wanted to break out of the tradition of publishing elite biographies. Rejecting the notion that the investigation of the lives and times of well known figures and of their contribution to the

4

MARK D. SZUCHMAN

political state was the exclusive approach to understanding historical change, they established history's newest paradigm in the years following World War I. Traditionally, history's purpose had been civic: to train the elite to rule, to give it the means to reflect on civilization and aesthetics. This was the "frrst historical paradigm," which took on the form of "exemplar history."9 Beginning with Thucydides' The Peloponnesian Wars and building up from Herodotus' The Histories, exemplar history discarded the trivial in favor of narrating and explaining the glorious, while considering the lessons provided by the errors of civilization's leaders to be essential to the formation of subsequent generations of political elites.Io But for proponents of the history of mentalites, the objective was now to get inside the mind of the "people," a radically different orientation and a whole new way of conceiving the matter of history in ways that would turn it into a cognitive field. In the next chapter, Howard Kaminsky discusses the evolution of the history of mentalite by tracing the objectives and difficulties of those historians (beginning with the originators of the journal Annales and its school of thought), who, by concentrating on the internal components of human behavior, began to shape in the 1920s the boundaries of what has come to be known as social history. Kaminsky poses the exemplar and the Annales paradigms not so much in opposition as in a strained relationship that arises from a sociologized generation of historians who expanded the list of worthy topics. To be sure, as Kaminsky points out, the new list still contained political entries, but the topics tended toward the collective approach: For example, prosopography, rather than individual biography, provided the medium of understanding historical actors but within the new sociological-behavioral methods. THE POLffiCAL PARADIGM IN LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY

The literature on Latin America's past contains more than a few instances of the exemplar variety of history and a much smaller component of the alternatives that prosopographical methods offered. The political and military convulsions that coincided with the establishment of independence in Latin American republics early in the nineteenth century may have served to prolong the exemplar paradigm. Indeed, the "official story" continues to enjoy great respectability and mass following in many parts of Latin America. A circuitous logic preserved the usefulness of exemplar history. Sporadic and sometimes relentless political turmoil made it all the more necessary for elites to establish models of appropriate-usually servile-citizenship, the political version of the psychologists' moral exemplar.u Latin Americans were not alone in seeing the political usefulness of history, nor were they especially creative in the implementation of historiographical traditions. Historical propaganda had accumulated a rich literature in Europe, ·vvith the Anglo-Saxons often leading the way, as anyone could tell by reading the his-

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5

tories commissioned during the seventeenth-century English revolutions by both sides.u Thereafter, during the European Enlightenment, R. G. Collingwood reminds us, "no attempt was made to lift history above the level of propaganda "13 But eventually the British, French, and German historians did pass through this stage to move on to higher levels of theory, purpose, and professionalization. By contrast, the elites of Latin America responded to their own peoples' revolutionary trends by complementing the classical purpose that had given history its special meaning-the education of future generations of leaderswith a civilizing role aimed at the general population that was also intended to rationalize elite rule to the common folk. In this fashion, the Latin American ruling classes were quick to adopt the concepts of the Utilitarian system promoted by Claude Helvetius in France and Jeremy Bentham in England. History, as one of the instruments of education, took on a clearly political mission for the Latin American intelligentsia, which coincidentally also held important posts in governing the republics. Intellectuals recognized the value of Instruction, seeing in it a helpful tool for mankind to shun the spirit of family, sect, or party, which according to Bentham militated "against the love of country. "14 Exemplar Latin American history was thus designed around a wider audience than simply the patrician children: In a conscientious attempt to expand the levels of popular identification with the public action of the privileged, historians presented heroes of independence as stripped of class representation, regional affinities, or religious zeal. All of this is not to suggest that the history written by Latin American intellectuals was a faithful reconstruction of either Thucydides' model or of the virtues ascribed to history by Cicero. Nor was the history written by Latin Americans informed by the aesthetics and the passion Petrarch felt for the age of Rome's empire, although a pale comparison can be made in the way the medieval poet's senses were moved "beyond words" by his impression of Rome's ruins in 1337 to the manner in which Sim6n Bolivar's political rage led him in 1805 to proclaim his sworn dedication to liberate his countrymen from Spanish colonial rule while gazing on Roman ruins from the Aventine Hill.ts That the Ibero-American Clio had new purposes especially suited to the political elite's formative experiences and calculations is explicable if we tum our attention to the intellectual trends prevalent at the time of Latin American history's birth. Historians in Latin America began their scholarship when the discipline entered its second paradigm, aimed at analyzing the development of the nation-state, understood as the culmination of progress. The new paradigm redefined both the field of history and its fundamental purpose. Beginning in the eighteenth century and blossoming in the nineteenth, the historians' goal continued to be the discovery of general laws of human development from the body of particular evidence, but it now contained an

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MARK D. SZUCHMAN

ideological motivation: to determine the principles of national and cultural autonomy. This goal would be achieved through the personalities of its originators and major participants, the national elites.l6 The nation-state was considered to be the perfect vehicle of progress, a manifestation of the intelligence and evolution of mankindP In Latin America, and particularly in Spanish America, progress was seen as an expression of the transition from colonial to republican status. The exemplarity of heroes, however, remained a stronger ingredient in Latin American historiography than among its European counterparts. Until recently, the overwhelming majority of historians from Latin America felt themselves to be beyond (above?) the tenets of social scientists. If Durkheim and Freud had made inroads among influential historians in continental Europe, they were ignored by the membership of the various academias de historias of Latin America's provincial and national capitals. The need for writing about men who would act as historical model figures became quickly and deeply rooted. So strong was this tradition that one of the most notable of Latin American historians, Diego Barros Arana of Chile, remarked that "if history does not offer us model men, it is the duty of the historian to make them. "1s To explain the slowness with which social history fowtd acceptability and its late incorporation into the historical methodology would require us to delve into the nature and composition of the intelligentsia, itself the product of the region's social and economic conditions. Suffice it to say that the history written by the Latin American intelligentsia wttil at least after World War II represented a modest proportion of the population, reflected a limited worldview of progress and its contributors, and was methodologically inert. The intellectual circles responsible for virtually all of the historiography of the region tended to be homogeneous in class and racial composition. Moreover, Latin America's intellectuals were moved by a value system that had more in common with the views of their European cowtterparts than with those of their own peoples. In a region of racial and ethnic diversity, the intelligentsia was virtually all white. In a culture characterized by regional aff'mities and localistic concerns, the intellectuals saw matters from the perspectives of the capital cities. In economies fundamentally dependent on primary production, the academicians echoed the political elites' aspirations for concentrating material advancements in the cities.l9 The methodology of traditional Latin American history, therefore, owes much to the analysis of the nation-state's principal actors and their ideological framework. The life-and-times form of history tended to ignore the commoners of society in the belief that ideology was beyond them-that ideological formulations were constructs of an educated mind, the purview of a small segment of the population that had been intellectually nourished by its tutelary elite in the interest of its own preservation. Insofar as these attitudes crossed the ideological lines that otherwise split the elites into acrimonious

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camps, few attitudinal differences can be discerned between Latin American liberal and conservative intellectuals. Both employed history to satisfy their own political goals, using it as the literary ammunition to frre at their opponents. History quickly became less an intellectual pursuit than a political medium, and intellectuals incorporated it into the political arsenals.20 In this climate, the exemplar form of history resisted the challenges of the sort that had been developing among the sociologized historians of Europe. TIIE FOCUS ON TIIE WIDER SOCIETY

Beginning in the 1960s, aided by the increased interest in Latin America brought about by the diplomatic and ideological considerations associated with the Cuban Revolution, the field of history turned its attention toward an examination of the roles played by the popular sectors. The traditional historical paradigm used by Latin Americans had been designed to provide models of loyal leadership while building a popular sense of patriotism that would provide elite legitimacy. It had borrowed heavily from both the first historical paradigm of exemplar history and the second one that focused on the rise of the nation-state. This synthesis-which has not fully run out of steam-could no longer prevent the study of the crowd and the popular components of the Latin American past. In this effort to rescue the commoners from an inexistence imposed by the cultural and political preferences of the Latin American intelligentsia, the colonialists took the lead. By investigating the impact of conquest on the Indians' administrative structures that governed their daily life, historians uncovered the changes in social and political relations that resulted from the transformation of Indians into a service peasantry serving the seigneurial aspirations of the conquerors, who developed a habit of mind that was reconstituted seriatim in their Spanish American descendants.21 North American scholars took the lead in sociologizing the past: Students of colonial Spanish American history will readily recognize the notable contribution of Charles Gibson's The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule in moving the discussions and the empirical evidence regarding relations between Indians and whites beyond the legal and religious debates that had taken place within the Spanish courtly circles between advocates of the conquerors' privileges and the humanist defenders of Indians' rights.n This signaled a significant change in the orientation given to Latin American history. The perspective of the conqueror, which included an emphasis on administrative structures and on strategies of the dominant groups, was now complemented by a view of colonial society that "saw in it the prehistory of the creole-mestizo nations that were to emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "23 Although the inquiry into the rise of the nation-state was still alive and well in Latin American history, it was now being reinforced by social considerations beyond (and below) the level of the notables.

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But even histories that focused on the elites were undergoing change in both concept and methodology. The collective approach to elite behaviors gained favor among historians who took cross-sectional views to observe elite composition, and a fuller understanding of elite calculations unfolded as they were found meaningful equally within and outside the formal institutional structures of power, as Diana Balmori, Stuart Voss, and Miles Wortman have shown for the nineteenth century.24 This socialization approach to elite studies has been characterized as one of the most notable trends of recent historiography.2S Bureaucrats-and we no longer need to restrict the category to high-level administrators-took on the characteristics of interest groups in a Weberian (that is, a sociologized) form of history: Officials were seen as not only being capable of, but also in need of intersecting with social and economic circles of influences. Because of the social considerations embedded in the new studies of political elites, perspectives on patronage relations expanded to accommodate the concept of clientelism in reverse- the political game involved the placement of a considerable proportion of bureaucrats as clients of extraofficially powerful individuals. Here the colonialists led the way for historians of the nineteenth century who discovered the reconstitution of these colonial modes of patron-client behaviors well into the republican era.26 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, royal selection to noble position had bestowed political status on the recipients. Nobility thus melded with high public office, and both, in turn, yielded privilege, wealth, and power. During the era of expansion and conquest, for example, the Spaniards typified the residues of the medieval mind: Esteem, summarized Peggy Liss, was the result of "achieving goals and positions their own society held to be most honorable and worthy of attainment, and in Spanish society, as they knew it, among the most revered of all were the military virtues of honor and glory and their material manifestations, wealth and nobility."21 The fundamental change over time in Latin America was that the nobility that had existed on the basis of racial privileges and rights to Amerindian labor had metamorphosed since the seventeenth century into a mercantile contingent, as distinguished from (but not in opposition to) a political corps. In the course of the nineteenth century, landed elites were added to the constituencies that comprised the political body. The social history of Latin America was demonstrating how lberoAmerican minds, despite the changes in the occupational profiles of the elites, had retained a medieval sense of estate and how these habits of mind in tum continued to incorporate public and private elements in equally important measures into the formula for personal success. By contrast, the disjunction of the majority of the population from the private satisfaction of the few, and the concept of a social position separable from a discrete set of political responsibilities, were already becoming ingrained in the social and

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political practices of many nineteenth-century Europeans.21 The durable perception among Spanish Americans that spheres of action were fluid and not rigidly defined received empirical support from studies such as David Brading's Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, and it has been sustained by other studies of the politics of the colonial system similarly founded on social theory. Family connections, including the ultimate unit of solidarities, marriage, reinforced the matrix of clientelism in thick webs of dependencies that accorded rights and obligations on the basis of opportunities while affording strengthened or new alliances.29 Family studies as such, however, have appeared only more recently. The works on the social history of Latin America that began in earnest in the late 1960s considered family position and connections as parts, rather than as wholes, in broader treatments of the social and political structures. These books also approached historical players' calculations. They treated family aspects of leaders of notable society as tools of a discrete set of individuals who fonned a class against-over and above would be more accuratt>r-the interests of subsidiary classes (Indian peasants or mestizo artisans, and so on). To be sure, such calculations were based on attitudes deeply ingrained in the mentalites of the players, but this approximates a truism and is in no way a substitute for focused study of the mind of the player at work. There have been only glimpses at mentalite among Ibero-Americans. In the work of Peggy Liss already mentioned, one can note clear statements regarding habits of mind associated with the Catholic and Spanish sense of being. Her usage of the term "mentality" itself is new and refreshing, as are overt references to "attitudes" that she explicitly relates to action. Similarly, she highlights mental constructions regarding the domain of monarchs, the components of a nation and a civilization, and other abstractions that are fundamental for an understanding of an era and its people.30 Still, her approach is rare. By contrast, "family" as a heuristic concept became in the 1950s an important part of studies of mentalite by adherents of the Annales school of social history, especially in research covering the medieval and early modem periods. Beginning with Philippe Aries' study of childhood, originally published in 1960, family history quickly established itself as an important avenue for fmding rich and colorful evidence regarding society's habits of mind and attitudes toward everyday life. Books and articles on European history (and eventually on U.S. history) throughout the 1960s and 1970s addressed different aspects of everyday life for commoners and notables alike, an expression of the continuous interplay among family, society, politics, the economy, and the environment The family afforded a deeper penetration into the historical mind than the pioneers of the mentalite school had imagined: a point of entry into the study of private thoughts, attitudes, and habits that refracted the worldviews

