Subaltern technologies and early modernity in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Colonial Latin American and Atlantic-world scholarship that does not explicitly concern indigenous, black, and other subaltern individuals and groups continues to marginalize, if not completely ignore, them. This lingering, if often inadvertent, Eurocentrism endures, according to this essay, for several reasons, including a preoccupation with modernization, notions of ‘nature’ that make it easy to ignore ‘culture,’ and models of culture that presume fixed boundaries rather than permeability. This essay suggests that a focus on ‘technology’—capaciously defined to include phenomena such as hammocks and chocolate, as well as mining and storm management—is one way out of this predicament. Investigating the myriad technologies that dominated colonial Latin America reveals the centrality of subaltern actors throughout the region and the Atlantic world more broadly. It also affords a fruitful way to explore the relationships between material and symbolic culture in the context of an ‘entangled’ early modern world.

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful for the comments and suggestions on multiple drafts offered by Ralph Bauer, Greg Childs, Robin Derby, Kris Lane, Dana Leibsohn, Antonella Romano, David Sartorius, Silvia Sebastiani, Stephanie Smallwood, Claudia Verhoeven, Andrew Zimmerman, and anonymous CLAR readers. I also wish to express my appreciation to the participants in the 2013 seminar and 2015 conference, ‘Entangled Trajectories: Integrating Indigenous and European Histories.’ I’m also grateful to Sebastián van Doesburg and Michael Swanton of the Biblioteca de Investigación Juan de Córdova for inviting me to speak at the ‘Posada de Cacao’ held at the Centro Cultural San Pablo in Oaxaca in 2014 on ‘Chocolate: una tecnología americana difundida por el mundo.’

Notes on contributor

Marcy Norton received her PhD. from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an associate professor in the Department of History at The George Washington University. Her research focuses on the Spanish World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the entangled histories of Native Americans and Europeans on both sides of the Atlantic. She is the author of Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2008), which won the best book award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. Her current project is a history of human-animal relationships in the early modern Atlantic world.

Notes

1. For guns and steel, see Diamond (1997), for domesticated animals, see Anderson (2004). For re-appraisals of conquest that de-emphasize European weaponry, see Restall (2004) and Matthew (2012). More recent scholarship has answered that question by looking at how indigenous peoples appropriated some of these very same European technologies, e.g. Bushnell 2009.

2. See the introduction to this special issue for a discussion of the history and an extended analysis of this term.

3. The ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ outlined in this essay are intended to encompass all parts of the Atlantic world, including regions in Africa, Latin America, and Europe. I offer examples that include all of these but there will be a preponderance of attention to Mesoamerica and the Circum-Caribbean/Lowland South America due to my areas of expertise. Much of this model also applies to trans-Pacific entanglements in Latin America and beyond but the relationship of Asia and the Americas in the early modern period has distinct features that make it beyond the scope of this essay.

4. Subaltern and non-European, however, are not synonymous since European soldiers, merchants and missionaries, etc. often encountered Africans and Native Americans as equals or even more powerful agents in myriad Atlantic world contexts.

5. The notion of ‘disavowal’ is at the center of Sibylle Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (2004).

6. Elliott does not name any of the scholars he had in mind, but the prior decade had seen the publication of several seminal ethnohistorical works (e.g. Aguirre Beltrán 1963, Gibson 1964).

7. For economic history, see, for instance Pomeranz (2000). For revisionist history of science that focuses on the Iberian world, pioneering scholarship includes López Piñero 1979; López Piñero and Pardo 1996, Pimentel 1998, Barrera 2006, and Cañizares-Esguerra 2001 and 2006. See also note 8 below.

8. In their landmark histories of sciences, Antonio Barrera (2006) and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (2001, 2006) were among the first U.S.-based scholars to make the case that Iberian-world actors were on the forefront of the Scientific Revolution, revising a 'core narrative' that focuses exclusively on the 'British as precocious harbingers of modernity' and in which Spanish scientists and intellectuals 'remain invisible' (Cañizares-Esguerra 2007, 1430-31). Initially, however, increasing the visibility of Ibero- Europeans and creoles did not necessarily lead to increased visibility of subalterns. In his early work, for example, Cañizares-Esguerra wrote, for instance, that 'formal systems of science created by the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca seem to have evaporated into thin air in the wake of the Spanish conquest' and so 'the history of science in colonial Latin America, by and large, does not belong in the “non-Western world.” The scientific practices and ideas that became dominant were those brought by Europeans as they strove to create stable, viable colonial societies' (2006, 46-47). More recently, however, Cañizares-Esguerra, as well as many of his students, have emphasized the importance of non-European actors in the Atlantic world (e.g. Cañizares-Esguerra and Breen 2013).

