ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Naturalist Knowledge and Colonial Knowledge in the Santa Clara de Asís Mission, 1777-1833

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

English Abstract

In recent years there has been proliferation of superb work on pre-modern science and medicine in the Spanish empire; such work has spanned many corners of the vast empire, from the Andes (Heaney, 2023; Warren, 2009), central Mexico (Ramos, 2021; Rodríguez, 2018), Central America (Few, 2015), and the Caribbean (Gómez, 2017, Yero, 2024). Building on early emphases of colonial power relations and the body (Arnold, 1993, among many others), these works have tended to emphasize the importance of colonial knowledge in the making of global scientific knowledge. Relatively few works have focused on knowledge-making in Imperial hinterlands, though these shed light on the nature of Empire in important ways. Far beyond niche case studies, peripheral zones are often the most emblematic of the center’s policies and internal conflicts (Carabelli and Jovanović). This paper builds on that trend by focusing on evangelization and its relation to scientific and natural knowledge at the Santa Clara de Asís Mission in Alta California, which was the topic of excellent research by Kuepper-Valle (1974) and Reid (2012). The paper draws on mission records and naturalist writings to argue that the missionary authorities viewed indigenous Ohlones women's reproductive behavior as evidence of their spiritual and cultural imperfection; it was common, for example, for priests to complain that fornication and abortion were among the “most dominant vices” of Ohlone women. In a 1792 writing, for example, José Longinos Martínez claimed that the Ohlones always induced abortion during their first pregnancy because they believed that their future children would be born dead if they did not terminate the first pregnancy. A secondary argument here is that Franciscan resistance to secularization manifested through discourses about the need to perfect the body and discipline reproductive activity. This work will contribute to a local understanding of how colonial politics interfaced with the making of medical knowledge, and vice versa.

Author

• Elizabeth O'Brien, University of California, Los Angeles