Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Latin America 178661376X, 9781786613769

Table of contents :
Contents
Translators’ Introduction
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction
1 Places of Enlightenment: Colonial Discourse and the Geopolitics of Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment
2 Purus Ab Omnia Macula Sanguinis: The Apparatus of Whiteness in New Granada
3 Imperial Biopolitics: Health and Disease Under the Bourbon Reforms
Illegitimate Knowledges: The Enlightenment as Apparatus of Epistemic Expropriation
5 Striated Spaces: Geography, Territorial Politics, and Population Control
Epilogue
Appendix: The Eighteenth Century: The Birth of Biopolitics
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Zero-Point Hubris

Reinventing Critical Theory Series Editors: Gabriel Rockhill, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Villanova University and Jennifer Ponce de León, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania The Reinventing Critical Theory series publishes cutting-edge work that seeks to reinvent critical social theory for the twenty-first century. It serves as a platform for new research in critical philosophy that examines the political, social, historical, anthropological, psychological, technological, religious, aesthetic, and/or economic dynamics shaping the contemporary situation. Books in the series provide alternative accounts and points of view regarding the development of critical social theory, put critical theory in dialogue with other intellectual traditions around the world, and/or advance new, radical forms of pluralist critical theory that contest the current hegemonic order. Commercium: Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View Brian Milstein Resistance and Decolonization Amílcar Cabral—Translated by Dan Wood Critical Theories of Crisis in Europe: From Weimar to the Euro Edited by Poul F. Kjaer and Niklas Olsen Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency Joshua Ramey Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish The Invention of the Visible: The Image in Light of the Arts Patrick Vauday—Translated by Jared Bly Metaphors of Invention and Dissension Rajeshwari S. Vallury Technology, Modernity and Democracy Edited by Eduardo Beira and Andrew Feenberg A Critique of Sovereignty Daniel Loick—Translated by Amanda DeMarco Democracy and Relativism: A Debate Cornelius Castoriadis—Translated by John V. Garner Democracy in Spite of the Demos: From Arendt to the Frankfurt School Larry Alan Busk The Politics of Bodies: Philosophical Emancipation With and Beyond Rancière Laura Quintana Domination and Emancipation: For a Revival of Social Critique Luc Boltanski and Nancy Fraser—Edited by Daniel Benson Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Latin America Santiago Castro-Gómez—Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher and Don T. Deere

Zero-Point Hubris Science, Race, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Latin America

Santiago Castro-Gómez Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher and Don T. Deere

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com English translation copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Originally published in Spanish as La hybris del punto cero: ciencia, raza e ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750–1816) Copyright © Santiago Castro-Gómez All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Castro-Gómez, Santiago, 1958- author. Title: Zero-point hubris: science, race, and enlightenment in eighteenth-century Latin America / Santiago Castro-Gómez; translated by George Ciccariello-Maher and Don T. Deere. Other titles: Hybris del punto cero. English Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. | Series: Reinventing critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021040381 (print) | LCCN 2021040382 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786613769 (cloth) | ISBN 9781786613776 (paperback) | ISBN 9781786613783 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Ethnology—Colombia—History. | Enlightenment—Colombia—History. | Science—Colombia—History. | Race discrimination—Colombia—History. | Colombia— Intellectual life. | Colombia—Civilization. | Colombia—Social life and customs. Classification: LCC GN17.3.C7 C3713 2021 (print) | LCC GN17.3.C7 (ebook) | DDC 305.8009861—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040381 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040382 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Translators’ Introduction

vii

Preface to the English Edition

xv

Introduction1 1 Places of Enlightenment: Colonial Discourse and the Geopolitics of Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment 2 Purus Ab Omnia Macula Sanguinis: The Apparatus of Whiteness in New Granada

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3 Imperial Biopolitics: Health and Disease Under the Bourbon Reforms

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4 Illegitimate Knowledges: The Enlightenment as Apparatus of Epistemic Expropriation

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5 Striated Spaces: Geography, Territorial Politics, and Population Control

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Epilogue 267 Appendix: The Eighteenth Century: The Birth of Biopolitics

275

Bibliography 287 Index 307

Translators’ Introduction

Latin American philosophy, and decolonial thought in particular, have increasingly found a place in the English-speaking academic and intellectual mainstream, but the books of Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez have remained stubbornly untranslated. This is not for lack of demand, however. A quick glimpse at his Google Scholar entry shows, at the time of writing this introduction, nearly ten thousand citations, mostly English works citing his still-untranslated Spanish texts. With the translation of both this text and his Critique of Latin American Reason,1 this situation will have changed radically. The force of Castro-Gómez’s thought will continue to transform the landscape of contemporary decolonial studies, Latin American philosophy, political philosophy, and critical theory more generally. These are ideas whose time has come. In what follows, we offer a brief introduction for the uninitiated. *** While Latin American philosophy in the twentieth century spent much time trying to grapple with its European influences and the identity of an authentically Latin American philosophy versus a derivative copy, the originality of Castro-Gómez’s thought lies in freeing itself from this antinomy and carving out new space. In fact, the terrain has shifted both with respect to the traditional problematic of center and periphery and the global stakes of carrying

 Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2011 [1996]). English translation: as Critique of Latin American Reason, trans. Andrew Ascherl (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

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out work in critical theory in the broad sense. Proof of this shift can be seen, for example, in the fact that Madrid’s Complutense University, which once sent some of Spain’s greatest philosophers, such as José Gaos and José Ortega y Gasset, to Latin America during the Spanish civil war, recently published a critical volume dedicated to Castro-Gómez’s thought.2 The colonial framework of theoretical production, in this case, is reversed. With the linguistic barrier removed, we are sure to see similar works forthcoming in the English-speaking world, as the colonial geography of thought continues to be upended. Castro-Gómez’s work is pathbreaking in a number of registers and intersects with many fields of thought from Latin American philosophy, decolonial theory, political philosophy, to genealogy, philosophy of race, and critical theory. His work is what he calls transdisciplinary, employing a variety of sources and influences to navigate beyond traditional philosophical terrain. He is a key figure in contemporary decolonial philosophy, offering an original approach to some of the key questions related to ModernityColoniality-Decoloniality. His distinctive approach to thinking the coloniality of power supplements the global macro-perspective with the microphysical detail of local genealogies. Developing genealogies of coloniality, he focuses on the intersection of global structures of power with local transformations of subjectivity, common sense, and modes of racialization. The trajectory of Castro-Gómez’s work can be roughly divided between his first three books, which focus on the genealogical and archeological approach to practices of coloniality and the discursive formation of Latin American thought, and his last four, which make a more explicit turn to political philosophy, and eventually toward a positive project that he calls transmodern republicanism.3 In his first book, Critique of Latin American Reason (1996), CastroGómez offers an incisive critique of the key themes of “philosophical Latin Americanism” in the twentieth century, reading these works through the lens of postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said and the genealogicalarcheological lens of Michel Foucault. His aim is to overcome the stalemate of identity and alterity in twentieth-century Latin American thought. This question of the unique identity (or alterity) of Latin America plays a key role

 Filosofía política y genealogías de la colonialidad: Diálogos con Santiago Castro-Gómez, ed. Adán Salinas Araya (Viña del Mar, Chile: CENALTES, 2017) [Political Philosophy and Genealogies of Coloniality: Dialogues with Santiago Castro-Gómez]. 3  This division of his work follows the one offered by Castro-Gómez in his retrospective, contained at the end of El tonto y los canallas: Notas para un republicanismo transmoderno (Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana, 2019) [The Fool and the Knaves], also originally published as “Mirar en retrospective: Debates en torno a las genealogías de la colonialidad y el papel de la filosofía política en América Latina,” in Filosofía política y genealogías de la colonialidad, 207–274. 2

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in the attempt to situate the philosophical and geocultural specificity of the region in the twentieth century. Both the philosophical historicism that we find in Leopoldo Zea and the philosophy of liberation that we find in thinkers like Enrique Dussel and Rodolfo Kusch, seek in some way to answer this question of Latin America’s specificity and otherness with respect to Europe. Castro-Gómez argues that despite critical interventions against the colonizing logic of modernity, these schools of thought remain trapped in the binary and totalizing logics they seek to critique. The attempt to carve out a space for Latin America in world history and philosophy leads instead to a homogenization of Latin America as the other of Europe. Instead, Castro-Gómez turns to an analysis of what he understands to be Latin America’s postmodern ontological condition and considers the resources for critique that rest not on unity, consensus, and utopia but rather the unbinding and agonistic politics of dissensus. In an attempt to avoid these pitfalls, Critique of Latin American Reason represents Castro-Gómez’s first formulation of an archeological study of the conditions of possibility of Latin America as discursive formation in Philosophy: what he calls philosophical Latin Americanism. He also raises the question of the locus of enunciation of Latin American thought, critiquing the notion of a pure geocultural foundation from which an authentic Latin American philosophy might arise. In Zero-Point Hubris, he returns to this question of the locus of enunciation with a more fine-tuned genealogical approach to the local history of practices. Zero-Point Hubris thus offers a continuation of key themes of Critique, working beyond the historicist tradition in Latin American philosophy. Here, Castro-Gómez develops a localized history of practices, a condition of possibility for any history of ideas. With this approach, he seeks not to study the reception of enlightenment ideas in Latin America in the eighteenth century but rather to demonstrate how the enlightenment was itself shaped and practiced globally and locally, outside of Europe. To do this, he develops a robust genealogy drawing from a focused but massive late colonial archive: that of the colonial viceroyalty of New Granada from 1750 to 1816, a region that included present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, along with parts of Brazil, Suriname, Guyana, and Peru, prior to their independence. If Zero-Point Hubris marks the genealogical deepening of his early archaeological work on Latin American reason, Castro-Gómez’s next book, Oneiric Fabrics: Mobility, Capitalism, and Biopolitics in Bogotá (1910–1930) (2009),4 takes up a narrower archive in order to excavate the subjective transformations at play in the history of capitalism in Colombia at the start of the twentieth  Tejidos oníricos: Movilidad, capitalismo y biopolítica en Bogotá (1910–1930) (Bogotá: Editorial Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009).

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century. Instead of empirical social fabrics, this book emphasizes the oneiric fabrics of the urban imaginary of Bogotá that produced a new apparatus of speed and mobility, as a condition of possibility for the expansion of capitalism in Colombia. The urban imaginary thus had real material effects in producing new forms of subjectivity and an accompanying apparatus of mobility. Having established this genealogical and archeological foundation to the study of coloniality in Latin America and Colombia, in particular, CastroGómez begins a series of reflections on his own genealogical method with a two-part series of books on Foucault and governmentality: History of Governmentality I & II (2010 & 2016).5 These investigations began with a question about the possibility of thinking an emancipatory politics out of Foucault’s notions of power and governmentality. Volume I works closely through Foucault’s Collège de France lectures on governmentality in the late 1970s, and Volume II turns to the “final Foucault” of the 1980s on notions of subjectivity and subjectivation in response to the trappings of neoliberal and biopolitical power. Castro-Gómez argues that the turn to subjectivity and an aesthetics of the self in Foucault is insufficient for the articulation of an emancipatory politics. Thus, the latter volume develops a critical response to Foucault and completes his turn toward political philosophy as irreducible to power relations. He further develops his account of politics through a critical reading of Slavoj Zizek alongside Latin American political philosophers such as Enrique Dussel and Ernesto Laclau in Revolutions without Subject: Slavoj Zizek and the Critique of Postmodern Historicism (2015).6 Most recently, his 2019 collection, The Fool and the Knaves: Notes Toward a Transmodern Republicanism, traces his trajectory in relation to questions of decolonial thought. He puts forth a transmodern approach to global modernity, seeking to extend and transform the project of modernity. Here, he is against an anti-modern attempt to locate a pure outside to modernity, echoing his earliest criticisms of notions of exteriority and alterity in Latin American philosophy. In his own account, the three fundamental axes articulated across his work are history, power, and politics.7 In his most recent books, he shifts from the question of power as the ultimate grid of analysis, to a notion of politics that opens more directly to questions of emancipation. ***

 Historia de la gubernamentalidad. Razón de estado, liberalism y neoliberalismo en Michel Foucault (Bogotá: Sigle del Hombre Editores, 2010); Historia de la gubernamentalidad II. Filosofía, cristianismo y sexualidad en Michel Foucault (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2016). 6  Revoluciones sin sujeto: Slavoj Zizek y la crítica del historicismo posmoderno (Mexico City: Akal, 2015). 7  El tonto y las canallas, 237. 5

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The power of the text in your hands begins from the fraught conjunction posed in the title itself between the epistemological project of the zero-point and the hubris built into this project, which proves its ultimate, if partial undoing. For Castro-Gómez, the zero-point is not the no-place of utopian imagination but rather a central pretension of the scientific language of the enlightenment. Much like Descartes’ ego cogito, Castro-Gómez shows how European thought sought more broadly to position itself outside the empirical world as an essential precondition to knowing that world objectively. The zero-point therefore constitutes what he deems a “neutral observation platform” from which the enlightened philosopher, scientist, and governor can survey reality, an unassailable God’s-eye-view from which one can see without being seen. The zero-point was more than simply an idea, however, but a material project that could only concretely emerge in time and space. For Castro-Gómez, this project was hubristic in its original, Greek sense, its proponents guilty not merely of arrogance in general but that specific kind of arrogance that forgets the material constraints of the mortal world. What were the parameters of that mortal world? That modernity was intrinsically bound up with the colonial project—Latin America was not pre- or anti-modern, he insists pointedly— and the enlightenment was consequently a transatlantic phenomenon located, indeed forged, simultaneously in the core and the periphery. Colonialism was a two-way street, and the hubris of the zero-point would play a major role in deepening colonial domination, justifying the epistemic expropriation and erasure of other ways of knowing. But Castro-Gómez is unique in his attentiveness to the powerful tensions this project generated once it took its place in the material world, and specifically that of what he calls the apparatus of whiteness. When modernizing Spanish Bourbon reformers came to see whiteness as a barrier to biopolitical governmentality, the American-born descendants of Europeans known as criollos, in whose habitus whiteness featured prominently, doubled down on policing the boundaries of race (here Castro-Gómez deftly decolonizes both Foucault and Bourdieu, infusing their concepts with new, transatlantic meaning). Ironically, the colonial core lost this battle to its own children, and the result was a naturalized inequality that was embedded in independent Latin American national states and prevails across the region today. Zero-point hubris thus names both an essential project of Europe and the modern/colonial world system and its fundamental impossibility. If the first provides us with a powerful diagnostic tool for decolonial critique of Eurocentrism and its pretensions to objectivity and neutrality, the second offers a hopeful reminder that colonialism was not a one-way street, and that such arrogant projects often fail. While it’s true that in this case—and in many cases—this failure falls to the side of reaction, a subversive reading

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could point instead to the persistence of resistance and alternatives occluded by this war among colonial titans. This signature concept will be traced through several key themes in this vast work. We indicate three major threads here. The first is the tension between two apparatuses (dispositivos) of power that Castro-Gómez diagnoses in the late colonial period: whiteness and biopolitics. The apparatus of whiteness, which Castro-Gómez locates largely in the Américas, is organized around the racial habitus of the criollos over the castes (nonwhite subjects in the Americas: Black people, Indians, and mestizos) rooted in the discourse of blood purity. By contrast, the biopolitical apparatus is connected to the imperial Bourbon reforms organized by “reason of state” with the aim of maximizing the productivity of the colonial population. This tension manifests in attempts by Bourbon reformers to undermine the privileged status of traditional para-state powers of the Church and the aristocracy. And the ultimately successful counterattack from the criollos upholds and reinforces whiteness, working to “expel the state” from taking over the administration of the colonies. Embedded within this trajectory are questions of the emergent capitalist global economy and the imperial practice of science. The Spanish Bourbon state underwent a series of reforms to develop their imperial biopolitical apparatus so as to reestablish their competitiveness against other global colonial powers, like France, Holland, and England. This shift marks a new concern for the health and productiveness of the population, biopolitics, especially around medicine, work, and the hospital; it also marks a new concern for the development of the sciences of geography and botany. A second trajectory opens the question of how to read the global entanglements between European and Latin American enlightenments. At heart, this is a question of the intersection between epistemology and the coloniality of power. How to think of the coloniality of power not just as a system imposed from the outside but as an apparatus of power-knowledge with its own local practice in the Kingdom of New Granada among its enlightened Criollo thinkers? In essence, this global entanglement between different trajectories of enlightenment can be seen to rest on the construction of a scientific site of enunciation, which is supposed to be pure, neutral, and placeless, which is, in fact, coincident with a racial and political position of power, one that is only held by the European or white criollo in New Granada. The zero-point thus disqualifies all other epistemic positions through the epistemic expropriation of Indigenous, mestizo, and Black modes of knowing that have a connection to local histories, traditions, and cultures. A third trajectory concerns the local genealogy of enlightenment criollo thought as a counter history to the founding of the independent nation-state, by tracing criollo practice in New Granada in the period directly leading up to the independence struggles against Spain. Just as the French revolution

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looms in the background of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, this text offers a counter history to the later emergence of anti-colonial revolution of Gran Colombia in 1819, three years after Castro-Gómez’s genealogy ends. Instead of an emancipatory revolution carried out by a subjugated criollo class freeing itself from the shackles of Spanish colonial power, we instead see the stratification of criollo power through the perpetuation of colonial racial hierarchies. The colonial fabric is embedded into the nation-state form. Questions of nationalism and independence from Spain remain unstated in the background but frame much of the decolonial impetus of this work, as the coloniality of power seeps into the Latin American present through the inheritance of this apparatus of naturalized racial inequality. *** Zero-Point Hubris is a theoretically innovative book that eruditely navigates a complex historical archive. For us as translators, this has meant that the hardest choices were often in how to preserve the specificity of certain Spanish colonial terms that do not easily lend themselves to translation. In some cases, we have opted to retain the original term when necessary, including a translator’s footnote in the cases where the meaning of the term is not immediately evident from the explanation internal to the text itself. For example, criollo, is retained throughout as the English equivalent “creole” is rife with many other significations that mask the specificity of the meaning of this term to refer to American-born descendants of white Europeans. The philosophical terminology did not present as many difficult choices, though we have opted to translate dispositivo as “apparatus” throughout for the sake of readability rather than the more literal “dispositif” or “dispositive.” We have translated all citations without an existing English language translation, especially the numerous citations from the eighteenth-century colonial archive, and made use of existing English translations when available. We are grateful to Santiago Castro-Gómez for his guidance and enthusiasm as we completed this translation of his work, to María del Rosario Acosta for her encouragement to pursue the project, to Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez for his invaluable translation suggestions, to the series editors of the Reinventing Critical Theory series, Gabriel Rockhill and Yannik Thiem, for their interest in this translation, and to the editors at Rowman & Littlefield International, Frankie Mace and Sarah Campbell, for their constant support of the project.

Preface to the English Edition

This book is the initial result of my doctoral thesis, which was presented in 2003 toward the degree of “Doktor der Philosophie” at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, under the title Aufklärung als kolonialer Diskurs. The thesis was translated into Spanish in 2005 and published by the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá under the title La hybris del punto cero. A second expanded and corrected edition of the book was later published in 2011, which serves as the basis for this English translation. The book proposes taking up Michel Foucault’s genealogical method to solve a series of theoretical and methodological problems that arose within some currents of Latin American thought in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. It thus seeks to use genealogy as an analytical tool to address some open questions in two Latin American traditions in particular: philosophical historicism and decolonial thought. Against the historicist tradition (Leopoldo Zea, Arturo Ardao, Arturo Roig), Zero-Point Hubris argues that we need to consider the eighteenth century from a perspective that abandons the traditional history of ideas and moves toward a history of practices. This means emphasizing not the “reception” of the ideas of the European enlightenment (the way that texts by Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, etc. were read), but the way that the political project of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty unleashed a series of (economic, scientific, administrative, hygienic, etc.) practices in the viceroyalty of New Granada that sought to combat and replace the old aristocratic and unproductive practices of the white criollo1 elite descended from the first European settlers. Against the decolonial tradition (Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo), Zero-Point Hubris argues that we need to complement the  [The direct descendants of European settlers born in Latin America—Trans.]

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use of macro-sociological tools (like Wallerstein’s world systems analysis) with tools like genealogy, which focuses on analyzing how colonial legacies are reproduced on a microphysical level, directly related to subjectivity or common sense, and not only on the macrophysical level of “longue durée structures.” The book seeks to combine both analytical perspectives, attempting to avoid the overgeneralizations that the sociological Marxist perspective of coloniality tends to fall into. In sum, Zero-Point Hubris seeks to respond to Kant’s famous question, “What is Enlightenment?,” but to do so by shifting the analysis outside strictly European space. By deploying genealogy, this book seeks to establish a cartography of the acting powers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Granada, distinguishing two broad regimes of practices that confronted one another during that period. The first is the apparatus of whiteness, which emerged at the end of the sixteenth century, and which functioned as the condition of possibility for the subjectivation practices of the white criollo elites of New Granada. This is a power that is established and reproduced through technologies of filiation and alliances, that is, well-calculated strategies of intermarriage among those same elites. These strategies centered on the Spanish idea of “blood purity” and sought to delineate a distancing border between criollos (direct descendants of the first Spanish settlers) and the other population groups in New Granada, who they referred to as “the castes” (Black people, Indians, and mestizos2). It is here that we can appreciate what Aníbal Quijano calls the “coloniality of power,” which refers in this case to defining social identity on the basis of the racialization of bodies. What someone “is” socially does not depend solely on the color of their skin but on the “purity” of their genealogical tree. Social privileges were reserved for those who were able to demonstrate that there was no mixing with people of “bad blood” in their ancestry. Strategies of intermarriage “among (white) equals” sought precisely to prevent Black people, Indians, and mestizos from accessing the world of privilege. In this sense, Zero-Point Hubris seeks to demonstrate that the “hard core” of colonial legacies in Latin America is the naturalization of inequality as the organizing pillar of society, a situation that persists today. It is important to grasp that this structural inequality requires a political operation that, following Pierre Clastres, I call the “expulsion of the state.” By this, I refer to the attempt to avoid at all costs the constitution of a transcendental power located “beyond” criollo alliance networks that would threaten their oligarchic privileges. But this was precisely what began to happen in the eighteenth century with the dynastic change in Spain. ZeroPoint Hubris analyzes the emergence of a second power regime that I call  [Mixed-race people, specifically European and Indigenous. Mestizaje refers more broadly to the complex process of racial mixture specific to Latin America—Trans.]

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the biopolitical apparatus, which is linked in this case to the governmental project of the Bourbons. At the dawn of industrial capitalism, the Spanish monarchy hoped to ensure its commercial monopoly over certain mineral and agrarian products and sought to transform its overseas colonies into productive factories designed to place these products advantageously on the world market. But to achieve this, it was necessary to implement a series of administrative, medical, geographical, and educational reforms that were legitimized by the discourse of the new science. The objective was to promote scientific-technical intervention into the life of the population, so as to make it a basic element of enlightened policymaking. From this perspective, “reason of state” was seen as the sole intelligibility principle presiding over relations between the Spanish Crown and its colonies, which white criollo elites felt to be a real threat. And in reality, what they feared so much had indeed emerged: the constitution of a power located beyond the logic of alliance capable of “expropriating” their privileges. In this sense, this book not only examines the specific rationality presiding over each of the two apparatuses of whiteness and biopolitics but also analyzes the antagonism produced between them. The political interest of the Bourbons was to combat the hegemony of both the criollos and the Church over colonial institutions and common sense. The criollos, in turn, sought to neutralize, delay, or slow that first modernization process in Latin American history. As you can see, Zero-Point Hubris analyzes the dialectic between coloniality and modernity, showing how the former ended up becoming a precondition for the latter. This book is particularly interested in analyzing the practices of “border subjects,” and in this case those enlightened criollos who moved “between” the two apparatuses. On the one hand, these subjects appropriated the discourses of the new science promoted by the Spanish monarchy and functioned as battering rams for the Bourbon reforms. They therefore contributed to the dismantling of the traditional common sense on which the power of the criollo oligarchy stood. But on the other hand, as children of this same oligarchy, they reproduced colonial discourse toward Black and Indigenous people and mestizos, who they saw as “lower quality” beings. In this sense, this book shows how epistemic purity inspired by the new science and blood purity promoted by oligarchic elites paradoxically “intersect” in the subjectivity of enlightened criollos. The result is the production of a universalist and colonial “gaze” toward populations, territory, and its resources, that I call the “zero-point.” Latin America begins to be observed by its own intellectual elites from the perspective of an epistemic platform that de-historicizes it, extracting it from its specific logics and “fetishizing” it, at the same moment that the mechanism of commodity production later studied by Marx begins to unfold in Europe. We witness the emergence of a scientistic and colonial discourse about the region which would also accompany the new social sciences

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that appear in the course of the nineteenth century. We witness, in short, the birth of Latin Americanism. I am especially thankful to George Ciccariello-Maher and Don Deere for the enthusiasm and precision with which they have translated the book and to the editors at Rowman & Littlefield for their interest in publishing it. Bogotá, May 12, 2020

Introduction

In 1787, Russian Empress Catherine II penned a missive to Spanish King Carlos III, requesting that he send all materials he could find on Indigenous languages in the Americas to St. Petersburg. An enthusiastic defender of the sciences and a personal friend of Voltaire, the Empress planned to hand this material over to the learned members of her court so that they might prepare a comparative study of all the known languages of the world. At that time, as Michel Foucault (1994) has shown, enlightened Europeans believed that they could decipher the grammatical laws common to all linguistic domains, which would constitute the basic structure of all possible languages. This project of a “General Grammar” required comparing some languages to others, but not to discover their common historical origin, as had been believed up to that point (Hebrew as the “mother language” prior to the confusion of Babel), but rather to discover the universal linguistic structure underlying all languages on the planet. Each particular language, then, would represent a specific modality of this universal structure. Enlightened members of the Russian court, led by a wise man named Pallas, aware of the fact that the Jesuits had published many studies of Indigenous American languages, requested the assistance of the Empress to obtain this valuable material with the goal of contributing to the project.1 Agreeing to the Russian Empress’ request, King Carlos III ordered his viceroys in the Americas to search out, collect, and send to Spain all existing documents on the subject. In the viceroyalty of New Granada,2 viceroy

 Pallas’ work was published in 1789 as Linguarium totius orbis vocabulario comparativa, augustissimae cura collecta, scilicet primae lenguas Europae, et Asiae complexae. 2  [Comprising at the time what is today Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador, as well as parts of Guyana, Suriname, Brazil, and Peru, and previously including Venezuela—Trans.] 1

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2

Introduction

Antonio Caballero y Góngora assigned the task to Spanish physician and mathematician don José Celestino Mutis. Since his arrival in New Granada in 1761, Mutis had dedicated part of his time to searching for manuscripts related to Indigenous languages. In reality, Mutis was not interested in the Indians, but in advancing the new science of human languages (linguistics), and so he was glad to receive the assignment and assembled a team to begin the search. After a year of searching schools, convents, and libraries, Mutis had managed to collect twenty-one manuscripts, including some of the most important works on the Muisca language drafted by missionaries in New Granada.3 This valuable material was shipped to Spain in the luggage of viceroy Caballero y Góngora himself, who personally turned it over to the palace library in 1789.4 Almost twenty years earlier, Carlos III had himself issued a decree that categorically prohibited the use of Indigenous languages in his American colonies. Preaching to the Indians in their own languages was no longer among the prerogatives of the Bourbon dynasty, which was instead focused on the linguistic unification of the Empire for the purposes of facilitating commerce, banishing ignorance, and ensuring the incorporation of vassals in the Americas into a single mode of production. Vernacular languages thus stood as an obstacle to the integration of the Spanish Empire into the global market, and Spanish became the single language that could be spoken and taught in the Americas (Triana and Antorveza, 1987: 499–511). The royal edict of 1770 thereby orders: that the Indians be instructed in the Dogmas of our Religion in Castilian, and that they be taught to read and write in this language, which should be extended and become singular and universal in the same Territories, being the language of the Monarchs and Conquistadors, to facilitate the administration and spiritual nourishment of the natives, and so that they might be understood by their Superiors, develop a love for the Conquering Nation, banish idolatry, become

 As with Nahuatl in Mexico and Quechua in Peru, Muisca (or Chibcha) was considered to be the “general language of the Indians” of New Granada in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as a result professorships for the language were established in universities so that missionaries might learn it, and dictionaries, grammar texts, and vocabulary lexicons were created. The works found by Mutis include renowned grammar texts by the Dominican Bernardo de Lugo (“Gramática de la lengua general del Nuevo Reino llamada mosca”) and the Jesuit José Dadey (“Gramática, vocabulario y confesionario de la lengua mosca-chibcha”). For a study of works on the Chibcha language produced prior to 1810, see González de Pérez, 1980. 4  We know that the material sent by Mutis never reached Russia (Ortega Ricaurte, 1978: 101). The outbreak of the French Revolution and the death of Carlos III might have dissuaded the Spanish Crown from completing the Empress’ mission. 3

Introduction

3

civilized for business and commerce; and avoid that men be confused by a great diversity of languages, as in the Tower of Babel.5

The question is this: Why did the same king who had decreed the extinction of Indigenous languages order the collection of all existing studies about those languages just a few years later? What is the relationship between the edict of 1770 and the Russian empress’ request in 1787? What does the enlightened science of language have to do with the enlightened politics of language? This work will seek to resolve these questions through the perspective opened up by cultural studies in general, and by postcolonial theory in particular.6 Postcolonial theories were especially well received in humanities departments, above all in some European and U.S. universities during the 1980s, and for good reason: it gradually became clear that the global diffusion of languages like Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese could not continue to be seen as independent of European colonialism. In other words, postcolonial theorists began to emphasize the idea that the colonial expansion of modern Europe necessarily entailed designing and imposing an imperial politics of language. Linguistic phenomena thereby began to be seen as an integral part of the colonization of the globe, and language itself as an instrument of domination and/or emancipation. For postcolonial theorists, the history and transformation of modern European languages thereby become a sort of archaeology of colonialism. Now as Foucault (1994) has shown, the enlightenment project of “General Grammar” was based on the assumption that the structure of science was analogous to the structure of language, and that both are reflections of the universal structure of reason. However, within the framework of this project, science was privileged over language. Science was nothing but a wellconstructed language, and particular languages are imperfect sciences insofar as they are incapable of reflecting on their own structure. This is why in the eighteenth century the enlightenment aspired to create a universal metalanguage capable of overcoming the limitations of all particular languages. The language of science would allow for the production of exact knowledge about the natural and social world, thereby avoiding the indeterminacy  “Real cédula para que en los reinos de las Indias se extingan los diferentes idiomas de que se usa y sólo se hable el castellano,” in Tanck de Estrada, 1985: 37. 6  These new fields of knowledge emerged in various universities in England and the United States toward the end of the 1970s, very much influenced by the post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida, but also by the work of Marxist philosophers like Gramsci and Althusser. From poststructuralism, this approach took the critique of classic notions of representation, knowledge, and reality that have been fundamental to the formation of the “West” as a cultural project; from Marxism they took the suspicion that ethnocentric discourses and representations of the “other” served as tools for constituting political and cultural hegemonies both in Europe and its overseas colonies (Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Loomba, 1998; Gandhi, 1998). 5

4

Introduction

characteristic of all other languages. The ideal of the enlightened scientist is to distance oneself epistemologically from everyday language—considered to be a source of error and confusion—and thereby to locate oneself at what I refer to in this book as the zero-point. Unlike other human languages, the universal language of science has no specific place on the map but is instead a neutral observation platform from which the world can be named in its essentiality. No longer produced on the basis of everyday life (Lebenswelt) but from an observational zero-point, the enlightenment understands scientific language to be the most perfect of all human languages, insofar as it reflects the universal structure of reason in its purest form. The general question that this work poses is whether or not the language of science can be understood as analogous to how postcolonial theories analyze the development of modern European languages. Can we also say in this case that the development of scientific language—and in particular the analytical categories developed by the human sciences—runs parallel and in close relation to global European expansion? Can we speak of an imperial politics of science that functioned similarly to imperial politics of language? (Reinhard, 1982). Can science be seen as a “colonial discourse” produced within an imperial structure for selecting and distributing knowledge? In this book, I will attempt to answer these questions in the affirmative, showing how the politics of the “no place” embraced by eighteenth-century human sciences occupied a specific place on the map of colonial society and functioned as a strategy for controlling subaltern populations. This work therefore seeks to examine the enlightenment as an ensemble of discourses articulated both in the global core and in the colonial periphery of the Americas. I set out from the following working hypothesis: by believing they possessed a language capable of revealing things “in-themselves,” enlightenment thinkers (in both Europe and the Americas) assumed that science could faithfully translate and document the characteristics of an exotic nature and culture. Enlightenment discourse thereby acquired an ethnographic character, and the human sciences became a sort of “New Chronicle” of the American world, with the enlightened scientist assuming a role similar to that of sixteenth-century chroniclers. In this view, my interest lies in examining the way that “America,” as an object of knowledge, is at the center of enlightenment discourse. European thinkers like Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Turgot, and Condorcet were constantly informed about the Americas and the lives of its inhabitants, above all through sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles and travel literature. In the first chapter, I will show that the way these philosophers translated their “American readings” was one of the factors that inspired the birth of the human sciences in the eighteenth century. The Americas were read and translated from the perspective of the geopolitical and cultural hegemony of France, Holland, England, and Prussia,

Introduction

5

which at that moment served as centers for the production and diffusion of knowledge. But my work will of course emphasize the opposite process: How was the enlightenment read and articulated in the Spanish colonies, and particularly in the New Kingdom of Granada? This is why I am not interested in wondering if enlightened New Granadian thinkers read Rousseau, Montesquieu, Locke, or Buffon well or badly, or if the Colombian enlightenment was anything more than the apish expression of a “delayed modernity.” As I will argue in the first chapter, I do not consider the European enlightenment to be an “original” text that was then copied by others, or an intra-European phenomenon that was then “disseminated” throughout the world, toward which we can only speak of a good or a bad “reception.” Instead, I am interested in inquiring about the place from which the enlightenment was read, translated, and articulated in Colombia. Insofar as all cultural translation entails dislocation, relocation, and displacement (Translatio, Über-setzung), my question has to do with the specificity of the New Granadian enlightenment, the particular place in which the discourses of the new science were re-located and gained meaning in this part of the world in the mid-eighteenth century. To analyze the characteristics of this locus enuntiationis, I will make use of three concepts from the social sciences. The first is the notion of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu, which I consider in this work in direct relation to his notion of cultural capital. I will defend the hypothesis that blood purity—the belief in the ethnic superiority of criollos over other population groups in New Granada—functioned as the habitus through which the European enlightenment was translated and articulated in Colombia. For enlightened criollos, whiteness was their most valuable and valued form of cultural capital, since it guaranteed access to the scientific and literary knowledge of the epoch as well as social distance from the “colonial other” who served as an object of their research. In their profile of the New Granadian population, enlightened criollos projected their own habitus of ethnic distancing (their “spontaneous sociology”) onto scientific discourse, concealing it under a pretension of truth, objectivity, and neutrality. This is all to emphasize that the Colombian enlightenment was not a simple transposition of meaning carried out from a neutral location (the “zero-point”) with an “original” text as its source (the writings of Rousseau, Smith, Buffon, etc.), but was instead a strategy of social positioning by educated criollos vis-à-vis subaltern groups. I deploy Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics to consider a second aspect of the enlightenment in New Granada. I refer to efforts by the Spanish Empire to implement a politics of control over life in the colonies toward the middle of the eighteenth century. In an already belated attempt to maintain its geopolitical hegemony against powers like France, Holland, and England,

6

Introduction

the Spanish Crown hoped to take advantage of modern scientific discourses to exert rational control over the population and territory. The Bourbon state sought to carry out a series of enlightened diagnostics of the vital processes of the colonial population (health, labor, diet, birth rate, climatic influence, fertility), and to convert these into government policies (“governmentality”). This, it was hoped, would contribute to rationalizing state administration, improving the economic habits of subjects, and increasing the production of wealth, thereby strengthening the Spanish Empire in its struggle to regain hegemony in the global market. The enlightenment was read and translated through the lens of imperial (bio)politics and this would influence how the criollos of New Granada positioned themselves on the subject. While the Bourbon reforms were welcomed by a sector of local elites, they threatened the criollo habitus of blood purity, and so the way that criollo thinkers articulated the enlightenment did not coincide with how the Spanish state did. While the state articulated the European enlightenment from the perspective of imperial interests, New Granadian criollos did so on the basis of a “national” interest. We thus witness the staging of a criollo proto-nationalism marked by the apparatus of whiteness, which would not possess its own form of biopolitical expression until the mid-nineteenth century. The third concept that I will use to approach the enlightenment in New Granada is that of the coloniality of power, developed by Latin American theorists like Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Enrique Dussel. This concept refers to the cognitive dimension of colonial power relations, or in other words how these relations are reflected in the production, circulation, and assimilation of knowledge. The coloniality of power has two dimensions that I will explore in this work: on the one hand we will see how in the hands of the metropolitan state and New Granadian criollo elites, the enlightenment was seen as an ideal mechanism for eliminating the “many forms of knowledge” that still existed among native populations and replacing these with a single, true way of knowing the world: modern scientific-technical rationality. This effort would also characterize the missionary attitude of criollo political elites throughout the nineteenth century in Latin America. The other dimension of coloniality that this work will touch upon has to do with the constitution of the sciences of man in the eighteenth century. This subject deserves a separate study but is relevant here for two basic reasons. In the first place, and as Said’s works have already shown (Orientalism in particular), the human sciences find their ultimate meaning and condition of possibility in the European colonial experience. The contrast that enlightenment philosophers establish between the barbarism of American, Asian, and African people (“tradition”) and the civilization of Europeans (“modernity”) not only provides the basic categories of analysis for future disciplines like sociology and anthropology, it also serves as an instrument for consolidating

Introduction

7

an imperial and civilizational process (“the West”) which feels called upon to impose its own cultural values onto other people because they are considered essentially superior. This factor is important for understanding how the enlightened philosophers of eighteenth-century Europe “translate” reports about other ways of life and incorporate them into a teleological view of history in which “the West” appears as the vanguard of human progress. However, the idea that the human sciences and coloniality are tightly related phenomena is not immediately evident for many academics and experts on Latin American history. A good part of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury social theory, itself a tributary of the modern idea of progress, got us used to thinking about coloniality as modernity’s past, under the assumption that in order to “enter” modernity a society needed to “exit” coloniality. Even important cultural studies theorists like José Joaquín Brunner argue that prior to the 1950s, Latin America was still experiencing a radical misencounter with modernity, since it lacked the social, technological, and professional “ground” necessary to uphold it. It is only with the emergence of specialized circuits for the production, transmission, and consumption of symbolic goods that modernity properly speaking begins in Latin America, and with it the emergence of the human sciences as academic disciplines. The enlightened humanist discourses of earlier periods were, in Brunner’s opinion, merely an “ideological fragment” among elites amid a fundamentally colonial and premodern culture (Brunner, 1992: 50–63). In the first chapter, however, we will see that the scientific discourses of New Granadian criollo elites were not merely “ideological fragments” present only “in the heads” of a small group that was disconnected from its own world and connected exclusively to Europe. Instead, these discourses were anchored in a colonial habitus established during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the apparatus of whiteness. It is precisely through these colonial practices, that the enlightenment is read, translated, articulated, and produced among us. As a result, it makes no sense to speak of a “radical misencounter” with modernity in Latin America, since modernity and coloniality are not temporally sequential but spatially simultaneous. The second chapter will show that the discourse of blood purity was the axis around which the subjectivity of social actors in New Granada was constructed from the sixteenth century on. To be white had less to do with skin color than with the staging of an apparatus that wove together religious beliefs, types of clothing, certificates of nobility, modes of behavior, and most relevant to this study, forms of knowledge production. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will address three different aspects of criollo enlightenment discourse. In chapter 3, we will see how modern science, and medical practices, in particular, served as an instrument for consolidating ethnic borders in a way that ensured the social preeminence of criollos in New Granada.

8

Introduction

Chapter 4 will examine more closely what the symbolic violence of enlightenment discourse consisted of. Articulated by criollo elites and sanctioned by the imperial biopolitics of the state, the enlightenment proposed not only the superiority of some people over others but also the superiority of some forms of knowledge over others. It therefore functioned as an apparatus of epistemic expropriation and the construction of the cognitive hegemony of criollos in social space. Finally, chapter 5 will focus on the discourse of geography, showing that territorial control in New Granada responded not only to the geopolitical imperatives of the Bourbon state but also to the attempt by local elites to impose their hegemony over the different populations inhabiting the territory. The question animating this work is the following: If enlightened European science presents itself as a universal discourse independent of spatial constraints, how was its in situ translation by New Granadian thinkers in the late eighteenth century possible at all? Throughout this work, I will therefore emphasize the contrast between the “no place” of science and the locus of its translation. Hence, the previously mentioned insistence on the concept of the “zero-point.” By this, I refer to the imaginary according to which an observer of the social world can situate themselves on a neutral observation platform that, in turn, cannot be observed from any point. Our hypothetical observer would be in a position to adopt a sovereign gaze toward the world, whose power would lie precisely in that it can be neither observed nor represented. Inhabitants of the zero-point (enlightenment philosophers and scientists) are convinced that they can gain a point of view toward which no point of view is possible. This pretension—which recalls the theological image of the Deus absconditus (who observes without being observed), but also the Foucauldian panopticon—clearly exemplifies the hubris of enlightenment thought. For the Greeks, hubris was the worst of sins since it presumes the illusion of being able to transcend the limits of the mortal condition and to become like the gods. Hubris thus entails neglect for corporeality and is therefore synonymous with arrogance and excess. Through their pretension to lack any locus of enunciation and translation, criollo thinkers in New Granada were guilty of the sin of hubris—a sin that later, in the nineteenth century, would come to be institutionalized in the criollo project of the nation-state.

Chapter 1

Places of Enlightenment Colonial Discourse and the Geopolitics of Knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment

The Oriental, the African, the Amerindian are all necessary components for the negative foundation of European identity and modern sovereignty as such. The dark Other of European Enlightenment stands at its very foundation just as the productive relationship with the “dark continents” serves as the economic foundation of the European nationstates. —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

In September 1774, the German magazine Berlinische Monatschrift published an essay in which the philosopher Immanuel Kant responded to the question: What is enlightenment? There, Kant argued that enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” understood as “the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant, 1991: 54). The “maturity” that Kant believed he was seeing in a still incomplete form in his contemporary Europe, is the refusal to accept the authority of tradition and the submission of all beliefs to the supreme court of reason, to be judged according to principles established by reason itself. It is these universal normative principles that would serve to unravel the mysteries of nature and set human society off down the inevitable path of progress. Kant understands the immaturity of those people and individuals who resist this path as being “self-incurred,” and believes that they are deserving of their own misery, since the conditions were already present in the late eighteenth century for humanity to begin to escape its ignorance. In that same year on the other side of the world, in the gloomy capital of an extremely remote and craggy province of the Spanish Empire, the viceroy of New Granada, don Manuel de Guirior, charges the attorney Francisco Moreno y Escandón with drafting a curriculum that would provide the basis 9

10

Chapter 1

for organizing a university capable of educating criollo elites in the scientific principles of the enlightenment. Two years later, and running against the grain of this effort, the Dutch abbé Cornelius de Pauw published an article in the Encyclopedia arguing that no one born in the Americas was capable of enlightenment, since they all inhabit a humid and sterile land. Five short years later, a coalition of criollos, Indians, and mestizos born in New Granada, would rise up against enlightened authorities to protest a tax increase ordered by the Bourbon dynasty to fund their imperialist war against the English. How to explain this series of simultaneous and apparently contradictory events? An optimistic Prussian philosopher who never left his hometown dared to speak up in the name of all humanity to announce the arrival of an “Age of Enlightenment” in which everyone would be able to use their own understanding without appeal to outside authorities. Not far from there, an enlightened priest argues that the inhabitants of the Americas are incapable of using their “own understanding,” while on the other side of the Atlantic an outside authority in the Americas takes up the program of the enlightenment and orders the creation of a public university. This order, however, is resisted by a sector of local criollo elites who saw the enlightenment as a direct threat to their traditional privileges. At the same time, a coalition of native-born Americans, acting independently of external authorities, appeal to local knowledge and truths to organize opposition to both counter-enlightenment white elites and the enlightened despotism of the viceroys. So what is enlightenment? By whom and against whom is it articulated, in which places, and with what objectives? The thesis I would like to defend is that the enlightenment is not a European phenomenon that is then “disseminated” throughout the world. Instead, it is above all an ensemble of discourses produced and articulated from different locations that by the eighteenth century was already circulating globally. I propose to relate some of these places and discourses to one another to show that apparently contradictory events like those mentioned above in reality form part of a single, complex planetary network of scientific ideas, liberatory sentiments, racial attitudes, and imperialist ambitions. In this chapter, in particular, I am interested in investigating the relationship between the scientific project of the enlightenment and the European colonial project, bearing in mind that the fundamental pretension of enlightenment discourse was that science lacks an empirical locus of enunciation. I will show that what allows for the invisibilization of the locus of enunciation of knowledge is the way that science and geopolitical ambitions come to be linked together in the modern/colonial world system from the sixteenth century on. My working hypothesis is that the imperial struggle for the control of key territories for the expansion of the nascent capitalist system and the population inhabiting those territories provided the background for the enlightenment.

Places of Enlightenment

11

In order to investigate the relationship between eighteenth-century science and geopolitics, I take as my starting point the project of a “science of man” originally formulated by Hume in 1734 to pose the problem that I refer to in this book as zero-point hubris. I will then attempt to immanently reconstruct the structural linkages between this program and both capitalism and colonialism through the writings of Kant, Rousseau, Turgot, and Condorcet. Finally, I will seek to integrate these two aspects into an overall view through Edward Said’s postcolonial theoretical framework, but with special attention to the relationship between science and coloniality as formulated by Latin American authors such as Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, and Aníbal Quijano. In so doing, I hope to gain some theoretical tools that will allow me to reconstruct enlightenment criollo discourse in New Granada in the chapters that follow. 1.1 THE COSMOPOLIS PROJECT In his book Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, the philosopher Stephen Toulmin argues that toward the middle of the seventeenth century, a new and strange vision of nature and society began to emerge at the heart of European intellectual life. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a “practical” approach to knowledge had prevailed in Europe in which philosophical questions were linked to problems related to the experience of human life. Thinkers like Las Casas, Vitoria, Montaigne, Vives, Erasmus, and More reflected on the moral, political, religious, juridical, and everyday affairs of their age, rejecting all abstract, theoretical dogmatism. They were of the opinion that knowledge should be focused on contextual issues rather than addressing general and scholastic questions unconnected to lived experience.1 However, things began to change radically in the seventeenth century. The use of precise instruments to observe the stars and calculate their movements, the development of mathematics and physics, Europe’s new colonial settlements, and the concomitant expansion of the capitalist economy transformed how people looked upon the social and natural worlds. The cognitio historica of Montaigne, Vives, and Erasmus begins to give way to the idea of a “rigorous science” exemplified by figures like Descartes, Galileo, and Newton. Toulmin synthesizes this “change of mind” that began to take place within the European intellectual community from the seventeenth century onward in four points:

 Such knowledge, as Hardt and Negri (2000: 70–74) would say, was firmly committed to the plane of immanence.

