ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bodies, Values, Materiality: New Histories of Health and Illness in Early Modern Latin America

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel convenes scholars of early modern Latin American history whose work approaches the past through the lens of the materiality of human corporeality. Building upon the rich epistemic and semiotic analyses of corporeal, pharmacological, and medical practices that have characterized scholarship on medical histories in the region recent decades, the panel proposes a new locus for observation and debate emerging from Latin America itself—one concerned with the histories of bodies, their material conditions, and their systems of value. The papers presented here, drawing upon underutilized and, in some cases, newly unearthed sources, move beyond a preoccupation with the colonial and the centripetal dynamics of imperial or Eurocentric histories of health. Instead, they examine how historical actors in early Latin America experienced and contended with the vicissitudes of the flesh, negotiating their worlds through embodied practices and generating distinctive frameworks of value. Focusing on cases from Peru, Argentina, Cuba, and Chile, the presenters investigate how practices of bodily recognition within judicial spaces gave rise to corporeal cartographies grounded in material or evidentiary standards. They further demonstrate how, in Havana, Lima, and Buenos Aires, enslaved actors negotiated the value of their bodies through processes related to the financialization of corporeality and through legal actions seeking emancipation. In these contexts, enslaved individuals articulated and contested notions of disability, fitness, and worth that complicate prevailing accounts of the early modern history of the body. At the same time, the panelists consider Amerindian reproductive materials, practices, and technologies in regions such as New Spain, revealing how locally grounded materialities illuminate new histories of reproduction and corporeal knowledge in early modern Latin America.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Individual Presentations

• Ability's Experts: Healers and the Assessment and Diagnosis of Enslaved Litigants in Colonial Lima and Buenos Aires - Adam Warren, University of Washington

• Naturalist Knowledge and Colonial Knowledge in the Santa Clara de Asís Mission, 1777-1833 - Elizabeth O'Brien, University of California, Los Angeles

• Medical Opinion at the Real Audiencia: How Healers Inspected, Interpreted, and Valued the Human Body in Eighteenth-Century Chile - Mariana Labarca Pinto, Universidad de Santiago de Chile

• Embodied Economies of Freedom: Afro-Caribbean Corporeal Finance in the Seventeenth Century - Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin–Madison