Technologies of Surveillance, Technologies of Care? Colonial Census, Biopolitics, and Networks of Surveillance in Southern Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Technologies of surveillance are a common element of diverse forms of extractive early modern colonial projects as a method of effectively extracting value from humans/non-humans. The forms surveillance takes vary widely, frequently blurring into technologies of “care” for laboring bodies to ensure their continued productivity. Theories of bio/necropolitics highlight these intersections between surveillance and care in the exploitation of (re)producing bodies, or what Berlant’s “slow death” frames as the management of the “physical wearing out of a population.” Padrones (census documents) emerge as one of the more effective technologies of such dispersed surveillance and care in colonial Guatemala, as they tracked the number and location of tribute paying individuals in the region’s native communities, including last known sightings and probable whereabouts of those missing/escaped from where they “belonged.” These documents also reveal a form of paternalistic “care” recording bodily health, injuries, births/deaths, and wayward spouses as part of managing the wear of colonial extraction on native bodies, and communities. Through archival, GIS and social network analysis, this paper materializes these ephemeral early modern colonial technologies of surveillance and looks to bridge the premodern/modern divide in studies of surveillance by highlighting the persisting coloniality of surveillance/care in Guatemala’s contemporary/recent past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41619.0