Irene Marsha Silverblatt's Books

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

By: Irene Marsha Silverblatt

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Moon, Sun, and Witches

Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

By: Irene Marsha Silverblatt

When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, men of the Inca Umpire worshipped the Sun as Father and their dead kings as ancestor heroes, while women venerated the Moon and her daughters, the Inca queens, as founders of female dynasties. In the pre-Inca period such notions of parallel descent were expressions of complementarity between men and women. Examining the interplay between gender ideologies and political hierarchy, Irene Silverblatt shows how Inca rulers used their Sun and Moon traditions as methods of controlling women and the Andean peoples the Incas conquered. She then explores the process by which the Spaniards employed European male and female imageries to establish their own rule in Peru and to make new inroads on the power of native women, particularly poor peasant women. Harassed economically and abused sexually, Andean women fought back, earning in the process the Spaniards' condemnation as "witches." Fresh from the European witch hunts that damned women for susceptibility to heresy and diabolic influence, Spanish clerics were predisposed to charge politically disruptive poor women with witchcraft. Silverblatt shows that these very accusations provided women with an ideology of rebellion and a method for defending their culture.

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301

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

1400843340

ISBN 13

9781400843343

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

By: Irene Marsha Silverblatt

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Moon, Sun, and Witches

Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

By: Irene Marsha Silverblatt

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301

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Princeton University Press

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ISBN 10

1400843340

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9781400843343

Modern Inquisitions

Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

By: Irene Silverblatt

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Modern Inquisitions

Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

By: Irene Silverblatt

Trying to understand how “civilized” people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt’s insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics of the modern state are evident in the workings of the Inquisition. Her analysis of the tribunal’s persecution of women and men in colonial Peru illuminates modernity’s intricate “dance of bureaucracy and race.” Drawing on extensive research in Peruvian and Spanish archives, Silverblatt uses church records, evangelizing sermons, and missionary guides to explore how the emerging modern world was built, experienced, and understood by colonists, native peoples, and Inquisition officials: Early missionaries preached about world history and about the races and nations that inhabited the globe; Inquisitors, able bureaucrats, defined who was a legitimate Spaniard as they executed heretics for “reasons of state”; the “stained blood” of Indians, blacks, and descendants of Jews and Moors was said to cause their deficient character; and native Peruvians began to call themselves Indian. In dialogue with Arendt and other theorists of modernity, Silverblatt shows that the modern world’s underside is tied to its origins in colonialism and to its capacity to rationalize violence. Modern Inquisitions forces the reader to confront the idea that the Inquisition was not only a product of the modern world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but party to the creation of the civilized world we know today.

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317

Publisher

Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822386232

ISBN 13

9780822386230

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

By: Irene Silverblatt

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Moon, Sun, and Witches

Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

By: Irene Silverblatt

The myths and cosmologies of non-Western peoples are not just histories, relating the world as it once was, nor are they pseudo-histories, justifying the world as it has come to be. Instead, they are tools of struggle: ideologies both producing and produced by the effort to create society in someone's image. On them are written the memories and hopes of forgotten people, yearning for power over their - and others' - lives. Such is Irene Silverblatt's argument as she documents religious/ideological struggle in pre- and post-conquest Peru. Heavily influenced by Marxist anthropology and by debates about the social construction of gender, she examines religious and gender ideologies in the Andes prior to the Inca conquest, during their short reign (1450-1532), and after the coming of the Spanish. Though the pre-Inca period is relatively opaque Silverblatt argues that the sexes were relatively equal. Men's and women's work, men's and women's religion each upheld a portion of the universe. Women inherited from women, worshipped female gods and directed their cults; men inherited from men, and ruled cults whose gods were male. Gender was the dominant screen through which these people viewed life - and both sides could play. The Incas shared this gender-defined worldview, but used it to justify their conquest and control. They worshipped Viracocha, whom they claimed as the an-drogynous pro-genitor of Sun and Moon, respectively the ancestors of men and women." -- from www.jstor.org (Nov. 9, 2010).

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266

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ISBN 10

0691077266

ISBN 13

9780691077260

Book's by Irene Marsha Silverblatt

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Modern Inquisitions

Modern Inquisitions

Moon, Sun, and Witches

Moon, Sun, and Witches

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