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held in past times and laid them open for observation and analysis. They included parental authority, sexual attitudes, demographic behaviors, the parameters of action by youths, and attitudes toward the aging process, among others.3t Here one can think of important French and English contributions: Flandrin's overview from a legalistic and customary perspective of Fiance's family configurations in his Families in Former Times, Stone's overarching approach to British society in The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, and LeRoy Ladurie's The Peasants of Languedoc, a worlc on the effects of environment, population, and production over the course of the "great agrarian cycle" from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.n These and other titles derive much of their attraction from their incorporation of anthropological, sociological, and psychological models of explanation. Furthermore, they all share a concern for addressing the recurrent-and thus comparable-aspects of the human condition and so invite all historians to join in the comparative perspective that allows the discovery of both distinctiveness and commonality among peoples. Insofar as this type of history does not depend for explanations on figures or events peculiar to a given people, it becomes less idiosyncratic, more approachable, more human. There is nothing comparable in the Latin American field in either the matter of temporal sweep or the comprehensiveness of approach. This is true despite the opportunities for comparing virtually all of the colonial era with the findings by Europeanists for the early modem period.33 Still, the last decade has seen a growing awareness that habits of mind among Latin Americans have been shaped by the environment, by the special racial matrix composed of European, African, and Amerindian populations, by the longevity of the baroque style in culture and scholastic mode in learning, and by the conditioning factor of regionalism, among other determinants. Mentalite is an underlying theme in recently published works on the conflicts that ensued between European and Amerindian concepts of self-identity and power in the Andes, on the challenges to parental prerogatives in Mexico, on the relationships between family strategies and politics in the Rio de la Plata as well as in Brazil, on the relationship of mankind and cosmos, and on the psychological boundaries of community in Argentina. Thus, mentalite is becoming a more important variable than ever before among historians, and the inclusion of anthropological and sociopsychological perspectives is becoming well established.34 Such trends notwithstanding, the thrust of research in Latin American history has been directed toward the articulation of social and economic relations that resulted from the increasingly regionalized specialization of the world economy. Titles thus abound on socioeconomic relations and conflicts among diverse racial groups, classes, and regions of production and consumption.:JS We therefore know much more about the nature of the relationships between a given cultural or social circle with groups external to it than

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we do about either individuals or groups in the- context of their own consciousness, their self-identity. Moreover, the studies of Latin American habits of mind characteristically emphasize the attitudes and perceptions held by the small minorities of men and women who left written records.36 Furthermore, these elites tended to restrict their written thoughts to matters related to material progress and economic development mther than to considerations of affect, the self, and human relations.37 This book is designed to begin the process of filling this void in our knowledge of Latin America's past by concentrating on the commoners, the mass of the population, for it is their cultural identities and mental states in the past about which we know the least Regional and local studies have demonstrated the complexities and the contradictions of peoples who are capable of retaining traditions and adapting them to newer circumstances,38 Such scholarship tends to be rooted in classbased analyses, which in the end force us back into an explanation of historical change based on political and materialist variables. Regardless of whether the relationships among the major socioeconomic groups (landholding elites, commercial netwmts, Indian peasantry, and so forth) turned out to have been based on conflict, consensus, or accommodation, historians of Latin America have tended to cull meaning from each group's external orientations-from the calculations that such groups make in relation to one another. By contrast, we know relatively little about the private worlds of morality or about the values of peoples who remained largely inarticulate. THE QUESTION OF PERIODIZATION

The essays in this collection seek to enrich our understanding of IberoAmerican cultural traditions by exploring mental and cultural dispositions over the course of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. This was the long term associated in the West with driunatic changes in habits of thought affecting important forms of social and cultural intercourse (including religious pmctices, strategies of production, and political activities) as well as the perception of rights and obligations by both citizens and authorities. These were the legacies of the transition out of medieval casuistry, the intellectual dominance of Cartesian rationalism, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and Liberalism. The traditional periodization used in the field of Latin American history can be reexamined. The separation of the colonial period from the point at which independent republics (in the case of Brazil, the empire) were established accords explanatory power to the constitutionality of the political state: It is as if to say that the Crown shaped the values of its subjects in significantly different fashion from the way the republican presidents or ministers-or even caudillos-shaped the values and attitudes of their peoples. By contrast, the authOIS in this volume ignore the line that divided colony from

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nation. with limited regard for the nature of the state. In sum. mther than viewing political independence as an instrument for contrast or for discovering change. the authors employ values and attitudes toward religious figures. death. homestead. indigence. or love to understand political obligation. Such a framework subsumes major political events to the historical nature of value systems. a construction that distinguishes important actions in the political game from the challenges of life considered minor by civilization but fundamental for the individual.39 Collectively. the following chapters present an opportunity to address the issue of periodization. Mental dispositions. which change slowly over the course of great periods of time (the longue duree). are explored within the framework that covers the years between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Two ems are thereby isolated: the sixteenth-century conquests and the export-led boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were obviously important both in their own right and for their longlasting legacies. Conquest signified. among other things. demographic disaster for the Amerindian population. significant changes in patterns of labor and production. new racial configumtions and conflicts. and-from the transAtlantic perspective-a new orientation in the economic and geopolitical scope of Europe. For its part. the period of the late 1800s and early 1900s witnessed conquests of a different sort. driven by the tools of diplomatic and military pressures and by the profit considerations of private investors who lived in Europe and the United States. isolated from the Latin American regions where their investments were changing the superficial aspects in the quality of life inside selected regions. Empire building proved itself dynamic. capable of adapting to new-circumstances and needs. but in between these two drastic forms of intervention by forces from without the lands of Latin America. a longue duree of habits of mind had opportunities to develop from within. This is not to suggest that Latin America remained isolated after conquest and before the commercial revolution that brought its primary production to the European and North American marketplace-clearly. no hothouse effect took place. The seventeenth-century crisis in Latin America may have had its own character with added indigenous dimensions. but it was contemporaneous with Europe's economic and financial crisis. Similarly. the Enlightenment may have been late in arriving. but it did make important inroads in the minds of individuals during the eighteenth century. And although nineteenth-century European notions of Romantic individualism may have had difficulties in finding fertile soil in Latin America. this only demonstrates that such notions were being considered. As a multicultural region. Latin America offers a unique opportunity to investigate the extent to which values generally associated with Western society were able to penetrate the various layers of populations that circulated under the dominant

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elites. the putative custodians of Western traditions. Perhaps because of their awareness of the heterogeneous composition of their subjects, these "custodians" felt the need to impose a common denominator of attitudes and value systems on their cultural wards. One of the fundamental objectives of this book, therefore, is to examine the process of cultural conflict and compromise that obtained in the course of time within a region where large majorities of the public shared cultural elements that did not easily admit of Western values. Increasingly, we are coming to the realization that important, slow, and deliberate changes in the articulation of social relationships followed the foundation phase, as Marcello Carmagnani termed the formative sixteenth century.40 Eric Van Young has argued for a periodization that would span from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, straddling the revolutions in order to gauge and reinterpret the relationships between political ideology and social relations.41 Stuart Voss makes the case for a periodization that conceptualizes the late 1700s through the Great Depression as a single temporal unit in the history of Latin America.4z I would argue for the division that is represented in this book: beginning with the consolidation of patterns brought about by the conquerors' forced reconstitution of Amerindian traditions and ending at the point when significant imports of infrastructural elements and consumer goods resulted from massive foreign loans and investments.43 Whatever the alternative temporal schemata, all are constructing a "middle period." Consensus is developing that the traditional periodization, which divides the colonial from the national periods, is inadequate in addressing the contradictions between institutionally driven concepts and social reality. Moreover, the standard periodization of Latin American history represents the residues of the historical paradigm we referred to earlier, with its emphasis on the development of the nation-state as the culmination of human progress and the attendant hagiography of its revolutionary war heroes. What values and attitudes developed over the course of Latin America's history between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries? Did they develop differently, depending on mcial, regional, or class determinants? How did private moralities impel collective action? It is our hope that the following essays will help to answer these questions and raise others for further discussion.

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NOTES

1. Cicero, De oratore (55 B.C.); Quintilian, lnstituto oratoria (c. A.D. 96). Cicero, De oratore, with an introduction by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1942), 2 vols. The lnstituto oratoria of Quintilian, with an English translation by H. E. Buler (London and New York, 1921-1922). 2. For a discussion of "ideal types" in the Weberian sense, as distinguished from other "types," see H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, ''Introduction: The Man and His Work," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), pp. 59-65. 3. Talcott Parsons, "Culture and Social System Revisited," in The Idea of Culture in the Social Sciences, ed. Louis Schneider and Charles Bonjean (New York, 1973), p. 34. See also Alfred L. Kroeber and Talcott Parsons, 'The Concepts of Culture and of Social System," American Sociological Review 23 (October 1958): 582-583; and Talcott Parsons, The System of Modem Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971). 4. Robert F. Berkhofer, A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York, 1969), p. 84. 5. Gustave LeBon, The Mind of the Crowd (London, 1897). 6. Hobart A Spalding, Jr., "Argentine Sociology from the End of the Nineteenth Century to World War One," Documento de Trabajo 52 (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, 1968), pp. 2-3. 7. Ramos Mejfa, Las multitudes argentinas (Buenos Aires, 1899), p. 42. 8. Robert R. Evans, ed., Readings in Collective Behavior (Chicago, 1975), pp. 4-5. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York, 1960). 9. George H. Nadel, "Philosophy of History Before Historicism," in Studies in the Philosophy ofHistory: Selected Essays from "History and Theory," ed. George H. Nadel (New York, 1965), pp. 49-73. A classic exposition of the exemplar individual's role in shaping a people can be seen in Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, HeroWorship, and the Heroic in History (London, 1940). 10. See William Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History: Thoughts on History and Society, ed. H. P. Rickman (New York, 1962). Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The ANNALES Paradigm (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), pp. 25-29. 11. On the field of moral development, see Jtirgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston, 1979), pp. 69-94; William M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz, "Certainty and Morality: Objectivistic Versus Relativistic Approaches," in Morality, Moral Behavior, and Moral Development, ed. William M. Kurtines and Jacob L. Gewirtz (New York, 1984), pp. 3-23; and James R. Rest, 'The Major Components of Morality," in Morality, Moral Behavior, ed. Kurtines and Gewirtz, pp. 24-48. 12. Paul K. Conkin and Roland Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge of History (New York, 1975), pp. 42-44. In addition to the Earl of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, one could list the Historical Collections of John Rushworth, published in 1659, the result of a commission by Parliament aimed at legitimating its prerogatives. See J. G. A Pocock's study of the polemics regarding the royalist and parliamentary claims, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1967).