1

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Chapter 1

a. Logic and rhetoric, which up to this point had been seen as legitimate scientific fields—since they had a practical objective tied to the oral transmission of knowledge—are now considered irrelevant. Instead of oral argumentation, written proof, formulated in mathematical language and understood only by experts, is established as the only form for the validation and transmission of knowledge. b. Juridical and moral theory, focused on understanding and resolving particular cases, is replaced by ethics as speculation oriented toward the study of universal principles of conduct (good, evil, justice). “Case studies” fall outside of ethical reflection. c. The empirical sources of knowledge utilized by humanists (ancient documents, geographical maps, travel literature, ethnographic material, esoteric practices) are now seen as causes of error and confusion. The only trustworthy source of knowledge is the internal operation of the intellect, namely, the “clear and distinct” representations of the human mind. d. Time and space, essential variables for Renaissance thinkers, are rejected as objects worthy of philosophical speculation. The role of the philosopher is to distance himself from spatiotemporal conditions in which their lives unfold in order to disentangle the permanent structures underlying all phenomena, natural or social (Toulmin, 1990: 30–34). Toulmin concludes that under this new epistemic configuration, knowledge of human life attempts to bring together two elements symbolized by the Greek terms cosmos and polis. Cosmos refers to nature, ordered and governed by fixed eternal laws that are discovered by reason, whereas polis refers to the human community and its organizational practices. From a scientific perspective, the pretension of formulating a kind of knowledge that takes man and society as objects of study to be subjected to the exactitude of physical laws, in accordance with Newton’s model appears. From a political perspective, the pretension of creating a society that is rationally ordered through the centralized power of the state appears. With the help of science and through the sovereignty of the state, the natural order of the cosmos could be reproduced within the rational order of the polis (Toulmin, 1990: 67). Now, what allows the project of Cosmopolis to even be formulated is the idea that society can be observed from a neutral observation point, uncontaminated by the relative contingencies of space and time. No thinker managed to express this pretension with the clarity of René Descartes. In the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes states that certainty in scientific knowledge is only possible if the observer has previously shed all opinions anchored in common sense. We must eliminate all possible sources of uncertainty, since the principal cause of errors in science stems from the

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13

observer’s excessive familiarity with their social and cultural environment.2 Therefore, Descartes recommends suspending these “ancient and commonly held” opinions from everyday life in order to find a solid point of departure from which it might be possible to reconstruct the entire edifice of knowledge (Descartes, 1993: 49). This absolute point of departure, where the observer reduces all previously learned knowledge to a tabula rasa, is what we will call in this book zero-point hubris. To begin everything anew means having the power to name the world for the first time; to draw a border between legitimate and illegitimate knowledge, and moreover to define which behaviors are normal and which are pathological. The zero-point is thus one of the absolute epistemological beginning, but also of economic and social control of the world. To situate oneself at the zero-point is to have the power to institute, to represent, to construct a vision of the social and natural world that is recognized as legitimate and underwritten by the state. This is a representation in which “enlightened men” define themselves as neutral and impartial observers of reality. The construction of Cosmopolis becomes not only a utopia for social reformers throughout the entire eighteenth century but also an obsession for the European empires fighting for control of the world at that moment. 1.1.1 The Plane of Transcendence According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the enlightenment set into motion a transcendental apparatus whose purpose was to establish rational mediations for all spheres of human action. Politics, knowledge, and morality were subjected to a preconstituted order that did indeed propose a new metaphysical ordering of the world, without reproducing the old dualisms of the Middle Ages. It was no longer God but human nature that would guarantee that the laws of the cosmos would correspond to the laws of the polis (Hardt and Negri 2000: 78–79). And it is perhaps in David Hume’s 1734 Treatise of Human Nature that we find the first systematic formulation of science grounded in the transcendental plane of human nature as the rational basis for the construction of Cosmopolis.3 Like Descartes, Hume proposes “a compleat system of the sciences, built on a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can stand with any security” (Hume, 1960: xx). In Descartes, as is well known,

 “For these ancient and commonly held opinions still revert frequently to my mind, long and familiar custom having given them the right to occupy my mind against my inclination and rendered them almost masters of my belief” (Descartes 1993: 49). 3  In fact, the subtitle of that book clearly indicates Hume’s objective: “Attempt to introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.” 2

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scientific objectivity results from a method in which we seek a primary certainty in consciousness (“clear and distinct” ideas) from which we can then, and in a strictly mathematical way, deduce all scientific truths. Hume thinks that while all branches of the sciences seem to concern themselves with objects outside of consciousness, in reality it is people themselves who make judgments regarding the truth or falsehood of the propositions they use to study those objects. Therefore, if what is sought is a solid foundation that guarantees the certainty of knowledge, this foundation can be nothing other than human perceptive and cognitive faculties. The study of these faculties of human nature is the object of the “Science of Man”: ’Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another. Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man; since they lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties . . . There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz’d in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become acquainted with that science . . . And as the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences, so the only solid foundation we can give to this science itself must be laid on experience and observation. (Hume, 1960: xix–xx, author’s emphasis)

The science of man thereby becomes the epistemological foundation of all other sciences, including natural philosophy, that is, the physics exemplified by Newton. How is this possible? According to Hume, applying the “experimental Method of Reasoning” had such positive results in the physical sciences to the study of mankind. It is therefore a question of investigating human behavior without beginning from any preconceived, metaphysical idea of the human, but instead utilizing only the empirical data provided by experience and observation.4 Just as Newton managed to free himself from a metaphysical conception of nature inherited from Aristotle to formulate the laws governing the movement of celestial bodies, so too must the social scientist (the Newton of the human sciences) distance themselves from all sorts of mythological preconceptions about humanity in order to formulate the laws governing human nature. In other words, just as physics managed to determine the laws governing the celestial world, the science of man ought to apply the same method to determine the laws governing the terrestrial world  On this subject, see the already classic study by Italian philosopher Alberto Moravia, La Scienza dell’Uomo nel Settecento, in which he analyzes in detail the constitution of the French “Societé des Observateurs de l’homme” and the birth of ethnology in the eighteenth century (Moravia, 1989).

4

Places of Enlightenment

15

of social life. And since these laws, according to Hume, are anchored in human nature, this new science would take human cognitive and perceptive faculties as its object of analysis in order to explain—through observation and experience—the basic structures governing social and moral behavior. Notice that Hume’s pretension, like that of Descartes, is to locate the science of man at an observational zero-point capable of guaranteeing its objectivity. The only difference is that, unlike Descartes, Hume’s zero-point is reached by applying the experimental method in order to establish an analogy between the Newtonian universe and the political-moral universe. But the pretension of both thinkers is the same: to convert science into an unobserved observation platform from which an impartial observer is able to establish the laws governing both the cosmos and the polis. To reach the zero-point therefore implies that this hypothetical observer abandons all prescientific, metaphysical observation that might cloud their view. The first rule for reaching the zero-point is thus the following: any other knowledge that does not meet the requirements of the analytic-experimental method must be radically discarded. For Hume, strictly applying this rule would allow the science of man to look upon its object of study as it is and not as it should be. To observe human nature from the zero-point means bracketing all moral, religious, and metaphysical beliefs about humanity in order to see people in their pure facticity. The science of man is not normative, it is descriptive. But what is this facticity of human nature that the science of man discovers? Human actions, Hume argues, are not motivated by reason but by interest in self-preservation. No one acts in the absence of their own personal interest, and so the utility (or pleasure) that a specific action offers the individual is what explains why the action is judged to be “good” or “evil.” Morality and justice are not therefore inscribed in human nature but are conventions through which people publicly manifest their passions5: Now it appears, that in the original frame of our mind, our strongest attention is confin’d to ourselves; our next is extended to our relations and acquaintance; and ’tis only the weakest which reaches to strangers and indifferent persons . . . Nothing is more certain, than that men are, in a great measure, govern’d by interest, and that even when they extend their concern beyond themselves, ’tis not to any great distance; nor is it usual for them, in common life, to look farther than their nearest friends and acquaintance. (Hume, 1960: 488; 534, author’s emphasis)

 See: Hume, 1960: 484.

5

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The first “law of human nature” discovered by the science of man is therefore the following: natural instinct inevitably leads people to prefer the nearby to the remote. Nothing in human nature leads them to want to “extend their concern beyond themselves,” so that all actions they undertake, even the most disinterested and altruistic, make sense only insofar as they benefit themselves.6 The question Hume asks is therefore the following: How is life in community possible? If natural law dictates that all people prefer what is near, how can we explain their capacity to obey a remote code of impersonal laws and to conduct themselves in a civilized way toward others. If people are not naturally social beings, as Aristotle had believed—this is a “pre-scientific myth” that we must abandon—then what is the origin of society? Through an unobserved observation of how human passions function, the science of man would attempt to explain the origin of this historical artifice called society. For Hume as for Hobbes, the laws of society do not exist before individuals agree to establish themselves as a social group. But according to the Scottish thinker, what led them to this agreement was not the insecurity of a war of all against all, as Hobbes supposed, but the need to satisfy a fundamental passion: that of “acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends” (Hume, 1960: 491–2). But since nature has not provided all people with equal capacities and means for satisfying this impulse, it became necessary to resort to an artifice: the creation of laws regulating commerce and property.7 While it is true that this artifice restrains the egoistic impulses of some individuals in favor of the needs of others, when considered as a whole this is a beneficial arrangement for all. If the insatiable desire for property were left to its own devices a war for resources would be inevitable, commerce would become impossible, and no individual would be able to satisfy their self-interest. In sum, the science of man establishes that at the origin of human society we find the creation of a regulatory mechanism for the economy, whose function is to allow individuals to satisfy their natural necessities, but only insofar as this does not threaten what all value as a public interest: self-preservation. The law of the state must prioritize the remote so that everyone can opt for what is nearby. Now this “great discovery” of the science of man that Hume proclaimed in the first half of the eighteenth century was taken up and developed by one of his most brilliant disciples: the Scottish thinker Adam Smith. Like Hume, Smith was convinced that the science of man must rest on the model  “In general,” Hume asserts, “it may be affirm’d, that there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourself” (Hume 1960: 481). 7  Locke, in his second Essay on Civil Government, had stated that private property was a “law of nature,” one already present in the state of nature, and that its preservation and regulation was one of the motivations for the creation of the civil state (Locke 1988: 299). 6

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of Newtonian physics. Like the natural order, the social order is governed by a sort of mechanism that acts independently of human intentions. Society (the polis) should be understood as a universe governed by impersonal laws analogous to those governing the physical world (the cosmos): gravitation, attraction, and equilibrium. And like Hume, Smith believes that economic activities are the ideal sphere for impartially observing how these laws of human nature operate. Thus in The Wealth of Nations Smith argues that: The Division of labor, from which so many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom, which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is the necessary, through very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another. (Smith, 1993: 21)

The division of labor and the propensity toward commerce through the exchange of goods are therefore universal phenomena that do not depend on anyone’s individual consciousness or culture but are instead regulated by an impersonal mechanism that is precisely the object of study for the science of man and, in this case, of political economy. The universality of these phenomena results from their anchoring in an invariable tendency of human nature that Hume had already indicated: the need to satisfy nearby interests over remote ones. If people enter into commercial relations, this is not due to the interest of some in providing what others lack, but from the passionate springs underlying all human action that lead inevitably to the egoistic pursuit of personal benefit.8 Like Hume, Smith wonders how to strengthen this pursuit of personal advantage in such a way that the selfish interests of individuals can be harmonized with the interests of the collective. But the disciple’s response differs slightly from that offered by the master. While Hume finds it necessary to restrain (through the law) the natural desire to satisfy the nearby over the remote to ensure peaceful coexistence, Smith thinks that any coercion of human nature would be harmful. Rather than restraining, we must strengthen those selfish tendencies that motivate human action. Individuals must be allowed (laissez-faire) to exercise their own will, so that the selfish pursuit of one’s own enrichment might generate benefits for the whole collective. We  “Give me that which I want, and I shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages” (Smith, 1993: 22).

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do not need to construct an artificial mechanism for the state regulation of the economy, simply because this mechanism already exists (it is ontological) and is itself regulated by the social laws of motion. The market, which Smith sees not as a contingent sphere where some exercise power over others but as the necessary and inevitable result of the evolution of human society, is the natural mechanism regulating commodity exchange (Smith, 1993: 53). It is therefore enough to allow individuals to enter the market freely to satisfy their nearby interests for the internal and supra-individual laws of the mechanism—like a sort of “invisible hand”—to regulate the equilibrium between the individual and the collective with precision: By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry, [every individual] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that is was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. (Smith, 1993: 291–292, author’s emphasis)

The transcendental nature of the global market is based on the laws of human nature as discovered by political economy. Smith and Hume therefore set out from an unquestionable assumption: human nature is a transcendental sphere valid for all people on earth that functions independently of all cultural or subjective variables. Therefore, the science that studies this nature must be liberated from all pre-scientific opinion and situate itself on the plane of transcendence, at the zero-point from which it can achieve an objective and totalizing view of its object of study. But it is worth asking here: What is the locus of enunciation that allows Smith and Hume to claim that their enunciation has no locus? Where is the immanent power grid that postulates that this power has a transcendental foundation? The Marxist tradition has identified this position of power as that of a vigorous English commercial bourgeoisie whose values centered on work ethic (Berufsethik), mercantilism, and utilitarianism. From this analytic perspective, the enlightened program of Smith and Hume expressed a typically bourgeois Weltanschauung that was directly opposed to aristocratic values that centered on leisure, the subsistence economy, and the uselessness of knowledge.9

 As an example, it is sufficient to recall Lukacs’ profound analysis of the “antinomies of bourgeois thought” in his classic book History and Class Consciousness. But Hardt and Negri also belong to this tradition when they argue that, “With Descartes we are at the beginning of the history of

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However, and while recognizing the obvious link between the enlightenment and the European bourgeoisie, it seems to me that Smith and Hume’s locus enuntiationis has another dimension that goes beyond their “class” condition within the framework of English capitalism. At the time that Hume and Smith penned their treatises, England, Holland, and France found themselves fighting for control of the Atlantic circuit, which had been in the hands of the Spanish since the sixteenth century. These powers were aware of the need to create commercial enclaves in the overseas colonies in order to take advantage of the non-European workforce. England in particular decided to establish stable colonies on the route to the Indies so that the productive labor of the natives (settlers and slaves alike) might open up new markets and increase the profits of commercial companies (Wallerstein, 1980: 244–289; Wolf, 1997: 158–194). Access to new sources of wealth therefore depended on the asymmetrical interaction between European settlers and native populations. And it is here that the enlightenment project of Cosmopolis exemplified by Smith and Hume can be seen as a colonial discourse. As Hardt and Negri put it: Whereas within its domain the nation-state and its attendant ideological structures work tirelessly to create and reproduce the purity of the people, on the outside the nation-state is a machine that produces Others, creates racial difference, and raises boundaries that delimit and support the modern subject of sovereignty. These boundaries and barriers, however, are not impermeable but rather serve to regulate two-way flows between Europe and its outside. The oriental, the African, the Amerindian are all necessary components for the negative foundation of European identity and modern sovereignty as such. The dark Other of European Enlightenment stands at its very foundation just as the productive relationship with the “dark continents” serves as the economic foundation of the European nation-states. (Hardt and Negri 2000: 114–115)

This explains why Smith must include not only European nations but also European colonies in his theory of the global market. The populations of both the former and the latter are situated in the exact location that naturally corresponds to them, which is to say that their function as producers, sellers, or processers of raw materials cannot be changed, since to do so would mean intervening in market dynamics, that is to say, wanting to change the laws of nature. For this reason, one of the central tasks of the science of man is to demonstrate, as we will soon see, that not all populations on the planet exist on the same level of human evolution and that this asymmetry obeys the Enlightenment, or rather bourgeois ideology. The transcendental apparatus he proposes is the distinctive trademark of European Enlightenment thought” (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 80).

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nature’s master plan. The science of man would seek to account for not only the origin of human society but would attempt to rationally reconstruct its historical evolution to show what the inexorable logic of progress consists of. A logic that would allow Europe to construct its economic and political identity ex negativo vis-à-vis the colonies, and which would help colonial criollos strengthen their racial identity vis-à-vis the castes. 1.1.2 The Denial of Simultaneity During the second half of the eighteenth century, with the writings of Turgot, Bossuet, and Condorcet, the enlightened project of a science of man sought to reconstruct the historical evolution of human society. But the project confronted a serious methodological problem: How to empirically observe the past? If what distinguishes scientific observation is precisely the “experimental Method of Reasoning” guaranteeing its zero-point location, how can one have experiences of past societies? The solution to this dilemma rested on a simple process of reasoning: it is only possible to scientifically observe those societies existing in the present, but it is possible to rationally defend the hypothesis that the historical evolution of some of these societies has stagnated while others have progressed further. The background assumption is therefore the following: since human nature is singular, the history of all human societies can be reconstructed a posteriori as following the same evolutionary pattern throughout time.10 So while at present we experience a large number of societies existing simultaneously in space, not all of these societies exist simultaneously in time. We would only need to engage in comparative observation, according to the analytic method, to determine which of these societies pertain to an inferior (earlier) stage and which are higher on the evolutionary scale. This analytic procedure had already been tested out by authors like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, when they sought to explain the historical origin of the state.11 In his Second Treatise on Civil  Arthur Lovejoy has shown that during the eighteenth century, the hypothesis of the “great chain of being” that prevailed as the organizing principle of knowledge in Western science up to that moment begins to temporalize. This means that the ontological fullness of all beings begins to be understood as a “natural plan” unfolding gradually in time (Lovejoy, 2001: 242–287). 11  I would like to recall here Rousseau’s excellent commentary in the Second Discourse regarding the procedure followed by theorists like Hobbes and Locke. Rousseau insists that it is not possible to study humans scientifically in their pure and natural state, since all empirically observable people have been affected by civilizational processes. What science does is to isolate the individual from civilization in a purely analytic way to discover the laws governing “human nature.” With the basic structure of human nature thereby established, it would then be possible to apply this model to study the “origin” of history, but bearing in mind that this is merely the application of a model derived from physics and not the determination of a historical truth. In Rousseau’s words: “One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely 10

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Government, Locke investigates human society’s transition from the state of nature to civil society, setting out from the following hypothesis: at the origins of humanity there was still no need for an organized division of labor, since the economy was merely one of subsistence and the value of the products taken from nature was marked by the use that people granted them to fulfill their basic needs (Locke, 1988: 296). But we begin to leave this “primitive phase” of human society behind when population density increases and competition springs up between different people for the appropriation of resources, thereby establishing the need for trade and the rational division of labor. For Locke, leaving the state of nature coincides with the invention of money and the appearance of exchange value. The point is that in order to determine how “primitive societies” were organized—without money and without a market economy—Locke appeals to observations of Indigenous communities in the Americas as described by European travelers, chroniclers, and adventurers. In contrast to Europe, societies from previous epochs lived in permanent scarcity despite the vast abundance of nature. The market (a generator of wealth) did not exist since people were content to work only as much as necessary to obtain what they needed to survive: There cannot be a clearer demonstration of any thing, than several nations of the Americans are of this, who are rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life; whom Nature having furnished as liberally as any other people with the materials of Plenty, i.e. a fruitful Soil, apt to produce in abundance what might serve for food, rayment, and delight; yet, for want of improving it by labour, have not one hundredth part of the Conveniencies we enjoy: And a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England . . . Thus in the beginning all the World was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known. (Locke, 1988: 296–7; 301, author’s emphasis)

Locke’s comparative observation established that between contemporary European and American societies there exists a relationship of non-simultaneity. While European societies managed to develop a mode of subsistence based on the specialized division of labor and the capitalist market, American societies found themselves anchored to an economy pertaining to “humanity’s past.” The relationship between an English worker and an Indigenous shepherd in New Granada is one of temporal asymmetry. Both live in the as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fittted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin; reasonings similar to those used every day by our physicists to explain the formation of the earth” (Rousseau, 1985: 78, author’s emphasis).

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seventeenth century but they belong to different stages of human development. The different modes of subsistence in which these people’s lives take place are indicative of the fact that societies progress in time and that this progress consists of the gradual development of productive labor. Hunting, herding, agriculture, and commerce represent successive stages of development marking human progress (Meek, 1976). Seen from the zero-point, all societies appear as if governed by an inexorable law that leads them, sooner or later, toward the pinnacle of the modern capitalist economy. The telos of history is the definitive suppression of that which throughout millennia constituted the curse of human reality par excellence: scarcity. But it is perhaps in the writings of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot that we find the clearest expression of this pretension to scientifically reconstruct the laws governing the development of human history. Turgot sets out from the same methodological assumption as Descartes: science must be situated at an observational zero-point that guarantees the observer’s “epistemological break” with all religious and metaphysical conceptions of the world. In particular, a scientific view of the past needs to be free of the Christian narrative of the “history of salvation,” which viewed human events as oriented toward transcendental ends. Having shed this metaphysical burden, history comes to be seen as the result of a ferocious struggle by humans to dominate nature through labor; a struggle that is not a product of chance but instead governed by the same mechanical laws studied by Newton. The philosopher needs to account for these laws, which are the same for all societies since all people are endowed with the same organs, their ideas formed according to the same “logic,” and their needs, inclinations, and reactions toward nature the same.12 Turgot’s rational reconstruction therefore works from the assumption that human nature is singular (homo faber) and therefore that at the beginning of history all humans suffered the same scarcity and barbarism. During the first period of humanity, people lived immersed in the chaos of the senses, language was incapable of articulating abstract ideas, and basic needs were fulfilled through a subsistence economy (Turgot, 1973: 65–6). They managed to escape this primitive situation when language became more complex, since it was only then that writing, the sciences, and the arts could unfold. Thus, humans would learn to technologically dominate the forces of nature, to rationally organize the labor force, and the economy would slowly shift from  In his A Philosophical Review of the Successive Stages of the Human Mind, Turgot writes: “The same senses, the same organs, and the spectacle of the same universe, have everywhere given men the same ideas, just as the same needs and inclinations have everywhere taught them the same arts” (1973, 42). And in On Universal History, he adds: “To unveil the influence of general and necessary causes, that of particular causes and the free actions of great men, and the relation of all this to the very constitution of man; to reveal the springs and mechanisms of moral causes through their effects—that is what History is in the eyes of a philosopher” (64, author’s emphasis).

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a domestic subsistence economy to an economy of market-based production. For Turgot, “human progress” combines two factors that go hand-in-hand: on the one hand, the gradual unfolding of the rational faculties and the resulting transition from myth to scientific knowledge (the passage from doxa to episteme); on the other, the development of the technical means and organizational capacities allowing the control of nature through labor (the passage from scarcity to abundance). Like Hume and Smith, then, Turgot considers the economic dimension of human life to be the key to the rational reconstruction of the history of people. And like Locke, he believed that the “savages of America” needed to be placed on a lower rung of that history (humanity’s “infancy”), since we observe in them an absolute predominance of doxa in cognitive matters and scarcity in economic matters: A glance over the earth puts before our eyes, even today, the whole history of the human race, showing us traces of all the steps and monuments of all the stages through which it has passed from the barbarism, still in existence, of the American peoples to the civilization of the most enlightened nations of Europe. Alas! our ancestors and the Pelasgians who preceded the Greeks were like the savages of America! (Turgot, 1973: 89)

Here again, we find the argument of temporal non-simultaneity between Indigenous American societies and enlightened European societies. Viewed from the zero-point, these two societies coexist in space but not in time, since their economic and cognitive modes of production differ in evolutionary terms. For Turgot, human evolution seems to lead necessarily, with the same necessity as natural laws, to the “enlightenment” observed in the European societies of his time. Modern Europe’s mode of producing wealth (capitalism) and knowledge (the new science) are seen as the criteria for measuring the temporal development of all other societies. Knowledge thus passed through “various levels” on a linear scale, from primitive mentality to abstract thought, and the same can be said of the modes of producing wealth, which progress from the subsistence economy to the capitalist market economy. Nothing on this scale of progress occurs by chance and no link in the chain can be seen as unnecessary. The entire ensemble reveals the perfection and precision of a rational mechanism, so that Turgot can say with all confidence: the history of the human race, in which each man is no more than one part of an immense whole which has, like him, its infancy and its advancement… yet in the midst of their ravages manners are softened, the human mind becomes more enlightened, and separate nations are brought closer to one another. Finally commercial and political ties unite all parts of the globe, and the whole human

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race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on advancing, although at a slow pace, toward greater perfection. (Turgot, 1973: 63, 41)

What the enthusiastic Turgot does not explain is why, if all humans are equal in terms of natural capacities, scientific thought and the market economy emerged precisely in Europe rather than developing first in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. What natural causes explain the temporal non-simultaneity of different forms of wealth and knowledge production? Perhaps it was the influence of climate and geography on the human faculties, as Montesquieu argued? Maybe it was abrupt changes in environmental conditions, as Rousseau had supposed? Or perhaps it had to do with the natural superiority of the white race, as German thinkers like Blumenbach and Kant maintained? 1.1.3 Immature Races I cited Kant at the outset of this chapter in regard to his definition of Aufklärung, but it is now time to return to him in order to establish the relationship between the eighteenth-century project of the human sciences and his famous concept of “immaturity” (Unmündigkeit). I am interested in showing how Kant’s thought is linked to this enlightenment project, and I would like to do so with attention to a comment by the Nigerian philosopher Emmanuel Eze: “Strictly speaking, Kant’s anthropology and geography offer the strongest, if not the only, sufficiently articulated theoretical philosophical justification of the superior/inferior classification of ‘races of men’ of any European writer up to his time” (Eze, 1997: 129). In effect, while Kant’s writings on anthropology and geography are traditionally seen as “minor works” by the philosophical community, Eze is correct to suggest that a consideration of these texts can provide the key to understanding Kant’s position on the science of man, or Menschenkunde, as he called it.13 Like the other European philosophers considered up to this point, Kant was convinced that humans should be seen as an integral part of the natural kingdom and therefore as an object of study belonging to what was called at the time “natural history.” However, Kant thought that beyond being part of physical nature, there was something in humans that escaped the determinism of natural laws and could not be studied by natural history. This “something more” is humanity’s moral nature, whose study should be  Recall that throughout his career as a university professor, Kant gave more courses on anthropology and physical geography than on metaphysics and moral philosophy, teaching these courses continuously for more than forty years. It is also necessary to bear in mind that until the 1760s, Kant was known in Germany precisely for his theses on the subjects of history, anthropology, and geography (Zammito, 2002: 292).

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based on a different method than that of the empirical sciences. Accordingly, the science of man is divided into two major subdisciplines: “physical geography,” which studies corporeal nature from the perspective of its external determinations (environment, physiognomy, temperament, race), and “pragmatic anthropology,” which studies moral nature from the perspective of the capacity to overcome the determinism of physical nature and ascend to the plane of freedom (Kant, 2006: 6). Kant grants pragmatic anthropology a clear methodological priority over physical geography because he basically held to a dualist view in which the soul possesses greater dignity than the body and therefore the study of moral nature is superior to the study of physical nature. It is not that Kant discounted the advances made by the physical sciences at the time, particularly the work of Newton (whom he admired deeply), but he considered it nonsensical to apply the experimental method to moral affairs, as Hume hoped to do. He recognized the importance of empirical, cultural, and historical studies to understanding human behavior and society, but believed that these said nothing about the moral character of the human being (Kant, 2006: 5). Due to the characteristics of its object of study, pragmatic anthropology is not therefore rooted in experience and employs a clearly anti-empirical and dogmatic methodology. Rather than take as its object of study those aspects of human life that change over time, pragmatic anthropology focuses on what never changes and can always be observed in the same way: the “zero-point” of ethics. Kant shares with the English empiricists the idea that science operates according to rationally defined maxims and principles, valid independent of the relative position of the observer, so that the scientific observation point does not depend on the nature of the object under observation. The object can change according to its location in time and space, but observation insofar as it is scientific focuses on the universal principles that explain this change. The observation of the movements of the stars, for example, does not vary according to the position of the observed object or the particular location of the empirical observer: it remains fixed at the zero-point.14 This is why pragmatic anthropology and physical geography have the same epistemological status since for Kant all scientific knowledge needs to have a transcendental foundation guaranteeing its universal status. The difference is merely  This explains why Enlightenment thinkers privileged astronomy over astrology. Whereas astrology attributes to the observed object a special influence on the world, depending on the relative position of that object and the observer, astronomy distances itself completely from both from the object and from the observer to situate itself on a neutral observation platform. This neutrality is what gives astronomy its scientific status, while astrology—which continues to observe from nonneutral points (point one, two, three, etc.)—is relegated to the sphere of the “pre-scientific” and is seen as a form of knowledge belonging to the “past” or the “infancy” of humanity.

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methodological, since the two disciplines touch on two qualitatively distinct aspects of human experience. Physical geography, unlike pragmatic anthropology, studies human beings through those aspects that change in time and space, but this observation continues to occur formally from the zero-point. To do so, physical geography utilizes a taxonomy for classifying living things similar to that of Linnaeus, seeking to describe the natural world objectively through the grouping of different individuals (minerals, animals, plants, human beings) into abstract categories (genus, class, and species) in order to establish formal similarities between them. A clear example of the scientific status of physical geography is the way Kant approaches the problem of the races. The concept of “race,” like all categories applied to history, has no correspondence to nature but is instead the result of a formal operation of the understanding, that is, an observation carried out from the zero-point. In Kant’s opinion, its scientific usefulness lies in how it allows us to establish differences among groups that pertain to a single species (Art), but which have developed different hereditary characteristics (Abartungen). Differences in skin color therefore do not correspond to different classes (Arten) of people since all belong to the same trunk (Stamm), but instead to different races insofar as each maintains a distinct phenotype. In his 1775 essay “Of the Different Races of Human Beings,” Kant argues that there exist only four groups that should be classified under the formal category of race: I believe “a division of the human species into” four races will suffice in order to be able to derive [ableiten] all heritable and self-perpetuating distinctions within “the species.” They are: (1) the race of whites; (2) the Negro race; (3) the Hunnish race (Mongolish or Kalmuckish); and (4) the Hinduish, or Hindustanish, race . . . I believe “we” can derive all of the remaining, heritable characters of people [Völkercharaktere] from these four races either as mixed or incipient. (Kant, 2013: 47–48)

Ten years later, in his “Determination of the Concept of a Human Race,” Kant distinguishes these four races according to geography and skin color, introducing a new variant into his earlier taxonomy: American Indians, previously held to be a variant of the Mongolish race, now appear as one of the Grundrassen due to the red color of their skin.15 The four fundamental races  This classification of races according to skin color clearly reveals the influence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who had distinguished five races in his book De generis humani varietati nativa: Caucasic (white), Mongolic (yellow), Ethiopic (black), American (red), and Malaysic (coppery) (See: Vögelin, 1989: 74). But there is no doubt another factor that explains Kant’s alteration of his taxonomy. Between 1775 and 1785, between the drafting of these two essays, Kant had become familiar with travel literature, and particularly the chronicles that informed the European public

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are therefore white (Europe), yellow (Asia), black (Africa), and red (America) (Kant, 2013: 130). Kant’s basic thesis nevertheless remains the same: the four races correspond not only to differences among human groups marked by external determinations (climate and geography) but also and above all correspond to differences in the moral character of people, that is, internal differences marked by the capacity of these groups or individuals to overcome the determinism of nature. In other words, Kant is saying that race, and skin color in particular, should be seen as indicative of a people’s capacity or incapacity to “educate” (Bilden) the moral nature inherent to all humans. In effect, due to their peculiar psychological and moral temperament, some races cannot achieve self-consciousness and develop the will for rational action, while others gradually educate themselves (which is to say that they progress morally) through science and the arts. Africans, Asians, and Americans are morally immature races since their culture reveals an inability to attain the truly human ideal of overcoming natural determinism and placing oneself under the authority of moral law. Only the white European race, due to its internal and external characteristics, is capable of fulfilling this moral ideal of humanity. In his “Physical Geography,” Kant clearly establishes the idea that “Humanity has its highest degree of perfection (Volkommenheit) in the white race. The yellow Indians have a somewhat lesser talent. The Negroes are much lower, and lowest of all is part of the American races” (Kant, 2015: 576). The science of man that Kant defends thus proposes the existence of a moral hierarchy within humanity on the basis of climate and skin color. Just as Turgot and Condorcet denied the simultaneity of knowledge and forms of production by establishing a temporal hierarchy in which the new science and the market economy figure as vanguard institutions of human progress, Kant denies the simultaneity of cultural forms by establishing a moral hierarchy that privileges the traditions and customs of the white race as the sole model for “humanity.” Thus, just as Locke and Hobbes observed American societies like a paleontologist observes dinosaur bones—that is, as a testimony (frozen in time) of what human life was in the past—Kant locates the “red race” at the most primitive stage of moral development, thereby establishing the contrast between the yesterday of Unmündigkeit and the today of Aufklärung. Michel Foucault was right: the Kantian question Was ist Aufklärung? is a question about the ontological status of the present. But what Foucault did not manage to see is that the observation of this “present” is based on the contrast regarding the traditions and customs of Indigenous Americans. In fact, Kant begins his 1785 essay with the following phrase: “The reports [Kenntnisse] that recent travelers are spreading about the manifold diversities [Manigfaltigkeiten] within the human species have previously contributed more to stimulating the understanding to investigate this topic than to satisfy it” (Kant, 2013: 128).

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that the colonial discourse of the human sciences established between Europe and its overseas colonies. It is precisely in this context that the analytic category of the coloniality of power developed within Latin American critical theory becomes relevant. 1.2 THE MODERNITY/COLONIALITY PARADIGM In the previous section, I examined the enlightenment project of a “science of man” as formulated in the eighteenth century by thinkers like Hume, Smith, Rousseau, Condorcet, Turgot, and Kant. Our survey has considered this project from two complementary perspectives. Epistemologically, we have seen how the nascent human sciences appropriated the model of physics to create their object through an impartial and sterile form of observation that I have deemed zero-point hubris. The other perspective shows how, once installed at the zero-point, the sciences of man construct a discourse about the history and human nature in which those people colonized by Europe appear on the lowest level of the developmental scale, while the market economy, the new science, and modern political institutions are presented as the ultimate end (telos) of the social, cognitive, and moral evolution of humanity, respectively. In this section, I will attempt to bring these two aspects together in a unified vision, clarifying the relationship between the enlightenment project of Cosmopolis and the emergence of modern colonialism. To do so, I appeal initially to postcolonial theory, and specifically to the contributions of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, with the goal of demonstrating the relationship between colonialism and the human sciences. I will then move toward the Latin American theorization of coloniality as explored by thinkers like Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano, in the hopes of closing the circle and showing how the observational zero-point—from which Hume, Smith, Kant, Turgot, and Condorcet imagined the enlightenment project of Cosmopolis—was geopolitically constructed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. 1.2.1 The Orientalization of the Orient This is not the place for a detailed presentation of postcolonial theory and the way it was developed in the United States by those authors that Robert Young deems the “holy trinity” of the movement: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.16 To establish the point that interests me,  For a detailed study of the work of other postcolonial theorists, I refer the reader to two anthologies published in English and one in Spanish, in which some of the most important texts of this

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the structural relationship between colonialism and the human sciences, I will focus solely on Said’s work, and specifically on his most well-known book: Orientalism. Here, more than in other works, Said clearly argues that the enlightenment project of a science of man was upheld by a geopolitical imaginary (Occidentalism) that viewed the white European races as superior to all other cultural forms on the planet. The central argument of Orientalism is that Europe’s imperial domination of its Asian and Middle Eastern colonies entailed the institutionalization of a specific image or representation of “the Orient” and “the Oriental.” In Said’s opinion, one of the characteristics of modern colonialism is that imperial domination is not achieved by simply killing and subjugating the other by force, but that it also requires an ideological or “representational” element. In other words, without the construction of a discourse about the other and without the incorporation of this discourse into the habitus of dominator and dominated alike, Europe’s economic and political power over its colonies would have been impossible. The European dominator constructs the “colonial other” as an object of study (“the Orient”) at the same time that he constructs an image of his own imperial locus enuntiationis (“the Occident”): the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles . . . Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident.” Thus a very large mass of writers, among whom are poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. (Said, 1979: 1–3, author’s emphasis)

Representations and “conceptions of the world,” as well as the formation of subjectivity within these representations, are fundamental elements for the

theoretical current are compiled: Williams and Chrisman, 1994; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1995; and Rivera Cusicanqui and Barragán, 1999; Dube, 1999. One could also consult the following: Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1989; Young, 1990; Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Dirlik, 1997; Castro-Gómez and Mendieta, 1998; Loomba, 1998; Gandhi, 1998; Beverley, 1999; Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 2000.

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establishment of Europe’s colonial dominance. In Said’s opinion, modern colonialism is not reducible to the arbitrary exercise of economic and military power, but also possesses a cognitive dimension that we will henceforth refer to as coloniality. Without the construction of an imaginary of “Orient” and “Occident,” not as geographical locations but as forms of life and thought capable of generating concrete subjectivities, any explanation of colonialism (be it economic or sociological) would be incomplete. Obviously, Said notes, these forms of life and thought are not to be found solely in the habitus of social actors but are also anchored in objective structures: state laws, commercial codes, school curricula, scientific research projects, bureaucratic procedures, institutionalized forms of cultural consumption, and so on. Said is very clear on the fact that Orientalism is not merely a question of “consciousness” (false or true), but is above all the experience of an objective materiality. What particularly interests me is the role that Said grants to the human sciences in the construction of this colonial apparatus. As early as the nineteenth century, Orientalism had found a home in the metropolitan academy with the creation of professorships on “ancient civilizations” within the framework of the great enthusiasm generated by the study of Oriental languages. Said argues that it was Great Britain’s imperial control of India that allowed scholars unrestricted access to the texts, languages, and religions of the Asian world, which up to that moment had been unknown to Europe (Said, 1979: 77). It was, in fact, an employee of the East India Company and a member of the English colonial bureaucracy besides, magistrate William Jones, who took advantage of his vast knowledge of Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit to elaborate the first of the great Orientalist theories. In a speech delivered in 1786 to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Jones claimed that classical European languages (Latin and Greek) derived from a common root that can be traced back to Sanskrit. This thesis generated unprecedented excitement in the European scientific community and fomented the development of a new humanistic discipline: philology.17 The central point of this argument is that interest in the study of ancient Asian civilizations conforms to a strategy for the historic construction of the European present. The “origins” of a triumphant European civilization are sought in the Asian world’s past. Philology seemed to “scientifically prove” what philosophers like Hegel had been arguing since the end of the eighteenth century: that Asia is nothing but Europe’s grandiose past. Civilization certainly “begins” in Asia, but its fruits are gathered by Greece and Rome,  The same could be said of the development of other disciplines like archeology which, propelled by the study of ancient Egyptian civilization, was made possible thanks to the Napoleonic invasions (Said, 1979: 87).

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which constitute the cultural referent immediately prior to modern Europe. As Hegel would say, civilization follows the path of the sun: it appears in the East (where it finds its arché) but it unfolds and reaches its conclusion (its telos, its ultimate objective) in the West. European dominance of the world required a scientific legitimation, and here is where the nascent sciences of man—philology, archaeology, history, ethnology, anthropology, geography, paleontology—begin to play a fundamental role. In looking to the past of eastern civilizations, these disciplines constructed Europe’s enlightened present by way of contrast. Orientalism showed that Asia’s present had nothing to say to Europe since its cultural manifestations were old and had already been “overtaken” by modern civilization. It was only Asia’s cultural past that was of interest as a “preparatory” moment for the emergence of modern European rationality. From an enlightenment perspective, all of humanity’s other cultural voices are viewed as “traditional” or “primitive” and as outside of Weltgeschichte as a result. So within the apparatus of Orientalism, the eastern world—Egypt being perhaps the best example of this—is directly associated with the exotic, the mysterious, the magical, the aesthetic, and the Indigenous, in other words with “pre-modern” cultural forms. In this way, the many existing forms of knowledge are situated within a conception of history that delegitimizes their spatial coexistence and arranges them according to a teleological framework of temporal progression. The various forms of knowledge unfurled by humanity would lead gradually toward a single legitimate way of knowing the world: the scientific-technical rationality of modernity. By establishing a direct relationship between the birth of the human sciences and the birth of modern colonialism, Said makes clear the unavoidable link between knowledge and power identified by authors like Michel Foucault.18 But while Foucault focused his analysis on the micro-structures of power, Said decides to broaden this analysis to encompass the macro-structural sphere (imperial power relations), thereby situating us on the terrain of the geopolitics of knowledge: Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some

 In fact, Said explicitly recognizes his debt to Foucault’s thought: “I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the postEnlightenment period” (Said, 1979: 3).

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nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world. (Said, 1979: 12, first emphasis by author)

For Said, the geopolitical nexus between knowledge and power that created the Orient is the same that sustains Europe’s cultural, economic, and political hegemony over the rest of the world from the Age of Enlightenment on. In fact, one of Said’s most interesting arguments is that coloniality is a constitutive element of modernity, since the latter represents itself discursively through the belief that the geopolitical division of the world (into cores and peripheries) is based on an ontological division. On the one side is Occidental culture (the West), presented as the active side, the creator and provider of knowledge whose mission is to bring or “disseminate” modernity throughout the world; on the other we have all other cultures (the Rest), presented as passive elements and receivers of knowledge whose mission is to “embrace” the progress and civilization which come from Europe. The Occident is therefore characterized by discipline, creativity, abstract thought, and the possibility of cognitively occupying the zero-point, while all other cultures are seen as prerational, spontaneous, imitative, empirical, and dominated by myth. Said’s great merit is to have seen that the discourses of the human sciences are upheld by a geopolitical machinery of knowledge/power that has cognitively subalternized all other voices of humanity, which has in other words declared “illegitimate” the simultaneous existence of different ways of knowing and producing knowledge. Said shows that with the birth of the human sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we witness the invisibilization of humanity’s historical multivocality.19 Epistemic  Colombian anthropologist Cristóbal Gnecco puts it this way: “Western tradition, above all since the nineteenth century, has constructed spaces of exclusion allowing it to present the form of knowledge that science has patiently been constructing as singular, necessary, and inevitable, and to oppose it to other ways of knowing . . . Primitive thought was considered a sort of badlydeveloped initial abstraction and was placed at the beginning of a ladder of the human condition that began with elemental (primitive) abstraction and would end with total (scientific) abstraction. It is therefore clear that an obvious evolutionist hegemony is anthropology’s starting point, not its result, since adopting a perspective on the relations between societies—between Us and alterity—is also a political act” (Gnecco, 1999: 20–21).

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expropriation corresponds to Europe’s territorial and economic expropriation of the colonies, condemning the knowledge produced there as nothing more than modern science’s “past.” But while Orientalism convincingly poses the geopolitical links between enlightenment, colonialism, and human sciences, a theory of coloniality has developed within Latin American studies that not only complements but also adds new elements to Said’s postcolonialism. 1.2.2 The Destruction of the Myth of Modernity The critique of colonialism already enjoys a long tradition in Latin American social theory: from the works of Edmundo O’Gorman, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, and Pablo González Casanova in México, to the contributions of Agustín Cuevas in Ecuador, Orlando Fals Borda in Colombia, and Darcy Ribeiro in Brasil, and on to the significant work of Aníbal Pinto, Ruy Mauro Marini, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and other dependency theorists, not to mention Mariátegui, Haya de la Torre, Martí, Rodó, and to other “classics” of Latin American thought. But with notable exceptions, few studies have emphasized the properly epistemic dimension of colonialism. In fact, the majority of research has concentrated on its economic, historic, political, and social aspects, approaching these from the disciplinary paradigms of the human sciences without paying attention to what I am here calling coloniality. As one might expect, it is from within Latin American philosophy that a critique of colonialism that emphasizes its epistemic nucleus has begun to be sketched out. I refer concretely to the works of Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel, and specifically those centering on his critique of Eurocentrism. In fact, this subject has constituted one of the pillars of the “philosophy of liberation” that he has developed over more than thirty years. Since the 1970s, Dussel has sought to demonstrate that a structural relationship exists between the great theoretical products of modern philosophy and European colonial praxis. Setting out from Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics, Dussel argues that modern philosophy of consciousness, from Descartes to Marx, neglected the fact that thought is not disembodied but instead deeply rooted in everyday human life (Lebenswelt) (Dussel, 1995a: 92; 107). It is precisely the relationship that modern thought establishes between an abstract subject (with no sex, no class, no culture) and an inert object (nature) that explains the “totalization” of the Western world since this type of representation blocks from the outset the possibility of exchanging knowledge and ways of producing knowledge between different cultures. As a result, European civilization has looked at everything outside of itself as “barbarism,” as brute nature that needs to be “civilized.” In this way, the elimination of alterity—including, as we will see, epistemic alterity—constituted the “totalizing logic” that came to be imposed on Indigenous and African populations beginning in the sixteenth

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century, both by the Spanish conquistadors and their descendants, the criollos of the Americas (1995a: 200–204). Since the 1990s, Dussel has been creatively reformulating his theory of coloniality. The logic of Western domination is no longer conceived in terms of an “ontological totality” a là Heidegger, but instead as a “myth” with a concrete name: Eurocentrism. This myth, in Dussel’s opinion, emerges with the discovery of the Americas and has dominated our theoretical and practical understanding of what modernity means ever since. Dussel’s thesis (1998: 3) is that beginning in the eighteenth century, enlightenment thought developed a vision of itself, a discourse on its own origins according to which modernity was an exclusively European phenomenon that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages, and which then—on the basis of purely intra-European experiences like the Italian Renaissance, the enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the French Revolution—was disseminated throughout the world (figure 1.1). According to this view, Europe possesses unique internal

Figure 1.1  The Eurocentric Myth of Modernity.

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qualities that allowed it to develop scientific-technical rationality, which, in turn, explains its superiority over all other cultures. Thus, the Eurocentric myth of modernity was the pretension of identifying European particularity directly with universality (Dussel, 1995b: 19–26). Against this model, Dussel proposes an alternative that he calls the “planetary paradigm” and which he formulates as follows: modernity is a phenomenon of the world system which emerges as the result of the administration that different European empires (first Spain, then France, Holland, and England) undertake from their central position within this system. This means that events like the enlightenment, the Italian Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the French Revolution are not European but global phenomena, and that as a result they cannot be understood independent of the asymmetrical relationship between Europe and its colonial periphery. In Dussel’s words: Modernity is not a phenomenon of Europe as an independent system, but of Europe as center. This simple hypothesis absolutely changes the concept of modernity, its origin, development, and contemporary crisis, and thus, also the content of the belated modernity or postmodernity. In addition, we submit a thesis that qualifies the previous one: the centrality of Europe in the world-system is not the sole fruit of an internal superiority accumulated during the European Middle Ages over against other cultures. Instead, it is also the fundamental effect of the simple fact of the discovery, conquest, colonization, and integration (subsumption) of Amerindia. This simple fact will give Europe the determining comparative advantage over the OttomanMuslim world, India, and China. Modernity is the fruit of these events, not their cause. Subsequently, the management of the centrality of the world-system will allow Europe to transform itself in something like the “reflexive consciousness” (modern philosophy) of world history… Even capitalism is the fruit and not the cause of this juncture of European planetarization and centralization within the world-system. (Dussel, 1998: 4–5)

This alternative paradigm (figure 1.2) clearly challenges the dominant view according to which the conquest of the Americas was not a constitutive element of modernity, since the latter was based on intra-European phenomena like the Protestant Reformation, the emergence of the new science, and the French Revolution. Spain and its overseas colonies had fallen outside modernity since none of these phenomena took place there. Following Immanuel Wallerstein, Dussel instead shows that modernity was founded on the basis of a materiality that was created beginning in the sixteenth century with Spain’s territorial expansion. This generated the opening of new markets and the incorporation of unprecedented sources of raw materials and a labor

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Figure 1.2  Dussel’s Planetary Paradigm.

force that allowed for the “primitive accumulation of capital.” The modern/ colonial world system begins with the simultaneous constitution of Spain as the global core vis-à-vis its American periphery. Modernity and coloniality therefore belong to a single genetic matrix and are therefore mutually dependent. There is no modernity without colonialism and there is no colonialism without modernity because Europe only becomes the “core” of the world system at the same moment that it constitutes its overseas colonies as “peripheries.” The importance of Dussel’s “planetary paradigm” is that it allows us to demonstrate the coexistence of locations from which the enlightenment is articulated. If the enlightenment is not something that is preached from Europe but instead from the world system itself as the result of the interaction between Europe and its colonies, we could then say that the enlightenment is articulated simultaneously in various locations within the modern/colonial world system. Enlightenment discourses do not travel from the core to the

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periphery, but instead circulate throughout the world system and anchor themselves to different nodes of power. This is how the late-eighteenth-century struggle for hegemony among new imperial powers managed to redefine the meaning of the European civilizing mission and the role of scientific knowledge in that mission. In that moment, the enlightenment was enunciated from the perspective of this new struggle for world domination, and it is there, as we have seen, that the project of a science of man developed by Hobbes, Rousseau, Smith, Hume, Kant, Turgot, and Condorcet was articulated. Dussel also believes that the incorporation of the Americas as the first periphery of the modern world system generated not only the “primitive accumulation of capital” in core countries but also the first properly modern cultural expressions. The first “geoculture” of world-modernity, understood as a system of ritual, cognitive, juridical, political, and axiological symbols pertaining to the expanding world system, had as its center not France or England, but Mediterranean Catholic Europe.20 We could equally say that the first modern/colonial discourse, exemplified by the Sepúlveda-Las Casas debate, found its origins in Spain. What the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish world contributed to the world system was not only territories, a labor force, and raw materials as Wallerstein believes, but also discursive elements that allowed for the very constitution of modernity. In effect, Dussel speaks of modernity as a global phenomenon, but one with two different manifestations: the first was consolidated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and corresponds to the Catholic, humanist, Renaissance ethos that flourished in Italy, Portugal, Spain, and their American colonies (Dussel, 1998). This modernity was administered globally by the first hegemonic power of the world system (Spain) and generated not only a first form of subjectivity built on the basis of modern/colonial discourse but also a first critique of that discourse.21 Dussel conceptualizes this subjectivity in philosophical terms (drawing on Levinas’ thought), describing it as a conquering, aristocratic “I” that establishes an exclusionary relationship  This does not mean that prior to 1492 processes of self-centered European cultural modernization were not gestating. Dussel is clear on this point: “According to my central thesis, 1492 is the date of the ‘birth’ of modernity, although its gestation involves a preceding ‘intrauterine’ process of growth. The possibility of modernity originated in the free cities of medieval Europe, which were centers of enormous creativity. But modernity as such was ‘born’ when Europe was in a position to pose itself against an other, when, in other words, Europe could constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itself” (Dussel, 1993: 66, author’s emphasis). 21  Dussel has written a great deal on this subject. His central argument is that, in his mid-sixteenth century debate with Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas discovers for the first time the irrationality of the myth of Modernity, albeit with the philosophical tools of an earlier paradigm. Las Casas’ proposal was to “modernize” the other without destroying their alterity; to adopt Modernity without legitimating its myth. Modernization from alterity, not from the “sameness” of the system (Dussel, 1995b: 69–72). 20

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of domination toward the “other” (Black people, Indians, and mestizos) of the Americas.22 This ego conquiro of the first modernity thereby constitutes the protohistory of the ego cogito of the second modernity (Dussel, 1995b: 48). This second modernity, which presents itself ideologically as the only modernity, does not begin until the late seventeenth century with Spain’s geopolitical collapse and the emergence of new hegemonic powers. The central administration of the world system is now carried out from different locations and responds to the imperatives of efficiency, biopolitics, and rationalization described by Max Weber and Michel Foucault. This all entails that modern subjectivity is not only bourgeois subjectivity, as social theory has claimed since the nineteenth century, but that a form of subjectivity was also generated in the Spanish colonies that has constituted part of world modernity since the sixteenth century and coexisted with the birth of the European bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I call this subjectivity Spanish, but it was above all criollo, established in concordance with the colonial discourse of blood purity. The thesis that I will defend in this book is that the locus of enunciation of enlightened criollo discourse coincides with the locus of blood purity discourse, and that this coincidence should not be viewed as abnormal or “hybrid”—as those who equate the enlightenment with the bourgeoisie believe—but as typical of modernity in the Spanish colonial periphery. 1.2.3 The Discourse of Blood Purity Dussel’s philosophy of liberation establishes a critical dialogue with Wallerstein’s world systems analysis, seeking to integrate the critique of colonialism into a globalizing perspective. However, the central disagreement between the two projects—namely, Dussel’s argument that a SpanishCatholic modern geoculture emerged prior to the French Revolution—merits more sustained discussion. This discussion has been carried forward in large part by the Argentinean semiologist Walter Mignolo, who developed an explicit critique of Wallerstein’s theses by embracing Dussel’s reflections on the emergence of a modern/colonial (but not strictly bourgeois) subjectivity in the Spanish world. Mignolo recognizes the importance of Wallerstein’s monumental book The Modern World-System for the epistemological displacement it produced in social theory in the 1970s. Linking the contributions of dependency theory to Braudel’s works on the Mediterranean, Wallerstein manages to analyze the centrality of the Atlantic circuit for the establishment of the modern  “The conquistador is the first modern, active, practical human being to impose his violent individuality on the Other” (Dussel, 1995b: 38).

