Costumbrismo as Ethnographic Science: Novel Scientific Sketches of Everyday Life in Mid-19th century New Granada

• In Event: Culture’s Laboratory: New Histories of Anthropology in Peru and South America

Abstract

Recently scholars of Latin America have begun to rescue the hard-to-define genre of “costumbrismo” from the shadows of its much more well-known cousin, romanticism. And yet, when scholars read costumbrismo, they do not read it as a scientific form of knowledge production. If science is invoked at all, it is to examine how emerging racial sciences of the latter 19th century made their way into these descriptive, quotidian narratives. This paper reads costumbrismo itself as a unique contribution to ethnographic sciences made by mid-century Spanish American elites. The paper focuses on how New Granada elites employed and deployed real-world ethnographic observations as well as fictional depictions evoking local customs as a form of political science. Elites probed deeply into the souls of popular folk to unlock the ways the colonial legacy had embedded itself among them. Manuel Ancízar, Secretary of the Chorographic Commission, developed a detailed ethnographic account of popular sectors in New Granada’s Andean northeast provinces. Ancízar disseminated his explorations into the popular soul through print, a kind of dissemination that would work transformative magic over the popular sectors that needed to have the colonial legacy rooted out of them, as well as over the audiences who read about these local customs. Other writers of a more conservative political stripe offered very different readings of the same popular sectors through fictionalized ethnographies. These conservative writers read into the souls of provincial folks the kind of moral Catholic piety that was indispensable for the creation of moral, modern republics.

Author

• Lina M Del Castillo, University of Texas/ Austin