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15

13. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea ofHistory (London, 1956), p. 89. 14. Quoted in Charles A Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora (New Haven, Conn., 1968), p. 166. 15. Allan Bullock, The Humanist Tradition in the West (New York, 1985), pp. 14-15. On Petrarch's contributions, see Joseph R. Strayer and Dana C. Munro, The Middle Ages, 395-1500 (New York, 1970), pp. 535-540. On Bolivar, see Victor Andres Belaunde, BoUvar and the Political Thought of the Spanish American Revolution (New York, 1967); Jose Marfa Samper, El libertador SimOn BoUvar (Buenos Aires, 1884). 16. For an exposition of the ideological formula behind Latin American exemplar history, see E. Bradford Burns, "Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Historiography," Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (August 1978): 409-431. For the ideas of civilizing the population by means of history, see Mark D. Szuchman, Order, Family, and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810-1860 (Stanford, Calif., 1988). pp. 133-184. 17. Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 32-33. 18. Quoted in E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty ofProgress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1980), p. 41. 19. E. Bradford Burns, "Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Historiography," passim. 20. See Allen Woll, A Functional Past: The Uses of History in NineteenthCentury Chile (Baton Rouge, La., 1982), pp. 69-84; Juan Antonio Oddone, "La historiograffa uruguaya en el siglo XIX. Apuntes para su estudio," Revista Hist6rica de Ia Universidad 1 (February 1959). 21. Silvio Zavala, La encomienda indiana (Madrid, 1935); and Leslie Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain (Berkeley, Calif., 1950). 22. Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964). On the debates regarding the treatment of Indians, see Lewis Hanke, The Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston, 1965); Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington, lnd, 1975); Benjamin Keen, ''The White Legend Revisited: A Reply to Professor Hanke's 'Modest Proposal'," Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (May 1971): 336-355; Lewis Hanke, "A Modest Proposal for a Moratorium on Grand Generalization: Some Thoughts on the Black Legend," Hispanic American Historical Review 51 (February 1971): 112-127; and Ram6n Menendez Pidal, El padre Las Casas. Su doble personalidad, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1963). 23. Tullo Halperin Donghi, "The State of Latin American History," Occasional Papers in Latin American Studies 12 (Fall1985): 19. 24. See Diana Balmori, Stuart Voss, and Miles Wortman, Notable Family Networks in Latin America (Chicago, 1984). The following are a few representative examples of elite approaches to social history: David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763-1810 (London, 1971); James Lockhart, The Men ofCajamarca: A Social and Biographical Study ofthe First Conquerors of Peru (Austin, Tex., 1972); Leon G. Campbell, The Military and Society in Colonial Peru , 1750-1810 (Philadelphia, 1978); Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780-1826 (Austin, Tex., 1976); A J. R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos

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and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericordia of Bahia, 1550-1755 (Berkeley, Calif., 1968); Susan M. Socolow, The Merchants of Buetws Aires, 1778-1810: Family and Commerce (Cambridge, 1978); Linda J. Arnold, ''Bureaucracy and Bureaucrats in Mexico City, 1742-1835" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1982); and Luis Martin, Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the VICeroyalty ofPeru (Albuquerque, N.M., 1983). 25. The characterization was made by Eric Van Young for Mexico in "Recent Anglophone Scholarship on Mexico and Central America in the Age of Revolution (1750-1850)," Hispanic American Historical Review 65 (November 1985): 725-743. However, the collective approach has been equally notable for other Latin American regions as well, especially for Peru and Argentina. 26. For several examples of the continuities in colonial patronage, see Tulio Halperfu Donghi, Revoluci6n y guerra. Formaci6n de una elite dirigente en Ia Argentina crioUa (Buenos Aires, 1972). 27. Peggy K. Liss,Maico Under Spain, 1521-1556 (Chicago, 1975), p. 20. 28. For a brief discusssion of the medieval concept of estate, see Howard Kaminsky, Simon de Cramaud and the Great Schism (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983), pp. 66-68. For the scholarly codification of the separate qualities that by the nineteenth century distinguished status from class position, see Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), pp. 180-195. 29. The literature on the role of marriage and family has blossomed during the last decade. For recent examples spanning both the colonial and the national periods, see Susan M. Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769-1810: Amoral Real Servicio (Durham, N.C., 1987); Szuchman. Order, Family and Community; Martfu, Daughters ofthe Conquistadores. 30. See especially Liss, Mexico Under Spain, pp. xi-xv, and, for example, pp. 12-30. 31. A small sample of this literature would include the following titles: Andre Burgiere, "De Malthus a Max Weber: le mariage tardiff et l'esprit de l'entreprise," Annales 27 (1972): 1128-1138; Rudolf Braun, "Early Industrialization and Demographic Change in the Canton of Zurich," in Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, N.J., 1978), pp. 289-334; Natalie Zemon Davis, 'The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France," Past and Present 50 (Februaiy 1971): 41-75; Jolm Demos and Virginia Demos, "Adolescence in Historical Perspective," in The American Family in SocialHistorical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York, 1973), pp. 209-221; Jacques Dupaquier, ''Naming-Practices, God-parenthood, and Kinship in Vexin, 1540-1900," Journal of Family History 6 (Summer 1981): 135-155; Daniel Scott Smith, "The Changing Influence of the Elderly on the American Family," Proceedings of the World Conference on Records, vol. 12 (Salt Lake City, 1980). 32. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sauality (Cambridge, 1976); Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1974); and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Urbana. Ill., 1974). North American pioneers in the writing of history that incorporates psychological states were curious to see how connecting habits of mind to familial structures would contribute to a better understanding of the "Puritan mind." Among the first to do so was John Demos in A Little

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17

Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970). A good review of the literature and an assessment of the field appears in Lawrence Stone, "Family History in the 1980s: Past Achievements and Future Trends," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (Summer 1981): 51-87. 33. In a recent review of the historiography of colonial urban centers, Woodrow Borah does not even mention that mentalit6 is a subject or method that Latin Americanists should consider. See "Trends in Recent Studies of Colonial Latin American Cities," Hispanic American Historical Review 64 (August 1984): 535-554. The same may be said of the review of the literature in Marcello Carmagnani, ''The Inertia of Clio: The Social History of Colonial Mexico," Latin American Research Review 20, no. 1 (1985): 149-166. 34. Steve J. Stem, Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to /640 (Madison, Wise., 1982); Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 1988); Szuchman, Order, Family, and Comm.u.nity; Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraiba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton, N.J., 1987); Alberto Flores Galindo, "In Search of an Inca," in Resistance, RebeUion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th-20th Centuries, ed. Steve J. Stern (Madison, WISe., 1987). pp. 193-210; Kristin H. Ruggiero, And Here the World Ends: The Life of an Argentine Vdlage (Stanford, Calif., 1988). 35. The literature on economic structures is heavily infused with dependency theory and world-system analysis. Some of the most frequently cited titles include Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, Calif., 1979); Tulio Halperin Donghi, "'Dependency Theory' and Latin American Historiography," Latin American Research Review, 17 (1982): 115-130; Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein, eds. Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (New York, 1974); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York, 1970); and Celso Fmtado, La economfa latinoamericana desde Ia conquista iberica hasta la revoluci6n cubana (Mexico City, 1969). For a recent review of the issues revolving around capitalist development and underdevelopment, see Steve J. Stem, "Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean," American Historical Review 93 (October 1988): 829-872 36. One of the few examples of this literature is Glen Caudill Dealy, The Public Man: An Interpretation of Latin American and Other Catholic Countries (Amherst, Mass., 1977), which follows the pattern of emphasizing political relations among the elite. 37. Bums, The Poverty ofProgress, pp. 18-50. One of the few exceptions to this norm for the nineteenth century is Mariquita Smchez's memoirs. Males, however, would not be on the list of analysts of hmnan relations. 38. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560 (Madison, WISC., 1968), esp. pp. 199-220; John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxoca (Stanford, Calif., 1978); Florencia Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton, N.J., 1983); Mark D. Szuclunan, "Disorder and Social Control in Buenos Aires, 181~1860," Journal ofInterdisciplinary History 15 (August 1984): 83-110.

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39. There are plenty of indications that point to the continuities in economic and social relations, behavioral patterns which pen;isted despite the violent rhytluns of the revolutioruuy movements of the early nineteenth century. However, no major work has appeared that casts a boundary of time before and after the revolution, although there have been calls for such work; see Van Young, "Recent Anglophone Scholarship," p. 742; and Carmagnani, ''The Inertia of Clio," pp. 157-159. For a synthesis and analysis of preindependence and postindependence continuities, see George Reid Andrews, "Spanish American Independence: A Structural Analysis," Latin American Perspectives 12 (Wmter 1985): 105-132. 40. Carmagnani, ''The Inertia of Clio," p. 159. 41. Van Young, ''Recent Anglophone Scholarship." passim. 42. At the 1987 annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Stuart Voss organized an entire panel dedicated to reperiodizing Latin American history, taking the latter part of the eighteenth century as one of the starting points. The panel was entitled "From Imperial Refonn to World Depression: The Middle Period of Latin American History." See Voss' comments (unpub.) and the papers presented: Elizabeth A. Kumesof, "From Eighteenth-Century 'Depression' to NineteenthCentury Industrialization: Analyzing the Mysterious Modernization Process in Siio Paulo, Brazil"; Jolm Thtino, "Between Capitalism and Regionalism: State-Building and Social Conflict in Mexico, 1750-1949"; and Florencia E. Mallon, "New Perspectives on the Periodization of Latin American History: Nineteenth-Century Peru and Mexico in Comparative Perspective." 43. The argument for separating the seventeenth century for its own explanatory value in the field of history of Mexican mentalities is forcefully argued by Solange Alberro. He asserts that despite its reputation as an era when not much occured, the facts are otherwise: The seventeenth century is a period of relraction and healing of Mexican society; within it we can denote the tentative resurgence of the Indian demographic condition, a lranscendental phenomenon useful in explaining Mexican history. The assimilation of the African group continues in the seventeenth century and the nwnber of Casias, who augur Mexican society, are enlarged considerably. The seventeenth century is institutional consolidation, construction, territorial expansion; the missioruuy impetus allows the Indians to breathe, a very important fact, since it allows them to put together the broken pieces of their culture in syncretic fashion, which, in tmn, would allow them to proceed with a less burdensome lifestyle. The seventeenth century is a period of preparation, a sort of laboratory or hospital in which things do not appear to be shaken very much, because the fundamental bases are being prepared, they are gaining Slrength to come out in the light of the eighteenth century. Solange Alberro, "Historia de las mentalidades e historiograffa," in lntroducci6n ala historia de los 1111!11lalidodes, ed. Solange Alberro and Serge Gruzinski, Seminario de Historia de las Mentalidades y Religi6n en el Mexico Colonial, Instituto Nacional de AnlropOlogfa e Historia (Mexico City, 1979), p. 27.

2 From Mentalite to Mentality: The Implications of a Novelty HOWARD KAMINSKY

Historians have often been accused of not having enough interest in questions of theory and methodology. The charge is not as true as it used to be-witness the contents of this volume-but it is more true than false. Most historians do as they please, taking what interests them from the residues of methods past, choosing their subjects with little conscious thought about what the human race needs to know, and seeing no reason to hope for general agreement about what history is or ought to be. For many or perhaps most of us this is quite enough to go on, and we can point to the very name of our discipline as a patent of freedom: The Greek word historia means in the first place merely an inquiry, then, by extension, the results of an inquiry and the presentation of these results. No other discipline in the humanities or social sciences is so uncommitted to anything in particular as we are, and if some bitterly decry what they see as chaos, most of us prefer to think of it as pluralism and we go our several ways in the belief that everything will come out right in the end. Meanwhile, paradoxically, the condition of our untheoretical, unscientific, and disorderly discipline lays us open to penetration by our more highly charged neighbors in the social sciences, in ways that are not always unpleasant and with results that are often profitable. Protean as we are, we can turn all challenges into contributions, whose residues become part of the pluralist mix. So it seems to be with the history of mentalites, a spin-off of the French sort of social history that has been inspired by sociological modes of thought Originating after World War I in a repudiation of the traditional history of elites and of political action, the new sort of social history appropriated the Marxian understanding of the socioeconomic as primary, the political as superstructural; at the same time, however, a more direct impulse came from Emile Durkheim's sociological doctrines, emphasizing the primacy of the group over the individual. Durkheim's idea of conscience collective, or collective consciousness, suggested the development of social history into a history of mentalites, which also drew from the American George H. Mead's 19

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sociology of groups and interactions, in a context of social psychology.l The movement is usually thought of in association with the journal Annales, founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch as a forum precisely for the "structural history" resulting from a sociological rethinking of the historical enterprise; the journal was originally named Annales d'histoire economique et sociale. After World War II this group found a home base in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, in its Sixth Section, founded by Febvre in 1947. In 1946, the journal was renamed Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations, to declare the multidisciplinary program that has been pursued ever since.2 While its most powerful campaign has been to establish social history on a quantitative basis, a need was soon felt to attend to those spheres of social history that lay under or alongside the large-scale tendencies subject to statistical treatment-material culture, daily life, the family, health, disease, childhood-subjects that a century ago were not deemed historical. Mentalites constituted such a subject and were studied with vigor from the late 1950s on.J Because the tenn itself is mther vague and therefore highly seductive, we can pause here to defme it The French word mentalite entered the language a century ago and one fmds it discussed as a novelty by Marcel Proust, but in the sense of a state of mind or manner of thinking.4 It is now, however, a term of art, properly used to signify those habits of the mind that lie below the level of self-conscious thought, which they nevertheless shape.s At the same time, they are less fundamental than the Kantian a priori categories of understanding; these are universally human, but a mentalite is specific to a societal group during a certain period. It is not hard to think of examples: the sense of significant space among cloistered monks, in contmst to the sense of space among friars who travel; or the peasant's sense of time as a function of his activity, in contrast to our sense of time as an abstract objective framework;li the "feudal" sense of relationships of service between free men as necessarily mediated by loyalty, homage, and vassalage, even when they were contractual and monetary.? At a different level of behaviors, one could think of the difference between an upper-class sense of responsibility for the sociopolitical order and a lower-class absorption in private interests. None of these mental dispositions can be termed an idea, or a belief, or even an attitude; both go deeper and express socio-cultuml, structuml determinations of the human material for which the word mentalite seems perfectly appropriate. The basic point would be that mentalite is by definition collective and relatively durable, changing more slowly than any other sociocultural factor. An individual's mentalite would then be the group's as existing in him, not ideas he might have on his own. The term thus fits into the Annales school's interest in the history of collectivities and in the longue duree, the long-term perspective.• While the French term has pushed itself into current usage in other languages-German Mentalitat, Italian mentalita,