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world system in the sixteenth century (Mignolo, 2000: 11). With this, the Mediterranean ceases to be the axis of world history, as Hegel had argued,23 and Europe begins to be “provincialized” within social theory. What is now important is not to study Europe as such, but rather the “world-system” in all of its structural variations (cores, peripheries, and semi-peripheries). However, Wallerstein’s project still understands peripheries as geo-historical and geo-economic units, but not as geo-cultural ones. While Wallerstein is indeed correct to indicate that the modern world system begins around 1500, his perspective remains Eurocentric. He believes that the first geo-culture of this system—liberalism—only took form in the eighteenth century as a result of the globalization of the French Revolution. In Mignolo’s opinion, Wallerstein therefore remains a prisoner to the myth constructed by enlightenment philosophers according to which the second modernity (of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) represents modernity par excellence (2000: 56–57). From this perspective, the geo-culture of the first modernity remains invisible. In his book, Local Histories/Global Designs, Mignolo argues that the conquest of the Americas meant not only the creation of a new “world-economy” (with the opening of the commercial circuit linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic) but also the establishment of the modern world’s first great “discourse” (in the terms of Said and Foucault). Against Wallerstein, Mignolo argues that the universalist discourses legitimizing the global expansion of capital did not emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a result of European bourgeois revolution, but that they had already appeared much earlier during the “long sixteenth century,” and coincided with the formation of the modern/colonial world system (Mignolo, 2000: 23). The first modern universalist discourse is therefore not linked to the liberal bourgeois mentality but, paradoxically, to the aristocratic Christian mentality. This first discourse, according to Mignolo, was the discourse of blood purity, which functioned in the sixteenth century as the first classification scheme for the global population. While the discourse of blood purity did not emerge in the sixteenth century but had rather been gestating throughout the Christian Middle Ages, it went “global” thanks to Spain’s commercial expansion into the Atlantic and the beginning of European colonization. This means that a classificatory matrix pertaining to local history (medieval European Christian culture) became—by virtue of the global hegemony Spain gained during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—a global design that served to classify  Here it is worth recalling Hegel’s famous phrase: “The three continents of the Old World are therefore essentially related, and they combine to form a totality . . . For the connecting link between these three continents, the Mediterranean, is the focus [Mittelpunkt] of the whole of world history . . . World history would be inconceivable without it” (Hegel, 1975: 171–172).

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populations according to their position within the international division of labor. As a cognitive scheme for classifying populations, the discourse of blood purity is not a product of the sixteenth century, but instead draws upon the tripartite division of the world suggested by Herodotus and accepted by some of the most important thinkers of antiquity: Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Polybius, Strabo, Pliny, Marinus, and Ptolemy. The world was seen as a great island (the orbis terrarum) divided into three major regions: Europe, Asia, and Africa.24 While some assumed that among the Antipodes, to the south of orbis terrarum, there might exist other islands inhabited perhaps by a nonhuman species, ancient historians and geographers were most interested in the world as they knew it and the population types that the three major regions were home to. Thus, the territorial division of the world became a hierarchical and qualitative division among populations. Within this hierarchy, Europe occupied the most prominent position, since its inhabitants were considered more civilized than those of Asia and Africa, considered “barbaric” by the Greeks and Romans (O’Gorman, 1991: 147). Medieval Christian intellectuals appropriated this population classification schema, but not without introducing some modifications. Thus, for example, the Christian belief in the fundamental unity of the human species (all people are descended from Adam) forced St. Augustine to recognize that if other islands existed beyond the orbis terrarum, their inhabitants—if they were indeed inhabited—could not be classified as “men,” since potential inhabitants of the “City of God” could only be found in Europe, Asia, or Africa (O’Gorman, 1991: 148). Likewise, Christianity reinterpreted the old hierarchical division of the world. For what were now teleological reasons, Europe continued to occupy a privileged position above Asia and Africa.25 These three geographical regions were seen as the places settled by Noah’s three sons after the flood, and therefore as inhabited by three completely different types of people. The children of Shem populated Asia, those of Ham established themselves in Africa, and those of Japheth settled in Europe. This means that the three parts of the known world were hierarchically ordered according to a criterion of ethnic differentiation: Asians  For the characterization of the orbis terrarum and its influence on the division of global populations, I basically follow the arguments developed by the Mexican philosopher and historian Edmundo O’Gorman in his book La invención de América. Mignolo explicitly supports O’Gorman’s argument (Mignolo, 1995: 17). 25  While Europe certainly did not embody the most perfect of civilizations from a technical, economic, scientific, or military perspective—it was rather poor and “peripheral” vis-à-vis Asia and northern Africa—it was seen by many as the seat of the only society based on the true faith. This made it the representative of the immanent and transcendent destiny of humanity. Western Christian civilization was the bearer of the norm through which it was possible to judge and evaluate all other cultural forms on the planet (O’Gorman, 1991: 148). 24

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and Africans were descended from those sons who according to the biblical story fell into disgrace before their father, and were considered racially and culturally inferior to Europeans, the direct descendants of Japheth, Noah’s most beloved son.26 Mignolo (1995: 230) argues that Christianity resignified this ancient schema of population division, making it function as an ethnic and religious taxonomy of the population27 whose practical dimension only became clear in the sixteenth century. Columbus’ voyages had made it clear that the new lands of the Americas constituted a geographical entity distinct from the orbis terrarum, immediately provoking a broad debate about the nature of its inhabitants and territory. If only the “island of land”—the part of the globe comprising Europe, Asia, and Africa—was assigned by God to man after his expulsion from paradise, then what juridical status did these newly discovered territories possess? Did they fall under the universal sovereignty of the Pope, and could they therefore be legitimately occupied by a Christian king? If only the children of Noah could prove their direct descent from Adam, the father of humanity, what anthropological status did the inhabitants of the new territories have? Were these beings devoid of a rational soul who could therefore be legitimately enslaved by Europeans? Following O’Gorman, Mignolo argues that in the end, these new territories and their populations were not seen as ontologically distinct from Europe, but as their natural extension (the “New World”): During the sixteenth century, when “America” became conceptualized as such not by the Spanish crown but by intellectuals of the North (Italy and France), it was implicit that America was neither the land of Shem (the Orient) nor the land of Ham (Africa), but the enlargement of the land of Japheth. There was no other reason than the geopolitical distribution of the planet implemented by the  The biblical story shows that it was Noah himself who established a hierarchy among his three sons. The event that prompted this hierarchization is told in Chapter 9 of the Book of Genesis: after the flood had ended, Noah became drunk and lay naked in his shop. Ham, his youngest son, entered and saw his father’s nudity without attempting to cover it, while Shem and Japheth, walking backward, took a blanket and covered Noah’s body. Upon awakening from his stupor, Noah realized what had happened and passed the following judgment: “And he said, Cursed be Canaan [the son of Ham]; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant” (Genesis 9: 25–27). In accordance with this story, the hierarchy was established as follows: first Japheth, Noah’s eldest son and father of the Europeans, then Shem, father of the Asians, and finally Ham, the cursed son, father of the African nations. 27  Mignolo refers explicitly to the famous T-O map by Isidoro de Sevilla (560–636 C.E). This map, first used to illustrate Sevilla’s book Etymologiae, represents a circle divided in three by two lines forming a T. The top portion, which takes up half of the circle, represents the Asian continent (the Orient) populated by Shem, while the other half of the circle, the bottom half, is divided into two parts: the left represents the European continent populated by Japheth, and the right represents the African continent settled by Ham (Mignolo, 1995: 231). 26

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Christian T/O map to perceive the planet as divided into four continents; and there was no other place in the Christian T/O map for “America” than its inclusion in the domain of Japheth, that is, in the West (Occident). Occidentalism, in other words, is the overarching geopolitical imaginary of the modern/colonial world system. (Mignolo, 2000: 58–59, author’s emphasis)

Mignolo’s point here is that the belief in Europe’s ethnic superiority over colonized populations was projected onto the cognitive schema of the tripartite division of the world’s population and the imaginary of the Orbis Universalis Christianus. The vision of the Americas as a prolongation of the land of Japheth meant that the exploitation of their natural resources and the military subjugation of their populations was held to be “just and legitimate,” because it was only from Europe that the light of true knowledge of God could come. Conversion was therefore a state imperative that determined that only “old Christians”—namely, those not mixed with Jews, Moors, and Africans (people descended from Ham or Shem)—could legitimately travel to and establish themselves in American territory. The New World thus became the natural stage for the extension of white European man and his Christian culture. In other words, the apparatus of whiteness is, according to Mignolo’s interpretation, the first global apparatus to be incorporated into the habitus of the European immigrant population, legitimating at the same time the ethnic division of labor and the transfer of people, capital, and raw materials on a global scale. We should note at this point that Mignolo’s reading both converges with and diverges from that of Said. Like Said, Mignolo knows that without the construction of a discourse capable of incorporating the habitus of both the dominators and the dominated, European colonialism would have been impossible. But against Said, Mignolo does not identify this discourse with “Orientalism” but with “Occidentalism,” thereby emphasizing the need to inscribe postcolonial theories within specific colonial legacies (in this case, Spanish colonialism).28 By posing Orientalism as the colonial discourse par excellence, Said seems not to realize that the discourses on the “other” generated by France and the British Empire correspond to the second modernity. As a result, Said not only neglects Spain’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century geo-cultural and geopolitical hegemony but also ends up legitimizing the

 “I attempt to emphasize the need to make a cultural and political intervention by inscribing postcolonial theorizing into particular colonial legacies: the need, in other words, to inscribe the ‘darker side of the Renaissance’ into the silenced space of Spanish/Latin America and Amerindian contributions . . . to postcolonial theorizing” (Mignolo, 1995: xi).

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eighteenth-century (Eurocentric) view of enlightened modernity that Dussel has denounced. On this point, Mignolo writes: I have no intention of ignoring the tremendous impact and the scholarly transformation Said’s book has made possible. Nor do I intend to join Aijaz Ahmad and engage in a devastating critique of Said because the book doesn’t do exactly what I want it to. However, I have no intention of reproducing the enormous silence that Said’s book enforces: without Occidentalism there is no Orientalism, and Europe’s “greatest and richest and oldest colonies” are not the “Oriental” but the “Occidental”: the Indias Occidentales and then the Americas. “Orientalism” is the hegemonic cultural imaginary of the modern world system in the second modernity when the image of the “heart of Europe” (England, France, Germany) replaces the “Christian Europe” of the fifteenth to mid-seventeenth century (Italy, Spain, Portugal) . . . It is true, as Said states, that the Orient became one of the recurring images of Europe’s Other after the eighteenth century. The Occident, however, was never Europe’s Other but the difference within sameness: Indias Occidentales (as you can see in the very name) and later America (in Buffon, Hegel, etc.), was the extreme West, not its alterity. America, contrary to Asia and Africa, was included [in the map] as part of Europe’s extension and not as its difference. This is why, once more, without Occidentalism there is no Orientalism. (Mignolo, 2000: 57; 58, author’s emphasis)

But despite their differences, if there is one thing that Mignolo and Said’s theoretical projects share it is the importance they grant the sphere of coloniality in explaining the phenomenon of colonialism. Both Said’s Orientalism and Mignolo’s Occidentalism are understood above all as cultural imaginaries, as discourses that become concrete not only in disciplinary “apparatuses” (laws, institutions, colonial bureaucracies) but that are also translated into concrete forms of subjectivity. Orientalism and Occidentalism are above all modes of life, structures of thought and action incorporated into the habitus of social actors. Mignolo thereby reinforces Dussel’s argument: the subjectivity of the first modernity has nothing to do with the emergence of the bourgeoisie but is instead related to the apparatus of whiteness. The modern/colonial world system’s first geoculture was that of an identity grounded in ethnic difference from the other, a distinction that posed not only the superiority of some people over others but also the superiority of some forms of knowledge over others. This is why the enlightened discourse of criollo elites, with its emphasis on objective knowledge, did not contradict but only reinforced this apparatus of whiteness, as we will see in subsequent chapters. Imagining

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themselves to be located on a neutral observation platform, criollos “erased” the fact that it was precisely their ethnic preeminence in social space (blood purity) that allowed them to consider themselves atemporal inhabitants of the zero-point, and other social actors (Indians, Black people, and mestizos) as inhabitants of the past. In fact, Mignolo argues that the key to understanding the emergence of the enlightened scientific epistemology of the eighteenth century is the separation that European geographers had previously established between the ethnic center and geometric center of observation (Mignolo, 1995: 233–236). In almost all known maps up to the sixteenth century, the ethnic and geometric centers coincided. So, for example, Chinese cartographers generated a representation of space in which the emperor’s royal palace occupied a central position around which his imperial dominions were organized. The same was true of medieval Christian maps in which the world was arranged circularly around the city of Jerusalem, and in thirteenth-century Arab maps in which the Islamic world appeared as the center of the world. In all these cases, the “center was mobile” because the observer was not interested in concealing their place of observation and excluding it from the representation. On the contrary, it was clear to the observer that the map’s geometric center coincided with the ethnic and religious center from which they observed (the Chinese, Jewish, Arab, Christian, or Aztec cultures, etc.). However, with the conquest of the Americas and the need to represent the new territories precisely under the imperative of their control and delimitation, something different begins to occur. Cartography incorporates the mathematization of perspective, which in that moment was revolutionizing pictorial practices in Mediterranean Catholic Europe (especially in Italy). This perspective presupposed the adoption of a single and fixed point of view, a sovereign gaze located outside of all representation. In other words, perspective is an instrument through which one sees but one cannot, in turn, be seen; perspective, in short, grants the possibility of having a point of view toward which no point of view is possible. This completely revolutionized the scientific practice of cartographers. With the locus of observation becoming invisible, the geometric center no longer coincides with the ethnic center. On the contrary, European cartographers and navigators, now equipped with precise measuring instruments, begin to consider representations made from the ethnic center to be pre-scientific since they remain linked to a specific cultural particularity. Truly scientific and objective representation can abstract itself from its place of observation and generate a “universal view” of space. It is precisely this view which claims to articulate itself independent of its ethnic and cultural observation points, that I call in this work zero-point hubris.

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Following closely what Dussel and Mignolo have argued, I will therefore say that zero-point hubris, with its pretentions of objectivity and scientificity, does not emerge with the second modernity but instead takes root in the geoculture of the first modernity. It is not the effect of the Copernican Revolution or bourgeois individualism,29 but of the Spanish state’s need to exercise control over the Atlantic circuit—against the claims of their European competitors—and to eradicate old belief systems in the periphery that were considered “idolatrous.” Different ways of seeing the world could no longer coexist but instead needed to be taxonomized in conformity with a hierarchization of time and space. From the sovereign viewpoint of the unobserved observer, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century world maps organized space according to larger units called “continents” and smaller units called “empires,” which were completely unrelated to physical geography. These were geopolitical constructs and, as such, were ordered according to extra-scientific imperatives. Europe—as had already occurred with Isidoro de Sevilla’s T/O map—continued to function as the center of cultural production and distribution, whereas Asia, Africa, and the Americas were considered cultural “recipients.” As we will see, this continental and geopolitical separation of the world would provide the epistemological basis upon which the anthropological, social, and evolutionist theories of the enlightenment would be drawn up. Mignolo reinforces this thesis when he writes that: The colonization of space (as well as of language and memory) took, during the sixteenth century, the form of an evolutionary process in which certain kinds of territorial representations (languages and ways of recording the past) were considered preferable to others. Differences were translated into values . . . During the sixteenth century a transition took place, in Europe, in the organization of space that impinged on the conception and evaluation of time . . . What happened was a long intellectual process that Maravall beautifully reconstructed as the emergence of the idea of “progress” in the European Renaissance . . . Colonization of space (of language, of memory) was signaled by the belief that differences could be measured in values and values measured in a chronological evolution. Alphabetic writing, Western historiography, and [sixteenth-century] cartography became part and parcel of a larger frame of  In fact, “zero-point hubris” has a clearly aristocratic—and not bourgeois—stamp, as Bourdieu has demonstrated. It presupposes a divorce between the intellect, which is considered superior, and the body, which is considered inferior. It affirms, moreover, the world as spectacle, as the stage for contemplation from the heights (Bourdieu, 1984). In this way, by ignoring its own material conditions of possibility, “zero-point hubris” legitimizes an ideological separation between the economic universe (from which the observer can calmly “abstract” themselves, since it is taken care of) and the universe of symbolic production (which is the “true” world to be conquered by genius and intelligence).

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mind in which the regional [Europe] could be universalized and taken as a yardstick to evaluate the degree of development of the rest of the human race. (Mignolo, 1995: 256–257, author’s emphasis)30

It is here that we see the relevance of the category of the geopolitics of knowledge, used widely by Mignolo. I have said that one of the consequences of zero-point hubris is the invisibilization of the particular locus of enunciation and its transformation into a place without a place, a universal. This tendency to convert a local history into a global design runs parallel to the establishment of that particular place as a center of geopolitical power. To the centrality of Spain, and later France, Holland, England, and the United States within the world system, there corresponds the pretension of turning their own local history into the single and universal location for the articulation and production of knowledge. Knowledge not produced in these power centers or in the circuits they control is declared irrelevant and “pre-scientific.” The history of knowledge, as represented from the zero-point, has a place on the map, a specific geography. Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as with Isidoro de Sevilla’s T/O map, fall outside this cartography and are not seen as regions that produce knowledge, but as consumers of the knowledge generated in the global core. 1.2.4 The Coloniality of Power Alongside Dussel and Mignolo, it is necessary to study the contributions of sociologist Aníbal Quijano to the construction of a critical theory of coloniality. From his 1970s writings on the emergence of Cholo identity in Peru to his work in the 1980s on the relationship between cultural identity and modernity, Quijano has long proposed that the cultural tensions of the continent needed to be studied with reference to the horizon of colonial relations of domination established between Europe and the Americas. However, in the 1990s Quijano broadened his perspective to argue that colonial power is not reducible to the economic, political, and military domination of the world by Europe, but that it also primarily involves the epistemic foundations sustaining the hegemony of European models of knowledge production. For Quijano, the critique of colonial power necessarily entails an interrogation of its epistemic nucleus, that is, a critique of the type of knowledge that legitimated European colonial domination and a critique of their pretensions to universal validity.  The Spanish anthropologist José Alcina Franch has also shown in various works how the enlightened idea of “progress” emerged beginning in the sixteenth century, and that it can be reconstructed in the writings of Acosta and Las Casas (Alcina Franch, 1988: 207–211).

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Like Mignolo, Quijano argues that colonialism sunk its epistemic roots into the hierarchical classification of populations that emerged in the sixteenth century but found its most powerful legitimation in seventeenth-century naturalist models and nineteenth-century biologistic models. These were taxonomies that divided the global population into different “races,” assigning to each a fixed and immobile position within the social hierarchy. While the idea of “race” had already been gestating in the Reconquista Wars on the Iberian Peninsula, it is only with the establishment of the world system in the sixteenth century that this idea becomes the epistemic foundation for colonial power (Quijano, 1999: 197). The idea that superior and inferior races exist “by nature” would serve as one of the pillars upon which Spain consolidated its control of the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and as a scientific legitimation of European colonial power in later centuries. In order to account for this phenomenon, Quijano developed his concept of the coloniality of power. The coloniality of power is an analytical category that refers to the specific structure of domination implemented in the American colonies since 1492. According to Quijano, Spanish colonizers established a power relation toward the colonized based on their ethnic and cognitive superiority over the latter. Within this power matrix, it was not simply a question of subjugating Indigenous people militarily and dominating them by force, but of radically transforming their traditional ways of knowing the world so they would adopt the oppressor’s cognitive horizon as their own. Quijano describes the coloniality of power in the following terms: [It] consists, in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination . . . The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivized expression, intellectual or visual or visual . . . The colonizers also imposed a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning. (Quijano, 2007: 169)

Here we see that the first characteristic of the coloniality of power, the most general of all, is domination through means that are not exclusively coercive. This was not a question of the mere physical repression of the dominated, but of naturalizing the European cultural apparatus as the only way of relating to nature, to the social world, and to subjectivity. This was therefore a sui generis project that sought to radically change the cognitive, affective, and volitional structures of the oppressed, to transform them into a “new man” in the image and likeness of white western man. To accomplish this

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civilizational objective the Spanish state created the encomienda,31 whose function was to integrate Indians into the cultural patterns of the dominant ethnic group. The role of the encomendero was to diligently oversee the “total conversion” of the Indian through systematic evangelism and hard physical labor. Both instruments, evangelism and labor, were geared toward the transformation of private life with the goal of allowing the Indian to escape their condition of “immaturity” and to finally access modes of thought and action suited to civilized life. The coloniality of power refers to how Spanish domination attempted to eliminate the “many forms of knowledge” that had existed among native populations and to replace them with others that would serve the civilizational objectives of the colonial regime. It thereby points toward the epistemic violence that the first modernity exercised over other forms of producing knowledge, images, symbols, and modes of signification. However, the category also has another complementary meaning. While these other forms of knowledge were not completely eliminated but at most stripped of their legitimacy and subalternized, the colonial apparatus did exert a continuous fascination over the desires, aspirations, and will of subaltern subjects. Quijano formulates this second characteristic of the coloniality of power as follows: “Then European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power. After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction. Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into an aspiration. It was a way of participating” in colonial power (Quijano, 2007: 169, author’s emphasis). This aspiration toward cultural Europeanization formed part of a power structure that cut across oppressors and oppressed alike and which, as I will show in this book, constituted the foundation on which the enlightenment project of Cosmopolis in New Granada was built from the late eighteenth century on. Bringing together the theses of Quijano and Mignolo, I will therefore say that the apparatus of whiteness represented an a priori condition for discourse and action in colonial society and functioned as the axis around which the subjectivity of social actors was constructed. To be “white” had less to do with skin color than with the personal staging of an apparatus woven together from religious beliefs, styles of dress, nobility certificates, modes of behavior, and most importantly for this project, ways of producing and transmitting knowledge. Flaunting those cultural insignias of distinction associated with the apparatus of whiteness was a sign of social status; a way of acquiring, accumulating, and transmitting symbolic capital.

 [The encomienda system was an early Spanish colonial institution of compulsory labor imposed on Indigenous people in “exchange” for supposed spiritual guidance. Individual Spaniards who possessed their own set of Indigenous subjects are referred to as encomenderos—trans.]

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To conclude and synthesize, I will therefore say that thinkers like Dussel, Quijano, and Mignolo have considerably broadened the notion of colonial discourse introduced by Said in the late 1970s. Drawing upon Foucault, Said had shown colonial discourse to be a system of signs through which colonial powers imposed specific kinds of knowledge, disciplines, values, and behaviors onto colonized groups. Dussel, Quijano, and Mignolo demonstrate that, understood in this way, colonial discourse not only finds legitimation in modern science but also plays an important role in configuring the scientific imaginary of the enlightenment. Science and colonial power are part of a single genealogical matrix configured in the sixteenth century with the establishment of the modern world system. Or put differently: if modernity and coloniality are two sides of a single coin, it is therefore possible to reconstruct the linkages between the colonial project and the scientific project of the enlightenment. This is the thesis that I have sought to present in this chapter and that I will develop through a case study in the chapters that follow.

Chapter 2

Purus Ab Omnia Macula Sanguinis1 The Apparatus of Whiteness in New Granada

Every colored person who is not completely black like an African, or copper-colored like an Indian, calls himself a Spaniard; belongs to the gente de razón, that is, gifted with reason, and this ‘reason,’ which is both arrogant and lazy, tells the whites and those who think themselves white that agriculture is work for slaves . . . It was strange to see many zambos, mulattos and other colored people who, through vanity, call themselves Spaniards, and think that they are white because they are not red like the Indians. —Alexander von Humboldt

The 1previous chapter allowed me to establish the relationship between the social-scientific project of the Enlightenment (Cosmopolis) and the geopolitical nature of its declarations. I have been interested in examining the tension between the pretension immanent to this discourse—namely, that it lacks a particular locus of enunciation (zero-point hubris)—and the geocultural and geopolitical interests that marked its production. Alongside Said and Latin American theorists like Dussel, Quijano, and Mignolo, we have seen that those Erkenntnisinteresse were often articulated through the discourse of ethnic superiority of some populations over others, deeply rooted in the subjectivity of the social actors in question. I have referred specifically to the discourse of blood purity since these authors argue that the colonial discourse of whiteness is not opposed to modernity (as modern social theory tends to argue), but instead coexists with modernity. Modernity and coloniality are two sides of the same coin.   This inscription, which certified the blood purity of the graduate, appeared printed on all diplomas issued by the Universidad Tomística de Bogotá during the eighteenth century. 1

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We will now demonstrate this coexistence of modernity with coloniality through a case study. The thesis that I will defend in the following chapters is that the locus of enunciation of enlightened criollo discourse coincides precisely with the discourse of blood purity and it is in that specific geocultural space that the modern apparatus of the zero-point coincided with the colonial apparatus of whiteness. But first, it is necessary to examine closely how the imaginary of whiteness was constructed in the colonial periphery of the Americas. In this second chapter, we will therefore see that the discourse of blood purity was the axis around which the subjectivity of social actors in New Granada was constructed. To be white had less to do with skin color than with staging a cultural apparatus that wove together religious beliefs, styles of dress, nobility certificates, modes of behavior, and forms of knowledge production. I will focus on some of the practices through which this imaginary was constructed and how it was embraced by different and conflicting social groups. The purpose of this exercise is to show that the struggle over distancing and appropriation, centered on the imaginary of whiteness, constituted the ground on which the scientific knowledge of enlightened criollo elites stood in the second half of the eighteenth century. 2.1 THE ETHNICIZATION OF WEALTH Antón de Olalla was a modest farmer and infantry sublieutenant who arrived in New Granada with the Jiménez de Quesada expedition in 1537. He participated actively in the “pacification” of the Panche and Muisca Indians and in the war against the cacique of Guatavita.2 As a reward for his services, the Spanish Crown assigned Olalla a portion of the spoils expropriated from the Indigenous people by Quesada’s troops, and made him part—and profitably so—of the first distribution [repartimiento] of Indians in the New Kingdom. By royal decree, he was named trustee of the encomienda of Bogotá in 1547, which encompassed hundreds of hectares of land on the outskirts of the city and included nearly one thousand Indigenous tributaries paying him the equivalent of one thousand pesos annually. Taking advantage of this massive supply of Indigenous labor at his disposal, Olalla was able to accumulate enough capital to purchase fertile lands and establish cattle ranches near Bogotá, so that in a short time he had become the largest landholder in the region. In less than fifteen years, he managed to take possession of seven estates that produced a large quantity of cattle, sheep, pigs, as well as cheeses, corn, and wheat. His wealth moreover assured him access to important  All the data presented here about Olalla and his family are drawn from the research of Colombian historian Jairo Gutiérrez Ramos (1998: 16–26).

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political positions. In 1544 he was named Lieutenant Governor of the New Kingdom of Granada, and between 1557 and 1573 he was mayor of Bogotá on four occasions. After Olalla’s death, his descendants began a very well-calculated series of marital alliances to consolidate and increase the family’s inherited estate. Olalla’s daughter, doña Jerónima de Orrego, married the admiral Francisco Maldonado de Mendoza, a Spanish noble who had recently arrived in New Granada. Maldonado de Mendoza officially took over as the new encomendero of Bogotá in 1596 and sought to diversify the productive activities of his lands.3 Taking advantage of the “personal service” of the Indians entrusted to him, he dedicated his life to increasing his fortune and multiplying his businesses. He worked in the sale of provisions and entered the mining business, acquiring a crew of Black slaves. Before dying in 1631, Maldonado de Mendoza established an entailed estate, the Mayorazgo de la Dehesa de Bogotá, through which he guaranteed that only members of his lineage would have access to his assets and required them to use his surname.4 The four subsequent generations of descendants, spanning the entire seventeenth century, constituted an endogamous clan composed of the most prestigious families of Bogotá, hoarding encomiendas, land, mines, and moreover monopolizing municipal and provincial power in the New Kingdom of Granada. The example of Olalla and his descendants allows me to pose the hypothesis that I hope to defend in this section of the book: that from the very outset of the colonization of New Granada, individual phenotype (white, Black, Indian, mestizo) determined one’s position within social space and, as a result, one’s ability to access those cultural and political goods that could be understood in terms of distinction. Olalla’s case is interesting because it shows that the construction of a tangled web of kinship and the acquisition of nobility titles or their hereditary transmission were the two fundamental strategies utilized by colonial elites to perpetuate their lineage and power. But these two strategies shared the same presupposition: the need to avoid any association with the “stain of the land,” to trace an ethnic border that would prevent the mixing of blood with Indians, Black people, mulattoes, or mestizos. I will refer  Gutiérrez Ramos calculates that at the end of the sixteenth century, don Francisco Maldonado’s lands reached some 20,000 hectares. The number of cattle he maintained on these lands oscillated between 5,000 and 8,000 head and on his “El Novillero” estate alone he could maintain up to 12,000 sheep (Gutiérrez Ramos, 1998: 37–40). 4  It is worth transcribing part of the will, as reproduced by Gutiérrez Ramos: “so that the persons that might marry the heiresses of this estate, however, in the case of having other surnames must have my own and that of my aforementioned wife, calling themselves and naming themselves Maldonado de Mendoza without mixing this with other surnames and taking the coat of arms of these two surnames, carrying them on their shields, stamps, and emblems, and placing them on their houses and whatever works they might execute without mixing them with any others, under the penalty that to do differently would result in loss of the estate” (Gutiérrez Ramos, 1998: 46). 3

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to the construction of an apparatus of whiteness according to which all other racial groups could be defined by lack as “pardos.” To clarify how New Granadian elites constructed a cultural imaginary of whiteness, we will first look at how the relationship between nobility, wealth, and blood purity was framed in the Spanish Americas. In 1736, officers of the Spanish navy Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa described the ethos of the dominant classes in the Spanish Americas as follows: One must assume that the creoles’ vanity and pretension concerning their social status reaches such a point that they argue constantly about the origin and development of their family tree. They do it in a way that they do not even have to envy the oldest, noblest families of Spain. Obsessed by this topic, they have it as the most important subject of conversation with strangers whom they instruct in their noble lineage. But it is well to speculate dispassionately on the little things which give them away. One can discover so many errors in their genealogies that it is rare to find a family which does not have impure blood or some other equally significant defect. (Juan and Ulloa, 1978: 219, author’s emphasis)

This passage by Juan and Ulloa reveals that the claim to blood purity, that is, to enjoy the condition of a white noble, was the distinctive sign that allowed criollos to differentiate themselves socially from mestizos and other social groups. What mattered was not being “truly” white, since almost no members of the criollo elite were able to prove their nobility claims,5 but rather to stage oneself socially as white and be accepted as such by the most preeminent social strata. This is why whiteness did not correlate strictly to skin color but designated above all the kind of wealth and social status a person possessed. Whiteness, as Bourdieu would say, was a cultural capital that allowed criollo elites to distinguish themselves socially from other groups and legitimate their control over those groups in terms of distinction. Whiteness was therefore fundamentally a lifestyle that was displayed publicly by the highest strata of society and desired by all other social groups. The example of Olalla allows us to see what exactly this cultural capital of whiteness consisted of. As I have said, in the second generation after Olalla the Mayorazgo de la Dehesa de Bogotá was created, indicating the formation  In a study of the nobility of Quito, Christian Büschges (1997: 51) emphasizes that throughout the colonial period there was not a single request for proof of nobility sent from local elites to the Royal Chancelleries of Granada and Valladolid, the offices empowered by the Spanish Crown to settle such cases. According to Büschges, this proves that the concept of nobility in New Granada had a highly “informal” character since one was considered noble for simply claiming and being recognized as such by criollo elites. Pilar Ponce de Leiva (1998: 43–44) speaks in this sense of a de facto but not a de jure aristocracy and compares it to the petty Castilian nobility. It was thus one thing to claim to be noble—to ensure a degree of social prestige—but it was a very different thing to possess a nobility title (to be noble “in property”) that could only be issued by Spanish chancelleries.

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of a new colonial aristocracy determined to defend itself from any meddling “social climbers” and those outside the original clan. Belonging to this clan demanded the fulfillment of at least one of two prerequisites: the first was to have “the blood of conquistadors,” or in other words to prove descent from the “first settlers” of New Granada (in our example, the descendants of Olalla); the second was to have “noble blood,” or to prove direct descent from a noble (in our example, the descendants of Maldonado de Mendoza). Put differently, New Granadian elites surrounded themselves with a social fortress based on two conceptions of “honor”: on the one hand, blood nobility, acquired as a child of noble parentage and transmitted legally to descendants; on the other, privilege nobility, acquired as the child of “distinguished” parentage—albeit not according to lineage—but lacking the same validity of blood nobility. My point is that the cornerstone of this social fortress constructed by colonial elites was its fundamentally ethnic character. This becomes clear if we recall that the requirement for the procurement and display of any title of nobility was blood purity. We know that in Spain, the sine qua non condition for receiving a nobility title was for the claimant to be an “old Christian” and not mixed with the “evil races,” that is, not having Moorish, Guinean, Jewish, or Gypsy blood. In the Americas, this sort of discrimination was even more powerful due to the existence of two republics, that of the whites and that of the Indians, such that one’s legal status was directly related to membership in an ethnic group. This led to social inequalities not being based solely on the various levels of material life (rich or poor), but above all on differences of blood, heredity, and lineage. Which means that while in Spain, blood purity was a primarily religious demand—required, for example, of Spaniards wanting to “pass to the Indies”—in the Americas it becomes an ethnic question and only secondarily religious and economic. The proof of this, as we will see later, lies in the fact that in the great majority of dissent cases, the arguments put forward are essentially racial while arguments relative to the economic condition of subjects turn out to be marginal and, in any case, inadmissible according to the laws protecting the social status of whiteness.6 The juridical order reflected a cultural value scale in which ethnic differences were far more important than the economic distinctions among social actors. Ethnic inequalities were therefore not based on the purely subjective evaluations of elites but were also sanctioned by a juridical order responsible for putting each individual into their corresponding ethnic group. So, for example, in the proceedings and records of local councils [cabildos] as well as in encomienda titles, it was officially noted whether a person was descended from the “first settlers” or not; nobility claims could be authorized before  See for example the documentation from the archive of the council of Medellín between 1674 and 1812 as compiled by William Jaramillo Mejía (2000).

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the Real Audiencia7 and local mayors so that whites would enjoy the right to receive special protections according to their ethnic status.8 The official registers also established a difference between “citizen” [vecino] and “resident” [morador], reserving the first category for members of the oldest and most distinguished families of an area. Similarly, in the Church’s sacramental proceedings, baptisms of whites and those of Indians, Black people, and mulattoes were registered in two separate books, as occurred, for example, in the parish of Nuestra Señora de Santa Bárbara in Bogotá (Ramírez, 2000: 44). In all of these cases, the function of the juridical order was to use ethnic arguments to legitimize existing de facto social and material differences between whites and the castes. It should be clear that the cultural values privileged by the criollo elite to distinguish themselves socially from other groups had little or nothing to do with one’s profession, commercial activities, or economic success, and everything to do with criteria like honor, nobility, and above all ethnic status. This is why the concept of “class”—in the sense of the Marxist tradition— seems to me inadequate for describing power relations among different social groups during the colonial period. I prefer to describe such relations through the category of the “coloniality of power,” which as we have seen refers to the creation and reproduction of a racial taxonomy that was key to constructing personal subjectivity, consolidating social hierarchies, and maintaining the established order. 2.1.1 The Spontaneous Sociology of Elites In chapter 1, referring to the ethnic taxonomies of the population of the Americas elaborated by sixteenth-century Spanish cartographers, chroniclers, and cosmographers, I showed that the discourse of blood purity also contains a cognitive dimension. In the previous section, I said that the power criollo elites held over subaltern groups required the construction of an imaginary of whiteness through which both sides “recognized” the legitimacy of a social order built on ethnic differentiation. I will now attempt to link these two elements, showing how ethnic taxonomies formed part of a cultural imaginary of whiteness. To do so, I will briefly study some “habitual” ways—that  [Spanish courts or tribunals which were granted broad judicial, legislative, and executive powers, making them key mechanisms of colonial control—Trans]. 8  To give just one example: when a white was imprisoned, it was prohibited to subject them to certain punishments reserved for “pardos,” such as restraint by shackles, chains, or stocks. It was also forbidden to hold a white person in the same jail as a Black person. When these laws were violated, the white victim could complain openly and request an exemplary punishment for the authority responsible, for not having taken their distinction and privileges into account (Gutiérrez de Pineda, Pineda Giraldo 1999: 426). 7

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is, those anchored in habitus—that dominant criollos represented others, themselves, and their “natural place” in society. I refer to an entire series of unreflective assumptions, assessments, and preconceptions through which criollos “constructed” social reality, projecting onto it their particular ideals and aspirations. I will refer to this series of particular representations, which nevertheless claimed to represent objective social reality, as the spontaneous sociology of elites.9 The Swedish historian Magnus Mörner (1969: 61) has demonstrated that the notion of “caste” was widely used by elites in the colonial Spanish Americas to designate people with mixed blood. An individual’s membership in one of the castes acquired a culturally pejorative valorization in colonial society that was sanctioned by the juridical order. And while official population censuses carried out in the eighteenth century did not use the category of “caste”—referring instead to “whites,” “Indians,” “slaves,” and “free people of all colors”—the obsession of criollo elites to avoid any suspicion of the “stain of the land” was such that they established a large number of classificatory taxonomies in an effort to specify which caste each individual belonged to. Through these taxonomies, elites imaginatively constructed a social order and elaborated representations of the respective positions they and the castes should occupy within that order. I will refer first to one of the most interesting techniques of social racialization to appear in eighteenth-century Spanish America: so-called “caste paintings.” A pictorial genre that emerged in Mexico, caste paintings represented artistically the different castes constituting colonial society (García Sáiz, 1989). While these paintings did not enjoy much influence in New Granada, it is nevertheless interesting to study their primary characteristics in order to get an idea of how the “spontaneous sociology of elites” operated. Caste paintings represent the complex process of mestizaje that was occurring throughout the Spanish Americas during the eighteenth century. They consisted of a collection of scenes—generally sixteen paintings—showing the different types of racial mixture and designating each with a name, an activity, and a specific social position. The series of paintings followed a strict taxonomic progression: beginning with the representation of a model “pure race”—Spanish—and then, in descending order, representing all castes according to their distance from the original ethnic model. Such paintings  Althusser (1990: 94) coined the term “spontaneous philosophy” to refer to the manner in which “practical ideologies” are introduced surreptitiously into the theoretical practice of scientists. Althusser views these ideologies or Weltanschauungen as “ideological means by which the ruling class achieves hegemony” that leak into the teaching and practice of the social sciences. Several years later, Pierre Bourdieu spoke of “spontaneous sociology” to illustrate how sociological language runs the risk of adopting a series of preconceptions trapped within common language that contains a “petrified philosophy of the social” (Bourdieu et al., 1991: 21).

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always feature a father, mother, and son, indicating their skin color, clothing, and characteristic work activity as well. The sixteen most frequently represented “blood types” in caste paintings10 were the following: 1. From Spanish and Indian, mestizo 2. From mestizo and Spanish, castizo [pure-blooded] 3. From castizo and Spanish, Spanish 4. From Spanish and Black, mulatto 5. From mulatto and Spanish, morisco 6. From morisco and Spanish, chino [Chinese] 7. From chino and Indian, salta atrás [leap backward] 8. From salta atrás and mulatto, lobo [wolf] 9. From lobo and china, jíbaro 10. From jíbaro and mulatto, albarazado [white spotted] 11. From albarazado and Black, cambujo 12. From cambujo and Indian, zambaigo 13. From zambaigo and loba, calpamulato 14. From calpamulato and cambuja, tente en el aire [hold yourself in midair] 15. From tente en el aire and mulatto, no te entiendo [I don’t understand you] 16. From no te entiendo and Indian, torna atrás [turn backward] While some of these names might seem slightly eccentric to us, they should not be seen as arbitrary. Rather, these names designated the precise position corresponding to each person within the process of social mobility. On the basis of the three basic types (Spanish, Indian, and Black), an entire series of subtypes was constructed to which a high degree of ethnic discrimination corresponded. The categories “leap backward” and “turn backward,” for example, refer to the fact that a mestizo descended from Blacks who marries an Indian woman would thereby move backward in the whitening process (Rosenblat, 1954: 174). The category “hold yourself in midair” meant that no advancement was possible since the union occurred between two people (calpamulato and cambuja) whose blood was already a complete mixture of the three races and therefore equidistant vis-à-vis whites and Indians. In other cases, the category designated some physical or linguistic characteristic of the individual. The “chino” had curly hair without being Black, while the “I don’t understand you” resulted from mixture among descendants of people (possibly newly arrived slaves) who did not speak Spanish well. Some categories, like “lobo,” “albarazado,” “barcino,” and “cambujo” were adopted in a derogatory manner from the terms commonly used in animal breeding.  See: https​:/​/co​​mmons​​.wiki​​media​​.org/​​wiki/​​Categ​​ory​:Mexi​​can​_C​​asta​_​​paint​​ings_​(seri​es_by​_Migu​ el_Ca​brera​).

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As we can see, both the names and the progression of the paintings reveal a “spontaneous sociology”: the higher the degree of blood mixture, the less the possibility of social mobility. Which meant that the less “pure” the blood running through a person’s veins, the fewer possibilities they would have for improving their social position. Note, for example, that the stigma of racial mixing could disappear by the third generation only because the male mestizo was seen as the son of two “pure” races (Spanish and Indian), and therefore had the opportunity to “redeem” his progeny if he produced legitimate children with a white woman. In turn, the product of this union (the castizo) could have legitimate children who would be immediately considered Spanish, but only if he faithfully followed his father’s example, namely, to marry a white woman. On the other hand, as soon as blood was “contaminated” with Black elements, redemption became impossible. The mulatto, product of the union between a Spanish man and a Black woman, could no longer whiten his blood, even if he, his children (moriscos), and his grandchildren (chinos) were to have legitimate children with white women. The principle is clear: Black blood cannot be redeemed. On the contrary, the higher the percentage of Black blood, the higher the degree of racial and social degeneration. The use of zoological categories (wolf,11 coyote12) indicates that the individuals belonging to these castes are hardly distinguishable from beasts. While caste paintings did not have a serious impact among New Granadian artists, criollo elites used the same classification principle to formulate their own ethnic taxonomies. Consider, for example, the following passage by the Capuchin friar Joaquín de Finestrad: Like the Arabs and Africans that inhabit the southern nations, so too are the Indians, the mulattoes, the Blacks, zambos, leap backward, hold yourself in midair, terceroons, cuadroons, quintroons, and cholos or mestizos. Those with black and white blood are called mulattoes; those born of mulatto and black, zambos; those born of zambo and Black, leap backward; those born of zambo and zamba, hold yourself in midair; those born of mulatto and mulatta, the same; those born of mulatto and white, terceroon; those born of terceroon and mulatta, leap backward; those born of terceroon and terceroon, hold yourself in midair; those born of terceroon and white, quatroon; those born of quatroon and white, quintroon; those born of quintroon and white, Spanish, since they are now deemed to be beyond the Black race. (Finestrad, 2000 [1789]: 135)

Notice that for Finestrad, all the castes of New Granada are “like the Arabs and Africans,” which is to say that they are “children of damnation” for being  http:​/​/www​​.artn​​et​.co​​m​/mag​​azine​​_pre2​​000​/f​​eatur​​es​/ra​​mirez​​​/ram1​​2​-06.​​asp  http:​/​/www​​.artn​​et​.co​​m​/mag​​azine​​_pre2​​000​/f​​eatur​​es​/ra​​mirez​​​/ram1​​2​-01.​​asp

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mixed with the descendants of Shem and Ham.13 On the other hand, he uses names employed by the Mexican painters (“hold yourself in midair,” “leap backward”) but adapts these to the particular racial situation in New Granada. Nevertheless, Finestrad’s taxonomic categories are slightly more precise than those used in Mexico, since names like “terceroon,” “quatroon,” and “quintroon” referred to their temporal proximity or distance from the model of racial purity. Hence, the terceroon was the product of three generations of white parentage, the quatroon of four, and the quintroon had cleansed their “evil blood” for five generations and could therefore produce children who would be considered criollos. In a magnificent essay, Ilona Katzew (1996) argues that ethnic classification systems reflect the need by eighteenth-century elites to create order and control amid the chaos that increasing mestizaje represented for them. This obsession with order also reflected the spirit of the Enlightenment, with its interest in those kinds of systematic classifications that Michel Foucault calls Tableaux. In fact, many caste paintings were sent to the natural history collections that were then increasingly popular in Bourbon Spain: In 1776, the same year the Gabinete [the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid] opened its doors to the public, an official decree was issued requesting viceroys and other functionaries to send natural products and artistic curiosities. Casta paintings were displayed with a host of archeological objects, rocks, minerals, fossils, and other “ethnographic” items. By entering the space of the Gabinete, casta paintings acquired a specific meaning related to their assumed “ethnographic” value. The Gabinete provided the ideal forum from which colonial difference could be contained and articulated as a category of nature. Thus, the inclusion of objects such as casta paintings, in addition to satisfying Europeans’ curiosity for the exotic, points to their need to classify the peoples of the Americas as a way of gaining control to the unknown. (Katzew, 1996: 15)

Katzew correctly points out the intrinsic relationship between systems of ethnic classification and so-called natural history, a problem that I will have an opportunity to work through in the fifth chapter. For the moment, I am interested in highlighting how these classification systems were anchored in a spontaneous sociology and formed part of an apparatus of whiteness. Recall that the caste paintings were not created by European scientists but by elite criollo artists, who were no doubt responding to a necessity of their social group. We could therefore say that, beyond what Katzew suggests, the importance of these classifications lies in the fact that it was through them and

 I will expand on this point in the fourth chapter.

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the contrast they presented that the dominant ethnic group “sociologically” defined what it meant to be white. Once a taxonomy of all possible blood mixtures had been established, it was then possible to determine ex negativo which social privileges members of the different castes should be excluded from or, to say the same thing, which privileges belonged exclusively to those establishing the categories.14 The conclusion is that the discourse of blood purity, with all its ethnic and separatist connotations, was an integral part of the habitus of dominant criollo elites insofar as it operated as a principle for the construction of social reality. Now, this spontaneous sociology of the elites not only served to classify and define the number of castes but also assigned a value to the character and personality of the individuals belonging to them. This was an important part of the elite goal of generating “order” amid the social “chaos” provoked by the eighteenth-century process of mestizaje. The Indian was of course the first group subjected to this kind of axiological classification. As the defeated race, their cultural difference was interpreted as a symptom of lack vis-à-vis the Spanish ethos of the victor. The military triumph of the conquistadors therefore meant the construction of an apparatus that established their own cultural modes of relating to nature, society, and subjectivity as the norma normata according to which all cultural expressions are to be judged. Thus, if the Indians attributed a different value to work than productivity, the Spanish interpreted this as a symptom of laziness and idleness; if they worshiped gods that were not those of the Bible, they were superstitious; if they had a different way of understanding sexuality, they were considered depraved; if they used a different technology for land cultivation, they were branded as stupid or “unenlightened.” Cultural deviation from the dominant model began to be seen as a natural defect typical of the caste. To belong to the Indian caste meant not only to have differentiating somatic characteristics but also and primarily to possess a character and personality that was essentially inferior to that of Western man. In New Granada, as in other parts of the Americas, idleness and laziness were the “natural defects” most often attributed to the character of Indians and mestizos. The spectacular decline in the Indigenous population contributed to the idea that Indians and their mestizo descendants were naturally “lazy,” and that the best thing would be to replace them with stronger and harder-working races like Blacks or to recruit them into the army to “discipline” them. In their report to Spanish authorities, officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa refer

 The same occurs with these taxonomies as Mignolo had said of sixteenth-century maps of the New World: the subject who classifies—like he who draws the maps—positions himself “outside of representation” (Mignolo, 1995: 219–313).