9. I find most convincing his account of longue durée of animist ontology of native Amazonia and Siberia (Norton 2015), but less so his arguments concerning governing ontologies in Mesoamerica. This may be related to his reliance on scholarship for Mesoamerica that does not reflect recent work showing that many of the colonial documents used to reconstruct pre-Hispanic ‘cosmovision’ are themselves significantly marked by colonial/European conceptions (e.g. Burkhart 1989).

10. For examples encompassing a range of places and periods, see Davis 1995; Chaplin 2001; Bauer 2003; Schiebinger 2004; Smith 2004; Parrish 2006; and Safier 2008, 2010.

11. Quoted in Norton 2008, 86. The arguments summarized here as well as the translations are found in Norton 2000, 2008. Concerning Monardes, see also Bleichmar 2005.

12. Bray (1998) discusses the ‘standard view’ and its demise.

13. I chose tobacco and chocolate as the topic of my dissertation (Norton 2000) in part as a response to readings, on the one hand, that argued that indigenous agency shaped the formation of institutions, religion, and colonial society and culture generally in colonial society, and to those, on the other hand, that claimed that the ‘encounter’ with the New World left Europe largely unchanged. The fact of tobacco and chocolate seemed, on the face of it, to belie the latter claims, and offered a way to bridge these two historiographical traditions. In my book (Norton 2008), I described tobacco and chocolate as ‘cultural artifacts’ whose existence was predicated on ‘knowledge and techniques developed over millennia in the western hemisphere’ as a way to revisit the question of the impact of the New World on the Old and to foreground the way that colonists and later Spaniards were transformed by their interactions with indigenous people and/or their material culture (4). As a result, my book attended closely to both the materiality of things and embodied experience and their effects on phenomena ranging from science to statecraft.

14. In addition to those discussed below, examples of subaltern technologies include plants (Radding 2012), pharmacopeia (Crawford 2016; Breen 2017), food (Earle 2014), martial arts (Desch-Obi 2008), sign language (Carayon 2016), and body ornamentation (Odle 2016).

15. There was a long tradition of viewing tool-making as a distinguishing feature of hominids in comparison to other animals (e.g. Gell 1988). As with Aristotle (see above), I see no reason to view ‘technology’ as an attribute exclusively possessed by homo sapiens. For instance, nests could be considered an avian technology, and tracking abilities of dogs, a canine one.

16. For fascinating and suggestive research along these lines in other contexts, Pamela Smith proposes that commonalities between Chinese and Arabic (and later Christian European) alchemical theories in the first millennia likely ‘will not be found in texts, but rather in the movement of materials’—e.g. technology—such as ammonium chloride, and for that reason one should also ‘not be astounded, then, at the similar powers with which the material cinnabar, quicksilver, vermillion, and lizards were endowed at opposite ends of Eurasia’ (Smith 2014, 127); see also Bevilacqua and Pfeifer 2013.

17. Oviedo (1547) wrote of canoes that ‘los cristianos que por acá vivimos, no podemos servirnos de las heredades que están en las costas de la mar y de los ríos grandes, sin estas canoas’ (bk. 6, chp. 4), and that hammocks were ‘buenas camas e limpias [ … ] en los ejércitos no serían poco provechosas, en España e Italia e otras partes, porque no adoloscerían ni morirían tantos por dormir en tierra en los inviernos e tiempos tempestuoso’ (bk. 5, chp. 2).

18. He wrote that pineapples were ‘una de las más hermosas fructas que yo he visto en todo lo que del mundo he andado’ (bk 7, ch.14), cassava was ‘bueno e de buen mantenimiento [ … ] delgado como obleas é tan blanco como un papel’ (bk 7, ch. 2).