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21

Spanish mentalidad-the English "mentality" is something of a faux ami, predating the French term but meaning mental endowment, or a complex of opinions, or just mind.9 However, here too the French meaning has begun to make headway, at least among scholars, and the resulting enlargement of "mentality's" semantic field gives it a unique value, which we shall consider later. The impact of the Annales school of social history has been overwhelming, comparable in scope if not in depth to the German Quellenforschung of the last century, but powerful thrusts of this sort do not go on forever. Success attracts followers who are inferior to their leaders in intellect and cultural sophistication; new generations of leaders harden into mandarins, and for some years now one has seen the Paris masters functioning as an establishment, presiding over their mission civilisatrice and encoding it in a pretentiously playful, allusive, and ultimately mystifying language reminiscent of the sort of German used by the Frankfurt school of the 1920s. Marc Bloch's brilliant practice of an incessant dialectic between particulars and meaning can be attempted only by a few; more often one fmds a juxtaposition of masses of data with speculations about meaning, the nexus consisting of little more than interesting possibility. And there is already a sizable body of writing critical of the school,1o as well as an increasing disenchantment with quantification as means of salvation. All this has no doubt been inevitable, and the same can be said for the increasingly problematic status of the history of mentalites, at least as originally constructed; our interest here, however, lies not in tracing the decline but in determining how much remains and how valuable it may continue to be. Twenty or thirty years ago some distinguished historians were celebrating the history of mentalites as a promising new departure within the booming enterprise of social history, itself on the crest of its wave.n Fifteen years later one could read the evidence of disappointment. Jacques Le Goff wondered whether the "ambiguous" and perhaps "outmoded" novelty should be encouraged or allowed quietly to disappear.12 Eric Hobsbawm, who in 1971 had praised the new mode as "an even more direct approach [than the study of class] to central methodological problems of social history," in 1980 referred to mentalite as "that vague catch-all term."13 Perhaps Hobsbawm, a Marxist, also came to sense that, as Le Goff put it, "the attractiveness of the history of mentalities comes most of all from the change of air [depaysement] it offers to those intoxicated by economic and social history, and especially by vulgarized Marxism. "14 Underneath this deliberate naughtiness one senses a certain malaise. As Gerd Tellenbach observed in an essay of 1974, commenting explicitly on Georges Duby's enthusiastic presentation of the mentalites paradigm, it is hard to see mentalite as a distinct subject of study: On the one hand, it seems inseparably tied to behavior, ideas, theories, ideologies, and moral codes; on the other hand, it seems to consist in matrices that

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are much more general-consciousness, the interaction between individual and group. "A history of mentalites," Tellenbach wrote, "can have no sources or methods specifically or even especially its own."1s The problem would seem to be that a subconscious disposition of the mind will hardly leave clear traces of itself in contemporary sources and will have to be constructed by the historian as a hypothesis peculiarly hard to test even by history's self-indulgent standards. If we see peasants in revolt, we can hypothesize that conditions had become worse and the peasants were desperate, or that conditions had improved and the peasants had rising expectations; ideally, both hypotheses can be tested by evidence of what conditions were, what the peasants thought of them, what other factors might have been in play, and what we know of peasant revolts elsewhere. But a hypothesis about peasant mentalite-say that peasants experience time as task-oriented rather than clock-measured, or that peasants attach reality to things rather than to ideas-cannot be tested in this way: The hypothesis is only remotely derived from particular cases and cannot be confirmed or disproved by looking at more of them. And because it defmes a constant substructure of the peasant mind, the hypothesis cannot explain variables-the differential actions that engage a historian's attention. Yet, few historians today would deny that these and similar notions of mentalite are interesting and, if true, not only valuable but essential to our understanding of the subject. Here we see why the history of mentalites, however vague and ambiguous it has to be, still refuses to fade away. Fortunately, history has an affinity with vague and ambiguous concepts, also with untestable hypotheses. Talk about theory and methodelogy can be exciting, but it is impossible to imagine any theory or method that cannot be used to deepen or extend our understanding of what we were in the past, and the only bad method is a sloppy one. As for concepts, historians who insists on precisely defined cognitive constructions will find themselves shaping their subject before learning about it, and good historians will, in any case, sacrifice the purity of their constructs in order to engage them with particular facts that lie outside them. So it is with mentalites. While it is easy to imagine a mentalite in the strict sense as a basic habit of mind below the level of self-consciousness, it is impossible in practice to write a history of just that; the subject slides off into attitudes, ideologies, beliefs, values, and so on. One can guess that all the books and articles ostensibly devoted to mentalires deal with other mental dispositions as well; there is an obvious sense in which one cannot, after all, write a history of something that barely changes over the longue duree. What remains is the value of the idea of such a mentalite, as, so to speak, the opposite pole of the abstract ideas expressed in treatises and studied in "the history of ideas." Approaching this point from another direction, we can begin by recalling the theoretical consensus that a mentalite is a habit of mind below the level of

FROM MENTALITE TO MENTALITY

23

self-conscious thought, characteristic of a socially defmable collectivity and tending to persist over a longue duree.l6 And we can juxtapose Le Goff's observation that "the initial attractiveness of the history of mentalites lay precisely in its imprecision, in its vocation of designating the residues left by historical analysis."11 In other words, if, as Tellenbach and others have held, there can be no proper history of mentalites, that is because the concept itself is not a historical construct but a sociological one. Here we need point only to its most celebrated progenitors: Karl Marx and his association of particular ideas and attitudes with specific societally located milieus; Max Scheler and Karl Mannheim with their refmement of this into a sociology of knowledge; and of course the French sociological tradition stemming from Durkheim, as noted earlier. A historian who tries to write a history of this or that mentalite, then, will necessarily end up doing something else, a kind of historical sociology or sociologized history (in the broadest possible sense of the term "sociology"). Such a historian's subject will not be the ideal mentalite of the theoretical literature, which manifests itself only in behaviors and discourses that can be understood phenomenally, without reference to a postulated essential determinant. Rather, the historian's use of this idea, in understanding and in writing history, will tend to make it like other ideas that historians are able to use: usefully loose, undemandingly imprecise, compliantly flexible. For if historical scholarship must be rigorous, historical understanding and composition are matters of imagination, Verstehen, and rhetorical art,ts none of which are compatible with strict theory, all of which allow openings to other "sciences of man"-such as sociology, aesthetics, philosophy. Something of the sort, at any rate, is what we see when we consider the essays in this book. For example, Alida Metcalf begins with a few lines about "mentalite, that vague and elusive notion," and then constructs a mentalite centering around "the epic and heroic image of the bandeirante" as the key to Siio Paulo's successful expansion into the wilderness. But another historian has defined bandeirismo much more soberly as "the forced recruitment of labor," and one is tempted to wonder how much of Metcalfs exuberant construction is necessary to an understanding of the actions she deals with, how much belongs to the rhetorical art with which she has created her remarkable essay.I9 Similar questions could be asked about the other contributions to this book. Both Mark Szuchman and John Chasteen focus on subversive changes in the selection of marriage partners and relate them to much wider issues of cultural change, generational conflict, environmental determination; menta/ire functions in both essays as a sort of postulated mediation between the particular subject matter and the wider framework. In other words, it is not the object of study but a way of telling the story-which is not to say that it is either superfluous or anything but illuminating, only that it is not the rigorously limited mentalite of the theoretical literature. One

24

HOWARD KAMINSKY

thinks of it best as simply "mentality"-in English-a disposition of the mind, heart, and soul that can hardly be defined disjunctively against, say, attitudes, beliefs, or self-consciousness.:zo It is not identical to these but there is much overlap. These remarks are not intended to dispose of the theoretical issues associated with the study of what we shall now call mentalities, but simply to establish what we are in fact dealing with here, a postulated mentality as a mode of understanding. And mentality in this sense raises its own theoretical issues, perhaps the most primitive of which would center on this question: What is the advantage of studying a subject that requires the postulation of mentality for its explanation? More concretely, why is it better to study the behavior of groups and classes, alias social history, than to study the public action of leading individuals? At issue here would be the nature of history itself: what it is, what it yields, why it is to be pursued. When Thucydides, the greatest of all historians, claimed that his history would be "a possession for all time," it was because he thought it would be "useful to those who want to know exactly what happened and what is likely, given human nature, to happen in the future in identical or similar form."21 He evidently presupposed the structural permanence of the political world that he knew and of the nature of its human material. Cicero evidently had the same idea in mind when he praised history as "testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis (the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, a herald from days of old)."22 This ancient idea of history as a source of wisdom for men involved in public affairs is still attractive to those who are not·ashamed to think of themselves as elite, but in the profession at large it is rather marginal. It carries its own cognitive construction of mentality-for example, Thucydides' repeated remarks about the foolish human tendency to believe that things will turn out as one wants them to-but this has little in common with the idea of mentality that interests us here, which belongs to a certain sort of social history. These last words bring us back to France and the Annales school, whose aim, Fernand Brandel has told us, was to promote "an absolutely new and even revolutionary history" by breaking down the walls that separated history from the other sciences of man and thereby create "a community of the human sciences."23 What the walls had protected would of course be sacrificed-the first victim being the specific kind of "historicist" history dominant in the nineteenth century and up to World War I, what a historian of the Annales school has called the "developmental paradigm.":M This was the history of the state and nation, which established the durative entity of these nineteenth-century constructions by relating the political and institutional history of the developments that had terminated in them. Unlike the ancient mode of history, the historicist mode embraced the Hegelian scheme of change, development in stages over the centuries, but it resonated with the

FROM MENTAUI'E TO MENTALITY

25

ancient mode in its focus on the actions of leading individuals, telling the story of public action. If it also traced the growth of institutions, it was in the same spirit of interest in the established order and its dominant classes. That this feature of the nineteenth-century world should have shared the fate of many others after the Great War, coming to seem problematical, uninteresting, or even offensive, is easy to understand Nor is it much of a chore to trace the roots of reaction to it: Bloch, Febvre, and their associates were obviously animated by all of the impulses at work in the sociological style of thoughL25 An equally interesting but less well-known parallel trend appeared in Germany, where a rich nineteenth-century tradition of socially oriented thought, both revolutionary and reactionary, issued in the Frankfurt school of sociology on the one hand, certain antiliberal lines of social and historical thought on the other-the latter destined to find something of a home with the Nazis.26 All of which should suggest that "social history," including the history of mentalities, carries a charge of implication that ought to be examined, if not by its practitioners then by interested observers. Perhaps the basic question here would be whether the sociologization of history that has just been noticed involves not only the rejection of nineteenth-century historicist history-institutional, constitutional, narrative, elitist-but of history itself as a distinct humanistic discipline. The traditional purpose of this discipline has been to form the mind of the politically active or at least interested members of the dominant class, by teaching prudence and wisdom on the one hand, by inducing the habit of identifying the self with the public interest on the other. Put into the savage disjunctions of modern discourse, this definition would seem to restrict the value of history to upper-class white males, but it can be adjusted to our mass society by thinking of history in this sense as an instrument of social mobility, presenting a so-to-speak elitist option for even lower-class, female, or black intellectuals who can join the elite by internalizing the elite paradigm manifested in the past While this perception may sound distasteful, at least as stated here, it is nevertheless a real and quite important function of our pedagogy and practice. And yet few professional historians now think in these terms. The powerful influence of the Annales school-both in France and outside it-has shaped the historical enterprise in ways that are still decisive even now that the newer Paris paradigm of deconstruction has moved to the cutting edge. Social history in the sense of a sociologized history remains dominant; the vogue of quantification is perhaps past, but its residues remain as a no doubt permanent acquisition, while the interest in such matters as the basics of daily life among the masses shows few signs of ebbing. Those who for whatever reason find little to fascinate them in, say, the exploits of the Black Prince in the Hundred Years' War, are nevertheless happy to study peasant tenures or family structures during the same period Social history, in other words, is the way in which a great many, perhaps most, historians

26

HOWARD KAMINSKY

appropriate the past and identify themselves with it. But to write about the past is not to describe something out there; it is to create the past-a certain image of it-as a mode of present experience.z7 Without in the least denying that new knowledge is valuable, one can always ask what exactly its value is for present purposes and interests. We can ask whether our mass society with its culture of permissive pluralism needs a sociological reconceptualization of the past, and if so, whether the need is historical or sociological-that is, whether the function of "social history" is to be the new viable avatar of history itself, or rather to dissolve history into the sciences of man. The purpose of an introductory essay is not to solve profound problems, but to define them and open them up, so as to make them appear as the "problematics" of the actual historical contributions. A good way to proceed, then, is to ask of a selection of contributions such as those in this book exactly what image or images of the past they create, and what is gained thereby. One striking answer occurs as we read the Metcalf essay, which is rather different from the others: A process akin to what in U.S. history is called The Westward Movement is made to appear not as just the result of evident economic or social interests, but as the manifestation of a sociocultural mentality working in part directly, in part by determining the economic and social interests themselves. The effect is to transform what would otherwise be a clear picture of progress and development into something profound and problematical, a saga of the soul, whose key themes are those of desperate heroism as well as racist greed. Whether this is destined to enrich the overall image of Brazilian history or to help destroy it is something to think about: The immediate effect, at any rate, is to suggest a breaking down of the walls (in Braudel's image) that protect historicist history from dissolving into literature on the one hand or into cultural sociology on the other. A similar prospect is generated in the study of Mexican Indian messianism by Eric Van Young, who shows how certain attitudes and behaviors that terminate in political action were derived not from the calculations of interest that are usually taken to inspire the political action of elites, but from certain structural traits of what it is no longer fashionable to call the primitive mind.2B This messianic mentality, as Van Young notes, has been studied in a variety of contexts and is essentially the same in all, although the actions in which it has issued were historically specific in each case. If we ask what is gained by attending to such things, one answer is suggested by the fact that one of the earliest treatments of the mentality in question was D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse (1931), profoundly aesthetical and sociocultural, but hardly historical, while most of the case studies can be found in the literature of anthropology. A historian who focuses on the subject will not throw a uniquely historical light on it merely because he (or she) belongs to a history department. The point appears even more sharply in Murdo MacLeod's study of the interplay between Catholic sacramental religion and peasant reactions to the mas-