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to mestizos as “lazy and immoral people,” as lacking productive work habits and therefore susceptible to falling into all sorts of licentious behaviors: It should be noted that the inland provinces of that part of America, which are those in the mountains, are also the most extensive and populated of all the regions: there the mestizo caste abounds, and are of little to no use in those countries, because the abundance of fruit therein, and their lack of industriousness in labor, has reduced them to an idle and lazy life; depositaries of all vices, the majority of these people never marry, and live scandalously, although there this irregularity of life is not strange being as common as it is. (Juan and Ulloa, 1983 [1826]: 164)

With regard to Black people, research by anthropologists Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda and Roberto Pineda (1999: 12–18) into documents on the slave trade in New Granada, as well as judgments issued against it, reveal what sort of social value they were granted. If the principal vice attributed to Indians was laziness, it was pride that most characterized Black people.15 This stereotype of the “arrogant” and “rebellious” personality of Black people was so deeply rooted that the price slave dealers charged varied according to the slave’s place of origin, since buyers believed that slaves from the Congo were “fatuous”—and should therefore be cheaper—while those arriving from Angola were “docile” and “restrained.”16 In general, Blacks were also accused of being dishonest, having a “malignance prone to slander,” and of being inclined to all sorts of licentious behaviors. Among these, sexual promiscuity stands out, and as a result, Black women were considered “easy and foul-mouthed,” inclined to prostitution and cohabitation, while Black men had the reputation of being “restless lovers.” Since they carried the “blood of the earth” in their veins, pardos of all combinations (mestizos, mulattoes, zambos, terceroons, etc.) were seen as racially inferior to the Spanish. In other words, not only did they carry the vices of their primary races—Indian or Black—in their blood, but also inherited new vices through their racial combination. The zambo was considered the most despised of all castes since they resulted from the mixture

 Note that both vices are related to the laboral status of Indians and Black people. The pejorative evaluation of the former refers to the Indian’s resistance to physical labor; in the latter, to the resistance among Blacks to obeying the orders of overseers. Both vices were considered “mortal sins” according to catholic teachings, but among Indians and Black people these were seen as “natural defects” of their racial constitution, making their correction through penance and repentance difficult or impossible. 16  The geographic origin of Black slaves could not be concealed by the dealers, since they bore marks on their bodies called “sajaduras” that identified them as coming from different regions of Africa (Díaz, 2001: 37). 15

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of Indians and Blacks.17 Besides being “extremely irascible, cruel, treasonous and, in sum, people with whom contact should be avoided,”18 the zambo was considered to be “taciturn, with a fierce and malicious look, and a nature so perverse that it leads them easily to evil.”19 In contrast, mulattoes were considered racially superior to the zambo, with a great capacity for literacy that made whites fear them as a result.20 However, mulattoes were also seen as “scandalous and petulant,” qualities received through their Black ancestry, and were as a result often accused of robbery and other crimes against property (Gutiérrez de Pineda and Pineda Giraldo, 1999: 63). Mulatto women were highly regarded for their beauty but considered to have inherited their Black ancestors’ tendency toward sexual promiscuity, which is why the most widespread characterization referred to their “unrestrained sexuality.” It was not only mulatto women, however, but in general, all caste women who were seen by white elites as tending “naturally” toward fornication and cohabitation. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa write that Mestizo or mulatto women from the second to the fourth or fifth generation normally are the ones who give themselves up to this licentious life, although they do not view it this way. Indifferent toward legal marriage, they feel equal to any married woman . . . But mulatto and mestizo women are not the only ones who take up this sort of existence. Involved also are those who have left the Indian and Negro race completely and are now known as Spanish. (Juan and Ulloa, 1978: 291–292)

All these examples show that not only the definition of who belongs to a caste according to the degree of “impurity” of their blood but also the imputation of a denigrative value onto all members of that caste, were strategies anchored in an apparatus of whiteness. We must insist that classification tables—racial or moral—were not a purely speculative exercise by elites but rather possessed a concrete materiality, since they were devised to classify individuals whose function was as a labor force in the service of the owners of the mines, haciendas, and encomiendas. Indians and Black people were seen as personal property, subject to laws regulating inheritance, debts, and taxes, and therefore excluded from all ecclesiastic and civil privileges. This condition  The enlightened criollo Jorge Tadeo Lozano writes: “Of late there results from the Indian and the African a mixed caste, whose individual members are called Sambos. This caste, the worst of all, is in external appearance more similar to the Black, but horribly disfigured with some Indian features. Their moral characteristics bring together all the evil qualities of their races of origin” (Tadeo Lozano, 1809: 366). 18  Cited in Rosenblat (1954: 167). 19  Cited in Gutiérrez de Pineda and Pineda Giraldo (1999a: 361). 20  Rosenblat (1954: 162) cites the case of a mulatto from Cajamarca who was punished with twentyfive lashes in the public square when it was discovered that he knew how to read and write. 17

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of servitude was, without a doubt, the material basis on which the dominant class constructed its cultural imaginary of racial purity. 2.1.2 The Pathos of Distance Besides the ethnic and moral classification tables described above, New Granadian colonial elites made use of other strategies to affirm their identity as the dominant ethnic group. I refer to the public use of emblems of rank. Pierre Bourdieu has developed the notion of habitus to conceptualize how individuals incorporate a whole series of cultural values related to their “class condition” into their psychological structure, which unfailingly identify them as members of a specific social group.21 Profession, clothing, use of language, type of home and location, and family structure all constitute a sort of “fingerprint” indicating the location of agents in social space and how they position themselves strategically in relation to other agents (Bourdieu, 1990; 2000). I will use this notion of habitus to show that the flaunting of cultural insignias by New Granadian elites functioned as a strategy for the social construction of subjectivity. As a sign of status and power, the Catholic family was one of the cultural insignias that elites used to demonstrate their ethnic privileges. The model of the Spanish family as sanctioned institutionally by the Church and the state functioned as a social apparatus distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate family relations. The socially legitimate family was one that formally fulfilled the norms of marriage in facie eclesiae, that is, Catholic marriage. In order to be invested with sacramental character, the Catholic marriage ceremony presupposed a series of legal and moral requirements, whose formal fulfillment represented part of the dominant class’s habitus: indissolubility, monogamy, family honor, sexual fidelity by the woman, and responsibility of the father toward his offspring. The legitimate family was the place where consensus about the “natural order” of things, the “common sense” accepted by all members as appropriate to their social condition, was established. Employing Bourdieu’s terms (1998: 67; 72), I would say that the acquisition of primary habitus within the Catholic family means that it was there that members of the dominant ethnic group learned the practical knowledge (sens pratique) governing the meaning of their “location” in social space.

 For Bourdieu, class differences do not merely have to do with the possession of material wealth, as Marx believed, but are also explained by the existence of different group schemas for classifying practices. These schemas establish differences between “true” and “false,” between “good” and “bad,” between the “distinguished” and the “vulgar.” Different practices, differences in wealth, and the expression of different opinions constitute an authentic “language” or code of communication that individuals belonging to the same class share (Bourdieu, 1998: 8).

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But the norms defining the legitimate family are the same norms that exclude all other models of family relations as “illegitimate.” And this is precisely what explains why the Catholic family functioned in New Granada as a mechanism for the social construction of whiteness. Casual or permanent unions among members of the castes almost always occurred on the margins of Catholic marriage. It was difficult for Indians, Black people, and mestizos to identify with the hegemonic model of the Catholic family, due in part to the fact that their own cultural traditions privileged other familial patterns. Even well into the eighteenth century, the Spanish matrimonial paradigm was not a part of their habitus because, since the beginning of the conquest, relations between Spanish men and Indian, Black, or mestiza women did not constitute a legitimately sanctioned nuclear family. The women who entered into such relationships were seen as concubines and their children were considered not only illegitimate but bastards. These children, contaminated by the “blood of the earth,” automatically acquired a condition of social inferiority with respect to their Spanish parent, predisposing them to establish relationships of cohabitation and concubinage with members of other castes. By contrast, the Spaniard was compelled by habitus to engage in legitimate matrimony with a woman of his own social level in order to fulfill the demands of his status. One could therefore say that among members of the New Granadian nobility, marriage—and its most immediate legal consequence, the legitimacy of children—functioned as a mechanism for ethnic differentiation from the “cohabitation” that predominated among the castes (Dueñas Vargas, 1997). For Bourdieu, the family is where agents appropriate the accumulated wealth of previous generations and use it as a point of departure for subsequent capital accumulation. This inherited wealth will then be the instrument through which some agents differentiate themselves from others according to their position in the hierarchy of social space. For this reason, marriage “among equals” was one of the strategies most often utilized by New Granadian colonial elites to consolidate their ethnic distance from the other social strata. Recall the case discussed above of the daughter of the encomendero Olalla, doña Jerónima de Orrego. Her marriage to the Spanish noble don Francisco Maldonado de Mendoza constituted the beginning of a great family dynasty that dominated the political and social scene in New Granada throughout the eighteenth century. This type of alliance was very common among members of the dominant elite as a means for transferring, managing, and reconverting their capital.22 Such alliances ensured that their immaterial inheritance, called blood purity, would be transmitted to subsequent  Pilar Ponce de Leiva (1998: 273) shows that in the concrete case of the council of Quito, of the ninety-four members exercising the right to speak and vote between 1593 and 1701, seventy-eight belonged to the city’s most prominent families.

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generations, thereby avoiding any threat to this accumulated wealth by an aspiring “upstart.” In a society where the concept of honor was directly tied to legitimacy, any child born out of wedlock was considered an interruption of the lineage and a grave offense against the dignity of the family. Through a closed system of alliances, it was therefore possible to prevent any member of the castes from being able to enter the elite family sphere, endangering the honor, prestige, and good name—the symbolic capital accumulated by lineage. This primary habitus acquired by criollo elites therefore entailed what Nietzsche might call the pathos of distance, the need to demonstrate, latently or openly, the incommensurable distance between the “masters” and their inferiors.23 Of course, this distancing was not equally possible for all members of the dominant ethnic group, since many lacked the necessary wealth. Certainly, the accumulation of economic capital was not the ultimate, declared goal of elite strategies for positioning themselves in social space, but without material wealth it was difficult for them to maintain their distance from the castes for very long. Thus, for example, many poor whites—or “embarrassing ones” as they were called at the time—were forced to intermarry with the daughters of prosperous mestizo traders to improve their economic situation. Similarly, and in response to the shortage of potential spouses of their same rank, many white women from impoverished families had to marry members of the castes.24 However, the general rule was that, despite the need to yield a bit when it came to the taboo against inter-ethnic marriage, criollo elites sought something much more desirable than wealth itself: identification with the discourse of blood purity as a criterion for social distinction. The symbolic capital of whiteness was made clear through the flaunting of external signs that were exhibited publicly to “display” the social and ethnic standing of those bearing them. One such demonstrative sign was clothing. In New Granada’s colonial society, clothing was a mark that identified a person’s socio-racial character. Local elites sought to imitate the tastes of the high Spanish nobility,

 To exemplify this pathos of ethnic separatism it is worth citing the case of a Bogotá criollo named Francisco Javier Bautista, who upon being invited to participate in the festival of San Juan Bautista, patron saint of the so-called “Brotherhood of the Pardos,” refused the invitation with indignation on the argument that it was incompatible with the purity of his blood, and that the invitation resulted from the “depraved intention of some who have sought to inconvenience [me] by suggesting that I am of their stock” (quoted in Díaz, 2001: 184). 24  With data and statistics, the historian Guiomar Dueñas Vargas has shown how an ethnic and sexual imbalance was one of the characteristics of Bogotá in the eighteenth century. The “marriage market” was disadvantageous for both white women and mestizas. White women had to seek a partner among the “whitened” men of the castes, or alternatively to opt for the monastic life and spinsterhood. Mestizas generally opted for informal relationships, leading to a proliferation of illegitimate children (Dueñas Vargas, 1997: 82). 23

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institutionalized since the end of the seventeenth century by the so-called Sumptuary Laws. According to these laws, the type of luxuries an individual displayed in their personal attire must correspond directly to their social rank, in agreement with a well-established hierarchy: nobles with titles, gentlemen and councilors, merchants, squires, and farmers (Martínez Carreño, 1995: 33). The goal was to regulate not only the form of the garments, but also the material, craftsmanship, and adornments. Nobles were allowed to flaunt expensive jewels and to use luxurious materials like velvet and silk, while these were prohibited for the lower classes. In the Americas, where the domestic slave represented the status of her master and needed therefore to dress luxuriously, Sumptuary Laws had a special rule. King Felipe II categorically prohibited Black and mulatto women from wearing silk dresses or adorning themselves with gold, cloaks, or pearls, the violation of which could be punished with up to one hundred lashes. But this applied only to the castes since any member of the colonial elite was free to wear garments that in Spain were a privilege of the noble strata. In New Granada, “where a mantilla scarf was worth more than a gold necklace and a small handkerchief the same as a cow” (39), elites were prepared to make any sacrifice to obtain the visible signs ensuring the performance of their whiteness.25 It was little wonder that contraband in luxurious European clothing became a fabulous business. In a classic essay, historian Jaime Jaramillo Uribe (1989: 191–198) has shown how the use of “don” was another symbolic strategy deployed by New Granadian elites to perpetuate their social being. This monosyllable preceding one’s name was a symbol of nobility in Spain, granted only to those fulfilling certain requirements, including legitimate birth and pure blood.26 But in the Americas, the same thing happened with “don” as with the Sumptuary Laws: criollo elites appropriated it informally, without needing to present the necessary nobility titles, and used it broadly to reinforce their ethnic distance from subaltern groups. To address someone as “don” or “caballero”  A good example of this is the “dispute for offenses to honor” that two elites from the Antioquia region lodged before the Real Audiencia of Medellín. One witness claimed that the daughter of the accused wore “the color red on her dresses,” making her appear to be a “quatroon of mestizos.” Another witness declares that he did not consider the same person to be a mulatto or white, but mestiza, “because she used a skirt and handkerchief” (Jaramillo Uribe, 1989: 190). In another case, also documented by Jaramillo Uribe, a gentleman from the town of San Gil appealed to the Real Audiencia to complain that the mayor of Ocaña had prohibited him from using a white hat characteristic of nobles. The offended claimed that the mayor had caused him to suffer “the public shame of removing the biretta or white hat that I was wearing, ordering me to no longer use this head covering as it was a distinction only to be used by nobles and not by commoners or people of bad race, being myself of good reputation and in the position of a white man with clean blood” (Ibid). 26  Büschger (1997: 51) argues that in Spain this qualifier was given above all to habit knights [caballeros de hábito], adding that in the Americas there never developed a class of nobility able to use the official title of “knight” that was granted by the Spanish Crown to officers with distinguished military service. Until today, both “don” and “caballero” are used in Colombia as signs of courtesy and/or social recognition. 25

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[gentleman or knight] meant to recognize that he and his family were “decent people” and not mixed or of lowly origin. The exhaustive research carried out by Virginia Gutiérrez and Roberto Pineda of the census registers in the Santander region during the late eighteenth century shows that people officially classified as “white” generally bore the prefix “don” or “doña” before their given name (Gutiérrez de Pineda and Pineda Giraldo, 1999: 424). In cases where the male head of the family carried the “don” but his wife did not use “doña,” it meant that he was white and she was mestiza. However, there could be cases in which people were officially recognized as “white” but lacked the distinction of “don.” This indicates not only that the process of cultural whitening of mestizos was already very advanced in the eighteenth century, but also that some members of the local aristocracy were not willing to tolerate someone using “don” improperly, without proving they belong to the most distinguished families of the region. But it was not only the prefix “don” and clothing type that served as cultural credentials attesting to a person’s whiteness: it was also the type of economic activities to which they dedicated themselves. Wallerstein (1998: 76) argues that the international division of labor was marked by a fundamentally ethnic character.27 The ethnicization of the labor force to which Wallerstein refers was apparent not only in the recruitment of the workforce for the haciendas, plantations, and mines but also in the cultural value imputed to the type of activities carried out by the people working there. In New Granada, manual labor was seen by the criollo elites as a “vile” exercise because it was undertaken by Black slaves, Indians on encomiendas, and mestizo peasants (also called “peons”). The symbolic display of whiteness therefore required that a person considered white occupy “noble trades” and not “vile and mechanical trades” (Juan and Ulloa, 1978 [1826]). Besides the jobs characteristic of rural and mine labor (farmers, mazamorro [corn stew] vendors, freighters, mule drivers, etc.), these “common” professions included schoolmaster, tailor, cobbler, merchant, silversmith, pharmacist, chicha [fermented corn

 This meant that specific economic roles were reserved for specific ethnic groups, so that individuals belonging to those groups were “born,” so to speak, to occupy a specific position in the system of production. Particularly during the constitution of the modern world system—which Wallerstein identifies with “the long sixteenth century”—the contingent of social actors that formed the basic labor force in peripheral regions did not constitute “classes” but “ethnic groups.” Their economic function was determined by their “culture,” that is, their language, religion, customs, geographic origin, and behavioral patterns. Wallerstein’s argument is that the “primitive accumulation of capital” that made possible the three great world revolutions of modernity—the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the political revolution of the eighteenth century, and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century—occurred in the sixteenth century, precisely at the moment when, thanks to the ethnic division of international labor, Spain was able to extract from its colonies the riches that generated the inflationary phenomenon that affected the rest of Europe (Wolf, 1997:139).

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drink] vendor, baker, and even surgeon.28 “Noble” trades, on the other hand, included public offices (mayor, soldier, judge, attorney, scribe, notary, prosecutor), as well as intellectual labor, jurisprudence, and the priesthood. More than wealth, what was required to obtain one of these positions and professions was to have a good surname and to keep it “clean,” which is to say free of ethnic contamination from members of the castes. This hierarchy of skills and trades served as a selection mechanism that would qualify or disqualify an individual from being part of the white elite. The maintenance of this hierarchy was ensured by the legal status granted to the guilds, corporative urban organizations which brought together workers from different sectors (silversmiths, jewelers, bakers, weavers, notaries, etc.). While some of these groups pressured the crown for a higher social standing for their profession, the stigma of ethnic origin weighed too heavily upon their practitioners, who were for the most part mestizos. Notaries, for example, could argue that their profession was not mechanical, but the dominant class considered them ineligible to occupy positions of a higher social standing since they lacked a university education, which is to say that they had not been subjected to the regime of “information.” As I will show later, this informational regime sought to determine the precise ethnic origin of candidates for entry into the university, so that for a scribe to assume public office it was not enough to simply know how to read and write: they also needed to prove their status as white.29 Residence type and location were also another strategy used by criollo elites in the social construction of whiteness. An analysis of the type of materials used for home construction in Cali at the beginning of the nineteenth century reveals the following: 100 percent of houses made out of mortar and tile housed whites; 53 percent of those constructed with mud and tile were inhabited by whites, followed closely by mestizos (41.3 percent); on the other hand, 81 percent of houses made from mud and straw were inhabited by mestizos, while whites only lived in 9.8 percent; finally, no whites occupied homes constructed of mud and bamboo, 37.1 percent were inhabited by mestizos, 48.1 percent by Black people, and 11.1 percent by Indians (Gutiérrez de Pineda, Pineda Giraldo, 1999: 439–440). If on the other hand we look at the  Jaramillo Uribe cites the case of the son of a surgeon from Cartagena who was rejected by the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario in Bogotá because the profession of surgeon was considered mechanical and unworthy of nobles (1989: 189). Renán Silva mentions two similar cases: a candidate from Cartagena was refused permission to matriculate because his father was a merchant (buying and selling candles) while another was rejected for being the “common son of a baker” (Silva, 1992a: 214–215). 29  In practice, social discrimination based on occupation was not strictly applied by the crown. We know that public offices could be sold to the children of people whose occupations were directly related to manual labor. However, I am referring to the importance that this type of ethnic and labor discrimination played in the apparatus of whiteness. 28

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distribution of the population among the various neighborhoods of Bogotá at the end of the colonial era, the figures are revealing. People were grouped by caste and social strata according to the following pattern: La Catedral (today, La Candelaria) was inhabited by the aristocracy of the capital, largely composed of white families, while Las Nieves, Santa Bárbara, and San Victorino were deemed “slums” and largely populated by Indians, mestizos, and impoverished whites who worked as servants, merchants, or artisans (Dueñas Vargas, 1997: 90–93; Mejía Pavony, 2000: 302–310). Home construction materials and location were therefore a sign distinguishing the rank and “ethnic character” of their inhabitants. We should add that some homes belonging to the dominant ethnic group were marked with heraldic symbols. Noble families would have their coat of arms carved into the main entrance of their houses, making clear that those living there were among the “decent” and distinguished people of the city. This was also visible in the decoration of their rooms, furniture, paintings of family members, and in some everyday utensils (silverware, dishes, fans, saddles). Emblems and coats of arms were not merely decorative elements but contained as well an entire “ethnic language” testifying to the family’s rank, lineage, and blood purity. Perhaps one of the cultural practices that most demonstrated one’s whiteness was the possession of slaves. To own slaves was not only something of obvious economic value for the master but also meant the possibility of “showing” one’s status and power to others. Thus, for example, wealthy wives did not walk the streets with their slave women simply for company, but to put their condition as distinguished white women on public display. When a woman from the white stratum first entered the convent, part of the dowry given to the convent was a contingent of Black or mulatto slaves.30 Something similar occurred when white men entered religious orders or schools. This explains why a large percentage of slaves living in Bogotá between 1700 and 1750 were in the hands of the clergy (Díaz, 2001: 138).31 Seminarians, priests, nuns, and students, almost all of whom were part of the criollo aristocracy, owned slaves and publicly flaunted them as private property, despite the internal rules of religious orders.

 Octavio Paz provides the following description of the convent of Las Jerónimas in México, in which Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was enrolled, but which could apply as well to convents like that of Santa Clara in Bogotá or that of Las Conceptas in Cuenca: “The convent population was composed of nuns, servants (maids and slaves), ‘girls,’ and ‘lay sisters’ . . . Nuns brought their own maids and slaves to the convent. The ratio of servants to nuns is revealing: there were three maids for each nun. In some convents the ratio was even higher: five maids per nun” (Paz, 1988: 119). 31  Research by Rafael Díaz reveals that of the 2,044 owners of slaves in Bogotá between 1700 and 1775, 680 were priests, 451 were soldiers, 301 were state functionaries, 131 were lawyers, and 108 were nuns or regular priests (Díaz, 2001: 141). 30

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As mentioned previously, all of these strategies for the construction of whiteness had as their objective, open or veiled, the private concentration of (economic, social, and cultural) capital in the hands of the criollo nobility. Since the time of the conquest, Spanish settlers had taken over the social privileges and the economic riches of the territory of New Granada, often at the expense of the Crown’s own interests. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their descendants, criollo encomenderos and ranchers, sought to fortify their power vis-à-vis the state through the creation of close family alliances. To do so, they sought to create matrimonial links with recently arrived Spanish functionaries, thereby gaining the unconditional support of the peninsular bureaucracy for their local interests. Through this and other strategies of empowerment—for example, buying public offices—criollos enjoyed enormous influence both in the court and the tax service. These sorts of practices, extremely common under the Habsburgs, extended well into the Bourbon era of the viceroyalty. 2.1.3 Subaltern Tactics I have shown that blood purity functioned as a hegemonic discourse of subjectification in colonial New Granada. This discourse was not constructed on the basis of philosophical theories or ideas learned from books but from cultural practices inscribed in a network of knowledge/power that, following Mignolo and Quijano, I have called the coloniality of power. The apparatus of whiteness was forged in the heat of a battle carried out against other groups for the possession of social privileges, using an ensemble of strategies for cultural distancing. However, this idea of a cultural battle would not be complete if we failed to mention how the oppressed “cannibalized,” in a manner of speaking, the strategies of the oppressors and turned them into tactics of resistance.32 The defeated communities were never passive elements  I use here the distinction that French thinker Michel de Certeau makes between “strategies” and “tactics.” The category of “strategy” refers to the “manipulation . . . of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) . . . postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. As in management, every ‘strategic’ rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its ‘own’ place, that is, the place of its own power and will, from an ‘environment’ (1984: 35–36).” In other words, strategies are calculated, conscious, and self-interested practices carried out from a position of (social, scientific, political, military) power, which allow for the delimitation of a field of action toward the subaltern through physical coercion or ideological persuasion. “Tactics,” on the other hand, are practices carried out from a disadvantageous position within the relations of power. They are actions of subaltern resistance that attempt to make an unfavorable situation favorable while playing according to the rules established by the hegemonic power. “The space of a tactic,” De Certeau argues, “is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance,

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that were functional for the system of colonial apartheid, but instead used the apparatus of whiteness to position themselves advantageously within social space. Since whiteness was the most valuable form of cultural capital, it was not odd for members of the castes to try to gradually “whiten” themselves as a way of fighting for hegemony. I would therefore say, following Quijano, that the oppressor’s culture was a “seduction” that “gave access to power” and that subaltern groups attempted to appropriate the cultural capital of whiteness as a tool for social mobility. Cultural Europeanization became an aspiration shared by all but was utilized in different ways according to the position agents occupied in social space (Quijano, 2007: 169). A keen observer of the moment, the criollo thinker Pedro Fermín de Vargas, describes the strategies of mulattoes and mestizos in New Granada in the following terms: Those who have passed five consecutive generations intermarrying with whites are held to be among the latter category, and can without obstacles claim the preeminence of criollos, an elevation granting them prestige that the prior classes would be incapable of . . . What happens with Indians occurs equally among Blacks, and in their place the mulattoes multiply, and like the mestizos this race also aspires to the criollo hierarchy, that is to say, that of the whites of the country, intermarrying as much as possible and thereby increasing every day with very perceptible improvements . . . The reason that Indians and blacks do whatever they can to transform themselves into mestizos and mulattoes, moving closer to the condition of whites, it is natural that they see the debasement of their original conditions, a debasement they cannot escape, in the current state of those colonies, except by raising themselves up to the level of whites. (Vargas, 1986 [1808]: 171; 174–175)

In effect, with the progress of racial mixing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ever greater numbers of people aspired to the cultural signs of distinction exclusive to the white stratum. Two basic factors contributed to this situation, both of which are contained in Vargas’ observations: one phenotypic and the other economic. In the first place, the intensity of mixing made it increasingly difficult to distinguish whites from mestizos based on external characteristics. Many terceroons could easily pass for white, as

in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver ‘within the enemy’s field of vision,’ as von Bülow put it, and within enemy territory . . . It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak” (37).

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census registers and baptism statistics from the period make clear.33 Second, the vertiginous increase in the mestizo population during the eighteenth century stimulated a gradual recovery from the recessionary tendencies of the New Granadian economy in the seventeenth century and a greater demand for lands legally protected as Indian reservations [resguardos] (McFarlane, 1997: 67). The invasion or illegal concession of protected lands to small mestizo farmers favored the gradual enrichment of those who dedicated themselves to the slave trade, manufacturing, and agricultural products. Above all in the “hot lands” of Tocaima, Vélez, and Socorro, there began to emerge in the eighteenth century a large contingent of traders and small businessowners—the majority mestizos and mulattoes—who competed favorably against criollo landowners. These businessmen owned small farms and mills that energetically supplied the needs of the urban centers, thereby competing with large hacienda owners (Díaz, 2001: 129–130). Moreover, by marrying women from impoverished white families, this class of nouveau riche attempted to distance themselves from the “degradation” of their Indian and Black ancestry and reclaim the symbolic credentials that would legitimize their economic power. They attempted, as Vargas put it, to “transform themselves” by “raising themselves up to the level of whites.” One notorious case of the way that mestizo businessowners began to gain power and reclaim juridically their condition as white in the late eighteenth century is that of the Muñoz family in Medellín. In 1786, Gabriel Ignacio Muñoz, a rich businessman from the city, initiated a criminal lawsuit against lieutenant governor Pedro Elejalde for having refused him the formal courtesy of “don” in a public document. As I have already mentioned, the use of “don” before one’s given name signified public acceptance of one’s status as white. The Muñoz family was certainly descended from a family tree that included intermarriage with mestizos and were moreover recognized businesspeople in the Antioquia region, meaning they were engaged in the “mechanical trades.” To top it all off, Gabriel Muñoz was not a legitimate child but born out of wedlock. However, his family’s wealth and power allowed Gabriel to feel entitled to demand treatment corresponding to “white people.” The family’s tactic consisted of using the same strategy pursued by criollo elites against the grain, by constructing a genealogical narrative of their ancestors that referred back to the first settlers of the region. Thus, Muñoz’s lawsuit is framed in the following terms:  Data compiled by Guiomar Dueñas in the parishes of Bogotá toward the end of the colonial period shows that the number of children baptized and classified as white greatly exceeded the “real” number of children born of Spaniards. By 1779 the proportion of whites was 49.8 percent according to that year’s census, and by 1810 the proportion of white children baptized was 61.2 percent in relation to the castes. These statistics clearly show that the level of mestizaje was already too high and that mestizos successfully fought to be officially classified as white (Dueñas Vargas, 1997: 90–91).

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I, don Gabriel Ignacio Muñoz, a citizen of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, in the jurisdiction of this Villa [Nuestra Señora de La Candelaria de Medellín], appear before your mercy, and insofar as the law allows I say that for my purposes, information should be admitted from witnesses who will be examined according to the following questions: . . . if they know I am reputed to be a white man and of clean blood . . . if they know I am the natural son of don Francisco Muñoz de Rojas and a principal lady of this Villa, descendant of its first founders, having been under the word of marriage… say if from both lines I am of clean blood, without mixture with Moors, Jews, zambos, mulattoes, or any other bad race . . . I which your honor will see my assertion corroborated as a whole, with more advantages than I have hinted at, making clear who my parents were, what privileges and circumstances they have enjoyed, from which your honor, Mr. Inspector, will conclude that the lieutenant could not and should not have denied me the courtesy of the “don,” without serious injury to my honor. For it is a fact that in this province it is this courtesy that distinguishes whites from the other people of the low sphere, such that for those to whom it is denied, by the same fact the common does not protect their rightful privileges.34

But Gabriel Muñoz’s imaginary construction of family identity and claim to the cultural credentials of whiteness provoked unease among a criollo nobility that did not tolerate the social climbing of the mestizos. Anxious to defend their cultural capital at all cost against the claim of these “intruders,” local criollos mobilized quickly against the Muñoz family. In 1787, the attorney general of Medellín officially requested that the racial character of “los Muñoces” be determined through a meticulous examination of baptismal and census registers, as well as marriage and burial ledgers for the previous three or four generations. The goal was to legally prove that the ancestors of the Muñoz family had been registered as “mestizos” and that several members of the family were blacksmiths. It was suspected that, thanks to the influence gained by their wealth, the Muñoz family had managed to alter various documents that certified their impure origin. The attorney general’s request is therefore that “the local council hand over the registry books pertaining to the distinction and class of peoples, to certify from the records in which the Muñoces Rojas are registered as belonging to the mestizo class, and to recognize the amendments and erasures these contain.”35 Faced with this offensive, the Muñoz family lawyer lodges an appeal for reinstatement in which he brilliantly shows that the corrections in the registry

 “Autos obrados por Don Gabriel Ignacio Muñoz, contra el teniente Gobernador Don Pedro Elejalde por haberle negado el ‘don’” [1786]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 213; 217. 35  “Información que pretendía el procurador general de esta villa contra la calidad de los Muñoces” [1787]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 431. 34

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do not prove anything and that the performance of mechanical trades does not in any way undermine the quality of people and much less does it harm the state since it instead contributes to increasing its wealth: The Romans, whose culture knew nothing of sacred history, ignoring the true origin of our nature and subsequent advances, categorized the arts according to their exercise, discriminating between the liberal and the mechanical and appropriating for the former the honor they denied the latter. Some Spanish writers followed this detour, but they tried in vain to collect quotations and authorities that did not serve but to uselessly occupy time and banish the laudable exercise of those in the second class. For this reason, the moderns have taken great pains to abolish an error that brings only fatal consequences for the well-being of the vassals and rightful regime of the people, showing the usefulness of these, no less than the necessary work of open popular education. And they solidly warn that those light and fantastic thoughts seeking to celebrate some trades and debase others are a deviation from all good government, because if all conspire uniformly for society and the benefit of the people, why should some be considered vile and others respected?36

This appeal to the enlightened ethos of the epoch and the goodness of the biopolitics of the state was sufficient for the Muñoz family to be exonerated of all charges against them and socially recognized as a prestigious Medellín family, despite their “infected origin.”37 This example shows that toward the end of the eighteenth century, the changing attitude of the state toward the traditional privileges of the nobility and the gradual enrichment of the mestizo population meant that some subalterns—the richest—could utilize the same strategies of the dominant, and even appeal to ideological state apparatuses like law, marriage, and the university, to reconvert the economic capital they had obtained into the cultural capital they desired. With that, they sought cultural whitening, that is, to gain symbolic legitimacy that had until then belonged to the whites in order to be their social “equals.” So, for example, prosperous mestizos diligently sought to marry their daughters to whites (even poor whites) to improve their status, since this would allow them to elevate their own social position and that of their descendants.38 As the economic capacity of mestizos improved, they were able to afford the  In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 461–462.  This was the exact expression used by the Muñoz family lawyer to refer ironically to the attorney general’s grievance. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 461. 38  This also occurred with other sectors of the population, like mulattoes, for example, who preferred that their daughters not marry Black people since this would reinforce the stain of their origin. In general, we could say that marriage to a “racial inferior” was repudiated by all the castes since it entailed a regression of their social position. 36 37

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garments and adornments exclusive to the white stratum and demand to be treated as a “don” or “doña,” as was seen in the case of the Muñoz family. Many mestizos did everything possible to “launder” the blood lineage of their ancestors so that their children might be allowed to occupy public posts or be admitted into seminaries, convents, or universities, spheres traditionally reserved for the dominant ethnic group. Some free mestizos and mulattoes were even granted the luxury of buying Black slaves and using them as personal servants, hoping to thereby demonstrate greater social dignity.39 An example of cultural whitening very close to the subject of this investigation is that of Salvador Rizo, a free Black native to Mompox who worked as a illustrator on the Royal Botanical Expedition. We know that Mutis greatly appreciated his abilities and he was even honored by the latter by dedicating his name to a new plant, the Rizoa. His people skills allowed him to gain the confidence of the scientist from Cádiz, to the point of being named chief steward of the expedition and charged as such with managing all of the institution’s money. His responsibilities included hiring “obedient slaves of good race” in Cartagena to work on the ranches in the hot lands that housed the Botanical Expedition (Ortega Ricaurte, 2002: 125). Later, Rizo served in Bolivar’s liberating army and was finally arrested and condemned to death by Pablo Morillo. His process of whitening even had an impact on his form of death, since he was executed “honorably” in the Plaza de San Francisco in Bogotá, sharing the same fate as his companions from the Botanical Expedition, the “wise” criollos Francisco José de Caldas and Jorge Tadeo Lozano (who, as we will see, did not conceal their profound skepticism toward the intellectual and moral capacity of Black people). Today, history remembers Caldas and Lozano’s “martyrdom for the homeland,” and their names have been granted to universities and scientific research centers, but the fate of personalities like Salvador Rizo have been forgotten. The case of Rizo, however, is symptomatic of what was occurring all across New Granadian society. In the run-up to the independence wars, the dividing line between different social strata, which had been traditionally based on the ethnic ascription of individuals, was gradually blurring. According to the 1778–1780 censuses, the racial profile of New Granada had changed to a surprising degree, becoming a heavily mestizo and highly Hispanicized society, unlike those colonial societies located in Mesoamerica and the Southern Andes.40 Mestizos were by now 47 percent of the population of New  Rafael Díaz mentions the case of Joseph Perea, a free mulatto who became wealthy through mining with slave labor and who in 1739 donated the not insignificant sum of three thousand pesos to the Convent of the Conception in Bogotá, insisting that such a donation would not affect his “sizeable possessions” at all (Díaz, 2001: 178). 40  In McFarlane’s words, “New Granada bore little resemblance to the colonial societies of its Andean neighbors with their large Quechua and Aymara-speaking populations. Seen as a whole, it 39

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Granada while whites constituted barely 26 percent, Indians 20 percent, and Black slaves 8 percent (McFarlane, 1993: 34). In a society that was nearly 50 percent mestizo and an economic situation that favored the enrichment of many of them, the process of cultural whitening was inevitable. Whiteness became the most desired prize of all social strata, particularly mestizos, because appropriating it meant gaining power in relation to the dominant criollo establishment. To become white therefore meant to become “equal” to the dominant by employing the same practices that allowed the latter to construct their cultural hegemony, using these instead as a tactic of resistance and mobilization. The new Bourbon dynasty recognized at the time the need to establish racial and population policies that would fit the new demographic and economic realities of the continent, following the rationalistic imperative of governmentality. Policies that, as I will show next, generated an intensification of the “race war” in New Granada. 2.2 BIOPOWER AND THE RACE WAR The topography that I described in the previous section demonstrates that social struggles in this region of the world were not understood as a confrontation between classes, but between ethnic groups and races. The dominant group—the criollos—were not defined by possession of the means of economic production or cultural value associated with efficiency and productivity, but by having been subjectified as “white” by the apparatus of whiteness. Blood purity is constituted in the hegemonic discourse of subjectification that cuts across dominant and dominated alike in New Granada. But now comes the question: did the promotion of modern science supported by the Bourbons constitute a rupture with or simply an extension of traditional modes of knowledge and socialization already prevalent in New Granada? This section will show that new eighteenth-century population designs, far from transforming the social world in the direction hoped for by the Bourbon state, were assimilated by the grammar of the “coloniality of power” firmly anchored in New Granadian society. In other words, the state dynamic of biopower was absorbed by the dynamic of the coloniality of power. What I hope to underline here are the “perverse consequences”—to put it another way—of the politics of Bourbonic modernization: the intensification of the race war in New Granada.

also differed markedly from the society of the adjoining province of Caracas, where creole planters dominated a society that rested on African slavery” (McFarlane, 1993: 38).

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2.2.1 The Perspective of the Whole Michel Foucault shows how the “art of government” began to change in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. A good governor was no longer defined by their ability to watch over the souls of subjects (the model of the “good shepherd”), but by their capacity to take charge of social relations between people, leading them wisely toward a very precise goal: the optimization of material and human resources present in the territory. Put simply, the art of government begins to follow an economic model. To govern a state “well” meant to exercise economic control, the rational administration of inhabitants, wealth, customs, territory, and the production of knowledge. To increase wealth and to create a productive subject through the rational control of the vital processes of the population (natality, mortality, diet, place of residence, health, and labor), such were the characteristics of a good government in the eighteenth century. This new “science of government” centered on the life of the population is what Foucault calls “biopolitics” (Foucault, 1999: 195): One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. (Foucault, 1978: 25)

In perhaps no other part of the western world was the enlightened project of biopolitics as necessary as in Spain’s overseas colonies. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Bourbon dynasty occupied the Habsburg throne in Spain, the geopolitical balance of forces had begun to change throughout Europe. During the sixteenth century, thanks to a strict commercial monopoly, Spain had established absolute control over the Atlantic circuit, allowing it to capture a large quantity of resources from its American colonies. Through the House of Trade in Sevilla, the Habsburgs had managed to channel all trade with America toward a single port of entry (first Sevilla and then Cádiz), putting transoceanic trade in the hands of authorized Spanish merchants. Foreigners were excluded from any direct commercial link with the Spanish colonies. Paradoxically, the major beneficiaries of this trade were not the Spanish themselves, but foreign merchants, bankers, and shipbuilders, mostly English and Dutch. From the end of the sixteenth

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century, a commercial oligarchy had been consolidating in Holland, France, and England with a great interest in expanding toward the Atlantic, backed up by significant naval power and the formation of statuary companies. Throughout the seventeenth century and above all after the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which put an end to the Thirty Years War, Spain began to lose control of the Atlantic commercial circuit (Arrighi, 1999: 60–62). English, French, and Dutch traders, with the help of corrupt local officials, managed to establish an extensive piracy and contraband network in the Caribbean, so that at the outset of the eighteenth century foreigners had taken over the better part of the American market. Amsterdam replaced Sevilla as the new neuralgic point of trade with the Americas and the center of the international economy was displaced from the southern coast of Europe to the northwest (Wallerstein, 1980: 37). The Bourbon dynasty, knowing full well the commercial, technical, and military disadvantage it faced with regard to its powerful neighbors, sought to regain Spain’s lost hegemony. The Bourbons knew very well that the nation that managed to modernize its political, economic, and military institutions most quickly, but above all the nation that managed to exercise rational control over the population, would come to control global trade. However, when Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa traveled across South America in the mid-eighteenth century as secret observers in the service of the Bourbon state, they described a bleak scene. Ineffective laws, the unlimited rapacity of public employees, contraband, corruption of the clergy, and above all the economic habits of the population constituted an obstacle to Spain becoming a serious competitor for control of global markets against England and France. What was needed was therefore a policy package geared toward radically changing those ancestral habits. These policies, based on precise knowledge of the population to be governed, the available natural resources, and the “natural laws” of commerce, would be sufficient to create a new type of man: the homo oeconomicus the Spanish empire desperately needed. In 1789, one of the most eminent Spanish economists of the period, don José del Campillo y Cossío, minister to the Bourbon King Felipe V, critically evaluated Spanish management in the Americas in the following terms: After the conquest came the greed of the mines, which for a time provided great profits to Spain, while it was her people who extracted the gold and silver but later, when we should have matched our conduct to the circumstances and applied ourselves to farming and occupations that now employ men, we have continued to extract infinite wealth that was passed on to and has enriched other

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nations; and the true treasure of the state, which is men, has been extinguished by this cruel work. (cited by Arcila Farias, 1955: 10, author’s emphasis)41

Campillo’s report clearly reflects how the biopolitics Foucault speaks of had begun to permeate Bourbon policy in the Americas. Eighteenth-century Spanish political leaders and economists had a very clear idea about what the art of “governing well” would look like for the empire: improving manufacturing through the introduction of machines, increasing wealth by promoting agriculture and applying botanical knowledge, and constructing roads, canals, and ports. All of which presupposed knowledge about the population with the goal of optimizing the labor force, since as Campillo argues, “the true treasure of the state is men.” Unlike the Habsburgs, the Bourbons realized that the true wealth of nations lay not primarily in natural resources, but in available human resources. Precious metals did not constitute wealth in and of themselves; their utility depends directly on the type of person that extracts, markets, and manages them. It was therefore a question of creating a productive subject that would obey state directives. The Bourbon reforms thus attempted to create the conditions for the state to exercise political control over social institutions, natural resources, and above all over the life of subjects. With the support of a technical-administrative rationality, the Bourbon state sought to occupy the perspective of the Whole: to concentrate, process, and redistribute information through codification systems like the census and statistics; to elaborate a unitary representation of territory through objectification techniques like cartography; to mold mental structures and impose unitary forms of thinking through ordering codes like law, education, and civic rituals; to punish idleness and create a useful labor force to stimulate the economic development of the colonies through strategies of social cleansing like medicine and criminology; to centralize and maximize fiscal income and rationalize state finances through surveillance apparatuses like General Inspection; and to inventory exploitable natural resources and improve techniques of food production and marketing through cognitive systems like the new science. In sum, the goal was to transform the Spanish state into a great factory of subjectivities capable of taking advantage of its immense human resources to successfully compete in the struggle for control of global trade. Advised by what Phelan (1978: 3) deemed a “small group of incipient technocrats,” the Bourbons took on the task of completely rationalizing the structure of the Spanish empire. This presupposed a threefold process of the formalization, instrumentalization, and bureaucratization of Spanish society  The quotation is taken from José del Campillo y Cossío, Nuevo sistema de gobiernoeconómico para la América. Mérida: Universidad de los Andes 1971.

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and its institutions. Formalization refers to the attempt to apply abstract criteria of action, that is, those not tied to domestic, private, or religious judgment, for the orientation of collective life. This meant subjecting collective life to an impersonal, legally ordained code instead of a personalized and traditional code, and ultimately dissolving traditional community bonds in favor of “acting according to rules” carefully designed by the state. Instrumentalization, in turn, has to do with how these rules favored the utilization of a series of technical, educational, political, and scientific instruments to achieve specific predetermined ends. Collective action should be guided toward attaining goals “useful to all of society” through the calculation of the most adequate means. This means that human action was no longer linked to the axiological postulates present within particular groups but should instead take on a decidedly technical character. Finally, bureaucratization refers to the fact that the state—and no longer the Church or the aristocracy—was the authority charged with establishing the ultimate goals of social life and implementing the technical means to achieve them. This demanded the concentration of power in the hands of a technocratic elite and specialized functionaries, loyal solely to the state and not to particular interests, whose job it was to design and execute public policies of population control. As I have said, the objective of all these reforms was to make rational use of the human resources available across the entire Spanish territory, and principally that of the population concentrated in the Indies. More than warriors and conquistadors, the state needed economic subjects capable of producing wealth and stimulating commerce and industry. Just as Campillo had explained, armed control over a territory means nothing if the territory’s riches and the productive capacity of the inhabitants do not result in the universal benefit of all sectors of the empire.42 Bourbon policy toward the Indies is therefore oriented toward encouraging agricultural production (at the expense of gold production) and the expansion of trade between the colonies themselves, freeing them from old regulations and excessive taxes so that Spanish products could compete favorably with contraband. Of course, this all required the modernization of the tax system and the protection of regional industries, as well as a more equitable distribution of fiscal burdens. What was therefore needed was a stricter and more efficient administration that would reestablish the metropole’s control over the local audiences overseas in order to unify the financial system and rebuff commercial aggression from European rivals (McFarlane, 1993).  “Our Spanish warriors did not look after the fact that a country’s trade, held exclusively, is much more valuable than its possession and domination, because the fruit is extracted and is not spent on its defense and government” (cited by Arcila Farias, 1955: 9).

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2.2.2 The Face of Machiavelli But the technocratic character of these new policies was a direct threat to what Phelan called the “unwritten constitution” (1978: 17), in reference to the traditional practice in the Americas of subjecting public decisions to the interests of private actors like the clergy and the local aristocracy. In this sense, Bourbon policies gravely disturbed the existing equilibrium between the main power groups of New Granada. This equilibrium was based on the fact that local oligarchies, thanks to their close friendships and alliances with the colonial bureaucracy, hoarded most of the economic, social, and cultural capital available in different spheres of social space. The Bourbons began a policy of expropriating and concentrating capital in the state, which now became the administrator of all flows of economic and symbolic capital in society. This meant that particular groups, no matter how much economic power (money) or symbolic power (legitimacy) they enjoyed, were forced to cede much of the administration of this power to an impersonal, central agency. In this way, the rationality of the Bourbon state was constitutively linked to an internal war carried out by all of its “apparatuses” against the resistance of subjects who saw their particular interests threatened by an abstract and technocratic “general interest.” The point I want to emphasize here is that the biopolitics of the Bourbon state also meant an internal war against the habitus of American criollos, their economic interests, and most importantly for my purposes, their pretensions of whiteness. In effect, the new imperial biopolitics meant getting rid of incompetent and unproductive functionaries and those disloyal to the interests of the central government, and strengthening the metropolitan authority of the Audiencias. It was necessary to cut the umbilical cord tying public functionaries to the particular interests of the criollo oligarchy and foreign contrabandists. Since the sixteenth century, it had been common for both the clergy and the most important criollo families to intervene directly in the political decisions of local audiencias. They did so, as we have seen, by establishing all kinds of alliances—preferably family alliances—with the civil and ecclesiastic functionaries sent by the Crown. As representatives of a government that they felt to be distant and incompetent, Spanish functionaries found themselves trapped in a web of alliances and agreements woven by criollos, serving as their spokespeople before the metropolitan authority instead of the opposite. But this practice—in operation for two centuries and inscribed in the habitus of criollos and understood as “natural” by them—would be violated by the Bourbon reforms. Now, the official policy was to expropriate all economic and administrative privileges from criollos and the Church.43 Beginning in  This implied, for example, eliminating the selling of public posts, thereby undermining criollo access to the audiencias and tipping the balance of power in favor of functionaries named directly

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particular with the government of Carlos III (1759–1788), it was imperial policy to educate a professional bureaucracy in the Americas, with obedient and well-trained, full-time civil servants who were solely and directly responsible to the King, and who worked according to uniform directives and guaranteed the strict application of top-down reforms. Figures like state minister José de Gálvez and Inspector General for New Granada Juan Francisco Gutiérrez de Piñeres exemplified this profile of the new civil servant. It was no longer about the conciliatory politician currying favor with the clergy and elites, but the impersonal technocrat pursuing rational ends without worrying about “adapting” to local circumstances.44 The visit by Gutiérrez de Piñeres to New Granada in 1778 sheds light on some interesting aspects of this policy of expropriation. One of the priorities of the Inspector General was to eliminate the presence of criollos in the Audiencia de Santafé (Bogotá), for which he needed to strike directly at the economic interests of the local aristocracy. We have already seen how these interests did not always have a real economic materiality—since only some criollos were truly rich in New Granada—but were instead anchored in the possession of a symbolic capital (imaginaries of whiteness, nobility, and distinction) that could eventually be reconverted into economic and political capital.45 This is why one of the expropriation strategies deployed by the state was to directly attack the central source for the appropriation and accumulation of symbolic capital: criollo family networks. Combating displays of nobility and nepotism by criollos meant destroying the primordial unit of organization that allowed them access to important positions in the Church and the state. And so one of Gutiérrez de Piñeres’ first measures was to cut off the possibility of capital reconversion, prohibiting Spanish functionaries from marrying women from the criollo nobility and ordering that “blood relatives to the third degree nor in-laws to the second degree” could not be employed in the same treasury office (Phelan, 1978: 14).46 by Spain (Phelan, 1978: 9). John Lynch argues that during the period 1647–1750, that is, before the ascent of the Bourbons, 44 percent of audiencia members were criollos, and as late as 1760 the majority of judges in the Audiences of Lima, Santiago, and Mexico were criollos. However, in 1751 and 1808, only 23 percent of appointments to the American audiencias were granted to criollos. In 1808, of the ninety-nine individuals occupying positions in colonial tribunals, only six were criollos (Lynch, 1991: 21). 44  McFarlane (1993: 169) suggests that the criterion of good government that prevailed among the viceroys prior to 1778 was of maintaining “harmony” between the interests of elites and the interests of the state, implementing certain Crown policies while omitting others that were believed not to adapt to the local situation. 45  I use here the concept of the “reconversion of capital” introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1984). 46  It seems as though one of the central goals of this measure was to dismantle the clan of the criollo Álvarez family, which controlled the greater part of the treasury administration. Almost all functionaries of this agency were related by marriage to the family which had powerful interests in the tobacco industry. Since one of the priorities of the state was to establish a monopoly over the production, distribution, and export of tobacco, it needed to weaken the linkages connecting the

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Criollo habitus had been disrupted not only by the displacement of their administrative privileges but also, and above all, by the symbolic transgression this displacement represented. If the possession of state posts was seen as recognition of the criollos’ whiteness and nobility, their allocation to social inferiors by the state was little more than a humiliation and an insult. It is important to insist that up to this moment, the social preeminence of the New Granadian nobility had not been guaranteed by wealth so much as by rewards from the Crown in the form of positions of legal privilege and quotas in the sinecures and activities of the government. Thus, for McFarlane, “elite politics was informed by a belief that crown and nobility were mutually dependent, with reciprocal claims on each other, and political activity revolved around competition for access to the rewards offered by the patrimonial state and its church” (1993: 240). With its new expropriation policy, however, the state had created very different rules of the game that were completely foreign to the traditional habitus of the criollo patricians. But the state’s most powerful blow to the symbolic capital of elites was without a doubt its policy favoring the social mobility of Indians, free Blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos. I have said that the main interest of the Bourbon state was to create a new type of “subject” capable of rationally utilizing available natural resources to generate income for the royal treasury through productive activities. This desired subject was not solely limited to elites, but also encompassed members of the castes and their mestizo descendants, who by then constituted almost half of the population and were therefore the principal labor force in New Granada.47 On the advice of a team of economists, the Spanish government realized that the condition of possibility for converting members of the castes into truly economic subjects was reducing as much as possible the legal barriers separating them from whites. Some of these economists, like the already mentioned Campillo, even suggested instituting strict social equality between Indians and Spanish. According to Campillo, Indians, and by extension mestizos as well, should enjoy the same rights of entry “into the houses of governors, intendants, and other ministers, and the same place in the Church and in all honorific posts of which their merit makes

owners of large tobacco farms to political decision-making agencies (McFarlane, 1993: 211–212). Gutiérrez de Piñeres’ strategy worked, since after three years only two members of the Álvarez family retained their fiscal positions in Bogotá (Phelan, 1978: 16). 47  Recall, for example, that by 1523 Emperor Carlos V had established that Indigenous men of working age (between eighteen and fifty) had to pay a tribute to the Spanish state in recognition of the King’s authority. It was later established that direct descendants of mixed Indians, that is, zambos (children of Indians and Blacks) and mestizos (children of Indians and whites) must also pay tribute like the Indians. But with the increasing mestizaje of the eighteenth century, it was no longer clear who needed to pay tribute and who did not. It was increasingly difficult to determine in the registry who was mestizo, mulatto, Indian, or zambo.

