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Promoting a better understanding of the phenomenon of colonization and its connection with environmental knowledge and technology, this article proposes a reframing of research agendas to take into account the municipal character of colonization in the Hispanic realm and to ask new questions. Questions should address what human– ecosystem relations, and the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the physical realm, can tell us about colonization itself; who the historical agents involved were, and what these actors knew, learned, and did in their environments. Using the Basin of Mexico's drainage and the agency of commoners, this article proposes that colonization depends on the massive deployment and generation of tacit knowledge about how to harness matter, energy, and time for the reproduction of human societies; the quotidian appropriation and reworking of autochthonous knowledge, techniques, and technology by the colonizing groups; the collaboration of the local populations in whom these are vested; and the agency of commoners with practical skills, environmental knowledge, and technological savvy derived from and honed in the realm of material production. In the Ibero-American realm, these agents were primarily commoners with skills in agropastoral production and the building trades; race, ethnicity, language, and gender were secondary conditions.
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 31:1, 115-127
Submerged Strata and the Condition of Knowledge in Latin America2022 •
The objective of this essay is to map the growing number of works that focus on the environmental humanities and to review two important contributions to the ongoing debates that are defining the direction of Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies. In 2019, Héctor Hoyos published Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and the Literatures of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey published Allegories of the Anthropocene. While the scope of these two works varies in terms of the regional and/or national geographies they cover, as well as the authors and artists they analyse, both books attempt to contest the nature/culture binary – along with other Modern dichotomies – from very different (perhaps even opposite) positions and angles: while Hoyos calls for a de-allegorisation (namely, a “literalisation” ) of several important Latin American works, DeLoughrey, on the other hand, invites us to reconsider allegory as a way of symbolising the “perceived disjunction between humans and the planet, between our ‘species’ and a dynamic external ‘nature’”.
1991 •
Journal of Post-Medieval Archaeology
Between the South Sea and the Mountainous Ridges: Biopolitical Assemblages in the Spanish Colonial Americas2018 •
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 labour with the specific biopolitical ecologies assembled through co-option, 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 labouring 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.
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World
From Paradise to the Extractive Zone: Anthropogenic Environmental Change and Historical Agency in Antonio de León Pinelo’s El paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo2022 •
This essay provides an interpretation of Antonio León Pinelo’s ideas on natural history and anthropogenic environmental change. It is centered on Pinelo’s El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo, a mid- seventeenth-century work that combines narratives regarding the geographical location of the Garden of Eden with theories on the natural history of the Indies. Building on studies that examine narratives on environmental change in the context of European expansion, this article intervenes in a growing academic literature that explores how societies have debated the political imbalances of climate change since the early modern period. In doing so, it highlights the importance of recognizing how discourses on climate and environmental change are forged through evolving conceptions of historical agency. Thus, the article examines Pinelo’s work as part of a broader corpus of narratives identifying human- initiated socio-ecological change linked to European colonial expansion. It reveals how writing about anthropogenic environmental-making processes implies generating the historical agent that has the authority to discipline and transform the environment. Here, it shows how Pinelo’s work minimizes Indigenous capacities to master the environment by subordinating their historical agency to the history of Nature. Ultimately, the article argues that writing about anthropogenic environmental-making processes reflects specific dynamics of domination that historians grappled with as they negotiated the political terms of Western ecological imperialism.
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2012 •
Agriculture and Human Values
Endogenous knowledge and practice regarding the environment in a Nahua community in Mexico2004 •
Ancient West Mexico. Time, Space, and Diversity, edited by Joshua Englehardt, Verenice Heredia and Christopher Beekman, 197-232. Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
Constructing the Pre-Hispanic Landscape in the Santiago Bayacora Basin, Durango2020 •
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2007 •
Maritime Communities of the Ancient Andes
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ames Krippner-Martínez. Rereading the Conquest. Power, Politics, and the History of Early Colonial Michoacán, Mexico, 1521–1565. Pennsylvania State University Press, 20012002 •
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Historical Archaeology
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Colonial Latin American Review
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