FROM MENTALITE TO MENTALITY

27

sive mortality of epidemics. A fascinating exercise in cultural sociology, it offers much to historians and its results can even be seen as indispensable to certain lines of historical study, but one can hardly imagine an accepted definition of history that would embrace it. Here too, the historian's conception of a subject in terms of mentality raises questions about what is happening to the discipline of history at the hands of its practitioners. The passionate betrothals or elopements described in the pages of Chasteen and Szuchman are set in much more specifically historical contexts. In both cases we learn of the failure of dominant groups or cultural forms to dominate their own younger generations, but one can easily imagine these essays fitting into a historical construction of national history, suitably subtilized, and in that case the sociological dimension would represent not the disintegration of history but an enrichment. To what end is another question, which can perhaps best be opened up in a more firmly established European context. Early in this century, Edouard Maugis published a three-volume Histoire du Parlement de Paris; like other such studies of institutions in its time and earlier, it took the institution itself as its subject and studied such things as personnel, organization, jurisdictional competence, routine, and the division of functions. No one then or later has ever asked why "we" should want to know about such things; the presupposition, as in all work within the "developmental paradigm," was that the subject of history as such was the development of the French (or whatever) nation and state.29 Such works are as good today as when they were written, but while scholars still use them, they do not try to imitate them. In 1981 Fran~oise Autrand published a study of Parlement during most of the period covered by Maugis, but her work was entitled Naissance d'un grand corps de l'etat: Les gens du Parlement de Paris, 1345-1454. Fredric Cheyette, reviewing the book in Speculum, began by noting that "French medievalists have almost totally abandoned the history of the French monarchy and its institutions"-only 4 of 228 theses then in progress fell into the category. Although he welcomed Autrand's worlc all the more for this reason, his discussion of it shows how radically different it is from what used to be called institutional history. "Her data base is a prosopography of the 678 presidents, councillors, and King's advocates who constituted the Parlement between 1345 and 1454, whose careers and family relations she analyzes both individually and collectively." She studies "family networks and strategies," "clienteles and factions," "solidarities that stretched beyond the court," "the formation of a Parisian milieu of state servants," and "the process by which this milieu of judges became noble." While Autrand herself retains a characteristically French attachment to the presupposed meaningfulness of "the State" and the monarchy, her historian's sense of what these large-scale entities really came down to has the effect of decomposing them into motivational units no different from those we find in all other institutions of church and state, and significantly similar to the

28

HOWARD KAMINSKY

infrastructures of provincial aristocracy, urban patricians and guildmasters, and indeed every local society.30 It is in this sort of social history, worked up if necessary by statistics and with computers (Autrand used both), that the determination of mentalities speciiiC to their milieus becomes both possible and useful, perhaps even necessary. One realizes that it builds on the knowledge created in old-fashioned institutional, constitutional, and even political history, but it also seems to supersede these modes; one instinctively feels that the image of the past created by this sort of social history is more real. So it is, to us, and this takes us to the last stage of our journey. One can think of any institution or other "structure" as an abstraction whose real existence consists uniquely in the minds of the individuals who make it up: Their mentalities, their consequent motivations and decisions, their still further consequent behaviors and actions, are the only being that the institution has (apart from buildings and other material things, which mean nothing by themselves). Cognition of a given structure can be of many forms-- economic, sociological, narrative, legal-and can be sought at several levels, ranging from the abstraction to the individual units of motivation, but it is always an image, a work of the mind's art, and while all such cognitions can be true, none of them are per se more real than others. If most of us today find Autrand's picture of Parlement more real than the one drawn by Maugis, it is because our minds, formed in our own sociocultural order, are more interested in behavior and motivation than in the elements of authority, domination, integration, and tradition that are manifest in the reality of an institution qua institution. Or if we are interested in such things, it is in their problematical aspects--their artificiality, hegemonic function, and moments of failure. So, for example, the Catholic church's extension of its religion to the Indians of Peru is reconceptualized by Manuel Burga as not so much a triumph of an institution as a syncretism in which the preconquest social order could be reconstituted-a very mixed triumph "in which the gods were Christian, and the rituals Andean." And the thought gives us pleasure. If "deconstruction" can be used in a general sense only loosely derived from its technical meaning in the work of Derrida and his school, it can serve as a good term for the intellectual impulse generated by our mass society and its radically pluralistic culture; we do not order our experience of meaningfulness by grand, authoritative, unquestioned abstractions of being or value, but we see our task as one of taking such abstractions apart, deconstructing them. We are incapable of generating a vision of history that would focus on the processes of organization, conquest, domination, and repression that created our world, but in exchange we devote our scholarly enterprise to redeeming the injured and the insulted, the marginal and the unassimilable, the repressed and the excluded. The French mode of social history is such an effort, and so is the use of "mentality" as a cognitive construct Without the slightest reservation in welcoming the new knowledge and wisdom thus created, one can

FROM MENTALITE TO MENTALITY

29

still usefully keep in mind the question that only the future will answer: Are we taking part in a postmodem disintegration of the modem form of historical enterprise, or just a comprehensive reconfiguration? Either way, it may be timidly suggested, the classical mode of history as literature-the "teacher of life"-may turn out to be the hard core, reemerging into light after its more scientific incrustations have melted away into the sciences of man. NOTES 1. Georges Duby, "Histoire des mentalites," in L'histoire et ses methodes, EncyclopOOie de la Pleiade, ed. Charles Samaran (Paris, 1961), pp. 937-966. Duby merely mentions Durkheim and Mead. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction ofReality (Garden City, N.Y., 1967) for a systematic sociology of knowledge derived from a combination of the two. It does not deal with "mentalities" in our context, but it bears on the matter throughout. See, e.g., pp. 85ff. for a discussion of "socially segregated subuniverses of meaning," which include mentalities and other ideas. 2. Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Middletown. Conn., 1975), chap. 2, esp. pp. 56f. See in general Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The ANNALES Paradigm (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976). 3. Iggers, New Directions, pp. 66f. 4. The Proustian passage is adduced by Jacques Le Goff in "Les mentalites. Une histoire ambigile," in Faire l'histoire, ed. J. Le Goff and Pierre Nora, 3 (Paris, 1974), pp. 76-94; also see Gerd Tellenbach, '"Mentalitiit'," in Geschichte, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft. Festschrift fiir Clemens Bauer, ed. E. Hassinger et al. (Berlin, 1974), pp. 11-30. 5. Tellenbach, p. 12, n. 4, observes that Durkheim's Latin formulation (in his dissertation), "sed homo ipse alius est in diversis societatibus. Non eodem animi habitu est," was translated in French (1953) as "mais dans des societes differentes l'homme lui-meme est autre. n n'a pas la meme mentalite... 6. Duby, "Histoire," p. 952; Tellenbach, "Mentalitiit," p. 21; E. P.. Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56-97, esp. 5~0. 7. Georges Duby, "La feodalite? Une mentalite medievale," Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations 13 (1958): 765-771. 8. Tellenbach, "Mentalitiit," p. 18, offers definitions of mentalite according to the common historical understanding: "a relatively constant disposition of the mind, inclined rather to repetition of the usual than to spontaneous, original thought"; "a mentalite is a natural and often impulsive behavior or reaction, hardly touching the conscious level." On p. 21, he suggests that "what above all aroused the interest of the 'Annales' school was the element of immutability, the longue duree." Le Goff, "Les mentalites," pp. 77, 82, holds that mentalite resides at "le niveau le plus stable, le plus immobile des societes," and that "la mentalite est ce qui change le plus lentement" On p. 89, he characterizes it as "eminernment collective." Cf. Tellenbach, pp. 21, 14, for both points, and cf. Frantisek Graus, "Mentalitiit-Versuch einer Begriffsbestinunung und Methoden del Untersuchung," in F. Graus, ed., Mentalitiiten im Mittelalter. Methodische und inhaltliche Probleme, Vortrage und Forchungen, Bd.

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HOWARD KAMINSKY

35 (Sigmaringen, 1987), p. 17, for a sort of residual defmition: "Mentalitiit is the common tonicity (fonus) of long-term behavioral forms and views of individuals within groups." Duby, "Histoire," p. 949, on the other hand, holds that the short, medium, and long durees have their respective mentalites, and Graus, "Mentalitiit-Versuch," p. 23, agrees, even though his definition emphasizes the long term. 9. Tellenbach, "Mentalitiit," p. 13. 10. lggers, New Directions, pp. 65ff.; Tellenbach, "Mentalitiit," p. 14, n. 14, lists some of the more recent German discussions. 11. Duby, "Histoire"; E. J. Hobsbawm, "From Social History to the History of Society," in Historical Studies Today, ed. Felix Gilbert and Stephen Graubard (New York, 1972), p. 18. 12. Le Goff, "Les mentalit6s," p. 76. 13. Hobsbawm, "From Social History," p. 18; idem, 'The Revival of Narrative: Some Comments," Past and Present 86 (February 1980): 8. 14. Le Goff, "Les mentalit6s," p. 79. 15. Tellenbach, ''Mentalitiit," p. 17. And see Graus, "Mentalitiit-Versuch," p. 48: ''In my opinion, the study of Mentalitiiten cannot itself be a field of research and cannot replace other modes of understanding." 16. Graus, "Mentalitiit-Versuch," p. 10, n. 7, cites some of the best and most recent definitions. 17. LeGoff, "Lesmentalit6s,"p. 76. 18. Graus, "Mentalitiit-Versuch," pp. 10 f., makes the important distinction between the use of concepts for Forschung (research) and for DarsteUung (the written record). 19. John French, "Riqueza, poder e mao de obra numa economia de subsistencia: Sao Paulo, 1596-1625," Revista du Arquivo Municipal (Siio Paulo), ano 45, no. 195 (January-December 1982): 79-107. 20. Tellenbach, "Mentalitiit," pp. 11-19, with remarks on the different and broader semantic field of English "mentality," for which see also Le Goff, "Les mentalites," p. 91, n. 13; today, however, the English word has picked up much of the sense we deal with here. 21. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I, 22.4. 22. Cicero, De oraiore, 2.936. 23. Fernand Brandel's foreword to Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 11fT. 24. Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 29ff.; see lggers, New Directions, pp. 121!. 25. Duby, "Histoire," pp. 937fT.; Stoianovich, French Historical Method, passim. 26. The most important historian in this line was Otto Brunner, on whom see Otto Gerhard Oexle, "Sozialgeschichte-Begriffsges chichte-Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Anmerkungen zum Werk Otto Brunners," Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial-und Wutschaftsges chichte 71 (1984): 305-341, esp. pp. 321-323, for the parallel to the Annales school; Steven Rowan, "Historical Questions and Literary Answers: A Dialogue," Gemumisch-Ro1111mische Monatsschrift 66 (1985): 131 ff.; James Van Hom Melton, "Otto Brunner and the Right-Wmg Origins of Modern German Social History" (unpublished paper). 27. Michael Oakeshott, Experilmce and Its Modes (Cambridge, 1933); cf. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea ofHistory (Oxford, 1946), pp. 151ff.

FROM MENTALITE TO MENTALITY

31

28. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, La mentalite primitive (Paris, 1921); cf. R. Firth, Symbols Public and Private (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), pp. 160ff. for the universality of this mentality. 29. See, e.g., Stoianovich, French Historical Method, pp. 32ff.; Bernard Guenee, "L'histoire de l'Etat en France ala fm du Moyen Age vue par les historiens franr,:ais depuis cent ans," Revue historique 232 (1964): 331-360. 30. Franr,:ois Autrand, Naissance d'un grand corps de l'etat: Les gens du Parlement de Paris, 1345-1454 (Publications de la Sorbonne, NS Recherche, 46; Paris: Universite de Paris I, Pantheon Sorbonne. 1981); Cheyette's review is in Speculum 58 (1983): 431-434.

