Between the South Sea and the Mountainous Ridges: Coerced Assemblages and Biopolitical Ecologies in the Spanish Colonial Americas

Summary

Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated.  This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession, and the disciplining of labor and dynamic biopolitical ecologies of assemblage, coercion, and accumulation.  This perspective is explored through two archaeological case studies from Peru and Guatemala, where competing concerns about altitude, climate, disease, violence, and populations of differentiated laboring bodies (both human and non-human) came to the fore in unexpected ways.  The resulting discussion challenges the reliance on abstract analytical totalities like ‘capitalism’ and ‘colonialism’ and shifts attention towards the diverse assemblages of actors that shape and continue to shape the processes central to political economic analyses.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Expanding the Intellectual Envelope Comparative Approaches to Political Economy   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 923