Defining and divining the healthy body: materialities of body and wellness in the 18th century Spanish New World

Summary

This paper explores the intersections of health, religion, race, and dress; how theories of disease and illness in the eighteenth century intersected with Spanish imperial understandings regarding race and dress of colonizer and colonized and culturally-distinct medicinal practices for treating physical and spiritual sicknesses. Colonial empires reshaped and redefined colonial bodies: physical and spiritual care, social and sexual interactions, and dress and language were just a few of the concerns of imperial powers who strove to maintain hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. For the colonial individual, practices of adorning and protecting body and soul (with medicine, amulets, and religious items) were integral to constructing identities and safeguarding spiritual well-being. Using archival and material sources, I explore how colonial peoples living in New Spanish treated, mended, and covered their bodies through dress, practices of faith, and medicine.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeological Approaches to Subjectification

Keywords

Spatial Coverage