3 The Triumph of Colonial Christianity in the Central Andes: Guilt, Good Conscience, and Indian Piety MANUEL BURGA CAPELIANIAS: DEVELOPMENT AND GEOGRAPHY OF COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY

The capellanfa, or chaplaincy, consisted of mortgaged property designed to provide annuities destined for ftmdamentally religious objectives. These religious mortgages ftmctioned in the same manner as the censos, or secular mortgages, and were governed by the same interest rates that applied to all other contemporaneous credit transactions. We can briefly describe the chaplaincy as a mortgage loan (on mban, rural, commercial, or even financial property) that provided an annual income typically used to cover the costs of masses said in memory of the chaplaincy's founder-a calculation designed to alleviate the severity of his sins and to permit the eternal rest of his soul, the souls of his family, or those of Christianity. At other times, chaplaincies were designed to be distributive (capellanfas colativas). In these cases, the ftmds were meant to provide permanent annuities for the maintenance of the founder's children or other family members who had chosen religious careers as friars, nuns, or secular priests. These religious mortgages had the clearly practical goal of financing the religious vocation of members of the most powerful economic groups in colonial society. Chaplaincies were commonly stipulated in wills drawn up near the time of death, though they occasionally were created in special documents drafted earlier in the founder's lifetime. We should also note that chaplaincies served as instruments of canon law through which faithful Christians could, by financing the activities of the colonial Church, express their religious piety and thereby find "an eternal Christian rest" for themselves and their families. These, then, were the two faces of the chaplaincies: For the founder, they served as an expression of his religiosity; for the Church, they meant an increase in its earthly possessions through which it financed Catholic liturgy and the material surroundings of individuals who had chosen religious careers. In almost all cases, the 33

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MANUEL BURGA

annuities served either to pay the chaplain who said mass or to maintain selected members of the clergy who came from the poorest sectors of society. In the case of chaplaincies established within the Archdiocese of Lima, it does not appear that sufficient liquidity had been achieved by the end of the seventeenth century for the juzgado, or supervisory office, to act as a significant financial force in the region.1 Liquidity, which by the nineteenth century had become considemble in Mexico, had not been achieved in the course of two centuries of colonial rule in Peru.2 Our main interest, however, does not lie in the purely economic aspects of the chaplaincies, but rather in their religious meaning as an expression of a given type of mentalite: the search for salvation through commitment of one's earthly possessions. This type of investment by the Peruvian colonial society-irrational if viewed from a strictly economic perspective-nevertheless offered an efficient way to fmd salvation and eternal peace in the gardens of paradise. It represented a problem of conscience for each founder of a chaplaincy and a test of Christian legitimacy before one's peers. In this context, the chaplaincy provides important information that allows us to gauge the development of religiosity during the colonial period. We can also use the statistical data of chaplaincies to give us a more precise sense of the acculturation processes among Indians within the Andean population. Who founded chaplaincies? Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, or Indians? Can we compile statistics about the increase in the number of masses that might thereby serve as an indicator of colonial religiosity? We are unable to answer such questions with precision, in part because of the uneven quality of the empirical data available from the documentation. The information in this chapter has been culled from forty-three legajos (bundles) of archival documentation found in the capellania section of the archive of the Archdiocese of Lima. Information regarding every chaplaincy was coded along sixteen variables for a total data set of 975 chaplaincies. The unevenness of the information was reduced by eliminating approximately 27 percent of the cases, which yielded a more reliable sample of 728 chaplaincies. The sixteen original variables were also reduced to six, and these provided the most valid and reliable information about the establishment of each chaplaincy: (1) founder's name, (2) foundation date, (3) location of properties, (4) amount of capital invested, (5) annual income derived from capellanias, and (6) description of properties and assets involved. The development of the concept we refer to as colonial Christianity can be noted in Figure 3.1, which shows by decades the founding dates of the chaplaincies in the Archdiocese of Lima The territory administered by the archdiocese represented an extensive region of central Peru that included the coastal area, the highland zones of the sierra, and sections of the tropical lowlands. Because of the extension and geographic diversity of the archdiocese's domain, the sample used has some applicability to studies of other Andean

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

35

Figure 3.1 Chaplaincies in Archdiocese of Lima, 1550-1689 Decade

1550-1559 1560-1569 1570-1579 1580-1589

13

1590-1599

44 65

1600-1609 1610-1619

80

1620-1629

90

n

1630-1639

114

1640-1649 1650-1659 1660-1669 1670-1679

216

117 94

57

1680-1689 0

30

60

120 90 Chaplaincies

150

180

210

240

Source: Juzgado de Capellanias del Arclrivo Arzobispal de Lima, Secci6n Capellanias, 43 lega-

jos.

areas during viceregal times. Those areas must have shared great similarities-in the context of Church mortgages-with the region that this chapter analyzes. Figure 3.1 shows the upward trend in the founding of chaplaincies peaking in the second half of the seventeenth century. In Figure 3.2, we can determine the periodization and trends in the establishment of chaplaincies. The foundation of chaplaincies is clustered from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries into three major periods: 1550-1599, 1600-1643, and 1644-1689. The act of founding became more frrmly entrenched in the course of time; thus, only 9 percent of the total number of chaplaincies were founded in the ftrSt period, 40 percent in the second, and 51 percent in the last era. Although few chaplaincies were established in the sixteenth century, more important is that the period is notable for the prominence of the historical figures who founded them and the reasoning behind their actions. Among the most famous chaplaincies of the era were the ones established by Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror, those of Archbishop Ger6nimo de Loayza, and those of several other major encomenderos, the white lords of Indian subjects. Theirs was the era of the guilty conscience, the result of Bartolome de Las Casas' ideology, from which other behavioral modalities arose in ever clearer focus to culminate in Spaniards' greater efforts to die as good Christians.

36

MANUEL BURG A

Figure 3.2 Disbibution of Chaplaincies, Archdiocese of Lima, 1550-1689 Percentage of Total 100

80

60%

44%

35%

1600-1643

1644-1689

60

40

20

0

Year

0

Provinces

-

City of Lima

Source: Juzgado de Capellanfas del Ard:rivo Arzobispal de Lima, Secci6n Capellanias, 43 lega-

·os.

By contrast, the significant increase in the nwnber of chaplaincies established during the seventeenth century was clearly one of the political consequences of the European Counter Reformation, which was manifested in Peru in two ways: in the heavy-handed intolerance of religious heterodoxy in the Andean region and in the significant growth of chaplaincies among the most thoroughly Christian social sectors.3 Insofar as chaplaincies were a fundamental feature of European Catholicism, the Andean growth and elaboration of the Church-managed mortgage market in the 1600s represented the undeniable success of Christianity in Peru: By then, a great many properties began to produce permanent annuities sufficient to promote divine worship. Spiritual salvation held the highest priority for this generation, even if it meant increasing the invested capital and thereby putting at risk the material welfare of future generations of family members. The important thing was Heaven, not Earth-the latter made sense only as a function of successfully addressing the former. This is the rationale by which we can understand one of the mechanisms responsible for fueling the revenue-producing economy that spread and eventually covered virtually all aspects of Peruvian society. The data in Table 3.1 show the geographic distribution of chaplaincies at the time of their establishment. During this period, the 432 chaplaincies

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

37

Table 3.1 Regional Distn"bution of Capellanlas Region

Number Established

Percent

Los Reyes and Callao

465

64

Southern roast (Pachacamac, Nasca, lea, Pisco, Ca:iiete-Cbincha)

141

19

Northern coast (Chancay, Huaral, Santa, Norte, Pativilca, Hueura, Supe)

45

6

Northern Sierra (Ancash, Cajamarca)

11

2

Central Sierra (Jauja, Huamanga, Huarochiri, Lunahuana, Huamantanga)

57

8

Southern Sierra Total 728

9 100

Source: Juzgado de Capellanfas del Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Secci6n Capellanfas, 43 lega-

jos.

founded in the city of Lima alone (appropriately limited to the area of Los Reyes) represented 59 percent of the pool of 728 capellanfas researched. These figures provide clear evidence of the urban and especially limeiio (pertaining to the city of Lima) characteristics of chaplaincies: Sixty-four percent of the chaplaincies' founders resided in Lima and its port city of Callao, and fully 89 percent of chaplaincies were located along the coastal regions. Only 11 percent of the chaplaincies were located in the Andean areas of the sierras, where a much larger proportion of the population resided, and a mere 8 percent were situated within the central sierra, part of the area on which this study is focused. These percentages suggest that colonial Christianity was primary in the urban environment of Lima and somewhat less important along the coast. The sierra-and this presents an important point-appears to have been a marginal territory for this form of expressing Christian piety. The behavioral trend on the part of the white population is not surprising, but the magnitude of the geographic differences between the coastal area and the sierra region is noteworthy. Also significant is that 79 percent of the chaplaincies founded in Lima and Callao consisted of urban properties. By contrast, chaplaincies established at great distances from Lima-both along the coast and on the sierra-show a very different characteristic: Rural settings represented 78 percent of the total chaplaincies. These percentages are consistent with a basic

38

MANUEL BURGA

reality of Spanish colonial society: In urban areas, one mortgaged the house, and in rural regions, the land Whatever the most profitable entity was, it would always be chosen for the service of God. GOD'S ANNUITY: THE ECONOMIC DIMENSION OF COLONIAL SPIRITIJALITY

In a strictly secular sense, the capellania had a vital economic dimension. It was clearly "God's annuity," serving to safeguard religious worship and thereby enhancing the vocational abilities of the clergy. We fmd close similarities with the European case during the medieval era: a strongly felt drive-all financial earnings or commercial benefits aside-that arose from a mentality obsessed with securing Christian salvation. Despite their religious basis, the functions of the chaplaincies' income were tied to secular affairs, to daily life, and to factors that affected economic existence in general. The chaplaincy was a legal instrument-initiated by the founder before a notary-in which numerous details were worked out, such as the amount of the annuity, the chaplaincy's initial investment capital, the mortgaged assets involved, the identities of the chaplain and the overseer, and the number of masses to be said annually. The chaplain, a priest contracted to say mass and pray in memory of and "purify" the founder through the religious act, earned his living out of the capellan{a's continuous earnings. The overseer, usually a kin of the founder, was charged with collecting the annuity, turning it over to the chaplain, and ensuring that the founder's testamentary wishes were followed. This very secular and legal charge allowed autonomous control over all aspects of the chaplaincy, free from intervention from the local or royal authorities-all of which was the result of shared rights and obligations among overseer, chaplain, and founding family. The annuities of each· chaplaincy could come from different sources: Andean production, a small farm in Lima, the lands of a curaca (Indian noble). Houses in Lima and in several other important population centers, such as Pisco, formed the basis for the establishment of many chaplaincies. In addition, they could be founded directly with capital, either in the form of silver bars or of cash, which could be used to mortgage urban or rural property. In any event, whether the capital used to establish the chaplaincy was invested in specific goods or deposited in a local bank, the important item was the annuity it produced. In the case of rural properties, the annuity was based on the value of production and the valuation of the land; in the urban setting, the annuity was composed, in part, of the rents collected from tenants. When funds were deposited in banks, the annuity was generated on the basis of the same interest rates as those that governed loans. Because of their religious character, chaplaincies were generally set up in perpetuity and could be liquidated only for the purpose of reinvesting the funds in more lucrative instruments. Theoretically, chaplaincies' annuities accumulated for an indefi-

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

39

nite period. They were indestructible. They were the earnings for God. Interest rates fluctuated over the course of three distinct periods: (1) 1550-1589, a time when interest rates hovered between 7 and 10 percent; (2) 1590-1622, a period of a stable rate of 7 percent; and (3) 1622-1689, which experienced a reduction in the rate to 5 percent Interest rates continued to fall, reaching 3 percent in the second half of the eighteenth century.4 It is highly probable that during the period covered by this study the secular tendency of the interest rate-affecting loans, censos, and chaplaincies-was directly influenced by the extent of available liquidity and overall profitability. Capital shortages in the sixteenth century had created a high interest rate, which declined to 5 percent starting in October 1622, the result of a Spanish administrative adjustment in the liquidity nonns found within urban regions. This decline in the yield brought fatal consequences to the era's primitive banks, such as the one owned by Juan de 1a Cueva, which apparently failed in the second half of the 1620s.s At the same time that this administrative measure served to lower profits in credit activities, it probably spurred productive enterprise. Because of the actions derived from secular economic principles, "God's annuity" experienced a decline that occasioned a series of lawsuits between chaplains and overseers. Yet the Christian response to the loss of profits was to increase the number of these religious mortgages: The continued logic of fervent belief, rather than economic rationality, prevailed Toward the close of the sixteenth century, the censos, capellanias, and, in general, most types of credit gravitated toward rural properties. This process was accelerated by the dominant sector's thirst for finances, which combined with their spiritual thirst The numerical data presented previously showed the growth of chaplaincies and illustrated well this process, but only in a very cold, impersonal manner, devoid of the drama that must have fonned part of the everyday life of the men and women involved in such affairs. For this reason, we tum now to the anecdotal aspects-the histoire evenementielle~egarding God's income. The properties that belonged to Dona Ines de Orellana, who left behind her mundane sorrows by cloistering herself in the Convent of the Concepcion, provide a clear example of the significant shift toward the establishment of mortgages on rural properties. She owned two haciendas, Chuquitanca and Punchauca, together with two large houses in Lima. Mter becoming a nun, around 1590, she established a capellania on her properties. Between 1590 and 1604, her invested capital amounted to 7,000 pesos, but her investment increased rapidly between 1604 and 1620, when fifteen mortgage contracts were drawn-eight destined to clerical and seven to secular management-raising the total capital invested in mortgages to 60,000 pesos, 56 percent of which was held in trust by the clergy.6 Dona Ines de Orellana thus provided an example of the dramatic growth of "God's annuity" drawn