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them worthy; and in a word, to give in all and for all the same treatment as Spanish from the same sphere.”48 Although the Crown did not take Campillo’s suggestion literally, the policies of the Bourbon state did at least manage to relax a bit the boundary between nobles and plebeians. It needed to take advantage of the labor force of the growing mestizo population and socially legitimize its productive activities. But this necessarily entailed eliminating a series of juridical obstacles that prevented members of the castes from deploying their full economic potential. The elimination of these juridical segregation barriers was important, since the enrichment of mestizos was not a sufficient condition for their economic activity to be seen as legitimate if the individual had not overcome the obstacle posed by whitening. One of the measures taken by the state to “release” the economic potential of mestizos—above all the richest—was the establishment of what were called gracias al sacar certificates, which offered pardos an exemption from the “state of infamy.”49 Applicants who could prove that some percentage Spanish blood ran through their veins or those of their children were able to juridically obtain the status of whiteness, qualifying them to receive education, marry whites, enter the priesthood, and most importantly, engage in productive economic activity. By juridically “washing away” the “stain of the land,” or what is the same thing, expropriating unproductive elites of their most prized symbolic capital, the state sought to reward the economic accomplishments of the mestizo population and stimulate the creation of wealth. Bit by bit a situation emerged in which it was the law of the state and not the segregationist discourse of the criollos that determined an individual’s social status.50 The result was twofold: on the one hand, it gave mestizos the go-ahead to enrich themselves through productive economic activities while, in parallel, it led to the impoverishment of unproductive whites who were left with no choice but to marry “lower quality” but richer people to maintain their status; on the other hand, the traditional dividing lines between whites and pardos were gradually dissolving, which as we will see greatly alarmed criollo elites, who watched with horror as their imaginaries of nobility and blood purity were publicly discredited.

 Cited by Arcila Farias, 1955: 11.  It is clear that only wealthy mestizos could request a gracias al sacar, since the fees one needed to pay were significant. By royal decree on February 10, 1795, it was ordered that exemption from the category of pardo was obtained for a fee of 500 reales and from the category of quinteroon (the closest to white) for 800 reales. Another decree from August 3, 1801, established that exemption from the category of pardo cost 700 reales and quinteroon 1,100 reales (Rosenblat, 1954: 180). 50  To stimulate industrial production in the colonies, the Bourbons offered the status of nobility to any person who had employed and would employ garment workers for two or three generations (Jaramillo Mejía, 1996: 63). 48 49

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Another measure that served to expropriate the symbolic capital of criollos and stimulate the social mobility of mestizos was the promotion of pardos within the army.51 Until the mid-eighteenth century, the army represented a center of power and privilege for criollo officers who, as whites, received all the same immunities enjoyed by Spanish soldiers. In 1643, King Felipe IV had issued a royal decree, which was reiterated four times, stipulating that military posts should not be created for mulattoes, morenos,52 or mestizos (Rosenblat, 1954: 153). But frequent English attacks on Spanish ports in the Caribbean forced the state to strengthen and restructure the army. Facing the impossibility of maintaining large Spanish garrisons in the Americas, and wary of handing over too much power over the troops to criollos, the Bourbons created a new militia that granted pardos a series of privileges previously reserved for white officers.53 Black and mulatto soldiers, who made up the bulk of the pardo battalions in Cartagena, received gifts and privileges from the state in recognition of their merits. Once again, the law of the state, by protecting the military privileges granted to mestizos and consequently encouraging their social whitening, undercut the criollo discourse of caste separation. It would be worthwhile to illustrate the Crown’s effort to expropriate the symbolic capital of criollos through the case of don Jorge Miguel Lozano de Peralta, better known as the Marquis of San Jorge. This distinguished representative of Bogotá’s criollo elite was a direct descendant of don Antón de Olalla, the sixteenth-century Spanish encomendero whose case I mentioned earlier. This made him the custodian of an immense amount of capital accumulated over several generations, allowing him to aspire to occupy the highest posts in the colonial administration. But the Marquis encountered many bureaucratic obstacles preventing his access to these desired positions, and which he considered violations of his “noble rights.” In 1767, the state forced him to pay a large quantity of money as tribute for the public use of his titles,  Recall that already in 1738, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa had urgently recommended that the Bourbon state demote criollo officers and allow mestizos to be incorporated into positions of responsibility within the army. “They declare themselves vassals of the king of Spain, and though mestizos, they take pride in being Spaniards and in descending from Indians, in such a curious way that, though they have an equal share of both, they are most bitter enemies of the Indians, who are their own blood . . . The troop these people form, although not all the same in color and some seeming more brown than the Spaniards, are as splendid and good as the best in Europe, because mestizos are generally well made, stocky and tall, some of such good stature that they exceed regularly tall men; and they are suited to war because they are raised in their countries accustomed to being on the move from one place to another, forced to walk barefoot, generally underdressed and malnourished, so that no work would be strange to them in war, and lack of conveniences would not cause them discomfort” (Juan y Ulloa, 1983 [1826]: 177). 52  [Generally used to refer to a mixture of Black and Indigenous ancestry—Trans.]. 53  Until the seventeenth century, using a horse and weapons had been reserved exclusively for the white stratum in New Granada. Black people and mulattoes were punished with particular severity for riding horses. 51

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lest they be suspended indefinitely (Gutiérrez Ramos, 1998: 125).54 Then, the viceroy Messía de la Cerda, concerned about the Marquis’ continued complaints before the Council, ordered him detained in jail for a few hours and the viceroy Flórez later stripped him of his encomienda in the Llanos. This all represented an outrage against not only the presumptuous Marquis but also against the entire criollo elite of Bogotá, who watched with anger how investigator Gutiérrez de Piñeres gradually “de-criollized” the council according to the new state policies. Advised by a team of criollo lawyers, in 1785 the Marquis sent a lengthy document to the king of Spain bitterly complaining about the state’s expropriation of his privileges: But it would not be strange to let fall here the most tender sobs of the American Spaniards. What value do we in this part of the world gain from our merits and the services that we have rendered? What of the blood our ancestors gloriously shed in the service of God our Lord and Your Majesty? What of their zeal, labor, and suffering in the conquest of these Indies? What of the continuous desire to show our love for Your Royal service and glorious occupations that the fidelity of our predecessors taught us? What of the efficient recommendations and preferential attention that Your laws of the Indies and specific Royal Decrees grant us? What of the viceroys here, their families and retainers who insult, mock, humiliate, and oppress us? . . . Finally, Sire, the more distinguished the unhappy American Spaniards are, the more they suffer. Their fortune has already been destroyed, and now their honor and reputations are under attack, staining them by depriving them of any honorific position of consequence. (Lozano de Peralta, 1996 [1785]: 281)

Lozano’s complaints centered on the refusal to recognize the inherited privileges of the criollo elite (“the unhappy American Spaniards”) which, as I have argued at length, were based on an apparatus of whiteness. The Bourbon state, through its viceroys, had not only trampled the lineage of the criollos, the direct descendants of the conquistadors who provided Spain with glory and honor, but also the rights conferred to them under Spanish laws. The Marquis specifically mentions the case of a viceroy who preferred to name a surgeon or barber as governor instead of a distinguished criollo. Lozano considers this attitude to be an example of arrogance and despotism by Bourbon functionaries, who arbitrarily designate their servants to the best administrative posts, “be they hairdressers, barbers, lackeys, it is as though  These were payments for taxes known as medias anatas y lanzas, which were tied to nobility titles. During the eighteenth century, and due to the crisis of the hacienda system, many families from the titled nobility suffered great economic difficulties, which in some cases led to the loss of their titles for not being able to pay the state for debts that had been accumulating for years.

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they consider them worthy of better rights over citizens of more outstanding merit” (Lozano de Peralta, 1996 [1785]: 279; 282). In another section from the same document, the Marquis compares viceroy Caballero y Góngora to “Niccolò Machiavelli, evidently a teacher of his maxims and policies,” for how he broke up the legal barriers separating nobles from the castes and refusing to comply with a law called the Royal Pragmatic (which I will discuss later). In effect, the way that some Bourbon state functionaries like Caballero y Góngora exercised power appeared in the eyes of the criollo nobility as the face of Machiavelli. But what seems to have been unclear for these criollos was that this exercise of power did not obey the whims of this or that functionary, but rather state policy. Personalities like the Marquis of San Jorge, owners of large tracts of unproductive land and defenders of an ethos that privileged contemplation over labor and the defense of private interest over the public, were a nuisance to the new economic directives of the state. Spanish functionaries managed to link the Marquis to the Comunero Rebellion of 1781 and minister Gálvez, in a letter dated June 15, 1784, ordered Caballero y Góngora to “restrain him to prison and lock him away for life in the castle of San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena, with no further trial, maintaining in prison the considerations of his nobility,” which the viceroy enthusiastically did (Gutiérrez Ramos 1998: 133). There the old Marquis would die on August 11, 1793. Aware of the great importance mestizos had begun to gain in society and the problem posed by criollo dominance, the Bourbons ensured the ascent of the castes, conceding to them exemptions and dispensations and even selling them the much sought-after capital of whiteness. But the offended criollos violently defended their privileges, taking juridical measures to keep ethnic barriers intact and throwing the “original sin” of the mestizos in their face. The biopolitics of the Bourbon state would need to yield to the coloniality of power prevailing in New Granada since the seventeenth century. 2.2.3 Nostalgia for Apartheid Bourbon policies sought to establish a new rationality in the colonies that would integrate into a single project social groups that had formed amid two hundred years of ethnic conflict. There was no attempt to dismantle the principles of social stratification inherited from the past, but only to achieve the legal, economic, and cultural homogeneity necessary for the absolute power of the monarch to act efficiently. The Bourbons believed that it would be enough to design a policy more geometrico [in a geometric style] in order to put the different sectors of colonial society to work. They were confident that it would be enough to rid society of the bureaucratic vices of the past

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so that human action, expertly directed by the state, could work in harmony with the functioning of natural laws and the Spanish Empire would finally set off toward inevitable material and spiritual progress. But the enlightened optimism of the Bourbons would collide head-on with the ethnic struggles prevailing in the colonies. Before they could activate the “preestablished harmony” of the natural laws of society, their policies of expropriation increased racial tensions in the Americas. Hounded by the social, demographic, and phenotypic rise of mestizos and pressured by liberal state policies, criollos went on the defensive and sought to barricade themselves into their already weakened ethnic fortress. Defensive of their increasingly illusory blood purity, they shut mestizos out of any possibility of entering the world of privilege through marriage. As we have already seen, honor was considered by the highest strata as a heritage to be maintained and defended at all costs, since it guaranteed the supremacy and social distance of the ennobled criollos from inferior social sectors. This was why if a family member entered into an “unequal marriage” with a mestizo or mestiza, it was seen as dishonoring the name of the entire family line. The strategy of the criollo clergy and aristocracy was to lean heavily on the government in Madrid to gain legal protection mechanisms for their most prized symbolic capital: whiteness.55 They hoped that the state would ratify the traditional idea that marriages between people from different social sectors was a violation of natural law, which constituted the juridical foundation for social stratification in the colony. As a result of these pressures, the central government issued a 1776 law called the Royal Pragmatic, which sought to counteract the social whitening of the castes through the strict regulation of “unequal marriages,” thereby preventing mestizos from enjoying the privileges reserved for the white stratum. To avoid white families finding their honor injured by the unwanted marriage of one of its members, the law established that no marriage between children  So, for example, on October 6, 1788, the council of Caracas sent a plea to the king in the following terms: “This council fears that if the pardos are admitted to the ecclesiastical state, it will decay greatly from the high rank in which there exists such a distinguished clergy as in this province. The pardos are seen with great contempt here for their origin and for the tributes that your royal laws impose upon them. They descend from slaves, their parentage is illegitimate, and they have their origins in the union of white men and Black women . . . The damages to the secular state would be no less if the pardos were allowed to marry white commoners. Because within a few years of allowing these marriages there would be such confusion within the family that it would be impossible to discern who is mixed and who is not. Marriages would become difficult for Europeans, who only want to marry whites, and instead of increasing the number of citizens with the qualities required by law for distinguished employment, they would decline and so would the state . . . Finally, the abundance of pardos in this province, their proud and arrogant temper, and their notable determination to become equal to the whites, all demand as a political measure that Your Majesty keep them in a position of dependence as they have been up to this point; otherwise, their arrogance will become unbearable and they will soon want to dominate those who have been their lords from the beginning” (quoted in Rosenblat, 1954: 183).

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under twenty-five years of age could be celebrated without the specific consent of the parents or guardians: And having become so frequent the abuse of unequal marriages by children of families, without awaiting the advice and consent of parents, relatives, or those in the place of parents, with other very serious damages and offenses to God, disturbing the good order of the state and sowing continuous discord and prejudice among families, against the condition and pious spirit of the Church, that although it does not annul or settle such marriages has always detested and forbidden them as opposed to the honor, respect, and obedience that children should give parents in matters of such seriousness and importance . . . I command that from now on, according to the provisions in them that to celebrate the contract of betrothal, children of families under twenty-five years must request and obtain the advice and consent of the father and, failing that, of the mother . . . That this obligation includes all without exceptions, from the highest classes of the state to the most common people, because there exists equally for all the natural and indispensable obligation to respect parents and elders who are in their position according to natural and divine law and by the seriousness of the choice of being with a suitable person; whose discernment cannot be entrusted to the children of families and minors without the intervention of paternal consent and deliberation, to reflect on the consequences and to contain beforehand turbulent and harmful impact on the public and families.56

This law contributed to reinforcing the pathos of distance of dominant elites since it invoked the old discourse of blood purity to prevent whites from breaking out of their traditional ethnic cloistering. As a result, two individuals from different racial conditions were not free to enter into a marriage relation, but instead needed to demonstrate the express approval of their parents or risk severe punishment from the socioeconomic order. While the Church could not declare an interracial marriage invalid, it did bring enormous pressure to bear to avoid those intermarriages that whites opposed for their “turbulent and harmful impact on the public and families.” If such a marriage were to take place, the law considers that both the couple in question and their children should be barred from receiving or passing on inheritances, and that the parents they disobeyed were free to annul their wills. It is clear that the purpose of this measure was to prevent the symbolic capital of elites, as concretized in titles of nobility, entailed estates, family names, and other hereditary privileges, from falling into the hands of people of “bad race.” As Lorenzo Benítez, a lawyer from the Real Audiencia put it, the spirit of the  “Pragmática sanción para evitar el abuso de contraer matrimonios desiguales” [1776]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 764.

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Royal Pragmatic “was nothing less than to ensure that families preserve the luster and honor with which they entered the world, and that nobles not mix with commoners through the yoke of marriage.”57 Armed with this juridical apparatus, criollo patricians unleashed a counteroffensive to maintain the apartheid regime that had traditionally upheld their economic and social privileges.58 Parents could now lodge what were called “dissent cases,” invoking their right to prevent their children from marrying people of an “inferior condition” and thereby maintaining the racial homogeneity of the family. Despite state efforts to favor the mobility of “the castes of the land,” the most traditional sectors of colonial society found these dissent cases to be an ideal mechanism for avoiding interracial marriages. They could now lean on old rights of nobility and argue that the social mobility of the castes was a threat to the social stability of the empire since the obligation of the state was to delineate a juridical barrier of ethnic separation that would protect the ideal of the white, noble, Catholic man loyal to the sovereign. It is no coincidence that in the majority of dissent cases lodged in New Granada at the end of the eighteenth century, opposition to unequal marriages was based not on economic or social arguments but on racial ones. Their hope was to counteract the tendency among many noble but impoverished families—with no resources aside from the capital of their whiteness—to intermarry with rich mestizos to improve their economic situation. For example, there is the case brought before a tribunal in Medellín in 1793 by don José Ignacio Callejas, a citizen of the city of Rionegro in Antioquia province, who sought to prevent his niece from marrying a mestizo businessman despite the fact that her own father had already consented to the marriage: Before your mercy as a person of my confidence and in the best form of law, I appear and I say: that news has reached me that don Miguel Mejía, a citizen of this town in Medellín, without reflection and consideration of his quality, and worried about the wretched situation in which God has put him, and without  “Disenso puesto por don Lucas y don Miguel Jerónimo Mejía al matrimonio que con Lorenzo Parra intenta contraer doña Salvadora Mejía” [1793]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 548. 58  Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the ethnic cloistering of criollos had reached such a high degree that a veritable system of racial apartheid was even applied in rural schools. Jaime Jaramillo Uribe documents the case of the parish priest of Girón, who in 1789 requested from the viceroy a license to organize a public school. The school regulations proposed by the clergyman included strict ethnic and social discrimination, tinged with the benevolence of “Christian morality”: “In the classroom, superior white students would be separated from inferior ones by half a meter. White children would occupy the first rows, and the commoners and castes those in the rear.” To attenuate the effects of the discrimination, which bothered the priest who authored the initiative, “special care would be taken so that the children of good stock not audaciously mock or insult those of lowly origins, nor mix with them but to teach them to ignore them or help them with what they need as an effect of the generosity that ought to be typical of noble people” (Jaramillo Uribe, 1982: 253). 57

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thinking with the honor that he should, wants to defile and debase his ancestors and descendants and those of the Orrego family as well, by giving as wife one of his daughters, named María Josefa, to Miguel Parra . . . I beg of your mercy not to allow such a marriage, until the above-mentioned Parra proves that his quality is equal to she who he intends as a consort, since for her part I am prepared to convince the court that the Orrego, Velásquez and Noreña are not of the same quality and bad race as the Parra family. With judicial documents I will make it clear that they are descendants of noble, white, Spaniards, for whose virtue and with the force of law that aids me and for our own honor (since the father of the contracting party ignores this most worthy jewel), I oppose the abovementioned marriage, making use of the Royal Pragmatic of His Majesty don Carlos III to do so.59

The petitioner then appealed to the Royal Pragmatic to prevent his family name from being “tarnished and debased” through unwanted intermarriage with a person of “bad race.” He presented the tribunal with judicial documents (birth certificates, baptism records, written testimonies) to prove that Miguel Parra’s ancestors were publicly renowned to be mestizos or mulattoes and that they were not of equal racial standing as the Mejía family. Once the racial inequality between the Parra and the Mejía families, the basis of the entire juridical argument, had been established, the petitioner introduced witnesses who emphasized the economic and social inequality of the couple. Thus, for example, one witness insisted that “the quality of the Parra family is not distinguished if we focus on their possessions and the trade of blacksmith that many have exercised.”60 Faced with such evidence, and despite the fact that the Royal Pragmatic favored the authority of the father above other relatives, the judge declared that “the Mejía family are subjects of distinction and clean and have remained in this state, and the Parra family in the capacity of the low sphere, for which reason it is seen that there exists between the engaged parties a notable inequality preventing said marriage, I [therefore] declare just and reasonable the dissent lodged by don José Ignacio Callejas and his consort doña Rosalía Orrego, to the matrimony that Miguel Parra attempted to enter into with doña María Josefa Mejía y Orrego.”61  “Sobre el pleito (porque) Miguel Mejía quiere casar a su hija” [1793]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 531. Author’s emphasis. 60  “Disentimiento interpuesto para impedir el matrimonio entre Miguel Lorenzo Parra y Doña María Josefa Salvadora Mejía” [1793]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 526. In the hegemonic imaginary of whiteness, as I will show later, mechanical trades—like blacksmithing—were considered appropriate to the castes since the ethnic division of society was also and above all an ethnic division of labor. 61  “Sobre el pleito (porque) Miguel Mejía quiere casar a su hija” [1793]. In: Jaramillo Mejía, 2000: 541. In this case, it is interesting to see how Miguel Parra attempted to deploy the same juridical elements as his accuser in order to nullify the dissent case. In the first place, he appealed to the 59

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I will cite one further case, documented this time by Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda and Roberto Pineda Giraldo, to show that not only skin color but also a person’s general phenotype played a fundamental role in the discourse of blood purity that criollos sought to defend at all costs. In the year 1783, doña Tomasa Salazar decides to lodge a dissent case against the matrimonial pretensions of her daughter Graciela Varelas with a tailor named Domingo Gómez. In the judicial record, doña Tomasa affirms that all of her relatives “are Spanish whites, public and well-known, clean of all bad race,” while her daughter’s betrothed is “a pure mulatto, old and toothless, the color of dark cinnamon, pug-nosed and with curly hair.”62 This case clearly shows how dissent cases were the primary weapon utilized by criollo elites to defend the inherited cultural capital of whiteness, above all when it was under threat from Black people. The values of the dominant criollo ethnic group, sanctioned by the Church and expressed in the discourse of blood purity, needed to be defended against the Bourbon state’s attempts to legitimize the social advancement of the castes. The battle between groups aspiring to racial whitening as a means of social mobility and the dominant criollo establishment that sought to contain this process became ever more dramatic with the passing of the eighteenth century. The “race war” present from the first years of the Conquest intensified in proportion to the increasing mestizo population. The Bourbon reforms, in turn, contributed to exacerbating ethnic conflict between different social groups. The unintended and perverse effect of Bourbon biopolitics was an increase in the distance between criollo elites and the general population. Rather than achieving a multiethnic consensus around the rationalist project of imperial modernity, the reforms became a factor that contributed to fortifying the ethnic cloistering of elites—a cloistering that would find one of its most reliable expressions in ideological apparatuses like the colonial university. 2.3 THE WALLS OF THE LETTERED CITY Up to this point, I have shown that the network of power in New Granadian society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was characterized by the “coloniality” of its practices, and I attempted to define that coloniality not so Royal Pragmatic to argue that José Callejas’ claim was not appropriate since his fiancée already had her father’s consent. When this attempt failed, the accused appealed to the court with the argument that the ancestors of his fiancée’s family are also mulattoes and therefore that the Parra family was not racially inferior to the Mejía family (2000: 542). This is an example of how subalterns attempted to appropriate the same apparatuses of control used by elites and to turn these against the grain. However, in this case, the social prestige of the Callejas family weighed far more heavily. 62  Cited by Gutiérrez de Pineda and Pineda Giraldo, 1999: 475.

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much in historical terms (“colonialism”), but as a modality of power capable of producing “subjects.” Alongside Quijano and Mignolo, but also utilizing concepts drawn from Foucault and Bourdieu, I have sought to describe this production of subjectivity through the concept of “blood purity.” I have argued that whiteness was a principle of subjectification shared by dominant and dominated alike, which served as a catalyzing matrix for social conflicts in New Granada. The Bourbon reforms, conducted under the global design of biopolitics, were necessarily caught up and involved in this local history of knowledge/power. For these reasons, and with attention to Quijano’s observation that the coloniality of power necessarily gains an epistemic dimension, we must now ask how the discourse of “blood purity” became embedded in institutions of knowledge production in New Granada and came to be present within what I have called zero-point hubris. However, resolving this problem requires a prior investigation. We need to first ask about the social status of the producers of this scientific knowledge and how blood purity contributed to molding their subjectivity. In a word, we need to ask about the training of a lettered colonial elite and its social function within the dominant ethnic group. The last section of this chapter will therefore be dedicated to showing that this educated elite [los letrados] played a fundamental role in the consolidation and legitimation of a social order that was hierarchically structured according to ethnic origin. I do so with attention to Ángel Rama’s observation that colonial letrados did not passively reflect the dictates of an order imposed from abroad, but themselves helped to legitimize—through the privilege that writing granted them—an “order” and a “natural sense” of the social world in which they themselves participated: The conquerors . . . required a writer of some sort (a scribe, a notary, a chronicler) to cast their foundational acts in the form of imperishable signs. The resulting scripture had the high function reserved to notarial documents, which according to the Spanish formula, give witness or “faith” to the acts they record. The prestige that could only derive from the written word thus began its portentous imperial career on the American continent. In Latin America, the written word became the only binding one—in contradistinction to the spoken word, which belonged to the realm of things precarious and uncertain . . . Writing boasted a permanence, a kind of autonomy from the material world, that imitated eternity and appeared free from the vicissitudes and metamorphoses of history. Above all, writing consolidated the political order by giving it rigorously elaborated cultural expression. (Rama, 1996: 6–7).

Rama’s observation is important because it shows us that the function of the colonial letrados was to use abstract language to give “order” to social

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dynamics marked by the sign of the “chaotic” and the “dangerous”—dynamics that, according to what we have seen in this chapter, were characterized by conflict around the symbolic capital of whiteness. Perceiving themselves to be unconditioned by society, lettered practice established a rupture between the “doxa” of (other) social practices and the “episteme” of knowledge they themselves produced. Knowledge thereby acquires a privileged status (a “value”) within colonial society. The insecurity and precarity of a social world traversed by the “race war” had to be domesticated through an ideal order designed by an elite of experts. The letrados were therefore specialists in the production of an abstract language about divine and human things, a distant and “auratized” language limited to a small sector of the dominant white ethnic group. My thesis is that the “ordering reason” of the letrados was constituted in the hinge joining power to knowledge, that is, on the necessary linkage between the ethnic segmentation of New Granadian society and the knowledge guaranteeing the legitimate maintenance and control of that segmentation. 2.3.1 Walls Painted White From the outset of colonization in the Americas, catechizing Indians was one of the motives behind training a lettered colonial elite. Insofar as the colonial enterprise was ideologically justified by the imperative to convert the Indians, the leadership of the secular clergy (bishops and archbishops) and religious orders (Franciscans, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Jesuits) advocated for the establishment of schools and universities that would adequately prepare aspiring priests. However, not all church leaders agreed on the appropriateness of giving Indians the opportunity to receive education and be ordained as priests. We know that in the viceroyalty of New Spain, Franciscans and Jesuits attempted to educate in Latin, the arts, theology, and philosophy an Indian elite capable of joining the priesthood, obtaining academic degrees, and even occupying native language chairs in the university.63 But this initiative clashed with opposition from the secular clergy and Dominicans, who questioned the mental capacity of Indians to assimilate the abstract language of western knowledge. Their lack of moral fortitude, their natural tendency toward drunkenness, and the fear that they might mix Christian doctrine with idolatry were some of the arguments utilized (Chocano Mena, 2000: 66–68).

 Hans-Albert Steger (1974: 228) mentions the case of the Indian Antonio López, who was appointed by the University of Guatemala to a chair in the Cakchiquel language. But traditional elites were so alarmed that they managed to annul López’s appointment by accusing him of allegedly being drunk while giving his classes.

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In New Granada, there was also opposition to Indians learning the humanities and being ordained as priests. At most, and in light of the need for native language preachers, Indians were allowed to occupy the “lower orders” and study in some schools governed by Augustinians and Jesuits. But as the Indigenous population declined, the few existing chairs in the Chibcha language began to disappear, as did the Crown’s interest in conversion. The advent of the Bourbons consolidated this tendency, and in 1770 King Carlos III ordered the eradication of Indigenous languages and only authorized the official use of the Castilian language.64 Adding to this was the suspicion weighing on mestizos as well from an ecclesiastical apparatus dominated by criollos and peninsular Spanish. Not only illegitimacy but also blood mixing was seen as an obstacle to obtaining positions in the church or accessing the knowledge of lettered culture. Mestizos could only be ordained as priests after the bishops had approved a rigorous and exhaustive report on their life and habits. With access to the education of the Church limited to Indians, Black people, and mestizos, and with the need to learn or teach Indigenous languages undermined, a wall was gradually built around lettered culture made up of ethnic distinctions. Dominant white elites were determined to prevent the incursion of the castes into the sacrosanct precinct of knowledge and to reserve the exclusivity of intellectual labor for themselves. Some literate Indians and mestizos could certainly work as notaries, but with rare exceptions, none could enter the temple where the cadre of high intellectual life were trained: universities and residential colleges [colegios mayores]. In effect, from the beginning of the colonial period universities in New Granada had functioned as platforms for legitimizing the dominant white ethnic group’s monopoly on the highest administrative and ecclesiastical posts. The university population was a society apart, limited to the most select elites and composed of individuals who aspired to hold positions of political and spiritual leadership in the colonies. No one was allowed to enter the university who did not belong to these social groups by race and lineage. The founding charter of the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, drafted in 1653 by the archbishop friar Cristóbal de Torres, puts it clearly as follows:

 In line with his modernizing policies, Carlos III sought to homogenize the Spanish empire with the goal of more efficient administration. More than a king, this required a religion and a law, a single language, and a single system of weights and measures. His royal declaration of 1770 argued that the existence of many languages was unfavorable to commerce and confused subjects like the Tower of Babel, and he therefore ordered that all preaching to Indians be done in Castilian. At the same time, he ordered that “the different languages used in the same dominion be eradicated, and only Castilian be spoken.” “Real cédula para que en los reinos de Indias se extingan los diferentes idiomas de que se usa y sólo se hable el castellano.” In: Tanck de Estrada, 1985: 37–45.

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All the students to be received from now on, we establish that they shall provide proof at least of cleanliness, a quality requested by all residential colleges; and that this is precisely necessary to serve the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition. In addition, we also establish that where possible, those of illustrious blood are preferred; and that if not notably inferior in ability they will be necessarily selected, since this represents a great part of the greatness of this College, and its veneration and appreciation, for which we establish that all pupils be legitimate children, without the opposite being dispensable; and we even want their parents to be legitimate, and that the opposite be granted only with great cause; the second being that the parents do not have lowly trades, much less those considered infamous by the laws of the kingdom, without this being dispensable either; the third being that they not have blood of the land, and that if their progenitors did, they have left this condition so that they might have a custom of nobility and not another sort; and the fourth being that they be persons of great hope for the public good.65

This text shows that those aspiring to enter the university needed to fulfill several religious, ethnic, social, and economic conditions. At a religious level, candidates should be “of clean blood,” which is to say old Christians without any ethnic contamination by gypsies or Jews, under penalty of being denounced before the Inquisition. We have already seen how this formed part of an apparatus that sought to maintain the purity of the Catholic faith in the colonies. But the discourse of blood purity also presupposed the maintenance of the apparatus of whiteness that I have discussed at length. This explains the requirement that not only the candidate but their parents as well must be legitimate children, that they not dedicate themselves to “lowly trades,” and that above all the not be stained by the “blood of the land”—that they not be mixed with Blacks, Indians, mestizos, or mulattoes. Finally, candidates needed to prove that they belonged socially to “noble families,” meaning that pupils must possess a social and economic status such that they be seen as “persons of great hope for the public good.”66 The institution of the university functioned in the colonial period as a rigid mechanism for legitimizing whiteness as inherited cultural capital. As Bourdieu has shown, elites tend to perpetuate their social being—that is, to  “Constituciones para el Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario” [1654]. Title III, Constitution III (author’s emphasis). 66  These requirements were not exclusive to the Colegio Mayor de Rosario. The Colegio de San Bartolomé, governed by Jesuit priests, similarly demanded that its students be “Spaniards,” that is, white. The founding charter of the Colegio Seminario, signed on October 18, 1605, stipulates that: “we order that the persons who might enter said seminary be poor, Spaniards, born of legitimate marriage, and of an age of at least twelve years; and that they know how to read and write; of good habits and abilities; and all else equal with a preference for the descendants of conquistadors” (cited by Jaramillo Mejía, 1996: 23). 65

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reproduce their wealth—through strategies of fertility, marriage, economics, and above all education (Bourdieu, 1998: 20). This explains why families from the dominant class want their children educated in the most prestigious schools since these lead to the highest social positions. Seen from this perspective, the school system is a bridge between the primary habitus acquired within the family and accomplishing the social aspirations engendered by this habitus. Schooling institutes and legitimizes social rank distinctions since it naturalizes (and universalizes) the habitus of the dominant classes. We have already seen how, in the case of New Granadian society, this difference of social rank was above all an ethnic one. The discourse of blood purity and the “pathos of distance” from the castes formed part of the primary habitus of elites. Higher education thereby transformed de facto social differences into de jure ethnic differences. So if a member of a criollo family was accepted into the university, this meant public recognition of their “whiteness,” or the social legitimation of their inherited cultural capital. To enroll at the two residential colleges in Bogotá (San Bartolomé or Rosario) or at the three universities operating in Quito (the Jesuit San Gregorio Magno, the Dominican Santo Tomás, or the Augustinian San Fulgencio), candidates were subjected to a rigorous interrogation called the “information.”67 Only if the candidate fully satisfied the requisites demanded in the interrogation could they then be admitted as a member of the college. To carry out the selection process, the college in question designated several commissioners and a notary to record the testimony of the witnesses (generally two) convoked to certify the candidate’s “nobility.” In the Colegio de San Bartolomé in Bogotá, the procedure was rigorously regulated: After the rector and the nine councilors who are appointed to investigate the nobility of the candidate, the secretary is instructed to take the statements, he will go to the secretariat with the two annual councilors, and execute the following: First he will make the witnesses, who are noble people, swear by Our Lord and the sign of the cross. After finishing, the statement will be read to the witness and the latter will be made to sign it. (cited by Jaramillo Mejía, 1996: 55)

The ritualism of the “information” is not exaggerated but corresponded in reality to a public ceremony establishing a legitimate separation between whites and the castes, proclaiming the establishment of ethnic borders valid for life. Ethnically separated from the rest of the population, those admitted  Entering a college usually involved paying a tuition fee (convictores) or winning a scholarship (becarios). The Colegio Mayor de Rosario normally offered fifteen scholarships per academic period, while San Bartolomé usually offered ten to twelve. There were also royal scholarships for the children of functionaries of the Crown (Silva, 1992a: 178).

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to matriculate (or “don the robe”) were anointed, as in a knighting ceremony, to assume the material and spiritual leadership of society.68 And so for a candidate to be rejected by a college created a profound personal and collective crisis, since it meant not only being excluded from the “right to lead” that they felt entitled to by birth, but also exposing their entire families to public disgrace, reducing them to the uncomfortable condition of “non-white.” In effect, if we look at the interrogation to which witnesses were subjected, we can understand fully the gravity of possible rejection. In the case of the Colegio de San Bartolomé in 1689, the interrogation consisted of six questions. They were asked specifically about the legitimacy and blood purity of the candidate (“clean of all bad race, from Moors and Jews and those punished by the Inquisition”); about whether their ancestors were “clean of the Indian and Black slave races”; and about the labor and juridical condition of their parents (Jaramillo Mejía, 1996: 52). By 1777, when criollo elites felt threatened by increasing mestizaje and the social mobility policies of the Bourbons, admission requirements became even stricter. Now there were seven questions inquiring not only about the candidate but also their parents and grandparents (“legitimate children”), seeking to determine if anyone in the family had engaged in “vile or mechanical trades,” and any of the candidates’ ancestors were “stained by the vileness, or any bad race like Jews, Moors, mulattos, mestizos, or recent converts.” Moreover, witnesses were interrogated as to the candidate’s “life and habits” since the college needed to ensure that none “suffered a chronic ailment or contagious disease.” Admission to residential colleges and the awarding of scholarships therefore presupposed a rigorous process of ethnic, religious, and social selection that only members of the most prominent families could successfully pass. For their part, family dynasties competed for scholarships since—like encomiendas and slaves—these could be passed by inheritance from fathers to sons and from brother to brother (Silva, 1992a: 195). In this way, the most powerful families put their whiteness on public display and assured their control and access to public posts,69 so that “donning the robe” in one of the  I take this comparison from Bourdieu (1998: 22), who uses it to refer to graduation ceremonies. But Bourdieu’s metaphor is also apt for the case of New Granada. The Universidad Tomística de Santafé, the only accredited degree-granting institution of higher education in New Granada, included the following recitation on its diplomas: vir purus ab omni macula sanguinis atque legitimus et natalibus descendens. This certification of legitimate birth and pure blood functioned as recognition of the graduate’s “whiteness” and thereby as an initiation rite into the world of public responsibilities. 69  Of course, academic titles were neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for accessing the highest bureaucratic posts. The clearest example of this is don Jorge Miguel Lozano de Peralta, the Marquis of San Jorge, who despite not finishing his legal studies at the Colegio Mayor de Rosario, was nevertheless a city councilor in Bogotá, mayor of the city, and major sergeant of the militias (Gutiérrez Ramos, 1998: 122; 131). Neither after the colonial era, nor during the entire nineteenth century or much of the twentieth have we seen the professionalization of public posts in Colombia. 68

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residential colleges meant joining the most select clan in New Granadian society.70 Some of the most eminent thinkers and scientists of New Granada’s Enlightenment belonged to this select clan: Francisco Antonio Zea, Francisco José de Caldas, José Félix de Restrepo, Frutos Joaquín Gutiérrez, Eloy Valenzuela, Camilo Torres, Diego Martín Tanco, José María Salazar, Pedro Fermín de Vargas, Jorge Tadeo Lozano, José Ignacio de Pombo, and many more. However, there was a group of candidates who did not need to present such “information” in order to enroll in colleges and who did not therefore belong to the category of “clean whites.” These were called “manteos,” “manteístas,” or “capistas,”71 generally children of wealthy mestizos recruited to cover the immense need for priests. As I have already said, mestizos were only admitted to the priesthood and education after individualized and exhaustive scrutiny. Once admitted to the college, manteos represented a separate ethnic group. They could not have much contact with the white students and so were required to live outside the cloister despite the fact that their parents paid full room and board. Once they had finished their studies, they could not aspire to positions of high leadership but were instead destined to occupy intermediate and subordinate positions (as parish priests or notaries), which were nevertheless necessary in a largely illiterate society. Little is currently known about manteos due to the lack of documentary sources. Renán Silva describes them as having constant disciplinary problems with college authorities and as having produced some captains and other heroes of the independence wars (Silva, 1992a: 223). We should add that professors were also required to fully prove their condition as white to be able to teach in the colleges. While professors were generally recruited from the contingents of graduates from the same college, thereby assuring a prior process of ethnic selection, this was not considered sufficient. On many occasions, and to clear up all doubts about the racial quality of a professor, the “information” process was demanded when the university convoked the “competition for chairs.” Jaime Jaramillo Uribe documents the case of a priest named Pedro Carracedo, a graduate of the Colegio  Renán Silva has shown how four families from different regions of the kingdom hoarded scholarships from the Colegio Mayor de Rosario during most of the eighteenth century. The Flórez family from Bogotá obtained sixteen scholarships between 1662 and 1776; the Díaz-Granados family from Santa Marta obtained twelve between 1772 and 1772 and 1800; the Caicedo family from Cali obtained eleven between 1777 and 1811, while the Camacho family from Tunja obtained ten scholarships between 1773 and 1819 (Silva, 1992a: 197). In the same study, Silva has also shown that 20.8 percent of scholarships granted by the Colegio Mayor del Rosario between 1660 and 1830 were obtained by the children of conquistadors and settlers, 18.2 percent by the children of royal functionaries and 9.5 percent by the children of encomenderos. During this extended period, only a single scholarship was awarded to the son of a merchant. 71  [Trans. note. Manteo refers to a cloak, capista is derived from cape] 70

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de San Bartolomé who received a doctorate from the Universidad Tomística, and who stood for a vacant chair in philosophy at the Colegio Seminario de San Carlos in Cartagena. Don Juan José Sotomayor, who was also a candidate for the chair, alleged that despite his academic titles and recommendations, Carracedo did not qualify as a candidate because he was mulatto, since his mother was the illegitimate daughter of a Black woman: The title of presbyter should not be considered as sufficient judgment in the case, because in addition to the information required by the Holy Council of Trent, such titles are not indicative of rigorous blood purity, in this diocese they are often dispensed out of necessity, as indeed occurred in the case of the presbyter in question. This is why the University must be more scrupulously managed regarding a matter of such importance to its decorum, demanding the respective purity required by its statutes . . . The constitutions of our College necessarily require the circumstance of having descended from Spanish parents who are clean of all bad race, which is not the case with solicitor Matías Carracedo and Manuela Yraola, the parents of our opponent . . . being forced to add, although with regret, that they are taken for and reputed to be mulattos, and particularly the mother, illegitimate daughter of a Black woman who still lives, confirming these facts not only through their notoriety, but also her refusal to define herself. (cited by Jaramillo Uribe, 1989: 187)

On the other hand, the demand for blood purity also applied to relatives who accompanied the pupils. Regulations for residential colleges stipulated that students—most of whom enrolled from a very young age—could be permanently supported by relatives serving as “tutors.” These relatives could even work in the college as sacristans or secretaries but were subject to strict discipline. Regardless of age, they wore a uniform with no coat of arms, ate the same meals in the refectory as everyone else, and were subordinated to the rector of the cloister. For their part, students and their relatives could be accompanied by servants tasked with carrying out “minor trades.” But the rules were very clear: “We do not want pupils [or their families] to each have their own Indian servants since it would lead to great disturbances and infidelities.”72 This rule, however, which sought to avoid private service by members of the castes, did not apply to the dowries that students brought with them. It was customary for parents to “donate” a small number of

 “Constituciones para el Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario” [1654]. Title iii, Constitution x.

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servants—Indians, mestizo peons, or Black slaves—for agricultural labor on the college haciendas.73 In effect, slave labor was systematically used to support the whitening regime of the colleges. The historic archive of the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario is full of transactions documenting the purchase of Black slaves by the rector himself, who set them to agricultural work on the college’s numerous haciendas (Ortega Ricaurte, 2002: 137–145). The historian Germán Colmenares (1998: 67) has shown that one of the largest investments made by Jesuits was the purchase of Black slaves, which they used for hard labor in the more than one hundred haciendas that sustained their colleges in New Granada. These haciendas were managed according to a strict economic rationality. The Jesuits calculated the depreciation of their haciendas due to the decline in the Indigenous workforce and the impact that this demographic factor could have for covering college expenses, which is why they preferred to use Black and not Indigenous workers.74 Black people worked in cattle farming, as well as in the production of cacao, beans, and sugar. The Jesuits kept their slaves under lock and key, separating men from women, and physically punished those who refused to work, although such punishments were not to be excessive and under no circumstances could they be administered by the fathers themselves. Furthermore, to avoid the temptations of the flesh, priests were not allowed to be present when Black women were punished. To summarize, we could say that colonial universities, built on the disciplinary model of the convent, were a closed (private) space for “training” the intellectual personality in accordance with the ethnic and social expectations of the ruling elite. In this separatist environment, the lettered minority defined itself not only by its racial ascription but also found social meaning for its existence in those ethnic distinctions that were now legitimized by the privilege of knowledge. The lettered belonged to an elite group and embraced as natural those interests, ways of thinking, tastes and lifestyles, in sum,  At their foundation, colleges needed to guarantee the possession of sufficient income to cover necessities. The possession and management of large haciendas, bought or donated, including the Indians, mestizos, and Black people who worked there, was how they obtained this income. In the inventory of haciendas that constituted the “initial capital” of the Colegio Mayor del Rosario, the archbishop friar Cristóbal de Torres includes the donation of a slave workforce: “There are forty slaves on these haciendas, according to the numbers provided to us, men, women, and children. Having the Achaguas [a local indigenous group], which your Excellency granted us, these will not be necessary, because they tell us the Achaguas are of better and greater service. It will therefore be decided to sell said slaves, at least thirty of them, and use for rent what these slaves bring, which will be about eight or nine thousand pesos, and will rent four-hundred” (Constituciones para el Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario. Título i, Punto i). 74  Germán Colmenares (1998: 57–66) argues that this preference for Black slaves could have resulted from the fact that Spanish laws prohibited the granting of encomiendas to priests and also to the progressive deterioration that the encomiendas suffered as a form of organization during the seventeenth century. However, he also demonstrates that the Jesuits enjoyed the largesse of “personal service” by Indigenous people and that some haciendas had more than 120 Indigenous workers. 73

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the entire system of assumptions tied to the habitus of the dominant white ethnic group. Their original experience of the social (their primary habitus), marked by the apparatus of whiteness, was fundamental for constituting their subjectivity.75 Elites, so to speak, blocked the castes’ access to the lettered city by the “front door” but supported it through the “back door” since they used Black and Indigenous labor on the haciendas that sustained the colleges economically. In this way, Black people, Indians, and mestizos helped to materially uphold the same apparatus that excluded them. 2.3.2 Battles for University Capital As we have seen, Bourbon biopolitics represented a violent intervention into an elite criollo habitus based on the apparatus of whiteness. The reforms sought to reduce the privileges of the nobility and increase the social mobility of the castes, strengthening the unity of the empire under the control of the state. Above belonging to any caste, ethnic group, or social condition, all loyalties had to point toward a single center. The Bourbon state sought to integrate all social sectors into a single “national culture” on the basis of shared traditions (language, allegiance, and religion). The old concept of a multiplicity of autonomous kingdoms united by the person of the king thus disappeared, giving way to the idea of a homogeneous national state (König, 1994: 59). The overseas “kingdoms” of the past now became colonies, whose obligation was to furnish significant economic benefits to the central state. As I have said, this meant installing the economic model as the ideal of “good government.” One of the central objectives of the reforms was to reduce the influence of “private” entities like the Catholic Church in all spheres of society. The imperative to concentrate capital demanded that the state receive tribute and profits from all Church possessions. It is enough to remember that the Church owned a large portion of productive lands in the colonies and that the entire educational apparatus was under its control. If the point was to intensify agricultural production, create a new kind of “economic subject,” and put the new science into the service of exploring natural resources, then it is clear why the religious orders stood in the way of Bourbon biopolitics. It would be impossible to implement the global designs of the state if the religious orders (and the Jesuits above all) continued to exercise an

 As I will seek to show in the next chapters, New Granadian letrados—and in particular, enlightened thinkers in the second half of the eighteenth century—reintroduced the unconscious assumptions of their first experience of the social into their scientific practices. Which means that the populational and territorial classifications on which they worked were traversed by what I have called here the “spontaneous sociology” of elites.

