Product details:
ISBN13: | 9780822348573 |
ISBN10: | 0822348578 |
Binding: | Hardback |
No. of pages: | 264 pages |
Size: | 250x150x15 mm |
Weight: | 220 g |
Language: | English |
Illustrations: | 27 illustrations, 3 tables, 2 maps |
0 |
Category:
Into the Archive ? Writing and Power in Colonial Peru
Writing and Power in Colonial Peru
Publisher: MD ? Duke University Press
Date of Publication: 27 September 2010
Number of Volumes: Cloth over boards
Normal price:
Publisher's listprice:
GBP 92.00
GBP 92.00
Your price:
39 992 (38 088 HUF + 5% VAT )
discount is: 10% (approx 4 444 HUF off)
The discount is only available for 'Alert of Favourite Topics' newsletter recipients.
Click here to subscribe.
Click here to subscribe.
Availability:
Temporarily out of stock.
Can't you provide more accurate information?
Short description:
Kathryn Burns shows how the biases and practices of Spanish notaries and their clients in colonial Cuzco shaped official records and, therefore, the archive on which contemporary historians rely.
Long description:
Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth?
Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.
“Those who read this small but wise volume will doubtless enhance both their understanding of colonial record making, and also their need to treat the documentary record with caution, always contextualizing the making of the records themselves. The author is to be congratulated for this major contribution to the analysis of colonial notarial sources, a book that will benefit all who work in archives.” - David J. Robinson, Journal of Latin American Geography