40

MANUEL BURGA

from the Lima elite's rural properties in the seventeenth century. This was by no means an unusual case. Properties of the curaca Garcia Nanasca. in the area of lea, were valued at 16,000 pesos, and the censos and capellanfas placed on them added another 50 percent, or 8,011 pesos.' The assets owned by Antonio Dfas de Rivadeneira, a Spaniard who lived in Nasca, amounted to 37,333 pesos, while the censos and capellanfas taken out on them totaled 16,000, representing 43 percent of the value of his vineyards.• In Lima, Juan Gonzales owned a small farm (chacra) in 1621 valued at 35,000 pesos, on which 12,000 pesos were taken out for censos, the equivalent of 36 percent of the property's value.' In 1672, Gabriel del Castillo y Lug6n, owner of an extensive chacra in Carabayllo (Lima), asked for a 10,000-peso censo on his properties, arguing that the existing mortgages amounted to only 45 percent of their total value.to Mortgages on rural properties took on such intensity that subsequent loans were eventually redirected toward urban sites. The significant increase in the funds invested in these mortgages occasionally resulted in sharply fought family disputes that culminated in legal battles, as occurred in the Acosta family in the 1620s. At the time of the father's death, one of the sons, a priest named Juan Luis de Acosta, attempted to sell the family's assets in order to guarantee his receipt of interests on the censo his father had established on his behalf. The appeal filed with officials by his mother, Leonor Medel, revealed the tone of desperation caused by her son's maneuvers: "And let the record show that I requested of Your Excellencies that my son, Juan Luis de Acosta, be brought before you in order to explain himself in the matter of the case which he has brought against me, and by which he is manipulating the law to force me to sell my dwelling in order to evict me. "u In fact, however, the priestly son was demanding back payment for the previous seven years of annuities of 250 pesos per year-albeit without considering the practical consequences of his actions on his mother and four younger brothers. In the end, Leonor Medel was forced to sell a slave in order to pay the debt owed to her son. A similar confrontation occurred between Ana Guisado and her son, Bias de Vargas, in a case that spanned the course of the 1660s and 1670s. The mother failed to meet the annual payments owed to Bias, who also was a priest, but despite his mother's need to care for her young children, Bias proceeded with his claims against her. After analyzing her situation, Ana Guisado accused her son of questionable motives: "It is of considerable significance that my son has proceeded in public fashion, not so much out of financial need, but rather for the purpose of making matters as difficult as possible for me, which is his way of seeking vengeance for my nomination of one of his brothers to the chaplaincy left vacant by the death of my cousin, the Bishop Don Fernando Balcasar."tz In both of these cases, bitter family clashes arose from inabilities to pay the interest on the capellanfas estab-

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

41

lished for the maintenance of sons who had chosen to enter religious life. The two cases also illustrate the heavy burden imposed by the censos, the difficulties they caused in meeting payment obligations, and the brazen responses to conflict that sons were capable of displaying when engaged in litigation. The records of capellania-related lawsuits show that such litigation was affecting urban properties significantly by the mid-seventeenth century. An example was the case of Dona Beatriz de Sossa, who in 1649 bought Diego de Alcazar's house, which carried mortgages worth 77 percent of its assessed value.t3 Similarly, heavy credit burdens existed in the case of a chaplaincy taken on the home of Fernando de la Fuente in 1662, when the censos on it already amounted to 58 percent of its valuation.t4 By then, it had become difficult to find a good urban lot on which to take out a censo or capellania-the majority of the property had already been heavily burdened with debtts This was the problem faced by the overseer of the capellania belonging to Doiia de Sossa, who liquidated her mortgage in 1661, but could not fmd another property in which to invest: "Despite my many efforts to fmd lots in which to invest the principal," wrote the chaplain, "I have not succeeded because of the many censos that are already taken out on all the houses and farms within the city and its outlying district. "Hi The situation worsened after October 20, 1687, when the city of Lima was shaken by an earthquake, a disaster with a destructive radius that affected the entire central coast between Pisco and Huaura. This earthquake was followed by another tremor of more moderate proportions in 1688, and the ruined state of Lima's houses completely disrupted the urban mortgage system and served to set the sights of capellania managers and church officials on the rural world, in search of safe investment properties. Yet the agrarian regions had also been seriously affected by the disaster. The plight of Antonio de Zifuentes, a man with a reputation for litigiousness and for failing to pay his debts, provides a good example of the situation in the rural areas. In the words of another hacendado who also found it impossible to honor his own mortgage interest payments after the earthquake of 1687: "I knew that when the sea washed over the town of Pisco last year in '87, the person whose assets were most devastated was Don Antonio Zifuentes, because his house was ruined and he lost jewelry and the few crops that his farm yielded, which had been barely enough to feed his family."t7 Natural disasters, according to witnesses, were responsible for converting Zifuentes from an hacendado into a vulgar petty rogue. Agrarian problems increased over subsequent years, yet the devastation in urban properties left the censos and capellanias directed principally toward rural holdings. It was as if investors refused to accept that the agrarian regions underwent similar destruction. This is the tone of the testimony given by a farmer toward the end of the seventeenth century, in May 1696:

42

MANUEL BURGA

Judging by their desire to extend credit on any property in this city, the result of the dire conditions of housing since the earthquakes, investors do not appear to notice that the haciendas of the countryside have been just as severely hit and that the cost of their repair is prohibitive. Moreover, we have experienced over the past five years such a range in weather conditions and, thus, such unpredictable harvests, in addition to such a rise in the costs of labor and seed, that everyone bemoans these misfortunes; they do not know what will happen to them from one day to the next. Consequently, they are afraid, and do not even want to buy seed or plant.lS

This testimony depicts the pathetic situation obtaining by the end of the seventeenth century: cities destroyed, yearly crop failures, and climactic changes affecting the agricultural regions of the central coast Nature's forces had begun a process of deepening impoverishment among rural property owners, which in turn was causing a reduction in "God's annuity." This situation led to debt payment defaults, debt accumulation, and increasingly strained relations between the laity and the clergy. Christian piety appeared to have gone awry in the face of natural misfortunes that God could not prevent In sum, the growth in the number of chaplaincies was accompanied by a decrease in the average amount of capital invested in each and a process of constriction in urban and rural properties. The variable of capital invested in chaplaincies was examined in 517 of 728 chaplaincies; the data have been clustered in the three periods designated, as shown in Table 3.2. The noticeable decline in the average amount of capital invested becomes clearer when averaged by decade over the course of the seventeenth century {Table 3.3). The downward secular tendency in capital in turD caused a predictable reduction in the income that was supposed to benefit the chaplains, another indicator of the situation at century's end that would affect Catholic liturgy in subtle ways. The disproportionate growth in the number of mortgages meant that all capital surpluses were invested in an economy based on annuities and in a level of consumption not supported by production. Annuities benefited moneylenders, merchants, and clergy-and of course they permitted, in the best times, an ostentatious Catholic liturgy. "God's annuity" very probably represented 50 percent of all the annuities in the region. The financial bases Table 3.2 Amounts Invested in Capellanlas per Designated Period Period

Number of Capellanfas

Average Capital Invested (pesos)

1550-1599

28

4,317

1600-1643

190

4,284

1644-1689

299

3,904

Sowce: Juzgado de Capellanlas del Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Secci6n Capellanlas, 43legajos.

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

43

Table 3.3 Average Capellanias Investments per Decade, 17th Century Investment Capital Decade

Number of Capellantas

(pesos)

1600-1609 1610-1619 1620-1629 1630-1639 1640-1649 1650-1659 1660-1669 1670-1679 1680-1689

27 42 61 40 68 68 82 64 37

3,495 5;375 3,980 4,575 4,084 4,242 3,805 3,672 3;308

Source: Juzgado de Capellanias del Arcbivo Arzobispal de Lima, Secci6n Capellanias, 43 lega-

jos.

of the colonial Church were conditioned by the secular principles of economics and were dynamically reconstituted as the result of a growth in Christian piety. Misfortunes increased religious sentiment, which in turn caused an upturn in charitable donations given by wealthy Christians. The people of this colonial society were caught in the double bind of the era's mentalites: in order to reach eternal rest one had to be wealthy, but the acquisition of such peace would frequently impoverish one's descendants. This calling to do pious deeds, a legacy of European feudalism, impeded capital accumulation among the lay population while it endowed religious institutions with power. The "road to God" generated an economy based increasingly on financial services that tended to favor the colonial Church. FROM GUILT TO GOOD CONSCIENCE

The proposals made by Bartolome de Las Casas had well-known consequences for both the conquerors and, subsequently, for the general Spanish population of the second half of the seventeenth century.l9 A bad conscience, guilt, and the need to alleviate the burden of their sins led many conquerors and second-generation encomenderos to remember "their Indians" in their last wills; moreover, they listed their desire to "restore" to the Indians a share of the wealth that had been accumulated by the conquerors, settlers, and clergy in the central Andean territories. This sense of obligation to compensate was undoubtedly a good indicator of the raising of consciousness on the part of the Spaniards as they recognized the misfortunes that had befallen the conquered indigenous populations.20 In 1552, Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566) published two of his most famous treatises, Brevisima relaciOn and El confesionario. In these works, Las Casas formulated the idea that assets unjustly obtained from Indians must be returned if Spaniards were ever to find the only avenue for cleansing their consciences and thus providing for their eternal peace. The principal

44

MANUEL BURGA

carriers of Las Casas' message to the Andean region were Friars Tomas de San Martin, Domingo de Santo Tomas, and Geronimo de Loayza. Loayza, who became archbishop of Lima, published a work in 1560 entitled Avisos breves para todos los confesores destos reynos del Pini in which he provided answers to the whys, whens, and bows of the restitution of the goods usurped from the Indians.21 Ger6nimo de Loayza's nonns not only regulated the procedural aspects of restitution, but they also required the fulfillment of a series of obligations as prelude to unburdening the sinners' heavy consciences; father confessors were required to deny absolution to any conqueror who was present at the looting of the regions of Cajamarca or Cuzco and to all encomenderos who overstepped their rights to exact tribute from "their Indians." The problematic here dealt fundamentally at the level of the Christian soul, since Las Casas' message represented a sort of "pressure on the consciences," which did not constitute legal nonn.n Undoubtedly, there was a relation between Las Casas' message and the sense of guilt that began to pervade the collective conscience of Spaniards. Las Casas' sentiments appear to have been accepted as respectable notions even prior to the publication of El confesionario in 1552 or to the appearance of Loayza's regulations in Lima in 1560. By the 1550s, restitution provisions were appearing with increasing frequency in Spaniards' last wills.23 In D e thesauris, published in 1562, Las Casas strongly reafftrmed his judgment that all the goods taken by the conquistadors in Cajamarca and Cuzco had been illegally obtained and represented behavior unacceptably far from the nonns of goodness required of Christians. This publication precipitated the whole process of collective repentance, illustrated by acts of restitution on the part of leading encomenderos, including Juan Castellanos (1563), Lucas Martinez Vegazo (1565), Juan de San Juan (1567), Diego de Maldonado (1570), Rodrigo Niilo (1571), Juan de Pancorbo (1573), Polo de Ondegardo (1575), and Pedro de Villagra (1577). Still, restitutions remained rare. The period of Francisco de Toledo's viceregal administration (1569-1581), a time when Spain undertook to formulate an ideological program designed to justify the conquest of the Indies, witnessed very few incidences of dispositions for the restitution of Indian assets. In any event, they amounted to little money."' The increase in the number of capellanias founded between 1550 and 1689 could thus be explained by different causes: advances made by Christianity, increasing anguish and atonement for sins committed, and the success of the Counter Reformation. In any case, the observable increase in both chaplaincies and incidences of restitution reveals a population besieged by a sense of guilt and pressed into seeking salvation and eternal life. Without a doubt, life-the riches obtained from conquest-among the majority of the individuals who founded chaplaincies had meaning only as a function of Christian spiritual existence. The spiritual dimension had great importance for this population, whose