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undeniable moral authority over the population, on top of hoarding the economic resources of their immense estates [latifundios] and monopolizing the education of elites. The 1767 expulsion of the Jesuits was an important step in the attempt to strengthen state authority, but it still needed to dismantle the educational apparatus that they left behind as their legacy and to replace it with a new one suited to the imperatives of governmentality. Education needed to be placed under state control and toward its ends, leading to a permanent conflict between the “two swords”: civil power and ecclesiastical power. The colleges of the Society of Jesus in New Granada were governed by what was called the Ratio Studiorum, a pedagogical treatise prescribing how the educational mission of the Jesuits should be carried out. The Jesuit educational ideal was centered on the religious and “characterological” development of the student. This entailed a practical apprenticeship in Christian virtues through strict isolation from the world in line with the private model of the convent.76 Students were to be protected from contagion by the “lowly people,” as befitting the children of the aristocracy. It was important to avoid any situation of “moral danger,” and so the behavior of students both within and outside the college needed to be closely watched by a “decurion” or a classmate in charge of ten students and relieved weekly, whose mission it was to inform the teachers of any offense observed among his companions (Bertrán-Quera, 1984: 26). Students were prohibited from attending any type of public spectacle or having direct contact with women in the cloister or in the street.77

 Discipline within the colleges was truly like that of a convent. Father Manuel Pacheco, historian for the Society of Jesus in Colombia, described the daily routine of students at the Colegio de San Bartolomé as follows: “The pupil at San Bartolomé was awoken from sleep by a bell rung at five in the morning. He had a half-hour to get dressed and ready, because at half past five he was to be in the chapel for a quarter-hour of mental or vocal prayer. He then dedicated himself to studying for an hour and a quarter. Lunch or breakfast followed at seven. He then went to the college of the Society to attend mass and classes. He then returned to the college at ten-thirty for half an hour of study there. At eleven, the bell rang to eat. All lined up for the dining-hall and remained standing next to their seats for the father Rector to bless the table before they would sit. During the meal, they read some instructive book, not only to increase the pupils’ knowledge but also to better maintain silence. At the end of the meal they were granted some time for recreation, during which all students went together to a location designated for this effect. At one o’clock, one hour of studying, and at two they returned again to the college to attend classes until five. In the seminary again they were allowed a snack and rest until six. Then came an hour of studying and at seven the repetition of the lessons heard throughout the day. At seven and three-quarters dinner followed by a brief recess. Before going to bed, they went to the chapel to pray the litanies and examine their consciences. At nine, the bell gave the signal to sleep, and a quarter of an hour later the lights were to be put out” (Pacheco, 1989: 130–131). 77  The Constitutions of the Colegio de San Bartolomé (1605) stipulated the following: “No woman will enter the College, no matter how important, nor for any reason, nor to converse or party, under penalty of greater excommunication ipso facto incurrenda” (cited by Jaramillo Mejía, 1996: 23). 76

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In terms of academic training, students at Jesuit colleges advanced their studies in three progressive stages: grammar, philosophy, and theology. Grammar classes—also called “humanities”—focused on learning and utilizing Latin. Texts by Cicero, Virgil, Erasmus, and Vives were used to practice reading, interpretation, writing, and the translation of Latin classics. The study of philosophy lasted four years and included classes in logic, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and metaphysics. Aristotle was seen as the most eminent authority in all these subjects, although students also read texts by Duns Scotus, Porphyry, Molina, and Suárez. Theological education centered on studying Saint Thomas Aquinas, with two daily lessons before and after meals, but also with an emphasis on holy scripture and moral theology. The teaching method was one of repetition, recitation, and disputation. The class was divided into “decuries,” groups of ten students under the oversight of a “decurion” whose role was to make his classmates recite their lesson and then report the results to the teacher (Bertrán-Quera, 1984: 42). It was also common to divide the class into two sides that would stage a confrontation between a thesis to be defended and another thesis to be attacked. The most important thing here was not so much judgment as the exercise of memory, whose objective was to stimulate the internalization of lessons. As we can see, and with the exception of some courses given by the Jesuits on astronomy, mathematics, and cosmography78 and other courses on medicine at the Colegio del Rosario in Bogotá and Santo Tomás University in Quito, New Granadian education focused on the quasi-rote learning of texts written in Greek or Latin. The canon of study was entirely fixed by the religious orders, without any state intervention. The advances made by European sciences since the seventeenth century were practically unknown in New Granada a century later. It was not Newton, Galileo, or Copernicus but Aristotle and Aquinas who were charged with guiding students toward the “scientific” study of nature. Logic and theology were seen as “foundational” for any study of the social and natural world. And this occurred not only in the Jesuit colleges but in all other educational institutions in the viceroyalty. The Colegio Mayor del Rosario, run by Dominican priests, stipulated the following: We order that no one in the school can hear any other Faculty, without first having heard the Arts of Saint Thomas, for many reasons: first, because it is not correct that they hear the Theology of Saint Thomas without first studying

 “According to the Ratio [Studiorum], teaching will begin with Euclid, practical arithmetic, geometry, principles of astronomy, cosmography. Later it moves on to the broader study of geometry, surveying, the theory of the planets. Ptolemy, the letters of Johann Regiomontano, the Alfonsine tables, etc. are also studied. Without forgetting the treatise on music” (Bertrán-Quera, 1984: 23).

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the Arts of Saint Thomas; second, because medicine also needs this foundation; third, because laws and canons cannot be fully achieved without this precaution, as logical truths teach us; and without these fundamentals they are not accomplished in canon law or legists.79

But this situation would begin to change once the expulsion of the Jesuits was consolidated. In 1768, King Carlos III ordered a full inventory of their goods (haciendas, churches, libraries, and colleges) in order to put these in the service of the “public good” (Soto, 1993: 5). That same year, the prosecutorprotector of Indians in the New Kingdom of Granada, don Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandón, was commissioned by the viceroy to write a report on the state of education. His mission was to evaluate the necessary conditions for founding and financing a public university in New Granada. The objective of the Bourbon state was to dismantle the private model of the convent and declare education an object of “public utility.” From that point on, the educational system was to be subordinated to economic policies of the state, where the dominant values were orchestrated in the name of utility, material prosperity, and public happiness. In this new enlightened context, scientific education was seen by the state as an indispensable requirement for the implementation of its economic project. Moreno y Escandón denounced the monopoly religious orders enjoyed over colonial universities, criticizing the uselessness of studies centered on the private education of their own members. The consequence of this was that religious orders imparted a type of education aimed at training priests, theologians, and metaphysicians, while preventing the state from interfering in the content of that education. Imperial biopolitics, by contrast, needed the public and secular training of judges, doctors, and scientists faithful to the modernizing goals of the state, making state control over academic processes increasingly urgent. The curriculum reform thus entailed replacing the “humanities” (grammar, rhetoric) with the “useful sciences” (mathematics, physics)80: If in all the wise world the introduction of useful philosophy has been necessary, purging logic and metaphysics of useless and reflex issues, and replacing what  “Constituciones para el Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario” [1654]. Título v, Constitución v. 80  Pierre Bourdieu has shown how the opposition between these two areas of knowledge is rooted in the struggle between two principles for legitimizing knowledge. One, represented by the defense of the humanities, ties knowledge to ethics (the private sphere) and its administration by the Church. The other, represented by the useful sciences, ties knowledge to the economy (the public sphere) and its administration by the state. As Bourdieu writes in Homo Academicus: “A support for science which is confined with the hostile relationship which the Roman Catholic bourgeoise has always had with science. It has long tended to channel its children into private education, which upholds the moral order” (Bourdieu, 1988: 51). 79

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had been taught under the name of physics with the solid knowledge of nature supported by observation and experience: nowhere in the world does this seem more necessary than in these fertile countries, whose soil and sky invite us to recognize the wonders of the Most High placed so far from the wise academies, to exercise at some time the curiosity of the Americans. (Moreno and Escandón, 1982 [1774]: 62)

The commercial exploitation of these “fertile countries” thus demanded a radical change in the institutional status of knowledge, starting with the language in which this knowledge was produced and transmitted. Latin, for centuries the privileged vehicle for accessing lettered knowledge, began to give way to pressure from European vernacular languages in which the new scientific knowledge of modernity was being produced. This is why the prosecutor believed that courses in Latin, useful perhaps for understanding ancient poetry and theological texts (“useless musings and sophistry”), in no way helped to train the kind of homo academicus that the state needed. The elimination of Latin from university studies was geared not only toward educating a cohort of linguistically homogeneous subjects, but also a broad group of letrados capable of producing knowledges in their own language. The state required knowledges that were subjected to the model of economic rationality: useful to society, sociable, reconvertible into government policies, able to circulate quickly and reach a greater number of users. As a result, the foundation of philosophy could not be Aristotelian logic, which according to Moreno y Escandón “corrupts the understanding of the children, forcing them to syllogize from their very first lessons,” but instead mathematics. In the first year of philosophy they should study basic arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. In the second year, the prosecutor considered it indispensable to introduce the student to basic elements of modern physics, according to the Newtonian method: The utilities resulting from this instruction will be infinite both for their own benefit and the common benefit of a country whose geography, natural history, meteorological observations, field of agriculture, and knowledge of precious minerals are crying out for instruction, which priests can only achieve leading other men in their parishes. This will be the source of universal influence for the promotion of agriculture, the arts, and commerce throughout the kingdom, whose ignorance has reduced them to the greatest dejection. (Moreno and Escandón, 1982 [1774]: 67)

It was therefore clear that humanistic education needed to be displaced in favor of a technical and scientific education that would be useful for the state’s governing projects. But the superiority of the empirical investigation

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of nature over the study and interpretation of canonical texts was not merely an epistemological postulate. The economic rationality of the state demanded an optimization of existing natural resources based on scientific knowledge. Science, stripped of its humanistic past, needed to become a fundamental pillar of biopolitics. Birth-rate policies, programs for eliminating idleness, the promotion of work, colonization projects for depopulated areas, hygiene campaigns, the establishment of orphanages, in short, the entire governmentality project needed to be legitimized by the “unquestioned” results of the new science. “Public happiness” no longer required moral or theological legitimacy, but a scientific guarantee. But the new educational policy caused great unrest not only within the religious orders directly impacted by the loss of their monopolies but also among the local criollo elite. We have already seen how the mere admission of some of their members into the university was an important mechanism of social legitimation for aristocratic families. More than the opportunity to access new knowledge, higher education was seen by students as recognition of their family’s noble status. But the Bourbon reforms radically changed this perspective. The introduction of empirical research methods demanded the development of new competencies by students, whose acquisition had nothing to do with the social status of their family but with a personal effort to seek the truth instead of memorizing it. The proposed elimination of the lectio and disputatio as teaching methods meant precisely that truth was an arduous process of conquest, not the repetition of formulas frozen in time. Candidates for public office needed to understand that the intellectual aristocracy of the humanists was to be replaced by the meritocracy of the technicians and scientists. But not all criollo aristocrats were willing to accept this. On the other hand, Moreno y Escandón’s reforms affected the economic interests of the Dominicans, who after the expulsion of the Jesuits had enjoyed the privilege of having the only university authorized to grant degrees. Up to the moment of their expulsion, the Jesuits had maintained a legal and political battle before the Crown for the same rights as the Dominicans to grant degrees, since without this privilege their graduates could be excluded from high administrative positions, civil as well as ecclesiastical.81 The efforts of the Society were successful but truncated by its forced exile, which the Dominicans skillfully took advantage of to capture vast economic resources. However, Moreno y Escandón does not look kindly on the fact that payment for graduation rights would fall into private hands without the state receiving any benefit:

 On this dispute between the Colleges of San Bartolomé and Rosario, see: Silva, 1992a: 41–44. For the case of the dispute between Jesuits and Dominicans in Quito, see: Vargas, 1983.

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In this capital, the sacred religion of preachers in its Santo Domingo convent enjoys the faculty of conferring degrees up to that of Doctor, a permission that gives them the name of university and for which the same religion appoints one of its members as rector, and Religious Lecturers of the same convent . . . They receive the price of the degrees, and more for arguments, which they distribute among themselves. (Moreno and Escandón, 1982 [1774]: 60).

Dominican friars, official defenders of Thomism, did not oppose the educational reform simply because they believed it contravened Holy Scripture— since it included Copernicus’ heretical teachings—but above all because it would strip them of their monopoly on higher education. The introduction of the new scientific curriculum implied that graduates trained in the old schools would be displaced by enlightened young graduates trained in geography, natural history, meteorology, and agriculture (Safford 1989: 134). Behind this conflict of disciplines was competition for access to bureaucratic posts and the defense of old economic privileges. For this reason, the Dominicans mobilized their influence in Madrid and Bogotá to finally doom Moreno y Escandón’s proposed reform plan to failure (Soto, 1993: 53–57).82 Opposition led by the Dominicans and joined by the majority of the criollo elite was proof that that the expropriation policies implemented by the Bourbons “from above” clashed directly with the apparatus of whiteness forged through three centuries of colonization. Their violent incursion into criollo habitus would eventually seal the failure of the Bourbon reforms in New Granada. Metropolitan biopolitics divided criollo elites into two sides, orthodox and enlightened, who embraced opposing attitudes toward the reformist project of the state. The enlightened sector identified with the pathos of novelty since they were convinced that society had to be renovated as a whole, that it was necessary to break with traditional forms of producing and transmitting knowledge, and that modern science would provide the tools to invent everything from zero. The orthodox sector, by contrast, considered this attitude to be dangerous to the status quo and saw in the enlightened sector  During his time in Bogotá, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt was a privileged witness to this struggle for control over university knowledge between the state and the Dominican priests, although his stubbornly “enlightened optimism” toward the outcome would be frustrated: “Mutis, who has had such a great influence on the enlightenment of this region, was the first who dared, in Santafé [Bogotá] in 1763, to demonstrate in a program the advantages of Newtonian philosophy over peripatetics, teaching the former publicly as professor of mathematics at the Colegio del Rosario. The Dominicans, who swear on the writings of Saint Thomas, wanted to accuse him of heresy and denounce him to the Inquisition, but without success . . . Father Rosas, an affable monk from the convent of San Augustín with whom I lived in great friendship, wanted to publicly defend the Copernican system in the convent. The Dominicans were alarmed and prosecutor Blaja opposed the Copernican system due to the decree of the Junta. The Viceroy left the decision on the matter to two clerics, one of whom was Mutis . . . The Augustinian monk defended his thesis, to the disgust of the Dominicans”(Humboldt, 1982 [1801a]: 46).

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the embodiment of all evil, assuming an aggressive attitude toward them. Gonzalo Hernández de Alba describes how some students from the orthodox wing lit a bonfire in Bogotá’s central plaza to burn a portrait of the enlightened criollo Frutos Joaquín Gutiérrez alongside a large number of scientific books and manuscripts, at the same time that the bells of excommunication rang from the Cathedral (Hernández de Alba, 1996: 142). The orthodox side would eventually win the battle for the control of knowledge in the universities and the enlightened sector would have to settle for conquering spaces outside the classroom (Silva 2002: 155–211). But as we will see in chapter 4, both sides, contending for control of the classrooms and appointments, would find themselves united in the battle against a much more dangerous common enemy: the traditional knowledge of the castes. The “pathos of distance” from Black people, Indians, and mestizos would also be reflected in an “epistemological break” from traditional modes of knowledge production. And in this case, it would be the enlightened side that would light the path to criollo victory. 2.3.3 Dr. Eugenio’s Corpse I have described the colonial university in New Granada through Ángel Rama’s metaphor of the “lettered city,” showing that its walls were “painted white,” marking an ethnic border against all those not belonging to the dominant white sector. However, the walls of the lettered city were not completely impermeable. Some members of the castes managed to penetrate the interior of the city and navigate innumerable obstacles to acquire the much longed-for university degree. But these were generally exceptional and tragic victories, since colonial society eventually imposed its frameworks of ethnic exclusion onto these characters, throwing their lowly origins in their faces. This was the case of the Quito doctor Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, one of the most important enlightened thinkers of the Spanish Americas. Espejo illustrates like no one else the fate of those mestizos who at the end of the eighteenth century dared to openly defy the coloniality of university institutions. Documents from the period attest to the fact that Espejo was the son of Luis Santa Cruz y Espejo, a Quechua Indian native to the Cajamarca region, and a mulatto woman named María Catalina Aldaz y Larrainzar, the daughter of a freed slave.83 In effect, there seems to be no doubt that Espejo’s grandfather bore the Quechua surname Chúsig, which he later changed to Cruz, and that his profession was “stonecutter.” He was most  In a document from 1789, the Bethlehemite friar José del Rosario argued that María Catalina Aldaz was reputedly “a mestiza or mulatto woman, from which Eugenio followed as a cholo or zambaygo, in respect of his father and grandfather being Indians” (cited by Astuto, 1981: 454).

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likely a hispanized Indian, since according to testimony from the friar José del Rosario, “he wore shoes and a cape, not a shirt or Indian clothing.”84 The doubts instead emerged when the ethnic origins of Espejo’s mother are investigated. Arturo Roig insists that the testimony according to which Espejo’s mother was the daughter of a free mulatto woman was merely despicable slander staged by the political enemies of the thinker from Quito (Roig, 1984b: 23). He supported this thesis with important genealogical research showing that Espejo’s maternal grandmother was of Basque ancestry. In fact, the strange pseudonyms Espejo used in his work The New Lucian of Quito (Don Xavier de Cía, Apéstegui, and Perochena) showed—according to Roig—that his mother’s side was descended from a Spanish nobleman from the house of Perochena named Peretón de Cía who arrived in the Americas toward the end of the fifteenth century, marrying María Martín de Larrainzar, a Basque woman from the ancestral house of Apesteguy. These would have been the grandparents of Espejo’s maternal grandmother. What Roig does not say is whether their descendants had children with a Black slave, which would at least partly confirm the testimony of the Bethlehemite friar. In any case, what is certain is that our philosopher was invariably tainted with the “stain of the land” and that in the eyes of the criollo elite he looked like a simple “cholo.” The question is: how could someone who so blatantly violated the hegemonic discourse of blood purity be accepted into the sacred precinct of the colonial university, acquiring therein the titles of doctor and lawyer? We may be able to find the answer in the new educational policies implemented by the Bourbons at the end of the eighteenth century. As I have said, the Crown’s interest was to transform a private and ecclesiastical university geared fundamentally toward educating the nobility into a public, state university geared toward the scientific training of the most dynamic economic sectors of society, which of course included mestizos. In the specific case of Quito, after the expulsion of the Jesuits the state opened the doors to a true secularization of higher education, even managing to turn the Dominican University Santo Tomás into a “public” university in 1787. And while these efforts ended in failure as in Bogotá, we can say that the young Eugenio Espejo—and with him an entire generation of the children of wealthy mestizos—was favored by this passing wave. In effect, while Espejo could not show the certificate of blood purity demanded by the “informational” regime, he was in fact able to instead acquire a certificate of vita et moribus, that is, a report on his “good manners,” which was sufficient to be admitted into the university under the new enlightened policies of the Bourbons. This was most likely how the young

 Cited by Roig, 1984b: 29.

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Espejo managed to navigate the first ethnic obstacle in order to begin studying medicine in 1765 in the Dominican college of San Fernando, graduating two years later at only twenty years of age. Later, in 1770, he completed his studies and obtained a degree in civil and canonical law at the Universidad de Santo Tomás. But the problem was not so much entering the university but leaving it as a practicing professional, since obtaining academic degrees and their later use were jealously controlled by the guardians of the most traditional ruling class, regents of university life who did not look kindly upon the new Bourbon policies. This is where Espejo would again need to confront the challenge of overcoming the obstacle of blood purity since only those students who fulfilled the requirements for “walking” could receive degrees. Recall that for the chance to walk, graduates needed to publicly display their family crest, in other words, the credentials of their noble and white status.85 Roig infers that Espejo managed to navigate this new obstacle with the help of the nobility titles of his maternal ancestors and by making intelligent use of his father’s surname (Santa Cruz), displaying a cut-out cross on a red, taffeta cloth (Roig, 1984b: 38). But things would not always be so easy for the recently minted mestizo doctor and lawyer. To get a license allowing him to practice his profession, the council of Quito demanded he prove the purity of his blood. Accused of having the “stain of the land,” Espejo preferred to “forget” his father’s Indian blood, instead emphasizing the noble character of his maternal grandparents. But Espejo was publicly humiliated and had to wait eight years to obtain a license. His colleagues, most of whom were from Quito’s posh nobility, were unwilling to tolerate the presence of a “cholo” in their profession. It is therefore no surprise that Espejo began to adopt a combative attitude toward the customs of his contemporary society, which would be fully reflected in the caustic and satirical style of his work. In 1779, Espejo wrote a work called The New Lucian of Quito in which he radically criticized the city’s educational system at the end of the eighteenth century. Hoping to ridicule the oligarchy that blocked his entry into influential circles, Espejo aimed his attacks against the “lettered city” in which its members were educated, and particularly against the sort of Homo Academicus  Amid great pomp, the graduate was accompanied from his home to the doors of the university by a procession consisting of the dean, professors from the faculty, friends, family members, and musicians. After traversing the main streets of the city, the graduate entered university grounds where he received his degree, later repeating the return procession to his house, where a private celebration awaited him. According to Steger (1974: 195), university statutes indicated that during the procession, the graduate must display the insignias corresponding to his rank (family shields, banners, and coats-of-arms), which certified his “white” status and publicly legitimized the granting of the degree. In this way, the university presented the new doctor into society, consecrating his new function as a “public man.”

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produced by the colonial university. To exemplify the terrible quality of graduated professionals, the doctor chose a famous sermon—“The Sorrows of the Most Holy Virgin”—delivered in the cathedral of Quito by one Sancho Escobar y Mendoza, who had studied in the Jesuit college and prided himself on being a great orator. As he makes clear in the book’s dedication, Espejo paints Escobar (who he refers to under the pseudonym of “Murillo”) as “the faithful portrait of the pedant, the semi-wise, uneducated man” (Espejo, 1981 [1779]: 6). What the colonial university, so proud of its nobility and lineage, truly produced was mediocre people like Escobar, lacking in good taste, ignorant of the new science, preoccupied with useless metaphysical questions, and made vain by a form of knowledge—Scholasticism—that was only useful for discussing incomprehensible subtleties. Such an attack on the very foundations of colonial education were never forgiven by his enemies, who did not rest until they had done away with the bothersome doctor entirely. As revenge for the accusations in The New Lucian, don Sancho Escobar took advantage of the death of one of Espejo’s patients to accuse him of professional incompetence and even murder. The sick man was none other than his own nephew, don Manuel de Escobar, deacon of the town of Zámbiza, who Espejo had treated for two months, who nevertheless died of a relapse. Infuriated by the fatal outcome, don Sancho insists that Espejo deliberately let the patient die and that his moral perversion was made evident by his writing of “satirical papers against people of the highest respect.” The point that I want to emphasize here is that Escobar’s arguments about professional incompetency and moral degradation were based on Espejo’s ethnic origin: I say that what must be first remedied is that Dr. Eugenio surnamed Espejo appeared before the Lord Provisor instead of the Lord Protector General of the natives of the district of this Real Audiencia regarding being a natural Indian from Cajamarca; because it is established that his father Luis with the surname Chúsig, which was changed to Espejo, was a native Indian of said Cajamarca, who came serving as chamber page to father Fray Josef del Rosario, bare in foot and leg, clothed in a blue shirt and pants of the same, and on his mother’s side, one Aldaz, although her nature is doubtful, but all doubt falls back on whether she is Indian or mulatto . . . Because the declarant knew practically the insufficiency of the named Eugenio for the long time that he was in his house; adding the same practical knowledge that the declarant had of the defect of his application to the study of medicine, using it only to catalog books from different faculties, and having all desire to write satirical papers against people of the highest respect, believing by this to appear to be a person educated in many faculties [ . . . and] seeming to be not a doctor who cured but a corrupt oil causing

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deadly contagion in the soul, in addition to the inevitable blush of dealing with an individual of such low extraction and origin. (cited by Freile, 2001: 13)

These kinds of accusations hindered Espejo’s professional career and closed the doors of university teaching to him, despite his recognized talents as a doctor, intellectual, and philosopher. Quito elites, attempting to avoid “dealing with an individual of such low extraction,” began a campaign to discredit him that eventually involved him in the famous Golillas incident.86 Espejo was unjustly imprisoned and sent to Bogotá to be tried by the viceroy of New Granada himself in 1789. Despite the seriousness of the charges against him—and his friendship with “suspicious” characters like Antonio Nariño and Francisco Antonio Zea—he was freed and allowed to return to Quito to continue his scientific and literary activities. There he was offered a position directing the recently founded public library that had belonged to the Colegio Máximo of the expelled Jesuits. But as a prerequisite for being named to the position, Espejo was once again required to prove the purity of his blood, which yet again put his name in the crosshairs of his enemies. But the worst tragedy had yet to befall the doctor from Quito. The campaign to discredit him reached its climax when his brother, the priest Juan Pablo Espejo, was accused of treason. The latter had carried on a romantic relationship with a prostitute named Francisca Navarrete who, apparently unhappy with the priest’s decision to end the relationship, decided to accuse him of making and disseminating seditious statements. The woman informed authorities that Espejo accused the King of being a tyrant, that it was necessary to expel all of the “chapetones”87 from the Americas, that the French were not heretics but defenders of human liberty, and that a plan was already in motion to free Quito from the yoke of its oppressors.88 It is still not clear whether the woman lied openly out of spite, if she told the truth about what the priest Espejo had said or, if so, whether his brother Eugenio shared these ideas. What is certain is that the doctor’s enemies saw the opportunity they had been waiting for in order to finally be rid of him. Without any proof linking him directly to his brother’s plans, Espejo was imprisoned and sentenced to two years in the Franciscan monastery of Popayán. In the prison  This refers to a skit entitled “Portrait of Golilla” targeting Spanish authorities in Quito. “Golillas” [a collar or ruff] was the derogatory nickname given to Spanish functionaries (“chapetones”) holding public posts in the Indies, but who did not graduate from the residential colleges. The skit, falsely attributed to Espejo, mocked the minister of the Indies don José de Galvez and explicitly supported Túpac Amaru’s Indigenous rebellion. 87  [Trans. note: greenhorn, derogatory term for recently arrived Spanish officials] 88  See: “Compendio de los puntos vertidos por el Presbítero Don Juan Pablo Espejo en dos conversaciones tenidas en la havitación de Doña Francisca Navarrete, que van en los mismos términos y voces que las profirió según que así se halla sentado con juramento en el gobierno de esta Real Audiencia” [1795]. In: Freile, 2001: 62–64. 86

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he contracted dysentery and fell gravely ill, but despite this he was held in chains and treated like a common criminal. Despite his dramatic appeal for liberation sent to viceroy Ezpeleta from prison,89 Espejo remained a prisoner and died on December 27, 1795. His death certificate, dated December 28, 1795, is registered in the book reserved for mestizos, Indians, Black people, and mulattoes. The registry speaks of “Dr. Eugenio’s corpse,” eliminating all surnames in accordance with the practice of masters toward their servants and slaves (Roig 1984b: 32). White elites punished with death and disgrace the attack by a “cholo” on the lettered city and its guardians. Paradoxically, the same Espejo had become one of the greatest promoters of enlightened medicine in Quito. The paradox lay, as we will see in the next chapter, in the fact that modern medicine is founded on an epistemic expropriation of traditional knowledge. Medical practice not only worked hand-in-hand with state biopolitics—which Espejo insisted on always obeying and respecting—but also served as a mechanism for the social domination of the castes.90 In this way, the social and political violence that Espejo suffered due to his ethnic origin corresponds directly to the symbolic violence that he himself exercised as an enlightened doctor toward the traditional knowledge of Black people, Indians, and mestizos. The “spontaneous sociology” that condemned Espejo was the same that Espejo himself reproduced with his defense of enlightened knowledge. My argument will therefore be that the coloniality of power extends its networks to a domain that enlightened thinkers believed to be pure and uncontaminated by social practices: the discourse of modern science.

 It is worth transcribing some asides from this petition: “In spite of an apparently armed sentinel, many vigilant spies who guarded me, dying locked up in a dark and damp dungeon; in spite of all this and much more even violent oppression, I would have pondered and found the discretion of using the natural remedy of prostrating myself at the feet of Your Excellency with my representations, and making you not only accessible but very kind toward my suffering. But in the first moments, and from the scandalous vexation that this has caused me, I expected quick relief from a generous feeling of error; and on the other hand my heart, always and deeply sacrificed to devotion to the Sovereign, offered as a gift from His Majesty the cruel treatment that was given to me, and the highest silence toward this same treatment. After two months of this, in the harsh prison of a barracks, I resolved to raise my complaints at the feet of that same sacred Majesty, whom I was alleged to have falsely and slanderously offended with the most sacrilegious infidelity . . . I have been until now treated by the entire apparatus as a prisoner of the state. In fiscal hearings, in interlocutories, in the whole monstrous process I have had no other order” (Espejo, 2001 [1795]: 72). 90  Here is but a sample (and I will bring in more in the next chapters): in his work known as Blancardian Science, Espejo harshly criticized those who practiced medicine without the accreditation of proper university degrees, accusing them of being empiricists and laymen (Espejo, 1981 [1780]: 323). I will show how the practice of empirical medicine, anchored in Indigenous or African cultural traditions and practiced primarily by mestizo healers, is seen by the enlightened sector as medical science’s past and as an imminent danger to all of society. 89

Chapter 3

Imperial Biopolitics Health and Disease Under the Bourbon Reforms

The principal objective that the sovereign prizes over all others is the good of his subjects: his principal focus ought to be directed to their preservation and happiness; and just as the best good of those who possess it is life and health, the law that the Monarch imposes to this end is not severe, but benign. —Francisco Gil

In the previous chapter, I showed that the apparatus of whiteness acted as a mechanism for generating subjectivities in New Granada. The discourse of blood purity rooted in criollo habitus serves as the ideological basis on which this group legitimated its power over the castes. I also pointed out that enlightened Bourbon discourse was perceived by a sector of the criollo elite as a threat to their claim to whiteness, even though the intention of the Crown was never to undo social hierarchies. Here, I will investigate the biopolitical apparatus of the Spanish Empire and its impact on the community of enlightened criollos in New Granada. The following hypothesis will guide this investigation: in contrast to the most traditionalist criollos, the minority sector of enlightened criollos will see the introduction of the Bourbon reforms as a good thing, not considering them a threat but rather a compliment to the colonial discourse of blood purity. The enlightenment pretension to be positioned as impartial observers of the world—what I have called here “zero-point hubris”—will give them the perfect motive to strengthen their established imaginary of superiority over the castes. The discourse of science, articulated by enlightenment thinkers of New Granada, will be in the end a colonial discourse. To be situated at the zero-point, as stated earlier, is to have the power to construct a vision of the social world that is recognized as legitimate and 117

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endorsed by the state. It is the work of constructing social reality where the “experts”—in this case, the enlightened criollos of the eighteenth century— define themselves as neutral and impartial observers of the world. The criollo thinker, Francisco Antonio Zea, understood this perfectly in his famous speech from 17911: No one can overlook the fact that the wise are to Republics what the soul is to man. They are the ones who animate this vast body of a thousand arms and put it into movement, as it carries out whatever they suggest; but it does not know how to act by itself, nor move one more point in the course they trace for it. In fact, the artist, the farmer, the artisan will never go beyond what they have seen their father or teacher do, if the keepers of human knowledge and progressive understanding do not offer to bring their philosophical lights to the workshop, the field, or the office. (Zea, 1982 [1791]: 93–94)

The enlightenment presupposed the establishment of a border between those who know how to play the game of science (the experts) and the “others” who remain imprisoned in the cultural shackles of “common sense.” Experts are like the soul, situated by means of “philosophical light” in a position of cognitive objectivity that allows them to give life to the totality of the social body. Without the assistance of knowledge produced by the wise, the rest of the population (the artist, the farmer, the artisan) would be aimless, immersed in the darkness of traditional knowledge. In this chapter, it will be shown that, in the hands of enlightened criollos, modern science and medicine in particular served as instruments for the consolidation of ethnic borders that ensured their control over social space. The apparatus of biopolitics is linked with the apparatus of whiteness. 3.1 THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD OR THE TWILIGHT OF CHARITY Already in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown established an indissoluble link between evangelization and the politics of the hospital. The hospital was essentially conceived as an institution of charity whose function was to benefit the poor.2 The word “hospital” was associated with the Christian  I agree with Renán Silva’s evaluation in the famous article “Avisos de Hebephilo” published by Zea in the eighth issue of the Papel periódico de Santa Fe de Bogotá, that Zea is fully inscribed within the colonial imaginary of Spanish absolutism, an imaginary also assumed by the enlightened criollos of New Granada (Silva, 2002: 159). 2  In this context, support for hospitals depended in large part on the charity of wealthy aristocrats, who publicly demonstrated their Christian virtue through generous donations. The doctor and 1

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virtue of “hospitality” and for that reason religious orders were in charge of the medical and spiritual assistance of the sick, seeing this as an essential part of their ministry. The hospital was a place administered by clergy—and not by the state—in which it was not so much the body but the soul that they sought to cure. Orphans, beggars, the elderly, and the disabled, that is to say, all those who due to physical incapacity or extreme poverty could not make use of physical strength to support themselves through work, would go there to seek temporary shelter (Quevedo, 1993: 51). Until the period of the Bourbon reforms, the institution of the hospital was seen in the colonies of the Americas as an aid institution, defined within the evangelizing function of the religious orders. Medical practice in hospitals was exercised as a service to the most disadvantaged members of society, and for this reason it was not the doctor but the priest who was responsible for administering care to the sick. Of course, people also went to hospitals to be cured of bodily illness. Particularly during the first years of the conquest, many Spanish soldiers arrived at the hospital wounded by poison arrows, mosquito bites, or affected by some contagious disease.3 We know that in this period, epidemics of fever and dysentery were frequent, and even the flu was a great cause of mortality during the Conquest. This situation led King Ferdinand the Catholic to order the founding of the first hospital in the New Kingdom of Granada in 1513 in the city of Santa María la Antigua del Darién, financed with royal funds and administered by Franciscan friars (Soriano Lleras, 1966: 38–39). However, despite the fact the religious orders took responsibility for attending medically to bodily disease, managing disease was a philanthropic exercise, not a therapeutic one. Disease was seen as an individual problem that had more to do with the spiritual well-being of the patient than the material well-being of society. The case of the Royal Hospital of San Lázaro in Cartagena de Indias could be illustrative in this respect. The hospital was created in 1608 to house all of the lepers of the New Kingdom of Granada, at a time when leprosy was still seen as a “biblical illness,” a divine punishment for sin (Obregón 1997: 35). This was, in short, an illness of the soul that should be treated “spiritually” by priests. This demanded the practice of Christian charity in accordance with

historian Emilio Quevedo cites such a donation in 1564 by Friar Juan de los Barrios, in which private resources are allocated for the establishment in Bogotá of “a hospital in which the poor of this city will live, gather, and be cured, both Spaniards and natives, [and in this] way I will and I should, I bestow and I know that I give, donate, transfer and fully pass on, perfectly, irrevocably, and completely as it is said between mortals, the houses of our dwellings, that are in this city of Santa Fe [Bogotá] . . . such that now and forever there will be founded thereon a hospital” (cited by Quevedo, 1993: 70–71). 3  Soriano Lleras (1966: 31) comments that insects in the hot regions probably took more Spanish soldiers and colonists as victims than the poisoned arrows of the Indians.

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the famous parable of Lazarus and the rich man as told by Jesus.4 Thus, the leper was not the object of medical treatment but mercy and their confinement in the hospital fundamentally adhered to this aim.5 The hospital was thus a place that “dispensed” divine grace, and this was not limited to lazar houses. The San Pedro hospital in Bogota in 1564 was also a “shelter for the poor” administered by the patronage of the city’s bishops. In 1630, King Felipe III decreed that the institution was to be managed by the order of the Brothers of San Juan de Dios, who converted it into a hospital-convent under the name Hospital of Jesus, Joseph, and Mary6 and later, San Juan de Dios.7 Neither the names assigned to the hospital, nor its conventual organization, and not even its geographical location were mere coincidence. The hospital had a manifestly evangelical purpose: to spiritually comfort the mildly ill, showing them the need for Christian charity; and to prepare the gravely ill for death, helping them to conclude their existence at peace with God.8 Another method used in the colony was that of the hospital-school. It involved institutions that combined religious and moral instruction with medical assistance. This was the case, for example, with the monks of the Incarnation in Popayán, who ran a center dedicated to the service of “poor maidens” (Paz Otero, 1964). There was also an institution of this sort functioning in Popayán administered by a group called the “Camilo Brothers of good death.” As their name indicated, the work of these priests was concentrated on helping the terminally ill, but also ensuring the education and care for the poor. The Camilo fathers not only visited the sick and administered final anointment, but also taught classes on Christianity and performed cesarean sections. It should be noted that the three forms of hospital organization, the convent, the school, the lazar house, share the same type of orientation: their  According to this parable, Lazarus was a mendicant leper who was eager to satiate himself with the scraps that fell from the table of the rich man, without any compassion from the latter. Both dead, the rich man was sent to Hades, while Lazarus was consoled on the lap of Abraham (Lucas 16: 19–25). 5  The activity of the Jesuit priest Pedro Claver is well known. Also known as “the apostle of blacks,” he dedicated his life to work for the sick in the hospital. Soriano Lleras says that “Saint Pedro Claver acquired clothes and medicine that he would send daily to the sick via messenger. When there were religious festivals he would reward them with a better and more abundant feast than they would prepare in the houses of friends, and he would also amuse them with a band of performers from the Jesuit college” (Soriano Lleras, 1966: 66). 6  See: Soriano Lleras, 1966: 89. 7  Curiously, even though the hospital was seen as an extension of the sacred mission of the Church, it was bad economic management that motivated the King’s decision. According to Soriano Lleras, the hospital’s income was being poorly administered by the priests, there was a scarcity of water and food, the alms of the parish were lower by the day, there were intruders occupying rooms in the house, and the priests did not visit the sick often enough (Soriano Lleras, 1966: 64). 8  See: Restrepo Zea, 1997: 81. 4

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private character. That is to say, these are institutions administered by parastate organizations—religious orders—whose governing policies escape state control. But with the introduction of the Bourbon reforms, this situation would change radically. The Bourbons made wealth and “public happiness” the pillars of their government. This meant turning the state into the ordering axis of each and every factor that intervened in social life. The Bourbon state occupied, as stated earlier, “the perspective of the Whole,” that is to say, it assumed the task of exercising rationally founded control over the wealth, the territory, and the population in its charge, with the aim of promoting the economic development of the empire. This task entailed, of course, the nationalization of spheres that had up until then been under the control of particular interests. It was necessary to expropriate the control over social flows of symbolic and economic capital from these subjects, centralizing this control in the hands of one unified and absolute subject: the state. In a word, the project of governmentality implemented by the Bourbons required the deterritorialization of those spheres that emerged as key for the increase of economic productivity. And one of these key spheres was public health. This juridical and political expropriation that began in the eighteenth century, however, ran parallel to epistemological expropriation. The establishment of the state as the only administrative center of social life represented an attack on the idea of God as the foundation and guarantee of the efficacy of the instrumental field of society (economics, politics, and law). Bourbon policies no longer set out from God as the guarantee of an eternal cosmic order, but rather from human activity (productive labor) as the only means for ordering nature and subjecting it to the immanent dictates of reason. Sickness and poverty ceased to be fates that were accepted with resignation, and were now seen as dysfunctions that could be domesticated by scientific-technical rationality. This explains why the Bourbon state attempted to seize control from the Church over the dispensation of the meaning of health and disease. These phenomena now required a new meaning legitimated by the absolutist state and its cognitive organum: modern science. Under the Bourbon government, disease was no longer seen as spiritual evil afflicting the individual for their sins, and thus a punishment from God, but rather as an evil that besieged the entire ensemble of society and one with material causes. It is not the body of the individual but rather the social body that is the carrier of disease. For this reason, the diagnosis of disease is tied to population technologies like demographic calculations, estimated mortality rates and life expectancy, the rationally founded study of the role of education, and scientific knowledge of geography and the “natural laws” governing commerce. What disease “means” no longer depends on private institutions like the Church dispensing meaning but on public policy directed by an economic model. The “good government”

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that the Bourbons aspired to was directly predicated on the success of its economic management, such that the management of public health was capable of ensuring the growth of productivity. From this point of view, sickness begins to have an economic meaning granted by the ideological apparatuses of the state, at the expense of the “theological” meaning dispensed by the Church. Intervention into public health became one of the priorities of enlightened government. Improving the health of the population, particularly of those sectors at a productive age, meant bettering the possibilities for economic growth in the colonies, and thereby ensuring Spain’s competitiveness on the global market. It was no longer simply a matter of preserving the health of criollo aristocrats—the only ones who could enjoy personalized medical treatment—but also that of the growing mestizo population, which at this time had become the key motor for wealth production in New Granada. The Bourbon biopolitical project required the impetus of actions to strengthen and increase the active working population, which required an all-out war against the two great enemies of productive labor: disease and poverty. It thus became necessary to reform hospital policy, which until then had understood disease as an individual problem and poverty as a problem of Christian charity. Both problems, disease and poverty, ceased to be private issues and became public ones, administered by the scientific-technical and bureaucratic rationality of the state. This change in meaning is evident in the plan for the construction of the San Pedro Hospital in the city of Zipaquirá, which was presented to the viceroy of New Granada by Pedro Fermín de Vargas. The enlightened criollo began by emphasizing the “healthy instruction” that Christian charity represented for the fulfillment of the moral duties required by social life. Imbued with this Christian spirit, the Spanish kings founded hospitals to provide shelter for the poor and needy while they were sick. Nevertheless, the majority of these hospitals, while inspired by evangelical charity, were founded “without knowledge of the most essential principles of medicine and politics, [which] has caused some more harm than benefit” (Vargas, 1944 [1789a]: 120). To correct this error, Vargas proposed that the hospital of Zipaquirá not be the responsibility of any religious community, and instead be public, that is, that it be directly subject to the central government of Bogotá. The viceroy should appoint a governing council composed of the chief magistrate, two mayors, and two native citizens chosen every two years from representatives of the people. They, and no longer the religious communities, would be responsible for the administration of the hospital in its totality. There would of course be a position for the chaplain, but his salary (200 pesos) will be much less than that of the doctor (500 pesos), given that the latter would assume full responsibility for the well-being of the sick. The chaplain would be limited to caring

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solely for the spiritual well-being of the sick, without assuming any kind of medical function (1944 [1789a]: 130–131). For Vargas, as for all the criollos that sympathized with the Bourbon project, it became clear that medicine was one thing and the love of one’s neighbor another. The former belonged to the external domain of the public and should therefore be administered by the state; the latter belonged instead to the internal domain of conscience (the private sphere) and should be administered by the Church. But in this division of labor, the private should be subject to the public, considering that it is there where the well-being of the human in this world is at stake. And since the function of the hospital is to rehabilitate the body of the sick so that they can be useful to the homeland, the chaplain should also be subordinated to the orders of higher authorities: the doctor, the mayor, and the chief magistrate. The “truth” administered by the state—whose cognitive instrument is science—is “of this world” and therefore superior to the metaphysical and uncertain truth administered by the Church. Along this same political line that sought to subject the private to the public, the enlightened criollo José Ignacio de Pombo proposed to the Provincial Board of Cartagena that the convent of San Diego, directed by the Franciscan priests, be definitively closed and the building established as a hospital. Pombo justified his proposal with two short pragmatic arguments: the first is that the convent is bankrupt and the monks need to continuously attend to its material upkeep, neglecting their religious obligations; the second is that the convent building “presents with its location and construction, all the advantages that one could desire for the establishment of the proposed Hospice [Hospicio] It is in an airy, healthy, and able location away from the general population” (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 174). According to Pombo, the Franciscans should not only cede their building, but they will also have to contribute one-fourth of the rent necessary to sustain the hospital, allocating as well a significant portion of the returns obtained from masses and alms collected in the chapel: If by law, the goods of the church are those of the poor and the clergy mere administrators, the proceeds of these quarters belong most justly to nobody else . . . and the most proper destination of these is none other than the Hospice in which a considerable number of the truly poor of the Diocese will be gathered, and in which they will consequently all enjoy this beneficence . . . The proceeds of these dispensations cannot have a better or more proper destination than the Hospice. It is not ecclesiastic income, nor is it owned by the Bishop; and is it [not] a duty to employ them to pious ends? And what could be greater, or more urgent, than the assistance and relief of the poor? (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 175)

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The “immanent vision” of health and disease defended by Vargas and Pombo, certainly recognized that it is God who gives and takes life, but it affirmed that human reason is fully able to discover the laws determining the function of the “machine of the body,” as Mutis called it. The study of these physical laws is seen by the thinker from Cadiz as a legitimate way to worship God, “since if the world is made according to such wise and manifest laws, what more than the man eager for knowledge, who allocates a few moments to the contemplation of things that enter his senses, as the most opportune medium for the praise due to the creator?” (Mutis 1983 [1762]: 41). For this same reason, in his impassioned defense of vaccination, Mutis—who in addition to being a doctor was also a priest—asserted that the preservation of human life and the increase of population are divine mandates (“be fruitful and multiply, and populate the earth”) and that vaccination therefore could not be contrary to religion. It is God himself who has given human beings the natural light to discover the secrets of nature through science, all with the purpose of better realizing his eternal designs. Opposing scientific practice in the name of religion is seen by Mutis as a cruel and inhumane attitude: If such had been the will of the Creator in the proliferation of humankind, if the people in their misfortune, seduced by such scruples continue to resist the benefits of inoculation, it would be to voluntarily sacrifice countless victims who undoubtedly perish in each epidemic, making us positively guilty of such a horrible sacrifice. (Mutis, 1983 [1796]: 226)

God is thus recognized as the arbiter of life, but insofar as this life can be preserved and elevated to a level of human quality in terms of physical health, it is not the responsibility of God but of science. This is the argument of criollo scientist Jorge Tadeo Lozano, who in his essay on the brevity of life—a theme traditionally dealt with by theology or moral philosophy—did not appeal to the Bible but to natural history. Lozano shows that the brevity of life can be explained entirely by “internal causes”: nutritional deficiency, unhealthy climate, immoderate lifestyle, contagious diseases, poor hygienic conditions, and excessive work. Above all, diseases are responsible for the destruction of “ninety percent of the human species” and none of these is a “direct consequence of the human constitution”; that is to say their mortality cannot be attributed to the will of God or the fragility of human nature punished by original sin, but rather to the ignorance of the people and the defects of a health policy not enlightened by science. Smallpox, measles, “paralipsis,” asthma, “hydropesia,” birth complications, “apoplexia,” “putrid fevers” [typhus], and dysentery are evils that can be corrected by enlightenment knowledge and good state politics (Lozano, 1993 [1801a]: 57–59).

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3.2 INFESTED CITIES A good example of this shift in the meaning of illness is that of the two smallpox epidemics that devastated the capital of the viceroyalty in 1782 and 1802. One year after the Comunero Revolt, an epidemic of smallpox was declared in the viceroyalty of New Granada, having come from the provinces to the north. Alarmed by the rapid advance of illness and its imminent arrival in the city of Bogotá, the Archbishop and viceroy Antonio Caballero y Góngora issued an edict in which the disease is presented as a divine punishment for the sins of the people: Humanity is greatly afflicted by the general punishments sent by Divine providence from time to time to wake up mortals and shake them from the profound lethargy that they are immersed in by continuous prosperity. Wars, famines, and plagues are the visits of the Father in the fashion of the Holy Scriptures to manifest his anger to the people; and these are the wake-up calls that God uses by his intelligent design and highest providence . . . We know with some consolation that when warned of the punishment that they are justly accused of, families prepare with practices of piety to receive the inevitable contagion as one of the eventualities to which our nature is subject . . . It is very good to think ahead of time to secure such healthful resources. It would also be good to remove the fear and horror, as far as possible, that contagious diseases naturally inspire in humanity. Even more, these tend to usually be purely human means and are not very effective in achieving that the God of anger and vengeance, so well-deserved for sins and public scandals, become and manifest toward us as the God of health and mercy . . . With greater activity and more confidently than in human help we should plead from Divine clemency the softness of the scourge in the benignity of contagion, as if it were of the kindness of the Father that persists with his sovereign warning through the propagation of the epidemic . . . To this end we highlight Sunday, the 24th of this month to celebrate a votive mass with the Most Holy Patent to continue the Prayers organized by the Church for this time of disease . . . We should await the fervent devotion of our diocesans, that aware of the common danger, will try to yearn, cry, and clamor for God with sincerity and veritable repentance for their sins . . . For which we exhort and persuade every one of our beloved diocesans to prepare yourselves to pray to God with a true confession and penitence for their sins; and we concede, in virtue of the Pontifical faculties that we have, a Plenary Indulgence to all of the persons who truly received communion on this day having truly repented and confessed.9  “Edicto del virrey Antonio Caballero y Góngora, Santa Fe, 20 de noviembre de 1782” (Frías Nuñez, 1992: 240–241).

