Indigenous Congregations and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue

Lecturer:

Tamar Herzog

Date:

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Venue:

McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University
111 Thayer Street, Providence, RI, USA

Organized by:

National Museum of Ethnology, Japan
http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/
Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University, USA
http://watson.brown.edu/

Abstract:

This lecture places Spanish efforts to congregate the native population of the Americas in the context of similar struggle to resettle Spaniards in both the Old and the New World. Asking what resettlement was and why it was important, it argues that for contemporary Spaniards at stake were not material issues such as where or how one lived but instead the conviction that those who were not integrated in self-governing local communities were unruly and uncivilized. They were also the quintessential foreigners in a universe in which being a Spaniard depended on local insertion. The conclusion addresses the need to integrate colonial with European history.

Information about the lecturer:

Tamar Herzog is Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard University and affiliated faculty member in the Harvard Law School. Among her publications are Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas, 2015; Upholding Justice: State, Law and the Penal System in Quito, 2004 (published in Spanish 1995 and French 2001); Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America, 2003 (Spanish translation 2006); Ritos de control, prácticas de negociación: pesquisas, visitas y residencias, 2000 (French translation 2014); and Mediación, archivos y ejercicio: los escribanos de Quito, 1996.