COLONIAL CHRSTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

45

perceptions had continuities and fluctuations. The wills of Spaniards who had meant to live in Peru only temporarily, such as merchants who happened to have died in Lima during their residence in the Viceroyalty, reveal some contrasts with the permanently settled Europeans. An example is the case of Sebastian Perez, a sailing-master of the ship Mar del Sur who had been born in Portugal and who signed his will in 1597.25 The document he left behind displayed a Christian sense of piety very much in the European style, devoid of any sense of affinity to the New World This seafaring man expressed his Catholicism in the traditional ways of the era: He established a chaplaincy for the pwpose of saying masses, designated sums of money to be used as charity for monasteries and hospitals for the needy, and left instructions for the liberation of several of his slaves. Yet the wills of wealthy Spaniards who stayed and made their fortunes in the New World reflect a different mode of Christian piety. Thus, in the capellanta established by Geronimo de Loayza, an important reference to the Indians appears: Some portion of the masses to be paid for by the funds generated by the chaplaincy were to be dedicated both to "the conversion of the Indians of this Archdiocese to our holy faith, and to provide for God, our Lord, to guide those who have already been converted. "26 A similar case comes from the year 1593, when Gonzalo Fernandez de Heredia, a resident of Huaura and a descendant of encomenderos living in neighboring provinces, founded a chaplaincy with an investment of 6,000 pesos for the purpose of saying mass for his soul and the souls of his parents, his dead kin, and the Indians of Cajatambo.%7 The last will of Juan Ruiz de Flores, a priest in San Geronimo ~e Surco (in the region of Huarochin'), stipulated that after his death, five hundred masses be said at different locations: "And these five hundred masses I direct to be said for my soul, for the souls of my parents and family members, for the souls of people to whom I am indebted, and for those of the Indians."2B In addition, he left 500 pesos to the Indians of San Ger6nimo de Soquiancancha, all of whom were located within his parish, which was probably intended as a form of the well-known practice of restitution, even though the specific term was absent from the document. A significant transition in modes of thinking regarding the notion of moral responsibility is found in the will of Antonio de Urefta, which was prepared in 1618.29 This Spaniard, who founded an important chaplaincy, at the same time left some of his assets to the Jesuit order because of "the great benefits done on behalf of the Spaniards, as well as of Indians and Blacks, by the members of the Company of Jesus ever since they entered this kingdom, as I have observed since my arrival, especially when dealing with the Indians, a people to whom we are all under obligation." These words suggest a transitional habit of thought to the extent that the reward was directed toward those who had treated the Indians well, not to the Indians themselves. This was the beginning of the end for even a minimal incidence in the notion

46

MANUEL BURGA

of restitution. In the decades that followed, no mention of Indians was made at all: Neither Spaniards nor native-born Peruvian whites offered restitution, nor did they even mention the services or tributes received from the Indians, in sharp contrast to Antonio de Urefia's approach. The curacas of high rank (curacas principales), however, acted in ways opposite to the Spaniards by having Indian commoners (indios del comUil) very much in mind at the time of death. Among the numerous last wills that demonstrated this concern are those of Diego Allaucan (1599), Diego Camaluana (1601), and Geronimo Macha (1605), all curacas principales of Lunahuarui. In a very Christian way, they established chaplaincies with the production of their vineyards and did not forget the population of Indians who lived on their lands. Geronimo Macha stipulated that an annuity of 100 pesos be set aside from one capellanfa: "Let the money be distributed and given out of my assets, since I am well aware that I am bestowing these funds as a form of restitution [and] for the good service they have provided me. "30 The stipulation made by Don Diego Camaluana contained more drama and emotion. He established a chaplaincy providing an annuity of 50 pesos to the Indians of Santiago de Pariaca, "to be distributed to everyone according to their position so that they will remember my soul. "31 This curaca left money behind specifically so that he would not be forgotten, a situation significantly different from the behavior among Spaniards. This same sensitivity to the notions of memory and restitution can be found in the will of Don Francisco Chumpi, curaca of Supe, who in 1592 bequeathed to Indians his farm of Guyan, consisting of 15 fanegadas, the equivalent of 24 acres, "which I donate so that the Indians of Supe can plant and harvest in order to pay ~eir tribute.... This I do for these Indians in recognition of their service and obedience shown to me as their cacique and lord. "32 Similar statements can be found in documentation from other regions. The last will of Juan Flores Guaina Mallqui from Ocros in 1634 made Indians the beneficiaries of material goods and chaplaincies that would open the gates of Heaven. If the noble curacas remembered "their Indians," they also exceeded Andean norms and even the Spanish restitution of assets. Not feeling satisfied with saving the Indians spiritually by establishing chaplaincies for the saying of mass, they also shared their wealth with their family members and the residents of Indian communities who had provided them with services. People had many reasons for establishing a chaplaincy, but in the end they all shared a religious motivation. What is more important for our purpose here is to discover whether any of the apparently conventional texts (such as last wills and testaments) underwent certain modifications at the time a capellania was established. These texts, albeit with certain limitations, contain expressions that reflected the founders' ideas or emotions; the language used may also have been representative of ideas and emotions of

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

47

the population in general. A small quantitative and qualitative study of the evolution of these texts (approximately 5 percent of the total of 728 chaplaincies researched) provided us with interesting data with which to study the documentation and to analyze their textual fluctuations, purges, eliminations, and new elements--matters that in a certain way represent patterns for measuring the evolution of Christian spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To the first half of the seventeenth century, the language Spaniards and Peruvian whites used when providing for chaplaincies in their wills expressed the goals of promoting the Christian religion and the Church and providing for redemption of all the souls in Purgatory. During the second half of the century, the texts of wills became briefer, and the wording most frequently employed pointed to the founding of chaplaincies as motivated by the personal salvation of the founder, the family, servants, and souls in Purgatory. It was then that the phrase "the law of charity" appeared with considerable regularity: The founders now felt obligated to establish chaplaincies for the sake of "souls held captive in Purgatory" as an additional act of charity, no longer to be simply assumed of all Christians. In sum, the seventeenth-century texts establishing chaplaincies denoted the transition away from an expressed desire to promote the Church and save the souls of others-be they Spaniards or Indians-to a more individualistic attitude of personal and familial salvation; in addition, there was the new textual ingredient dealing with souls in Purgatory as required by the "law of charity." This transition was not the result of a steady or linear evolution, nor did it correspond tightly to specific periods of time. Rather, this textual shift represented the consequence of several accumulated tendencies, the most salient of which included the disappearance of the Indians and the continued search for collective salvation. Finally, the increased usage of the term "law of charity" appears to indicate the presence of an imposed duty that had been unnecessary earlier in enlarging the number of chaplaincies. This subtle transition in the wording of the texts coincided with the decline in the average value of the capital invested in each chaplaincy. These two indicators thus announce at the least the beginning of a process of secularization in the era's collective consciousness-if not quite of a process of de-Christianization in the spiritual aspects of colonial society. Spaniards appeared to have forgotten the Indians, forgotten the sense of guilt that had been created by the writings of Las Casas and the actions of his apprentice, Loayza, in Peru. Spaniards developed good consciences and concerned themselves-virtually on an individual basis-with the obligatory Christian salvation demanded by their religion. This transition away from guilt and toward good conscience coincided with other processes: the disappearance of the generation of conquistadors, the decay of the encomienda system, and the definitive establishment of colonial authority. The elimination of con-

48

MANUEL BURGA

cerns about Indians might also have been the result of exploitation as a meaningful notion. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the decline in mining and dynamic growth in large agricultural estates, the matrix of which framed the social relations of production, masked the reality of exploitation and thus created conditions better suited for the diffusion of good consciences among the settlers.33 CAPELLANIAS DE INDIOS: THE CRISIS OF INDIAN CATHOLICISM

It is very difficult to know the real significance that chaplaincies represented for the Indians. either nobles or commoners (indios del comU.n). Should we conceptualize the practice of founding a chaplaincy by an Indian in the manner understood by European~ an instrument to express Christian piety and gain inner peace? If so, Indian chaplaincies would constitute an indicator of sincerity in their conversion to Catholicism, much in the way that the curaca of Supe, Francisco Chumpi, for example, expressed himself in the text of his will in 1592.34 Yet the high incidence of neglect and the repeated failures to meet specific promises and obligations regarding chaplaincies specified in wills might lead us to think that the establishment of capellanfas simply gave Indians an opportunity to emulate a European lifestyle. Examples of neglect in enforcing testamentary stipulations come from various cases: Don Francisco Chumpi's will of 1592 was not executed until the second half of the seventeenth century; similarly, Don Rodrigo Flores Guiana Caxamallqui, son of Don Juan Flores Guaina. neglected to turn fifty head of cattle over to the chaplaincy that had been founded by his fatheos In still other cases, Indian chaplaincies were founded as the result of the machinations and self-serving designs of clever doctrineros, priests charged with converting Indians and residing within Indian regions.36 Thus. three possible and very different conditions can explain the existence of Indian capellanfas: sincere conversion, superficial emulation of European practices, or schemes designed to impose chaplaincies on the Indians. It is impossible to distinguish in every case, but one thing is certain: A great number of Indians committed their assets, rural or urban, to the creation of income that was assigned to the colonial Church, in an attempt to prove the good quality of their Christianity prior to death. The Indians who founded capellanfas included both curacas and commoners. Many leading curacas mortgaged their lands, vineyards, and herds, although their contracts failed to specify either the capital they invested or their annuities. By contrast, among the common Indians' modestly sized chaplaincies (with annuities of 10 to 50 pesos), the founders almost always stipulated in the contracts the amounts to be invested, the number of masses to be said, and the assets involved. In a sample of twelve chaplaincies established by curacas, the average investment amounted to 3,935 pesos, a figure very close to the average investment for all chaplaincies in Peru.

COLONIAL CHRISTIANITY IN THE CENTRAL ANDES

Capellanias founded by poor Indians averaged 1,798 pesos, according

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to a sample of eight cases. Lunahuami, a parish in the charge of a dynamic priest, Alonso Ramires de Berrio, presented an unusual racial and social cross-section of capellania founders. Four curacas, Diego Allaucan, Ger6nimo Macha, Diego Camaluana, and Catalina Hirbay Ympa, established numerous chaplaincies between 1595 and 1606. These capellanias represented virtually all the properties that belonged to the principal Indian family, whose members lived in the region and in the lowlands area of Cailete. In addition, mestizos figured among modest capellania founders. Two women, Ysabel Escobar in Pisco and Juana Carbajal in lea, both the offspring of the union of free blacks with women who were supposedly of undisputed noble lineage from the Cuzco region, established chaplaincies in their own right37 Thus, Indian chaplaincies emanated from virtually all groups within the Andean populations: poor, rich, and mestizos with close relations to the upper levels of the Amerindian population. The mortgage burden on the Indian nobles' properties appears to have been considerable, as illustrated by the case of the Mochicas of lea. In order to make their payments, the Mochicas were forced to use the crops from the vineyard that belonged to Crist6bal de Olloscos, one of the descendants of the curaca Lorin lea Garcia Nanasca. The property cost 16,000 pesos when it was sold in 1598; the buyer, Garcia de C6rdova, paid 8,011 pesos and committed himself to paying the annuities yielded by the remaining 7,989 pesos. Thus, 50 percent of the vineyard became mortgaged.JS A similar situation appears to have affected the properties of Juan Machicao, curaca principal of Palpa and owner of several vineyards affected in 1604 by an unusually destructive flood. Among the effects of this disaster was a request to reduce the annuities to be paid by his descendants, Miguel Asllana and Diego Yapxi.39 The significant burden of censo and capellania debts that the properties of curacas principales began to carry may be a clear sign of additional forms of early acculturation on the part of this Indian social elite. Their acculturation process was a multiple one, not to be seen simply in terms of religious conversion. The curacas opted for a Europeanized lifestyle, which they expressed in various ways. For example, it was not unusual for curacas to own slaves, as was demonstrated by the case of Don Antonio Paytaguala, the curaca principal of Luringuanca who around 1627 stipulated in his will that a slave woman was to be sold and the proceeds used to found a chaplaincy.40 Don Juan Panaspaico, curaca principal in Huarmey, had become-with uncharacteristically Andean behavior-the beneficiary of the annuities produced by the properties of deceased Indians within his jurisdiction. When Joseph de caceres y Ulloa visited Huarmey in 1647, he recorded:

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MANUEL BURGA

In the aforementioned town of Laupaca [sic], a little over one league from this place, there are many uninhabited properties that were apportioned to the Indians of the town of Laupaca a long time ago and today there are no more than two Indians; for this reason, the governor [curaca principal] has rented out these lands to private individuals who are taking advantage of his policy without his caring about such matters, because he is the real owner of everything now that the town's Indians have died.41

Thus curacas principales established chaplaincies on their own properties, owned sJaves, and became rentiers as soon as such opportunities became available. All this means that the powerful Andean lords participated as much in the economic secuJar life as they did in the religious life-two traditions introduced into Andean territories by Europeans and absorbed by the Indian elites. But this fondness for the style of living brought by the conqueror did not remain a permanent or unaltered feature. In the sixteenth century, dazed by all of the unfamiliar aspects of Europeans and the speed of the events reJated to the conquest, Indians tried to emuJate, fawn over, and then blindly follow these bearded Vrracochas.42 After the initial phase of cultural disorientation, however, came a slow mental process of regaining cultural identity, of friction, and of an apparent return to the Indians' own cultural patterns, which would subsequently be eliminated during Viceroy Toledo's harsh repression. An attempt to present this transformation-which belongs more to the virtually inaccessible world of the Indians' mentalite and to the history of acculturation in the Andes---