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I have cited the 1782 viceroyal edict in extenso because there we find the central motives for what I have called the theological meaning granted to illness by the ecclesiastic apparatus. Within the framework of this technology of signification, the smallpox epidemic does not have natural causes but is instead the visible expression of something invisible, supernatural, and in this case, God’s anger at “the sins and public scandals” of the New Granadian people.10 The epidemic should not be seen as a natural phenomenon against which it is possible to take preventative measures based on scientific knowledge, but rather as a pedagogic instrument in the hands of God “to wake up mortals and shake them from their profound lethargy.” “Purely human means” are thus worthless in the fight against the contagion, since what is needed is the religious resignation of the people in the face of their well-deserved punishment. Before having faith in the “human means,” considered by Caballero y Góngora as “barely effective,” New Granadians should instead repent in their hearts and pray to God that the epidemic does not take too many victims.11 It is important to note that even though Caballero y Góngora was the viceroy of New Granada, that is, the official representative of the Bourbon state in the colony, his position toward the smallpox epidemic is not that of a state functionary—who speaks in the name of bureaucratic rationality—but that of the shepherd of the flock. He does not therefore speak under the authority granted him by the state, but “in virtue of the Pontifical faculties” that he has as the archbishop of New Granada.12 And as a representative of God more  The “public scandals” that Caballero y Góngora refers to have to do with the Comunero Revolt against viceroyal authorities one year before the epidemic. It is interesting to note in this regard that Caballero y Góngora made several pastoral visits to the regions that had rebelled to achieve their “pacification.” He was accompanied on some of these visits by the capuchin friar Joaquín de Finestrad, who I will discuss elsewhere in this book. What is interesting here is that in his 1789 book El vasallo ilustrado, Finestrad—a decided opponent of enlightenment ideas—gave the epidemic the same punitive significance that the enlightened Caballero y Góngora had given it seven years earlier in his edict. According to Finestrad, the Comunero Revolt was not caused by the bad government of the Bourbons but the moral decadence of the New Granadian people, whose rebellion was later punished by God with the epidemic. “The principle that gave rise to the previous inquietude and formidable storm of disruption that we suffered in 1781 that came close to a regrettable wreckage is the unrestrained liberty with which they live in such abomination as is often seen in this Kingdom. The anatomy that I have formed of these people does not allow me to refer blame for this general commotion to the bad governance of the wise Ministers of the King, as without Christian reflection the tumultuous commoners proclaimed. All public calamities, plagues, famines, and wars are punishments for the sins of the Republic” (Finestrad, 2000 [1789]: 265). 11  This type of theological meaning of disease is deeply rooted in popular religious practice. Renán Silva notes the case of the 1587 smallpox epidemic in Tunja, where a council of citizens asked the priest of Chiquinquirá to loan them the miraculous image of the Virgin to take it on a procession through the city. The same happened during the famine in the valley of Tenza in 1696, when the citizens organized a procession through the whole region, carrying the image of Santo Ecce Homo and calling out for forgiveness for their sins (Silva, 1992b: 22). 12  This displacement of voice from that of the viceroy to that of the archbishop was not due to Caballero y Góngora’s ignoring or questioning the biopolitical guidelines of the Bourbon state in terms of the necessity of inoculation, but was rather a question of political strategy. This can be seen from 10

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than of the King, his vision of disease is eminently theological. Health is not seen as a problem that falls to the state, but rather to the Church. It is not the doctor that is charged with combating disease, but the priest. Thus, the decree is a call to pastoral activity for the priests (“we exhort and persuade each and every one of our beloved diocesans to prepare yourselves to pray to God”) and to individual repentance of the parishioners. But something very different happens with the 1802 epidemic. The meaning of disease has changed radically, such that it is no longer the Church apparatuses but state apparatuses that define what disease “is” and how to combat it. Twenty years after the first smallpox epidemic, the government had strengthened its position against local instances of power, and public health had finally become state policy. When a new outbreak was announced in 1802, the viceroy Pedro Mendinueta took a set of measures no longer based on theology but rather on scientific knowledge. In a public announcement written by the chief justice Juan Hernández de Alba in the forced absence of the viceroy, the central government stipulates the following: That no one, of their own accord, administer an inoculation without previously consulting or satisfactorily taking the counsel of a Doctor; understanding that these must be doctors admitted and recognized by public authority, excluding all the rest . . . The Parish Priests, Prelates of Religious Houses, Preachers, and Confessors that exhort the people to offer themselves with docility to the beneficent ideas and merciful desires of the Supreme Government are moreover responsible for dissipating the errors and worries of the masses . . . In order to diminish the evil of the epidemic, the precaution of the previous announcement is also reiterated with respect to the cleanliness of the streets, formally prohibiting the disposal of garbage, rubble, filth, and dead animals, and requiring each citizen to keep the front of their respective house or shop swept, and if this is not done the established penalties will be imposed without exemption . . . Having permitted inoculation as a means to reduce the risk of death from smallpox, and practicing the most active and effective diligences, on the order of the Supreme Government, to request the Vaccine or the material contained in cowpox, with which once inoculated one is absolutely protected from smallpox, let it be the fact that in 1783 Caballero y Góngora commissioned Mutis to draft a report to minister of the Indies José de Galves in which he notified him of the progress being made to combat the epidemic, referring to the close to 1700 people who had been officially inoculated (Silva, 1992b: 41; Alzate, 1999: 4). Furthermore, his own nephew had received the inoculation (Frías Nuñez, 1992: 83). What we see here is Caballero y Góngora, with the collective memory of the Comunero uprising still very fresh, preferring to make use of the voice of the pastor admonishing people for their sins instead of the voice of the enlightened governor organizing a rational crusade against the epidemic. It was not convenient at this moment to boost confidence in human reason, but to the contrary to stimulate the feeling of dependence of vassals on God and the King. On Caballero y Góngora’s great political skill in navigating his double condition of viceroy and archbishop, see, Tisnés, 1984.

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declared and advertised that this permission for smallpox inoculations shall immediately cease once the Vaccine is found and its virtues felt . . . Finally, the Supreme Government, desiring to provide not only to this neighborhood but also to neighboring areas and all areas of the empire, the important protective benefit of the Vaccine, offers the award of 200 pesos to anyone who has the good luck to find it.13

As we can see, the differences between the viceroyal edict of 1782 and the 1802 public announcement are evident with respect to the meaning of the epidemic. The measures taken to avoid contagion no longer involve public prayers and individual repentance, but medical inspection and hygiene.14 The state recommends the method of inoculation, thereby clashing with the most ideologically conservative sectors of the Church, who saw in this practice a point of conflict with divine revelation.15 What smallpox is and how one should combat it is no longer a matter for the Church to define, but rather the state since it has the expert knowledge—the new science—necessary to determine its truth. All other forms of knowledge will be relegated to the order of ignorance and superstition. For this reason, the public announcement subtly urges priests to avoid nourishing “the errors and worries of the masses,” submitting themselves “with docility to the beneficent ideas and merciful desires of the Supreme Government.”16 The doctor, as recipient of this new  “Bando del oidor decano Juan Hernández de Alba, Santa Fe, July 9th, 1802” (Frías Nuñez, 1992: 253–256). 14  In his Disertación físico-médica para la preservación de los pueblos de las viruelas, a mandatory reference text in the colonies following the 1784 royal decree, the enlightened doctor Francisco Gil states that the greatest obstacle to vanquishing the disease is “the piteous deception in which the majority of men live, according to which it is fated that almost everyone will contract this disease, and it would be vain to flee, because in the end all is that which God wants” (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 91). Gil intends to counteract this “piteous deceit” by showing that even though bodily maladies enter the world because of human sin, they are not inevitable, thus God has given humans the means to combat them. In Gil’s opinion, “God has not given rise to any disease, but rather they all owe their origin to natural causes; and if we avoid these, we liberate ourselves from them. This is an invariable truth in conformity with sovereign and beneficent intentions of the Creator” (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 122). 15  Marcelo Frías Núñez sums up this ideological conflict nicely as follows: “[Inoculation] produces a modification in the idea of Nature: its ceases to view nature as something immutable and nature appears increasingly like something that can be modified with the application of technical skill. This idea, at the same time, removed the foundations of a society whose morality was based in a theological understanding: God is the only master of our destiny. All techniques for protection against the future thus appear as an affront to the will of God” (Frías Núñez, 1992: 49–50). The doctor Francisco Gil recognized that the practice of inoculation had many enemies in the Spanish empire, and that in the year 1724 some priests preached against the practice from the pulpit of the Church of San Andrés, claiming that it was a “diabolical invention” and a “gift from Satan” (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 36). 16  Here, it is necessary to distinguish the attitude of different sectors of the Church toward the biopolitical measures of the state. Renán Silva (1992b: 42–44; 98–99) has shown, for example, that even though the practice of inoculation was criticized by the high clergy it was accepted and even promoted by many local parish priests and preachers. 13

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expert knowledge, replaces the priest in the task of diagnosing disease. But the doctor, in turn, and thanks to the institution of the Protomedicato,17 operates as a functionary of the state. The announcement makes clear that only those doctors “admitted and recognized by public authority, excluding all the rest,” may complete the official inspections of these cases.18 It becomes clear that the Bourbon state aspires to not only have a monopoly on violence but also a monopoly on the cultural signification in society, delegitimizing and replacing all other private organizations in this role (the Church, the criollo aristocracy, traditional medicine). It is only by believing itself to possess such a monopoly that the state can prohibit, under the threat of a fine, the throwing of trash into the street and offer a cash reward to whoever discovers the antidote to smallpox.19 So what happened between the smallpox epidemic of 1782 and that of 1802? It could be summed up as follows: a shift occurred from a theological to an economic signification of health and disease. For the state it became critical to prevent the epidemic from taking so many victims from the population, no longer out of Christian charity but because it would decrease the available labor force and consequently the production of wealth. The battle against disease was no longer just a problem of a moral or religious order, but one of economic calculus. Public hygiene and stimulating scientific research were actions promoted by the state because with them it was believed that the state could avoid a decrease in the active laboring population. The obligation of the state was to protect its human resources and safeguard the increase of population, for which public health comes to be an object of strict state regulation. The eradication of smallpox thus becomes a biopolitical question, as was well expressed by Eugenio Espejo, the doctor from Quito, in his Reflections on a Method for Saving the People from Smallpox:

 The Protomedicato was a medical institution consisting of a board of state-appointed doctors that would regulate medical practices, with boards in Spain and its colonies [Tr.]. 18  This measure is due in part to the reservations expressed by Francisco Gil with respect to the effectiveness of vaccination. The Spanish doctor claimed that while vaccination can weaken the strength of the epidemic, its unregulated practice could lead to a greater spreading of the illness, and because of this he recommended strict supervision by a doctor officially endorsed by the state (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 38–40). José Celestino Mutis also claimed that without “all the precautions and resources offered by the science of the professors,” vaccination could lead to “mistakes caused by the unawareness or positive ignorance of the people” (Mutis, 1983 [1796]: 223). 19  In fact, the vaccine had already been discovered in England by doctor Edward Jenner in 1796. Nevertheless, and in light of gravity of the epidemic, it was not possible to wait for the vaccine to be brought from Spain, and so the government worked to acquire the material—present in the udders of cows—on local ranchers’ haciendas. For this, a medical commission was created and tasked with finding the appropriate cows and extracting the vaccine material. In this respect, José Celestino Mutis wrote a short treatise in which he provided instructions on how to recognize, extract, transport, and preserve the viral matter. See: Mutis, 1983 [1802]: 234–236. 17

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The happiness of the state depends on it seeing itself (if I can explain myself in this way) as responsible for a very large population, because the splendor, strength, and power of the people, and consequently of the whole kingdom, depend on the innumerable masses of rational individuals that they provide with utility; and (inevitably) promoting the means of propagating the human species, with the help of its unharmed persistence, is and should be the aim of all patriots. (Espejo, 1985 [1785]: 27–28)

From this perspective, inoculation was seen by enlightened thought as a humanitarian and patriotic action, because with it the depopulation of the viceroyalty could be contained. What might seem at first glance a cruel, reckless, and inhumane action (artificially introducing disease into a healthy body), became in the hands of the state the key to ensuring the progress and happiness of the people. For this reason, Mutis did not hesitate to recommend that newborns be the first to be inoculated, because “artificially accelerating the inevitable experience of smallpox from three to six months in children, would be the secret to increasing the population and relieving families of sorrow” (Mutis, 1993 [1801a]: 132).20 This is also why the Royal expedition that introduced Jenner’s vaccine into New Granada21 was praised by the criollo Miguel de Pombo as an unequivocal sign of humanitarianism and the “paternal affection” of King Carlos IV, who “moved by the havoc caused by smallpox in the colonies, in spite of the shortages of his public funds, the hardships and management of a long war, considers and executes an expensive expedition whose goal is to get us the vaccine” (Pombo, 1942 [1808]: 198).22 For enlightened criollos like Espejo, Mutis, and Pombo, the wisdom of the state can be seen in how it rationally combats obstacles to the growth of

 In his report to the minister of state José Gálvez on the smallpox epidemic of 1782, Mutis stated that if children artificially receive the virus, “it will thus leave the majority of useful inhabitants free of smallpox, from having experienced it in their early years” (Mutis, 1983 [1783a]: 208), author’s emphasis. 21  This was the Royal Philanthropic Expedition sent to the Americas by King Carlos IV in 1803 with the goal of distributing the vaccine against smallpox. In New Granada, this expedition—known as the “Salvani expedition”—was able to carry out more than 56,000 vaccinations according to official reports (Ramírez Martín, 1999: 385–389). 22  Pombo’s praise of Jenner, who discovered the vaccine, was no less enthusiastic, placing him on the level of Harvey, Galileo, and Newton: “While men know to appreciate life, and while they see it as the first of all goods, they will not remember Jenner without blessing his memory, recalling it to their last grandchildren. It would be in good time, Columbus the discoverer of the New World, Galileo the first to measure time with pendulums, Harvey the first who understands the circulation of blood, and Newton the first who unravels and explains the laws of nature . . .  But for you, enlightened Jenner, for you the incomparable glory of having first discovered and communicated from the cow to the human a fluid that protects from the most terrible disease, from a disease that ravaged the countryside, ruined cities, and depopulated the land. This land will cover itself with new inhabitants and it will be you who restored and preserved the human species” (Pombo, 1942 [1808]: 199). 20

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the working population, that “good government” is that which uses scientific knowledge as a means to secure the economic prosperity of the viceroyalty. Ultimately, it was a matter of the pretension to subject the “chaos” of nature—and its two “undesired” manifestations, scarcity and disease—to the dictates of human reason, without having to appeal to judgment by a superior will accessible only through prayers and spells. 3.3 MOTHS DESTROYING THE REPUBLIC In 1791, in the thirteenth issue of the recently founded Papel Periódico de la Ciudad de Santafé de Bogotá, editor Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez offers the following reflection: “To me it seems that if all politicians in the Universe asked themselves the question, ‘what is the most proper means for making a Republic flourish in a short time’?, all would unanimously respond: to establish in every populated part of the district a hospice and a Friends of the Country Economic Society” (Rodríguez, 1978 [1791]: 97). The question is: what does a hospice have to do with the establishment of an economic society? A lot, if we keep in mind that the change in cultural meaning that disease underwent in the eighteenth century also entailed a change in the social status of mendicancy and poverty. Poverty ceased to be seen as an individual eventuality that is the object of Christian charity by the Church, and became instead a disfunction of society which is the object of correction by the state. It was no longer a matter of giving alms to the poor lying in the street, but of integrating the needy into a public rehabilitation apparatus coordinated by the state, converting the “invalid” into someone who is “valid,” and transforming the poor into a useful workforce for society. The economic rationality of the state thus demanded the extirpation of idleness and the promotion of useful work. The link between mendicancy and economics, signaled by Rodríguez, was concretized in New Granada with the creation in 1790 of the Royal Hospice of Santafé, whose aim was to capture alms, classify the needy, and discipline mobile beggars. Under the initiative of Don Francisco Antonio Moreno and with the support of viceroy Ezpeleta, a house was founded to collect beggars equipped with doctors, chaplains, majordomos, administrators, and secretaries, and financed by public alms, and the sale of Black slaves,23 and some

 In the fourth issue of the Correo Curioso, on Tuesday, March 10, 1801, a public announcement stated the following: “For sale. There is to be found at the Royal Hospice House a young slave of good service, ready for hard work; he is married to an Indian woman, who is also young. Whoever would like to buy him should speak with D. Antonio Caxigas, the administrator of said house. He is being sold for the benefit of the poor.”

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state funds. Rodríguez comments on the work of the Royal Hospice in his newspaper with the following words: Having the Hospice arranged in the desired terms, one would no longer find vagrants of either sex in the streets who, trusting in the certainty of nourishment they can attain every day with the alms they collect, do not think of anything else but hiding an infinity of vices behind beggars’ customs . . . With the Hospice, there would not be as much bad upbringing and effeminacy in this large mob of vicious youth and idlers, who do not exert themselves in anything but cultivating paths of iniquity, such that every corner and door of a tavern, from morning until the latest hour of the night, does not offer any sight aside from debauchery, relaxation, indecency, impiety, all sustained and caused by drunkenness . . . With the Hospice, many young and old would no longer become miserably poor, which leads to many illicit love affairs among those who cannot cultivate them in any other way as they become the perfect instruments of this kind of commerce, devastating many houses. (Rodríguez, 1978 [1791]: 98–99)

The purpose of the hospice was therefore to classify and resocialize beggars in order to distinguish between those who were “truly” poor and those who were simply idlers living off of the labor of others. This would allow the viceroyalty to uproot the most dangerous vice for the economic interests of the state: idleness. Certainly, charity toward the poor is a virtue demanded by God in the gospels, but when vice and laziness of others is encouraged under the pretext of charity, one is actually committing “an abuse of the law of Jesus Christ.”24 The editor of Semanario thus advocated an “enlightened and patriotic charity” in which love for one’s neighbor is repurposed by the state into public utility. This would allow for the alms of the people, rather than fomenting laziness, to be channeled toward “a great reform of customs, since by these means we would make useful citizens of those who under the feigned habits of poverty were truly idlers and moths destroying the Republic” (Rodríguez, 1978 [1792]: 327, author’s emphasis). The poor needed to be “collected” not only to prevent the propagation of vices and disease but also to classify them and know who was and was not “rehabilitatable”; who could work and who truly needed medical assistance.  Rodríguez words are harsh toward those who believe that alms are a Christian duty no matter who is asking for them: “Here, sirs, is the family of Jesus Christ so recommended by his law; but here is a people that was not unhappy, if you look at them with a more rational compassion, with a more enlightened and generous charity, it is your fault that they remain in this miserable misfortune, because you do not want to give them more dignified alms than religion, more laudable for your zeal, more glorious for the fatherland, and more useful for themselves. That is to say, alms that redeem them once and for all from having to beg for alms” (Rodríguez, 1978 [1791]: 105).

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Only the doctor had the authority to decide who could be excused from productive labor, after subjecting beggars to a rigorous physical exam. Rodríguez thinks that the lame, amputees, and the blind, even if they are old, should not be seen as “civil cadavers” or “wandering specters of society,” since they can still learn a useful trade.25 Everyone, including women and children, can and should work for their own support and for the benefit of the community. The function of the Royal Hospice was precisely to help these individuals learn all sorts of manufacturing useful for commerce: spinning, linens, separating cotton, making wax candles (Rodríguez, 1978 [1791]: 142). No mendicant at the Hospice should remain without work, unless a doctor certified that their physical disability required a period of recovery and rehabilitation, for which the Royal Hospice should also be prepared. It is exactly this model of hospice workshop that José Ignacio de Pombo proposed for the Cartagena project cited previously: We have not spoken of the factories with respect to the raw materials the provinces produce, such as fique, agave, cotton, etc., and especially the most ordinary, easy, and common, that have most interest for consumption, and give work to the greatest number of hands; because their establishment goes alongside the proposal for the Hospice, where they will establish the teachers needed to train them, along with machines and instruments corresponding to the effort. Intelligent men will emerge from these workshops and will establish others in every province. (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 188)

In addition to developing the work of unproductive sectors, the medicalization of poverty had another important economic function: stimulating population growth. Combating the vices of the streets would not only extend productive life—since vices weaken the health of the body—but would also stimulate the reproduction of healthy bodies “useful to the state.” It is not strange, then, that in the same issue in which he writes about the economic function of the Royal Hospice (Friday, May 6, 1791), the editor of Papel

 “One-armed amputees, that class of men we see as absolutely useless, except for walking, could have occupations that make use of the scarce power that they have; given that their number is quite small such that there are perhaps only six in the capital city, seeing that there is no purpose they can serve, it will be enough to remove them from the streets, carrying out at the same time two dignified works of religion and politics. First, offering them rest that they could never enjoy in their miserable lives as beggars; and second, removing the risk of vice that not only they can fall into but that unwary youth will also follow by example. Nor should the blind be considered as specters and wandering specters of society. They are men who can serve in some fashion, repaying with the work of their hands the food that is provided them. Lack of vision is not a lack of power that incapacitates for any kind of occupation: they can work at pottery, palm weaving, and separating cotton; and work in other manufactures according to their respective abilities” (Rodríguez, 1978 [1791]: 143).

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Periódico announces a prize of fifty pesos for the discourse proposing the best solutions to the problem of the depopulation of New Granada.26 The criollo Diego Martín Tanco, winner of the announced competition, explained in his Discourse on Population that the best way to achieve this objective was “to employ the inhabitants without exception of sex, age, and faculties, so that the result would be opulence, the power of the state, its abundant population, and a good extensive to all the kinds of hierarchies” (Tanco, 1978 [1792]: 130). In his Discourse, Tanco agrees point by point with Rodríguez in asserting that the problem of New Granada is not so much the small number of inhabitants, but the insalubrity and immorality of those who are there: A Kingdom should not be called well-populated even if it is overflowing with inhabitants, if they are not hard-working and do not usefully employ themselves in those tasks that produce food, clothing, adornment, and other things needed for the comforts of life. That would be merely a multitude of idlers whose very inaction would bring them quickly toward their end, their posterity on this earth soon disappearing because a man without work is filled with vices, which morally turns him into a terrible and vile monster of society; and physically fills him with ills that are passed on uninterrupted to his children and grandchildren. (Tanco, 1978 [1792]: 130, author’s emphasis)

The message is clear: disease, vice, and unproductive labor are factors that contribute to the de-population of the viceroyalty and infringe upon the economic prosperity of the Spanish empire. It is thus necessary to rehabilitate the sick population of New Granada, not only physically but also morally. The sickness of the body and the soul mutually condition one another. This is why the “great reform of customs” announced by Rodríguez y Tanco is centered on an ethics of work and efficiency inspired by state apparatuses such as the Royal Hospice. The hospital, which up to this point occupied a domain separate from medicine, now became a center for physical and moral rehabilitation, since its function was to intervene on the body of the sick to restore its productive energy through the application of expert knowledge. The medicalization of poverty begins only when health and disease become  “A native subject and citizen of this capital, knowing that they could never achieve the true happiness of the Kingdom without achieving an increase in the population; mindful that a good patriot ought not only work for the time of their existence, but for their posterity, just as our fathers did, the quantity of fifty pesos is offered to whomever produces a Discourse showing with solid and well-founded reasons how to increase population in such a way that in forty or fifty years one could probably expect a significant transformation of the arts, industry, and other areas that form the good of the state of a Republic. Said discourse should be composed with the utmost clarity, shining forth with the elegance of vigorous and demonstrative reasoning. The measures proposed ought to be the most simple and straightforward, such that the project does not result in great costs to the Royal Treasury, nor in taxes on the public.”

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economic variables, that is to say, when the hospice becomes a curative mechanism in the service of the productive apparatus. The capuchin Friar Joaquín de Finestrad also understands idleness and poverty as grave obstacles to the prosperity of the viceroyalty. If what the government seeks is “to establish a new political edifice” which would put Spain in a position “capable of making her respectable in all of Europe,” then it is necessary to begin with a profound reform of the habits of the population (Finestrad, 2000 [1789]: 148). Reforming administrative and political structures is worth nothing if the morality of the governed is not first transformed. For this reason, the government’s attention should be focused on permanently uprooting vagrancy and idleness, which are the principal “spiritual maladies” of New Granada. Finestrad considers idleness to be a disease, that is, a deviation from the normal conduct established by human nature, because even in wild animals “indolence and idleness is foreign to them, and continued occupation is natural” (148). So the mission of government should be to collect vagrants and confine them, separating them from the rest of society: Gathering up the idlers, wayward, and layabouts is an important aim of Government. Tolerance for these monsters of the Republic, far from being useful to the Crown, is harmful to its preservation. An infected limb is cut from the human body to prevent the contagion from spreading to the rest of the body. Idlers, the wayward, and layabouts are corrupted members of the Republic and it is necessary to isolate them in order to preserve its good order and splendor. (Finestrad, 2000 [1789]: 148)

Here, poverty acquires a very different status than the one it held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: now it is equated with public uselessness and it requires medico-political treatment. In fact, the medical metaphors Finestrad uses (“corrupted member”) are quite clear in this respect: the poor should be treated as sick beings that require medical and spiritual attention. Given that the purpose of the Bourbon reforms was to place Spain within the dynamic of the second modernity that haunted all of Europe like a specter, it is not strange that idleness would be perceived as an unpatriotic or even unnatural conduct. For enlightenment thought, it was “natural” for productive labor to be the instrument allowing the definitive overcoming of scarcity. The humanity of the human was precisely its capacity to destroy and expel the chaos of nature, converting it through work and technology into an ordered entity. As such, the vagrant and the needy are held to be sick beings, if not subhumans (monsters of the Republic), since their attitude is not one of actively transforming nature but of defending themselves from it, passively resigning themselves to live in dependency on others. The obligation of the

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state is thus to resocialize such people through confinement in hospitals, with the goal of turning them into productive subjects. 3.4 THE HOSPITAL AS THE DREAM OF REASON “Gathering up the poor”—as Finestrad put it—meant confining them in hospitals intended to rehabilitate their physical health, making their “body useful to the nation.” But if the sick and the poor now needed be cured, the old structure of the colonial hospital would have to be completely updated. Zero-point hubris demanded the immediate substitution of the new for the old. To do so, the hospital needed to be rationally designed in advance, not only administratively, but also architecturally and geographically. It needed to be turned into a small laboratory sketched out a priori where one could put the rational control over nature into practice. Like Platonic forms, the hospital belonged to the intelligible world, since it first had to be thought, conceived rationally, before being implemented in the sensible world. First a rational model of the hospital had to be elaborated and later this model could be translated to empirical reality, such that only in a space conceived more geometrico could the poor and the sick internalize and incorporate the rational order dreamed by the state into their habitus. Prior design on the basis of an ordered rationality is thus one of the characteristics of the biopolitics of the hospital. In 1789, the chief magistrate of Zipaquirá, don Pedro Fermín de Vargas, complained to the viceroy of the “poor construction” of houses in the parish and commented that, “it is advisable to remedy the political and moral evils resulting from this.” “Your excellency,” he argues, “knows how much the comfort of buildings influences public health and how many plagues have owed their origin to their neglect” (Vargas, 1944 [1789d]: 141). He therefore proposed that the hospital building be constructed according to architectural norms established a priori to facilitate the full recovery of the sick: We know from repeated terrible experiences the great problems caused by hospitals, the proximity of the sick, making diseases oftentimes incurable by this terrible method. Toward this end, the Zipaquirá hospital will have infirmary rooms of corresponding length and width, not only to avoid the proximity of the sick but also to provide the needed relief for their treatment and so that dependents can enter without obstacle. Every room will have a number of windows corresponding to its size, so that the air is not corrupted, but there will be no connection between rooms except through corridors. (Vargas, 1944 [1789d]: 124)

Unity, functionality, and, above all, rigorous order, are the characteristics of hospital architecture indicated by Vargas. Order should have been established

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before the hospital exists since this would impede any future disorder. The design for this order falls to enlightened men who possess the knowledge required to successfully combat the undesired effects of nature. Insofar as they were “dreamers of order,” men of science were tasked with “seeing to foresee”; with constructing a rational model that could anticipate the movements of nature with the aim of controlling them. Prior to being an empirical reality, the hospital should be established as an idea, installed as a universal space of order to combat all that which deviates from the dreamed and desired norm. Just as disease is nothing but a “perverse consequence” of our ignorance of natural laws, so too must the hospital reflect the intelligible order of these laws in the sensible world. Only in this way can disease be completely understood and eradicated. José Ignacio de Pombo also imagined a rational distribution of spaces for his ambitious project to renovate the Hospital of San Juan de Dios in Cartagena. Not only did the hospital need dedicated rooms and halls to attend to the sick, but also sufficient space to assemble a veritable medical school within, including a botanical garden, a department of zoology, and an astronomical observatory: The Hospital of San Juan de Dios offers as many comforts and advantages as can be desired to establish the complete study of Medicine, Surgery, Pharmacy, and Anatomy, with a good Anatomical theater for the dissection of cadavers; for the school of Chemistry, its laboratory; for Minerology its corresponding collection; for Zoology, its department; and also for an Astronomical Observatory with its meridian telescope and all other necessities which are no less important; and all of this not only without harm to the Hospital and its poor and sick, but with the known utility of these studies and their teaching. The great capacity and extension of said building and factory in all directions, knowing how to take advantage of it and distribute it properly, and an advantageous location for relations with the indicated establishments, make it the most suited location in all of the city for these ends. (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 181)

It is not only the architecture but also the hospital’s location that needed to be thought out in advance. Above all in those areas prone to epidemics, it was advisable to build hospitals outside of town and in high places where the wind blows to prevent the spread of “fetid air.”27 In his 1784 Disertación físico-médica, the Spanish doctor Francisco Gil proposes to the government  The science of the period supported the opinion of the count of Combie-Blanche, who in issue 57 of Papel Periódico (Friday, March 16, 1792) asserted the following: “The observations of all centuries and all Nations concur to prove indisputably, that fetid air is the immediate cause of all pestilent contagions, be they endemic or epidemic.”

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in Madrid the creation of “field houses” for the recovery of those infected with smallpox. The objective of these houses was to submit the infected to a constant surveillance by the doctor, isolating them from all contact with the outside world and in this way avoiding the spread of the disease in densely populated areas (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 60; 62). The idea of the hospital was understood and designed as a machine for surveillance and recovery, thus its objective was to reestablish the health of the sick, returning to them the corporeal faculties needed to serve society usefully. Gil’s recommendation was therefore to “have the hospital outside of the city, where you can keep the inoculated until their full recovery.”28 Doctor Francisco Gil’s a priori design became empirical reality in New Granada when the smallpox epidemic suddenly broke out in 1802.29 Immediately, viceroy Mendinueta ordered a small hospital to be established on the outskirts of the city to care for those first infected. However, faced with the magnitude of the epidemic, the government decided to completely isolate Bogotá through the creation of hygienic zones (also called “degredos”) which everyone who entered the city was required to pass through. In addition to their curative function, degredos operated as a rigorous mechanism of sanitary control. Every traveler was suspected of carrying the disease and therefore subjected to a careful interrogation in which the authorities would investigate their geographic origin,30 other people they had been in contact with, as well as their clothing and kind of merchandise that they were transporting.31 Each person needed to undress and ventilate their clothing, while also being examined by a doctor to determine if they should remain in quarantine (Silva,

 It is interesting to observe that not only hospitals but also schools should be constructed according to a priori rational models. This design should guarantee that the wind will carry away all “fetid vapors” from the school and also facilitate constant surveillance by the teacher. The criollo Diego Martín Tanco, in his Discurso sobre la educación, stated: “The building that is to serve as the school should not, as a matter of fact, be in the center of the city or neighborhood, but rather in its most isolated area, far from all the bustle that can attract the attention of the children and distract them from their obligations. If it can be high up, that is preferred over lower areas, as it is healthier, better ventilated, and has more agreeable views. On the main entry door from the street, a sign with beautiful golden letters shall be hung: SCHOOL OF THE HOMELAND, so that it is known and respected by the public. The instruction room for the children should be large and well-lit; and in it the director should also have his seat, such that they can see what each one is doing, and nothing is hidden, without the need of making use of the care of others” (Tanco, 1942 [1808b]: 86–87), author’s emphasis. 29  The minister of the Indies, José Gálvez, had sent Gil’s work to all of the colonies so that their respective authorities could follow his prescriptions (Frías Núñez, 1992: 113). The town council of Quito convened a group of doctors to study Gil’s treatise and they submitted their written commentaries. One of the texts turned in to the council was Eugenio Espejo’s Reflexiones. 30  The common opinion was that epidemics almost always came from the ports of the Caribbean Sea (especially Cartagena) and that from there they traveled down the Magdalena river, through Mompox, toward the interior of the Kingdom (Silva, 1992b: 13). 31  Control was directed above all toward wool and cotton garments, as Francisco Gil’s Disertación argued that these materials transported contagion (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 62). 28

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1992b: 15). The degredo thereby became the empirical concretization of an ideal model, that as I stated, sought the social establishment of order. In effect, we know that as a result of the 1802 epidemic, the construction of degredos was accompanied by rigorous policing measures in the city of Bogotá. With the goal of rapidly identifying and isolating the sick, the town council [cabildo] arranged the creation of a health council responsible for coordinating systematic inspections of the city’s eight neighborhoods (Rodríguez González, 1999: 38). The health council, composed of two doctors in addition to commissioners and leading citizens [vecinos principales] from each neighborhood, was given the task of inspecting the city block by block and street by street to locate the sick and determine to which population group they belonged. Frías Núñez (1992: 136) states that in the houses of the “leading citizens,” inspectors were limited to knocking on the door and asking if there was anyone sick inside, while in the houses where “people of color” lived a painstaking search was carried out. Once they were identified by the sanitary police, those suspected of carrying the disease were to be forcibly detained in one of the four degredo hospitals built for this purpose. There they were examined by the doctor, the custodian of expert knowledge with which they could determine who was sick and what treatment was needed to reintegrate them into public life. But the empirical instantiation of the “enlightened dream” seemed to exceed the financial and administrative capacities of the Crown. The construction and maintenance of hospitals designed in this way required not only a specific cognitive competency (expert knowledge of a formal character, and professionals who embody this knowledge) but also a high level of rationalization at the political and bureaucratic levels. It was necessary to impose new taxes, to reorganize those already existing, and to channel these resources toward the new sphere of “public health.” It was also necessary to create price control mechanisms to prevent speculators from taking advantage of health crises for their own benefit (Silva, 1992b: 75). Added on top of this was the need to coordinate systematic censuses of the population, process the information obtained, administratively reorganize cities and towns according to this information, create new sanitary laws, and implement fines for infractions, and so on. In sum, state biopolitics required setting into motion a type of rationality aimed at establishing technically realizable objectives, maximizing resources, minimizing costs, and taking advantage of the existing workforce with the maximum possible degree of efficiency. The condition of possibility for the realization of the enlightened dream was, in turn, another dream of reason. We can see an example of this in the proposed hospital policy for the Spanish state formulated by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa. The two Bourbon functionaries strongly criticized the irrational way (the “bad

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providence”) that the question of health had been managed up to that point. The reason for this bad policy is that the state had allowed criollo hacendados to consider Black people and Indians to be private property, as though their labor force belonged to them exclusively and not to the “public happiness.” So when these people were beset with epidemics, the state would avoid responsibility for their care, leaving them in private hands32 instead of establishing public hospitals in each town, where people could be cured and promptly returned to work: There is not a Hacienda, of either the regular or secular clergy, or laypeople, that does not make this kind of use of Indians in all of Perú, with the exception of the sugar mills and factories that the Society has in the Quito province, and the haciendas of the valley that belong to all kinds of people who work employing Black people. In this supposition we can say without taking distance from the complete rigor of the truth, that the Indians are the ones who work all the haciendas, factories, mines, and as mule-drivers to traffic between places; and things being such as they are, it seems that it is just that all those who use the labor of the Indians contribute to their recovery when they are ill, such that their numbers do not diminish; since the greater the number of Indian workers the greater the profits from their labor. (Juan and Ulloa, 1983 [1826]: 325, author’s emphasis)

What, then, did the rational design elaborated by Juan and Ulloa consist of? First, it signaled that the function of the state was to optimize the available workforce in its territories and channel it toward activities that are useful for the community. This implied, in the second place, granting a new status to Black and Indian labor. Instead of seeing them as slaves destined for the “personal service” of private individuals, the state should see them as workers that produce wealth for the whole of society. The rationality of state policy, in the model of Juan and Ulloa, is measured according to strictly economic criteria. The greater the number of healthy individuals, the greater the rate of population growth and “the greater the profits from their labor.” And if it is Indians, Black people, and mestizos who sustain the economy then the duty of the state is to safeguard their health and allocate adequate means to cure them when they are sick.  Left to the piety of their white masters, Indians and Black people died by the thousands with the onset of epidemics, “as it is said in the first part of History, their shelter is reduced to a poor shack without any furniture . . . Disease attacks them in this state, and taking its regular course it is fatal for their lives. There is no one else to help them there except the women of the Indians, and no medicine but nature, nor any other gift for nourishment but herbs, cancha or mote, mascha and chicha: thus not only smallpox, but any other serious illness is fatal for them from the outset” (Juan and Ulloa, 1983 [1826]: 321).

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In the third place, Juan and Ulloa proposed the creation of public hospitals in every town, financed with taxes on the production of sugar cane and alcohol. No person or private entity would be exempt from this tax obligation (or, “right to hospitality”), not even the Catholic Church, which owned the largest mills. Equally, the encomenderos should be required by law to construct infirmaries on their haciendas so that Indians could receive free medical attention. However, since the Indians themselves benefit from this medical care, they should be taxed “one or two more reales in addition to their annual tribute.” Finally, Juan and Ulloa believed that the administration of these new hospitals should not be granted to the Brothers of San Juan de Dios, as this would “add riches on top of what these communities already have, without public benefit or hope thereof.” Economic management of the hospitals should instead be entrusted to the Jesuits, whose “wise conduct” in the rational administration of their business is well known.33 Juan and Ulloa’s rational plan was not translated into empirical reality by the Spanish Crown, but it is a good example of the way hospital policy initially emerged as a “project of the mind”—to use the expression of Rama (1996: 9). As is well known, Ángel Rama refers to the dream of the utopians and Renaissance architects who founded cities in the colonial Américas according to preestablished models.34 But his theory of the “lettered city” helps us to understand how rational plans for the hospital, even if never implemented in practice, served to establish the dominion of a symbolic order that consolidated the ethnic, social, and cultural hegemony of criollos. 3.5 THE TAMING OF CHANCE The establishment of a hospital structure oriented toward the reestablishment of physical and moral health formed part of the Bourbon project of rationalizing the economic and administrative structure of the empire. The  “The immediate receipt of all the assigned hospitals should go to the Society without getting into the royal houses, nor with intervention from the Officials of the Royal Hacienda . . . Similarly, the power to name necessary administrators and custodians should be granted to the Society so that they receive the rights to the hospitals, with the intervention of the prosecutor-protector.” 34  “Before becoming a material reality of houses, streets, and plazas, which could be constructed only gradually over decades or centuries, Latin American cities sprang forth in signs and plans, already complete, in the documents that laid their statutory foundations and in the charts and plans that established their ideal designs, with the fatal regularity that lurks in the dreams of reason . . . The dreams of architects (Alberti, Filarete, and Vitruvio) and designers of utopias (More, Campanella) came to little in material terms, but they fortified the order of signs, extending the rhetorical capacity of this instrument of absolutism to impose hierarchical order on sprawling empires. Born of circumstances specific to the age, the influence of these urbanistic designs far outlasted it. Such is the nature of the order of signs that it privileges potentiality over reality, creating frameworks that, if not eternal, have lasted and can still be found today” (Rama, 1996, 8–9). 33

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integration of the workforce into the market required on the one hand that disease no longer be understood as individual but instead social, and on the other that an inventory of populations be carried out in order to understand the evolution of the state of their health. But this inventory also required the use of an instrument of knowledge—mathematics—that would make the social measurement of disease possible. “Mathematical reason” would make it possible to banish the idea that health and disease were questions of chance or divine will, showing that the entire universe is subject to cause and effect and that knowledge of this order can be rationally discovered by science and used wisely by the state. Under the influence of Newton, which had already been felt in New Granada since before the arrival of Mutis, a mechanistic vision of the world and nature was being gradually imposed in official circles of the eighteenth century.35 Enlightened New Granadians believed that the entirety of nature was governed by constant and eternal laws that could be formulated mathematically by human reason.36 In his inaugural lecture as the chair of mathematics in 1762, Mutis stated that when God created the machine of the world “everything was arranged by number, weight, and measure with such a fixed order and foundation that the same movements of those very first centuries will reverberate until the last” (Mutis, 1983 [1762]: 41). If everything in the universe is subject to fixed laws, then there is nothing that cannot be known through mathematics. Thus, Mutis claimed that no other form of knowledge could turn out to be more useful to the state, since “all the ministries, departments, practices, occupations, and employments worthy of man are copiously illuminated by mathematics.” Medicine, of course, does not elude this universal applicability of mathematical thought. According to Mutis, all the

 Since 1740, the colleges of the Society of Jesus in Quito and Bogotá had promoted the teaching of authors like Newton, Copernicus, and Descartes. Christian Wolff’s Elements of All the Mathematical Sciences was widely circulated in New Granada, as can be seen by the repeated appearance of this text in inventories of elite criollo libraries and colonial universities (Quintero, 1999; Ortiz Rodríguez, 2003: 28–30). 36  The unshakeable confidence in man and the power of reason to dominate the forces of nature through knowledge was an important part of the enlightened imaginary. The criollo José Félix de Restrepo, in a lecture given in 1791 to the students of the Royal Seminary of Saint Francis of Assisi in Popayán, claimed that with respect to man “there is nothing that can resist his thought, the sole origin of his sovereign authority . . . To aid the forces of the eyes, according to the laws of a wise theory, thought creates instruments whose support extends the image of the object, illuminates, and brings it close. With the help of the microscope thought penetrates the interior of bodies, distinguishes imperceptible parts, and contemplates the marvels of its composition in wonder . . . Even though his height does not exceed six feet, he dares to refine a project that a giant with a thousand arms would not have the audacity to attempt; the winds become his vassals and servants, taking him to the other side of the widest seas; he tames the beasts of the forests. He constructs ships that will serve his grandchildren and their descendants. He marks out the movements of lightning, the most terrible phenomenon we know, and he makes a bridge to Rhône that will so shock posterity that it will be attributed to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit” (Restrepo, 2002 [1791]: 416). 35

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laws governing the universe can also be observed in that “small world” that is the human body. “It would be exhaustive,” he argued, “to want to name in detail all the parts of the human body whose movements are in tune with the laws of mechanics, without which it is impossible to understand the physics of the human body” (42). The usefulness of mathematics for medicine was not only rooted in understanding the laws of the body, but also in the creation of instruments that would allow one to measure the frequency of disease. Population censuses were founded on the idea that empirical facts—and in this case social facts— could be abstracted and converted into quantities that could be analyzed, compared, and processed with a high degree of certainty. The “data” thus obtained could be used by the state to develop government policy toward the population in order to promote “public happiness.” The state certainly needed a healthy population that could work efficiently, but it also needed to know how many actual and potential workers there were in the territory, the number of births and deaths, who these people were, where they lived, their “life expectancy,” how many had been admitted to the hospital with illnesses, what kind of sickness were they afflicted with, the percentage of the sick who recovered, and so on. Thus, interest in the application of mathematics to the “science of good government” was born, as a biopolitical instrument that would allow the state to know and effectively administer the available human resources. From this perspective, Joaquín de Finestrad, cited above, proposed periodic population censuses with the following argument: For the better order and repair of the Republic the knowledge of the families that compose it with the impartial distribution of different classes of individuals that make up the neighborhood is necessary. To calculate consumption the most exact reporting of the number of habitants in each province, their customs, occupations, character, and constitution is necessary. With this knowledge the Government could remedy so much illness . . . The good aristocrats will be known, the unruly will not be disguised, the bastard children of society will be seen, and the traitors, murderers, thieves, and seditious will not have a city of refuge. (Finestrad, 2000 [1789]: 161)

The censuses served not only to exercise strict police control over the population, as Finestad wanted but also to calculate their growth rate and state of health. In the report on the first general census of the population of Bogotá, published in the fifth and sixth issues of Correo Curioso, Francisco José de Caldas states that the benign climate of the capital, the salubrity of its atmosphere “which is rarely infested with pestilent vapors” and the “great fertility of the women,” give hope that the population will grow rapidly and

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that Bogotá will become “one of the greatest and most populous cities in the world” (Caldas, 1993 [1801]: 38). The city had 20,081 inhabitants, 11,890 of whom were women and only 8,191 men: a situation that does not seem to worry the wise New Granadian. The abundance of women is instead promising, since the number of “useful arms for the homeland” would potentially be increased, as demonstrated by the fact that births exceeded deaths by 247 persons in 1800. It was even more important to quantify the number of persons admitted to hospitals and to know how many of them had died or recovered. Caldas reported that 1,723 people entered the Hospital San Juan de Dios in 1800, of which only 274 died and 1,449 were cured. It was encouraging to learn that of these 1,723 people, 1,522 were poor or beggars (88 percent), of whom only 268 died (15 percent). The report proudly suggested that royal policies of collecting the poor were working, even though there was still much to do since the number of beggars and vagrants “who did not have permanent housing” was around 500 in the city. It was also important to know where these people lived and how their homes were distributed in order to exercise more effective sanitary control in case of epidemics. Caldas said that in Bogotá there were eight neighborhoods with 195 blocks and 4,517 doors, with the peripheral neighborhood of Nieves (inhabited primarily by mestizo artisans) being the most populated among these. Enthusiasm for statistics also spread to various rural parish priests, who meticulously recorded the number of births, deaths, and marriages every year and sent these to the newspapers. This allowed authorities to calculate population growth in every part of the viceroyalty. Priests who collected data were publicly recognized as “protectors of the public good” and held up as examples for others. This was the case for the priest Francisco Mosquera, whose labor was recognized by Caldas, who was at that time editor of the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada. Mosquera carried out the work of producing birth and death statistics in the city of Popayán between 1800 and 1804 by using the city’s parish records. “If all parish priests,” wrote Caldas, “were driven by the zeal of that of Popayán, they would carry out the most important service to the State, giving light to the population. This is the true political thermometer: here we know the salubrity of the climate, the ease of subsistence, the fertility of marriages, and a hundred other notions necessary for those careful to rule us, and with which they can reflect on the economy and happiness of the homeland” (Caldas, 1942 [1809b]: 195). Populational statistics were used, as Caldas states, to know the “salubrity of the climate” and thus prevent the spread of epidemics. This was the case with statistics on illness and death between 1802 and 1807 in the Hospital de Popayán, also published in Semanario. These statistics showed that of 4,975 sick patients 305 had died, and that the majority of these deaths occurred between 1805 and 1806. From this, Caldas concluded that it is likely that at

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this time the atmosphere of the city was carrying “pestilent vapors” and that it would be important to provide hospitals with measuring instruments to record climatic variations: Would this knowledge designed for an individual in every hospital to keep a detailed record of the readings of these instruments not be worth it? Would it not be rather interesting to add to these [statistical] lists the number of those sick, with a note of their disease and its major occurrences? To publish every year the result with the number of deaths?  . . . All of these instruments are of little expense and can be easily obtained. It would be for the good of the prelates in charge of these hospitals for such machines to be supplied, as indispensable as necessary as opium and ipecac to tend to the necessities of the sick. (Caldas, 1942 [1809c]: 14)

Statistics and instruments for quantitative measurement began to be seen as means in service of the fundamental objective of the state: increasing of economic productivity of the population. It was not mathematics per se but rather its social application that interested the Bourbon state, that is, mathematics as an enabler of a technology of population control. Taming chance and subjecting disease to a policy of order thus became central elements of imperial biopolitics. For this, it became necessary to link mathematics to a number of empirical factors (transformed into “variables”) that seemed totally unrelated in the eyes of the common person: the number of births and deaths per year, the size of the territory, the distribution of the population by region, race, and sex, royal income from taxes, the production and consumption of food, the price of supplies, the fertility rate of marriages, the temperature of cities and the countryside, the number and age of those sick from epidemics, the intensity of internal and external commerce, and so on. Thanks to all of these calculations one could deduce the state’s present and future capacity to administer the productive life of the population. In his Memoria sobre la población del Reino, the criollo Pedro Fermín de Vargas makes a similar calculation, albeit much less optimistic than that of Caldas: To know how low the resources of this population are and how little can be expected of them, one need only calculate the number of births every year, supposing as I said that the number of inhabitants of the Kingdom is 2,000,000; and relating the number of births to those existing in a ratio of 1 in 23 or 24, and even higher in the cities depending on commerce and size, where we calculate a mean that will be 24, thus: 2,000,000 over this number, the result is 83,333, which is the number of births in an average year. In the same way we know that the number of deaths of those living is around 1 in 29; and making the same

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calculation the result is 68,895 deaths in an average year, which subtracted from the 83,333, leaves 14,368, which would be our population increase each year; and thus according to the same principle, in 25 [years] the population will be 3,059,200, with a small margin. Thus, in order for this colony to reach the population that it needs and can support, many centuries would need to pass without any epidemics of disease, nor other causes that counter this increase. (Vargas, 1944 [1789c]: 94–95)

Here, Fermín de Vargas uses statistical data as a form of reasoning that quantifies the human with utilitarian aims of social control. Sequential tables allow the state to take an inventory of human beings and their habits with the goal of imposing taxes, exploiting natural resources, and “ordering society” according to a priori rational parameters. The goal was to know chance in order to subject it to an arithmetic of order; but above all else, to control deviant factors—in this case disease and poverty—in order to channel and integrate them into a project of governmentality designed by the state and its enlightened technocrats. 3.6 LICENSE TO CURE In addition to the hospital and populational statistics, the political economy of health had one of its most effective instruments in the “Royal Court of the Protomedicato.” This was an institution created by the King and Queen of Spain with the purpose of regulating and surveilling the professional practice of doctors, surgeons, and pharmacists.37 Through this institution of control, the state sought to centralize and professionalize available human resources, prohibiting the practice of medicine to those who did not have the required “license to cure.” Among the most important responsibilities of the court were the following38: • To examine graduates requesting to professionally practice the “art of medicine.” Once all of the documents presented had been meticulously reviewed, including a written declaration of the candidate’s “blood purity,” the Court would summon them for a rigorous examination evaluating their theoretical and practical knowledge. The examiners, also called “synodals,” were generally professors of medicine, anatomy, and surgery. • To periodically visit pharmacies to inspect the quality of medication dispensed to the public. The visitor, accompanied by a pharmacy professor,  On the history of the regulation of medical practice in medieval Spain, see: Ruiz Moreno, 1946.  All of this information is drawn from Tate Lanning, 1997.

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would examine the pharmacy’s accreditation document, the books used for preparing the medications (weights and measurements) and the most sold medicines: salts, oils, balms, purgatives, salves, syrups, tinctures, and flowers. If these did not meet the quality requirements established by the court, the pharmacy in question was closed and the owner fined. • To oversee the legal practice of medicine and surgery. Illicit bloodletting, operations, and “empirical” treatments for illness were severely punished by law, such that the Court would carry out inspections of doctors, surgeons, and bloodletters to check their qualifications and licenses to practice. Those who did not have their documents in order were reported to the local authorities and sanctioned with fines. In cases where somebody died due to the administration of medicine or treatment at the hand of someone without authorization, the punishment was inevitably prison. • To monitor the advertisement of remedies and medicines in newspapers. This is due to the fact that at the end of the eighteenth century, many newspapers and gazettes were publishing advertisements and promoting recent discoveries against muscular pains, toothaches, diarrhea, and other common ailments. The Court required that all remedies first be examined by an authorized doctor prior to being published. When a drug was advertised without authorization, the Court could initiate legal proceedings against the owners of the newspaper. While the Spanish crown established Courts in what are today Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and Chile, there are no signs of the existence of a medical police with these characteristics in New Granada. All that is known is that there were figures that occasionally performed the function of the protomedicos but from this we cannot deduce the presence of an institution capable of carrying out the normative and punitive tasks described above.39  Summing up advances in medicine during the first 162 years of the colony in Colombia, doctor Pedro María Ibáñez noted “the arrival of the first doctor to Santa Fe and the creation of the Protomedicato” (Ibáñez, 1968 [1884]: 15). According to his own information, Ibáñez referred to the arrival of Spanish doctor Diego Hernández in 1639, named by the King to perform the functions of the protomedico, to whom the Archbishop Brother Cristóbal de Torres awarded an annual salary of 350 pesos. However, he later noted that the “position of the Protomedico was vacant after the death of doctor Diego Hernández, and the King named viceroy Solís in 1758 to don Vicente Román Cancino.” For his part, Emilio Quevedo (1993: 55; 59), appealing to documents published by the historian Guillermo Hernández de Alba, emphasizes that doctor Hernández only spent ten years in Bogotá, that is, until 1649, in part because the faculty of medicine at the Colegio Mayor del Rosario had to be closed due to a lack of students. Moreover, Quevedo shows that all that is known of Vicente Román Cancino is that he held the chair in medicine at the Colegio del Rosario when it reopened in 1753, but not that he was the head of a Protomedicato capable of acting as medical police. All of this means that discounting the few individual activities of Hernández and Cancino, the Royal Tribunal of the Protomedicato never existed in Bogotá. We also know little about the activities of the Protomedicato in Cartagena, apart from the fact that it was staffed by various doctors (Solano Alonso, 1998).

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Nevertheless, an examination of the conflict that took place at the dawn of the nineteenth century between state health policy and the interests of the criollo aristocracy with respect to the Protomedicato could be useful in understanding the conflict between imperial biopolitics and the coloniality of power, which I already discussed in the previous chapter. I will refer first of all to the dispute that took place in Cartagena over the protomedico position left vacant as a result of the death of its previous holder, Doctor Francisco Javier Pérez. Two candidates were nominated to fill this position: the criollo doctor Alejandro Gastelbondo who studied in the Colegio Mayor del Rosario in Bogotá and was the disciple of Vicente Román Cancino, and the Spanish doctor Juan de Arias, a graduate from Cádiz and disciple of the surgeon Pedro Virgili (also the teacher of Mutis). Even though Gastelbondo possessed great experience as a doctor in the Hospital of San Juan de Dios in Bogotá and in the Military Hospital of San Carlos in Cartagena, and Arias had only arrived in New Granada in 1784, the position was irrevocably awarded to the latter by viceroy Mendinueta in 1797. The reason: despite having his degree, Gastelbondo had not been a professor of anatomy and surgery, and above all he was a pardo (Quevedo, 1993: 125–127). To be able to practice, Spanish law required that all “Latin” doctors—that is, those with a university degree in medicine—be legitimate children. We already saw in the previous chapter that legitimacy operated as mechanism of ethnic differentiation in colonial society. In the case of Gastelbondo, however, the legal argument employed to impugn his candidacy was not that he was a bastard, but that he had mixed blood and therefore belonged to one of the castes. The “infamy” of his birth excluded him from the practice of medicine according to the statutes of the university that, as we saw, prevented all those who could not demonstrate the purity of their blood from entering their halls. The question is why doctor Gastelbondo’s “impurity” was ignored and never registered in the files of the Colegio Mayor del Rosario? Why did they allow him to matriculate, graduate, and practice medicine for so many years without a problem? One possible response is that local needs prevented the law from being strictly enforced. Smallpox epidemics hit rural areas hard, where the only possibility of medical treatment was offered by traditional masseuses and healers. In some cases, the sick were cared for by barbers or “romancista,” surgeons who unlike “Latin” doctors were not university graduates, but had learned western medicine autodidactically. The vast majority of these surgeons were mestizos who were not in a condition to appear for examination before the Protomedicato and obtain a license, since they could not prove their blood purity. The only legitimate doctors were those who graduated from universities, of which there were only two in New Granada between

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1636 and 1800, according to the information given by Quevedo, with Gastelbondo being one of them (Quevedo, 1993: 119).40 In the face of this difficult situation, it is not surprising that the Colegio Mayor del Rosario had overlooked the candidate’s “lower” ethnic quality. In other words, facing the alternative of leaving the entire kingdom without medical attention, viceroyal authorities preferred to interpret the law realistically and to allow not only mestizos—like Alejandro Gastelbondo in Bogotá and Eugenio Espejo in Quito—but also the illegal practice of healers and empirical doctors in the provinces. If the intention of biopolitics was to promote the health of the population, the state needed to act pragmatically. It needed to reform—or at least “relax”—the university statutes that prevented mestizos from graduating and, at the same time, to tolerate the nonprofessional practice of some barbers and romancistas. But this is exactly where the conflict between the biopolitical apparatus of the center and the apparatus of whiteness anchored in the periphery appears. The New Granadian aristocracy looked badly on the state’s tolerance of doctors graduating from the castes. The reason for this unease is clear: the cultural capital of whiteness that legitimated their social domination of subalterns (the pathos of distance) was being threatened. Elites complained that the proliferation of healers, the monopoly of surgeons—a profession considered “mechanical”—and the admission of mestizo students to universities, had done away with the social prestige of medicine. Young people from “good families” stayed away from the faculties of medicine to avoid associating with people of a lower ethnic and social quality (Tate Lanning, 1997: 207). As a result, pressure from the aristocracy was brought to bear on local authorities to reinforce the ethnic boundary that prevented mestizos from gaining the same social status as whites. And this is also why, confronted with the insistence of the governor of Cartagena and local elites, viceroy Mendinueta denied Gastelbondo’s application and awarded the vacant position of Protomedico to the Spaniard Juan de Arias. However, the traditional discourse of criollo elites did not prevail against biopolitical designs in all cases. In 1798, King Carlos IV proposed to solve the health crisis New Granada was undergoing and he ordered the  By way of comparison, between 1607 and 1738, the University of Mexico conferred 438 degrees in medicine, which is to say, they graduated an average of three doctors per year. The University of San Carlos in Guatemala awarded thirty degrees between 1700 and 1821, an average of one Latin doctor graduated every four years (Tate Lanning, 1997: 205–206). Note that the situation in Guatemala—which until the beginning of the nineteenth century graduated an average of eighteen doctors per thousand inhabitants—was far superior to that of New Granada during the same period. If we add to this the fact that the salary of a graduated doctor was scarcely better than a porter, it is easy to imagine why faculties of medicine were closed for so long in New Granada. For the local children of the aristocracy, it was much more profitable, and more socially prestigious, to study law or theology.

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reorganization of the Protomedicato and the reform of the study of medicine. To fulfill this royal mandate, the viceroy requested a written plan from doctors Sebastián López Ruiz, Honorato de Vila, and José Celestino Mutis on how to carry out these reforms. López Ruiz was a criollo doctor from Panama who was proud of being “pure of all bad race” and of belonging to one of the most noble and distinguished families in his region.41 He studied medicine at the University of San Marcos in Lima, where he received a Galenic training, acquiring a medieval conception of the profession no longer in harmony with the biopolitical project of the Crown. Mutis, by contrast, was always very close to the Bourbons and from the time of his arrival in Bogotá supported reforming university studies and the implementation of an enlightened public health policy. The reports by Mutis and López Ruiz requested by viceroy Mendinueta exemplify the conflict between the interests of the Crown and the criollo aristocracy around the “ethnic question.” López Ruiz began his report in a rather unusual fashion, requesting that the viceroy “investigate if the others named with me to report are true doctors with legitimate legal requisites” (López Ruiz, 1996 [1799]: 73). That is to say, he requests that the other two commissioned for the report, Honorato de Vila and José Celestino Mutis, demonstrate the legitimacy of their knowledge, presenting university titles accrediting them as doctors. What is behind such a request? In my view, it was a strategic move by the most traditional criollo elites against the biopolitics of the state.42 These elites sought to reinforce control over the legal border preventing the social climbing of people of lower ethnic quality. One of the strategies to achieve this—in addition to the previously mentioned “dissent cases”—was to put a brake on the illegal practice of medicine.43 It was well known that a character like Mutis, more interested in the economic and scientific progress of the viceroyalty than in the formalities of the law, encouraged people to practice medicine who did not meet the legal requisites. One of them was the criollo priest Miguel de Isla, who despite not having formally studied was an enlightened autodidact trained under the tutelage of Mutis and had a great deal of experience as a

 Such was his zeal for the capital of whiteness that he publicly repudiated one of his sisters for having stained the family name by marrying a Black man. Pilar Gardeta Sabater (1996: 15) claims, however, that his father married a mulatta in his second marriage, which raised suspicions of the Panamanian doctor’s “ethnic quality.” In some government circles in Bogotá a rumor circulated that López Ruiz was the son of a mulatto and a mulatta, which was categorically denied by the doctor, who repeatedly proved that he was the legitimate son of old Christian Spaniards descended directly from conquistadors. 42  Here, I part ways with the interpretation that sees this incident as a purely personal dispute between López and Mutis over cinchona bark—which I will address below—or a simple confrontation between two groups of New Granadian intellectuals, the enlightened and the orthodox. 43  Here, keeping in mind that the majority of healers and romancista surgeons were mestizos. 41

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doctor in the San Juan de Dios hospital.44 With his direct attack on Mutis’ “illegal” aspiration to train doctors outside the university, López Ruiz sought to break one of the strongest pillars of Bourbon biopolitics in New Granada. López Ruiz’s strategy was to discredit Mutis’ authority as an ad hoc professor of medicine. To this end, he stated in his Report on the Professors of Santa Fe that until this moment “nobody has seen” Mutis’ degrees accrediting him as doctor and he suspects that they did not exist since the Royal College of Surgery in Cadiz, where Mutis studied, only trained Latin surgeons but not doctors (López Ruiz, 1996 [1801]: 91). He even suggested that naming Mutis professor of mathematics at the Colegio Mayor del Rosario in 1762 was completely illegal because it was done “without competition, without literary exercises and without the prior grace of his Majesty.” He testified that “it has been 26 years since I came to this capital, and not once have I seen this professor teach or preside over a single public event of mathematics.” Mutis was thereby presented as an “intruder” arbitrarily favored by the Bourbon state, who endangered the symbolic capital of elites (whiteness, nobility, distinction) by encouraging the promotion of doctors without university degrees through his bad example. For this reason, López Ruiz’s report is in reality a critique of state policies that neglect the laws regulating the medical profession45 and threaten the traditional privileges of the criollo nobility: I see subjects that without requisites adhering to the expressed principles, and what is more, without having had a Classroom or Medical Court of medicine where it could be legitimately studied, nor anyone with competent authority to examine them and renew or issue titles, practice the stated faculties in all their civil and forensic breadth with impunity, and they are treated as Doctors . . . As Medicine and Surgery have always been in a dejected state, no respectable young man will dedicate himself to their study until he sees them shine with the honor with which your Majesty awards, distinguishes, and protects his students. (López Ruiz, 1996 [1799]: 83; 87)

 Isla did study philosophy with the Jesuits at the Javeriana University in Bogotá and later entered the order of San Juan de Dios. However, he did not obtain his license to practice medicine from the university but from his order’s superior, Father Francisco Tello de Guzmán. His ample knowledge of pharmacy, botany, anatomy, and physiology was even recognized by Viceroy Caballero y Góngora, who named him doctor of the military hospital of Santa Fe (Quevedo, 1993: 131). During the second epidemic of smallpox in Bogotá, he was one of the most active doctors (Rodríguez González, 1999: 40). 45  López Ruiz refers to the sixteenth-century Laws of Castile, which speak of severe penalties for those who practice medicine or surgery without the proper degrees and licenses. The punishments prescribed by the law range from a fine of six to twelve thousand maravedís to exile (López Ruiz, 1996 [1799]: 80–81). 44

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For his part, Mutis began his report by stating that the proliferation of disease in New Granada hindered the enlightened plans of the government, since “so many calamities pile up that they present themselves on a daily basis, forming the horrible image of a generally wrecked population, as half of these individuals are not utilized for society or public welfare” (Mutis, 1983 [1801a]: 35). With this, he put himself on the side of those who sought to make health a question of “public welfare” administered by the state. This is why, if Mutis agrees with López Ruiz on the need to end the illegal practice of medicine, it is not to defend the privileges of the criollo nobility but to avoid the further destruction of the population’s health by charlatans and healers, and thereby the economic productivity of the Kingdom. Mutis knew perfectly well that the King had requested this report to mitigate a situation affecting the public well-being of the entire viceroyalty, not the private well-being of one social group in particular (the criollos) or of one professional trade (medicine). From this point of view, the doctor from Cadiz argues that López Ruiz’s declarations are not only full of “bitterness and acrimony,” but that they seek to defend his particular interests more than the interests of the state: This skilled professor [López Ruiz], even though he has satisfied and paid of his own merit up to the point of refusing to concur with the practices of his colleagues, would better provide consolation to the public and himself if his aid were not so scarce… It is well known in the capital and notorious in the whole Kingdom, that despite my advanced age and tasks of royal service, I keep my doors open at all hours to receive all persons without distinction or specific interest, to whomever requests help for their illnesses. In this way I have sacrificed much of my time, that I could have directed to my comfort or rest, while López wastes all of his cultivating his friendships, plotting his projects, undertaking his ambitions, and exalting his discoveries, that he claims on his word to have verified, failing to contribute for his part to the consolation of a suffering humanity, who dares not arrive at his door. (Mutis, 1983 [1801a]: 39; 43)

Mutis’ critique points to the fact that people like López Ruiz, who utilize the medical profession as a means to consolidate a lordly and aristocratic ethos, uninterested in public well-being, are the ones who encourage the presence of healers and intruders in the New Kingdom of Granada.46 They fill the  Recall what was said previously in the sense that medicine was not seen at this time as a lucrative career, but above all as a Christian commitment to the poor. When taking their oath, doctors agreed to help and tend to the poor without charging fees or expecting salaries. Piety and charity were thus the two principal virtues of the doctor. The Bourbons were able to transform the medical duty to “love thy neighbor” into the patriotic obligation to public health, a sufficient motive to induce doctors to care for the poor without charging them. This is precisely Mutis’ argument against López Ruiz.

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immense void left by the lack of professional attention and attend to those who could not afford to “arrive at the door” of an aristocrat like López Ruiz. This is precisely why Mutis would argue that the solution to the public health problem does not consist of prohibiting ipso facto the presence of healers without licenses, since this would leave the population definitively without any type of medical care. The solution is rather to distinguish those empirical doctors who are nothing more than “upstart charlatans,” from those who “through their education, charity, and good conduct” could be legitimately used as auxiliaries in subordinate activities (barbers, surgeons, bloodletters, midwives, pharmacists) or could even be promoted as doctors. Mutis referred specifically to barbers and bloodletters, stating that no learned population can take pride in having these “better and in more abundance” than New Granada.47 It is thanks to them that the 1782 smallpox epidemic was successfully combated since they performed an important function as inoculators. He also refers to pharmacists such as Father José Bohórquez and don Antonio Gorráez, and even doctors without degrees like father Miguel de Isla and don Manuel de Castro, whose labor had been useful in helping the most disadvantaged sectors of the population.48 The panorama was therefore not as gloomy as that presented by López Ruiz, who, with his “impassioned imagination,” argued that the scarcity of professors necessarily means the complete ignorance and barbarism of medical practice in the viceroyalty.49 Mutis thought that public health policy  Mutis claims that “during the last half century there have been those that I found accredited and later I met many of average skill and many of superior skill, whose disciples are successively replacing other youth because of the propensity, of course, with which the barbers’ apprentices apply themselves to this practice: from which very good romancista surgeons could emerge, admitted to the pertinent class of public education” (Mutis, 1983 [1801a]: 42). 48  López Ruiz did not consider either Brother José Bohórquez or Father Miguel de Isla, both religious figures with ample experience looking after convents and charity hospitals, to have the capacities necessary to practice as doctors or pharmacists. In this respect, he maliciously wrote: “If the punctual specification of people were not so tedious, I could lay out here a long list of secular and regular subjects who are intruders in medicine, surgery, and other subordinate fields; who are not content to practice with the public, and even dare to enter into the cloisters, and the convent cells of monks, accompanied by other religious figures to visit the sick and practice on them” (López Ruiz, 1996 [1799]: 74). He specifically writes of Miguel de Isla: “The friar Father Miguel de Isla, who until recently worked in the religious hospital of San Juan de Dios since his tender youth, already secularized with clerical habits, and of course Don Miguel has not had additional studies, or practiced medicine, which he himself proposed to acquire, as in many religious hospitals. In 1792 after having served as Prior in various convents of his province, he returned to the capital: and so he won the title of doctor given by his Excellency Viceroy Don José de Ezpeleta, prior to an exam that Don José [Celestino] Mutis, his teacher, gave with approval; but where did he graduate from with a bachelors in medicine and practice?” (López Ruiz, 1996 [1801]: 95). 49  “One should appreciate much more the horrific picture than the ideal one conceived in his impassioned imagination and relayed in his report to Sebastián López, buried in the profound abyss of ignorance as to how many doctors existed and exist today in Bogotá and with such dark colors, that one would not know how better to paint the unhappy fortune of our barbarous Indian neighbors, the Chimila and Guajiro” (Mutis, 1983 [1801a]: 39). 47

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in New Granada did not need to begin from zero, since while there were no doctors brandishing pompous degrees, there were in fact enough qualified people to fulfill the function of keeping the population healthy, capable of ensuring the production of wealth for the Empire. What was needed was to organize medical studies that could provide these groups with the education necessary to effectively fulfill their mission. It was not the granting of degrees that mattered but the type of education imparted, considering that there were many doctors with degrees like López Ruiz who practiced medicine “without having greeted the most celebrated authors of our century and without the most minimal attention to their theoretical and practical erudition that raises the doctor if not to the outstanding sphere, at least to that of of an average professor of his degree” (Mutis, 1983 [1801a]: 57). He thus proposed the creation of eight fixed chairs revolving around the three axes of enlightened medicine of his time (Newton, Linnaeus, and Boerhaave), including training in “basic sciences” like physics, chemistry, and mathematics, as well as the latest advances in subjects like botany, natural history, clinical medicine, physiology, and pathology.50 Mutis also proposed candidates to fill these chairs, including the controversial Father Miguel de Isla and the young Botanic Expedition assistant don Francisco Antonio Zea, who never studied medicine. Mutis’ plan was approved by the Crown and definitively signed on August 6, 1805 (Quevedo, 1993: 149). We also know that despite strong opposition from the most conservative criollo elites, father Isla received his medical degree without having to study at the university, with which he could be named professor of medicine at the Colegio Mayor del Rosario. On this occasion, state biopolitics appeared to triumph over the defenders of a social structure that defended the privileges associated with blood purity. Of course, it is not that Mutis and the Bourbon state promulgated social equality between whites and mestizos.51 What happened was that for pragmatic reasons—“state reason”—it was necessary to relax a bit the juridical border separating whites from the castes, due to the fact that at the end of the eighteenth century, the  The pensum that Mutis proposes is radically anti-scholastic, following the reformist line of the Bourbon state incarnated a few years earlier by the prosecutor Moreno y Escandón. Recall that in 1768, the criollo prosecutor had proposed changing the medical curriculum from its traditional Aristotelian-Galenic orientation to make it a truly scientific activity based on systematic observation, experimentation, and the formulation of laws according to the Newtonian analytic-synthetic method. 51  Mutis’ visceral contempt for pardos can be seen in this phrase, where he comments on the situation of the Royal Protomedicato in the city of Cartagena: “Would it not be very convenient to name and install [as Protomedico] an incorruptible, educated subject and the rest of the necessary guarantees for the performance of his function, in the example of enlightened Kings and much more necessary in that city, where the noble profession of medicine has unfortunately been debased and practiced by Pardos and people of lowly origins, with the exception of this or that Spanish surgeon from the royal or merchant marine?” (Mutis, 1983 [1801a]: 56). 50

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mestizo population was already the main labor force in New Granada. So the state had no qualms in promoting and encouraging the social mobility of subaltern social strata, hoping thereby to punish the most unproductive sectors of society (landholders and aristocratic criollos). What mattered to the technocratic state was not so much “who” performed a public labor (like that of a surgeon, pharmacist, or professor of medicine) but their efficiency in achieving the general objectives designed by the central government. But as we will see in what follows, in the mentality of enlightened criollos, the “who” continued to take precedence over the “how” and biopolitics ended up being for them an extension of their spontaneous sociology.

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Chapter 4

Illegitimate Knowledges The Enlightenment as Apparatus of Epistemic Expropriation

All of these people of the lower strata, who are not governed by the right use of reason and counsel, conduct themselves with a kind of indifference and abandon that would be unbelievable among rational people. —José Celestino Mutis

In chapter 2 we examined the hegemony of the apparatus of whiteness in New Granadian social space, and in chapter 3 we saw how the biopolitical apparatus, with its pretension to occupy the “zero point,” established a kind of rationality that articulated the thought and action of a minority sector of these elites: enlightened criollos. Now we need to link these two approaches within a single ensemble to show that zero-point hubris and the aristocratic discourse of blood purity were not antagonistic but complementary. The question that I would like to formulate here is the following: What effects did the discourse of blood purity have on the scientific imaginary of eighteenth-century criollos? If it was precisely the criollos who appropriated enlightenment discourse in New Granada, were they able to achieve their aspiration of positioning themselves as impartial observers of the world from the neutrality of the zero-point, or were they simply projecting their own habitus of social and ethnic distancing into scientific discourse? In this chapter, I will show that in the social location occupied by the enlightened criollos of New Granada, two apparently contradictory apparatuses were joined together: the apparatus of whiteness and the biopolitical apparatus.1 The discourse of blood purity

 In the first chapter, closely following the theses of Latin American thinkers such as Quijano, Dussel, and Mignolo, I argued at length why this contradiction is merely apparent.

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and the discourse of epistemic purity formed two parts of a single matrix of power/knowledge. My hypothesis is that the barrier separating enlightenment science from common opinion or doxa in reality coincided with the ethnic border dividing criollos from the castes. The establishment of this ethnic border was legitimated by an act of epistemic expropriation, that is to say, by a foundational act of symbolic violence that I would like to account for in this chapter. I will thus show that zero-point hubris, embraced by both the metropolitan state and enlightened thinkers in New Granada, was in fact an extension of the spontaneous sociology of the elites, who saw their dominion over Black people, Indigenous people, and mestizos, who they considered inferior beings, as “natural.” Seen from this perspective, enlightened discourse not only proposes the superiority of some people over others, but also the superiority of certain forms of knowledge over others. It therefore functioned as an apparatus of epistemic expropriation, establishing the cognitive hegemony of the criollos in New Granada. 4.1 ACCURSED CHILDREN I have said that the implementation of enlightenment medical practice in New Granada required two conditions: one of a formal character, the “epistemological break” from magico-religious interpretations of the world; the other political, state intervention to guarantee the institutionalization of this rupture. The zero-point was to be reached insofar as the meaning of health and disease ceased to be guided by the influence of religious thought and came to be defined by the expert knowledge of modern medicine. Modernizing the colonies thus meant that the scientific-technical vision of reality, orchestrated by the state, would completely replace all other ways of knowing the world. From then on, these other forms of knowledge would begin to be seen as the pre-history of medicine, that is, as “epistemological obstacles” that needed to be defeated in order to achieve knowledge of “the things themselves.” Now, in a complementary way, we need to ask the following: What did the blind faith of elites in the superiority of Western knowledge over the knowledge of the castes stem from? To resolve this question, I will refer to the discourse of blood purity that, as we saw in the first chapter, operated since the sixteenth century as a schema for classifying the global population according to ethnic origin. I will argue that this taxonomic schema was anchored not only in the habitus of Catholic missionaries but also in that of the enlightened scientists educated in their colleges. I will examine the spontaneous sociology of two eighteenth-century Jesuit chroniclers of New Granada, to see how this

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ideological representation passes uninterrupted into the scientific observations of enlightened criollos. In his 1741 book El Orinoco ilustrado, the Spanish Jesuit José Gumilla wonders about the historical origins of the Indigenous people of New Granada. His response corresponds to the discourse of blood purity as defined in the first chapter. Even though Europeans and Indigenous people are descendants of Noah, and thus children of God, since Noah is descended from Adam, this does not mean they are equal. Indigenous people are descendants of Ham, Noah’s second son, who God cursed for having ridiculed the nakedness of his father, while the Europeans are descendants of Japheth, Noah’s first born, who God blessed after the flood: I say, first, that the Indians are the children of Ham, Noah’s second son, and that they descend from him, in the same way that we descend from Japheth by way of Tubal, the founder and settler of Spain, who was his son and Noah’s nephew and came to Spain [in the] year 131 after the Great Flood, [year] 1788 of the creation of the world. (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 55)

According to the Christian discourse of blood purity, the children of Shem populated the Asiatic region, the children of Ham populated Africa, while the children of Japheth (“we,” as Gumilla says) populated Europe. The question was: How did the children of Ham come to America and what was the difference between them and their brothers who remained in Africa? Unlike the first Jesuit chroniclers (e.g., José de Acosta), by the eighteenth century Gumilla already knows that the Americas do not represent part of the orbis terrarium but rather constitute a space separated from Europe, Asia, and Africa by the immensity of the ocean. Thus, he speculates that the children of Ham who lived on Cape Verde did not forget the boat-building technique that they had learned from their ancestor Noah, and that some of them set sail and “carried by the wind” were able to cross the Atlantic (hundreds of years before Columbus), arriving on the coast of Brazil, whence began the population of the territories of the Americas (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 55, 201).2 In this way, one part of the “accursed race” settled in the Americas and gave rise to the Indigenous people later conquered by Spain.

 Gumilla supports his speculation with the case of a boat that set sail from the Canary Islands in 1731, reaching the mouth of the Orinoco river by the fury of the wind and the current: “Who can deny that what happened in our day could not take place in previous centuries? And will we not see classical authors attest to it? Nor should we be averse to the fact that, from the coasts of Spain, Africa, and others, after the confusion of tongues and the separation of those peoples, many boats were carried by the wind, in various times, towards the West, in the same way as the boat referred to above from the Canaries” (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 200).

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American Indians and Black Africans thus belonged to the same branch (the children of Ham), but there were differences between them. God had certainly destined both to servitude under European people, but the spirit of the Indians is even more “timid” than that of Black people. While Black people serve only their European master and never an Indian, Indians happily serve the Black slaves of the Europeans. “What mystery is this?” Gumilla wonders: I respond that they behave in this way to verify, to the letter, Noah’s curse when he awoke from his dream and said to Ham: A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren . . . And these are precisely the Indians, who not by force, but by their own inclination, verify the curse that Noah cast upon Ham. I would add: All Europeans that are in or have been to the Americas, know that the vice most embedded in the marrow of the Indians is drunkenness. It is most common and fatal flaw of those natives; and I also blame Ham for this universal weakness among Indians, like nudity, that the gentiles of the Americas have wasted and continue to be wasted by their own temperament. (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 55)

The point that I wish to highlight is that, using the discourse of blood purity mentioned above, Gumilla lays out a hierarchical taxonomy of the American population based on ethnic origin. Whites (Spanish and criollo) are at the top, whose social, cultural, and political institutions are essentially superior to all the other races. Next come Black people, who despite their mental and cultural inferiority are at least loyal to their masters and receptive to the liberating message of the gospel. Finally, on the lowest rung of the ladder are Indians, who very much despite civilizing efforts, remain in a barbarism that seems to be “embedded in their marrow.” And there are also hierarchies among different groups of Indians. Gumilla says that the Indians of Mexico and Peru are superior to those of New Granada, because while the former were able to develop a culture similar to the pagan empires of the East (Egyptians, Medians, Persians), the latter remain enveloped in the darkest barbarism, attenuated only by the merciful efforts of Jesuit missionaries. In sum, the Indian of New Granada, and above all those inhabiting the Amazon jungle, is nothing but a “never before seen monster, with an ignorant head, an ungrateful heart, an inconsistent chest, a lazy back, and fearful feet” (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 49). Such is the “spontaneous sociology” revealed by Father Gumilla’s taxonomy, shared by the majority of his fellow Jesuits in New Granada3 and by the eighteenth-century criollo elites educated in their colleges.  The Jesuit criollo Juan de Velasco wrote in his 1789 Historia del Reino de Quito that the Indians carry the curse of Ham “marked on their body”: “Everyone, or almost all of them are born with a red mark on their buttocks, over the tailbone, which as soon as they begin to come of age becomes

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Now, as Mignolo (1995) has shown, this ethnic and moral hierarchy was transferred to the epistemological terrain: to the hierarchical ordering of people based on ethnic origin and attitude toward the gospel there also corresponds a hierarchical ordering of their systems of knowledge. In this way, the knowledge produced by European people (the children of Japheth) was seen as superior to that produced by the Indians of Mexico and Peru (the Christianized children of Ham), and their knowledge was “more advanced” than that of the Indians of the Amazonian region (the children of Ham in rebellion against evangelization). According to the eighteenth-century Jesuits active in New Granada, this cognitive limitation of the children of Ham was due to the poverty of their languages, the product of the confusion of tongues that took place in Babel 6000 years after the creation of the earth. Father Pablo Maroni, a Jesuit missionary in the Amazon, wrote that the languages of the Indians of the Marañón region are denotative since they only serve to express concrete objects like plants, fruits, or animals but not abstract notions like God, the soul, or sin. This is why Jesuits had to introduce the use of the “the language of the Inca” (Quechua) in the Amazon, because according to Maroni, “it is the most substantial and expressive of the many languages used in South America” (Maroni, 1988 [1738]: 168). Father Gumilla, for his part, closed the circle by saying that the linguistic poverty of the Indians was the product of divine punishment after the fracturing of languages at Babel, since the children of Ham were bestowed with less expressive languages (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 197–198). Thus we see that the “spontaneous sociology of the elites” that attributed a lesser capacity for abstraction to Indigenous languages—and thereby to their systems of knowledge—than European ones, was legitimized by a theory according to which the linguistic diversity of the world took place 6000 years after the creation of Hebrew as the Ursprache (the language expressing the most perfect knowledge of all: that of divine law) from which others were derived through a process of degeneration. For this reason, eighteenthcentury Jesuits claimed that the capacity for abstraction in the Quechua language was not even a product of the intelligence of the Incas—as Garcilaso had claimed, for example—but of the initial contact that this language had with Hebrew. The Jesuits Gumilla and Velasco agree, arguing that one part of the ten tribes of Israel was in the American Andes after their dispersion in the time of Shalmaneser, the King of Assyria, that is, long before the time of the Incas. This would explain why there were Hebrew words in Quechua (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 199; Velasco 1998 [1789]: 299). And this also would explain why the Incas still had “recollections” of abstract ideas like God the darker and darker, taking on a dark-green color. Who knows if the curse of Noah marks with this stamp the descendants of Ham for having attacked his nudity?” (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 330).

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creator, surely reinforced by the presence of the apostles like Saint Tomas and Saint Bartolomé in the Americas (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 298; Maroni, 1988 [1738]: 171; 282). Despite the fact that some eighteenth-century European circles began to argue that Sanskrit constituted the common root of all Indo-European languages, enlightened thinkers like the French La Condamine, who I will discuss at greater length, continued to cling to a hierarchical view of knowledge and languages based on their capacity for abstraction.4 After visiting the Jesuit missions in the Amazon, La Condamine writes that despite there being “shared Hebrew words in many languages of the Americas,” All the languages of South-America whereof I have had any knowledge, are very barren; many of them are full of energy, susceptible of elegance, especially the ancient Peruvian tongue; but all of them are equally void of terms, to express abstracted and universal ideas; an evident proof, how little progress the understandings of these peoples have made. Time, duration, space, being, substance, matter, and body, all these words, with many others, have no term equivalent to them in their speech: and not only the names of metaphysical essences, but even those of moral ones, cannot be expressed by them, but imperfectly, and by long circumlocutions. (La Condamine, 1747 [1745]: 58–59)

Indeed, many eighteenth-century European theorists believed that the decisive step marking the exit from barbarism and the entrance into civilization was the development of an abstract language. Whereas the savage remained immersed in a “sensory” language that only allows one to know empirical objects, civilized man had managed to develop a language that allowed him to grasp universals. This was why only civilized people had developed  This conception differs, however, from the theory of language developed in the same period by other European thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau agrees with La Condamine on a single point: in terms of historical development, denotative language definitely precedes abstract language. Unlike civilized people, primitive communities use an elemental language devoid of logical means and differentiated grammatical functions. It is, in sum, a language that prevents the abstraction of thought. However, Rousseau did not see this as a symptom of the inferiority of primitive man vis-à-vis civilized man, but quite the opposite. The evolution of language from the particular to the universal, from the concrete to the abstract, is for him a sign that language has been denaturalized and corrupted in proportion to human civilization. Social decadence and linguistic abstraction are thus concomitant phenomena. In Rousseau’s words: “In proportion as needs increase, as affairs become entangled, as enlightenment extends, language changes character; it becomes more precise and less passionate; it substitutes ideas for feelings, it no longer speaks to the heart but to reason . . . [L]anguage becomes exact and clearer, but more drawn out, more muted, and colder.” (Rousseau 1998: 296). And elsewhere: “All written languages must change character and lose force as they gain clarity, that the more one aims at perfecting grammar and logic the more on accelerates this progress, and that in order to make a language cold and monotonous in no time, one has only to establish academies among the people that speak it” (Rousseau, 1998: 303–304).

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science because as Plato had put it, scientific knowledge is knowledge of universals. And this is also why, according to enlightenment philosophers, the most advanced people were the ones who had elaborated juridical codes based on general principles and not merely on particular norms (Pagden, 1997: 131–134).5 Needless to say, this inability to formulate abstract concepts that enlightened thinkers attributed to “savages,” corresponds directly with the thesis that these people suffer from the incapacity to produce alphabetic writing. Mignolo points out that even though the Aztecs had calendars and the Incas had quipus for narrating their history, the fact that they did not have written records of these was understood by the Spanish as proof of their cognitive inferiority vis-à-vis European people (Mignolo, 1995: 125–169). From this perspective, alphabetic writing is seen as evidence of the superiority of those who have developed it over those people with other systems of nonalphabetic notation (hieroglyphic, pictorial, or verbal). Only the possession of alphabetic writing could guarantee the possibility of generating analytic thought, and thereby producing knowledge. The Indians are thus seen as barbaric beings, equipped with a “primitive mentality” and therefore as incapable of generating abstract knowledge. This was precisely Father Gumilla’s opinion of the Amazon Indians: The nations that we are addressing are singularly uncultured and wild, neither reading, nor writing, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphs, like the Mexicans used, nor columns, nor historical records, like the colored knots that the Incas kept of their ancient memories, nor any sign to recall the memory of the past, has been founds in these nations. (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 52)

The inability to “recall the memory of the past” that Gumilla speaks of is thus a sign that Indigenous people do not and cannot possess an abstract language that would enable them to formulate and produce scientific knowledge. All of their knowledge in the field of medicine, for example, is seen as the result of ignorance and superstition, and thus lacks validity. Due to the “stain” of their ethnic origin, Black and Indigenous people could never develop thought with universal scope, independent of the European scientific tradition. Scientific discourse demands the creation of a universal and specialized language, capable of formulating and transmitting complex ideas; Indians,

 It is surprising that a twentieth-century thinker affiliated with “critical theory” such as Jürgen Habermas defends a thesis analogous to eighteenth-century enlightenment thinkers. In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas argues that the linguistic, moral, and cognitive structures of “primitive man” enabled only “the concretism of thought,” which is therefore structurally inferior to the universalist thought developed by Western man (Habermas, 1987: 46).

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in contrast, remain trapped in a denotative language that prevents them from thinking in universal terms. The only option is thus to become literate, which would mean taking on the language of science (Latin) and power (Spanish) as their own, and thereby obeying the “regime of truth” legitimated by writing (Zambrano, 2000). But while the Jesuits branded Indigenous and Black healers as “charlatans” due to their natural inability to produce knowledge, they said nothing, in contrast, about white healers belonging to religious orders like the Franciscans. Many of the prescriptions formulated by the Franciscans in eighteenth-century New Granada to cure illnesses included concoctions with burned horse manure, goose intestines, old rooster broth, dog blood, fox testicles, the urine of young boys, deer penis, and mouse ears to name only a few. Consider, for example, the following remedy “to remove a fever from the bones,” from the Franciscan Pharmacopoeia: You take the head of a dead dog, who has been in the trash heap for a long time, and remove the nape of the neck, that comes out to about one peso or a little more, depending on the size of the dog, wash it with vinegar and then with a lot of water, take it to the oven so that it roasts well, until it has the color of cinnamon, and then mince finely, strain the powder through the sieve and onto a gold doubloon, put it in a glass with two ounces of filtered honey, and take it for nine days, making enough powder ahead of time so that you do not run out, with three or four bones of dog’s napes, as stated, you will have it.6

Formulas like these, very typical of Indian healers, were known and used in Bogotá by priests like Brother Diego García, who was a personal friend of Mutis and participated actively in the Royal Botanical Expedition. Even Mutis, as Díaz Piedrahita clearly indicates, despite his academic formation, prescribed remedies based on Indigenous botanical and zoological knowledge (Díaz Piedrahita, Mantilla, 2002: 50). In fact, the Franciscan Pharmacopoeia was already a blend of European medical knowledge from the Middle Ages and pre-Columbian Indigenous traditions. The question is then: Why was the criollo elite willing to tolerate this mixture when the remedies were formulated by Franciscan healers but rejected them in horror when they came from Indigenous healers? One possible answer is that to the criollo mind, although Indigenous medical knowledge lacked validity of its own, it could nevertheless be “redeemed of its stain” by entering into contact with the tradition of Western medicine and when formulated by “white” doctors.

 “Recetario franciscano del siglo XVIII” (Díaz Piedrahita y Mantilla, 2002: 84).

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4.1.1 The Color of Reason It becomes clear that the spontaneous sociology of New Granadian elites constructed an image in which all knowledge from Europe was seen as essentially superior to the knowledge produced and transmitted empirically by the natives of the Americas and Africa. Without a language capable of communicating abstract and universal ideas, Indigenous knowledge lacked all epistemic validity. This judgment can be clearly seen in the case of traditional Indigenous medicine. Gumilla, for example, claimed that the Indians of New Granada did not have the necessary piety to pity the sick nor the adequate knowledge to cure them. They leave the sick alone without any treatment, and when they do offer it, the remedy turns out to be worse than the disease since the medical knowledge of the Indians is rooted in ignorance and superstition (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 106–107). Maroni says that even a simple cold can lead to the death of Indians due to their lack of rational ability to understand the origin of the illness: All of these diseases and the death that follows from them, they usually attribute not to natural causes, and even less to their own disorder or heavenly dispositions, but to the power and efficacy of spells, harmed by this or that Indian who is known to be a witchdoctor. To tell them that a disease comes from this or that disorder or the passage of time, that death follows laws, all of this is to speak to them in gibberish and they do not even pay attention to what you tell them. All of their discourse that men and women are thinking about day and night is that that Indian who entered their house or passed by them closely, that the other to whom they refused something that they had asked, would whisper against them and cause them harm; that that disease is one of many seeds that are now sprouting; and other nonsense they have as articles of faith. (Maroni, 1988 [1738]: 192)

One example of this contempt for the knowledge of non-European people has to do with the cure for snake bites. Gumilla thought that venomous snakes were messengers “that divine justice has sent to the shores of the great Orinoco river . . . as a scourge and punishment for the barbarous behavior of its inhabitants” (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 244), such that only God in his divine grace could provide the antidote for the bite. The Jesuit mentions the “Guayaquil vine” that is chewed for a long time and then smeared over the entire body by Black workers in the region. He also refers to a “seed” found by Filipino Indians that the Jesuit missionaries called “San Ignacio,” which they used as an antidote and prophylactic in all of their missions. So the existence of an antidote against snake bites is not due to the wisdom of Indians or Black people but to the grace of God and the perspicacity of the Jesuits. For

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his part, Maroni recognizes that some of the antidotes prepared by the Indians have shown positive results: “Some Indians also have their natural medicines and effective herbs with which they heal, especially viper bites . . . The most skilled in curing are the Omaguas, with the knowledge they have of various rinds and medicinal herbs; this is perhaps why among other Indians they are known as great sorcerers” (Maroni, 1988 [1738]: 194). Nevertheless, the Italian Jesuit adds that this curative art, which he calls “sorcery,” stems from an agreement the Omaguas have with the devil, from whom they undoubtedly learned “various abuses and curses for their revenge.” This spontaneous sociology that denied members of the castes the possibility of producing valid knowledge was shared by enlightened thinkers at the turn of the nineteenth century, as we can see in the text Memoria sobre las serpientes written by the criollo Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1808. As evident in the title, this text was written “to certify the true remedies capable of helping those who have been bitten by venomous snakes,” because according to the author, “medicine [in New Granada] is entrusted to the caprice and ignorance of charlatan healers who operate by mere routine” (Lozano, 1942 [1808]: 117). What Lozano sought to show was that those claiming to cure snake bites with the application of traditional herbs and salves were nothing more than ignorant charlatans. Knowledge rooted in oral traditions was seen by Lozano as a “mere routine” that must be submitted to the court of reason to empirically test its scientific validity. Experience is “the only oracle that one should believe on these subjects,” such that all “popular remedies” needed to be “sanctioned by that great master.” Therefore, when examining which snakes are venomous and which herbs provide appropriate antidotes, the author recommended using the classification tables developed by Linnaeus. For Lozano, doing so would show that the antidotes derived from falcon’s vine [Guaco] and used by the Black inhabitants of Chocó are nothing other than a fraud, as can be seen in the case of “a Black woman who was bitten by a common lancehead on the Bayamón hacienda [who applied] considerable amounts of falcon’s vine in and around the bite, and despite the espoused virtues of this treatment, died miserably thirty hours after the tragedy” (Lozano, 1942 [1808]: 118). But not all enlightened thinkers completely rejected the virtues of the antidote against snakebites discovered by the Black inhabitants of Chocó. Some wise criollos even recognized the efficacy of falcon’s vine, but like the Jesuits they did not attribute this remedy to genius of those who discovered it but to the goodness of God and/or nature.7 This was the case for Pedro Fermín  When the remedy came from a European scientist, by contrast, praise was not directed to the goodness of nature but rather to the genius of the discoverer. This was the case, as already mentioned, with Pombo’s praise of Jenner for discovering the smallpox vaccine.

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de Vargas, who related his experience with the antidote in issue 34 of Papel Periódico. The Black inhabitants of the region had observed that the laughing falcon—a bird that eats snakes—would eat the leaves of the vine prior to going on the hunt for its prey, thereby protecting itself from its venomous bite. On the basis of this observation, they extracted the juice of its leaves and inoculated themselves in different parts of the body, immunizing themselves against a possible bite. When a person had been bitten, healers would apply the extract directly to the patient’s wound or have them drink it for five or six days in a row in small doses (two spoonfuls per day). The result, as Vargas himself testified, was that the patient was completely cured (Vargas, 1978 [1791]: 290). Nevertheless, the enlightened criollo began his account with a citation from Pliny the Elder stating that nature has been more open with animals than with men,8 from which he concludes that “animals have been the inventors of the majority and the most certain of remedies with which we preserve our existence” (Vargas, 1978 [1791]: 201). For Vargas, the credit does not go to the people who prepared the antidote against snakebites but to the falcons, which is as absurd as saying that the credit for the discovery of the smallpox vaccine goes not to Jenner but to the cows! But this absurdity had its reason: in one case, those who discovered the antidote were Black healers from Chocó, while in the other case it was an enlightened, white, European scientist. In fact, Vargas’ incredulity to the possibility that Black people could have discovered an effective vaccine against snakebites is limitless. Determined to examine this incredible news through the court of reason, he had a Black man who worked as a slave in the Royal Botanical Expedition apply the antidote, calling upon José Celestino Mutis himself as his witness: The operation he performed on me was as follows. The Black man extracted the juice of some leaves of the Guaco into a glass, he had me drink two teaspoons and he proceeded to inoculate me by the skin, making six incisions: one on each foot, another between the index finger and the thumb on each hand, and the last two on both sides of the chest . . . To satisfy myself beyond doubt of the efficacy of the Guaco herb, I took the snake, which seemed a bit restless, into my own hands; but it did not look like it was going to bite, and once I was no longer afraid, I picked the snake up twice more in the presence of Dr. José Mutis . . . Having seen what I did, the others who had been inoculated were also determined to pick up the snake; and they moved it about such that it got irritated and finally bit Dr. Francisco Matis on the right hand, drawing some blood. Something frightened us about this accident, and we had not ceased to be wary

 “Ingenio nostrum est usuque parare magistro Quod docuit natura feras ratione carentes.”

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of some terrible occurrence, but the Black man showed much serenity, as did the bitten man after his wound was treated with the leaves of the herb and was assured that there was no risk. In fact, nothing came from that bite. Matis ate breakfast immediately with an appetite, worked all day at his art as a painter, and slept through the night without feeling the slightest novelty, leaving all of us entirely convinced of the goodness of the remedy, and desiring of its spread for the benefit of the human species. (Vargas, 1978 [1791]: 202–203)

Vargas’ “learned skepticism” had borne fruit: the human species could now celebrate having a new remedy, whose discoverers nevertheless needed to be systematically invisibilized. In accordance with the guidelines of the new imperial politics, the function of the state was to expropriate the private capital of all its vassals with the aim of centralizing and redistributing it for public benefit, especially when this capital took the form of useful knowledge. In possession of an antidote against venomous snakebites, the state could reap economic benefits comparable to those obtained from the exportation of cinchona. Thus, Vargas recommends making falcon’s vine into “an object of commerce to supply European pharmacies” (Vargas, 1978 [1791]: 291). The criollo owners of the large plantations in Mariquita, Vélez, Guaduas, Honda, and Girón, all places where the plant grew in abundance, would certainly benefit from this. On the benefit that the Black inhabitants of Chocó might receive from this commerce, Vargas said nothing. On other occasions, criollos would attribute the efficacy of antidotes prepared by Indians to the “felicitous chance” that rewarded the persistence of these “farmers” in the art of experimentation. Francisco José de Caldas tells the story of a Noanama Indian, renowned in the art of curing snakebites, who accompanied him in 1803 to travel across the jungles of Mira in search of exotic plants. Developing a friendship with the Indian, Caldas convinced him to reveal the secret of his remedies. Thus, when the Indian indicated which plants were effective against different bites, the “wise” Caldas noted that all of these pertained to the Besleria family according to Linnaeus’ universal taxonomy. Surprised by the coincidence, Caldas wonders: How is it that this farmer never mistook this genus, this greatly varied and capricious genus? Experience, extensive use, and felicitous chance have surely taught the inhabitants of these countries where snakes are in abundance that such a plant is a powerful remedy . . . A man who has never heard of the name Linnaeus or of family, genus, species; a man who has heard no teachings except necessity and occurrence, could not bring nine or ten species together under a genus that he calls Contra and the botanists call Besleria without having a background of knowledge and felicitous experiences in curing those miserable ones bitten by snakes. I do not ask you to take his word for it; but these facts should

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call our attention and encourage us to have experiences with all of the Besleria. (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 165–166)

Caldas’ anecdote therefore has a moral character. It is not that Indians were capable of having a medical science even comparable to that developed by Europe. What can be learned from this event is that experimentation is the beginning of the road to true scientific discovery, just as Newton would say. But in reality, the Indians barely set out on this great road, and they were guided more by chance than by intellect. This is why Caldas says that the “background of knowledge and felicitous experiences” that the Indians have is still not enough for science to exist. Scientific truth certainly begins with experience but is defined thanks to the elaboration of universal categories like those developed by Linnaeus in the case of botany. The medical knowledge of the Indians, by contrast, does not go beyond their merely particular experience and nor could it be formulated in a universal language. Under such conditions, the remedies developed by the Noanama Indian lack scientific status, such that Caldas recommends not taking his word for it.9 Another example of how the spontaneous sociology of the elites seeps into enlightened knowledge is that of the insalubrity of the Indians as a cause of the depopulation of the viceroyalty. In his 1741 chronicle, Father Gumilla gives four reasons to explain the dramatic decline in the Indigenous population during the previous century: “the lack of compassion they have for their sick,” “the voracity with which they eat when they have the opportunity,” “their nudity and lack of covering,” and “their plunging into the river to clean themselves, even when sweating” (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 210). This means that it was not the massacres suffered during the conquest, nor the cruelty of the taxes imposed by the Spanish, nor even the diseases brought from Europe, that explain the demographic crisis of the Indigenous people of New Granada. Gumilla argued that Black slaves also work very hard in the mines and suffer from diseases brought from Europe, but their numbers increased rather than decreased. It was rather their “unhealthy customs” that caused depopulation among Indians in the viceroyalty. Due to their indolence and ignorance, Indians would go to work “poorly clothed and almost uncovered” and squander their weekly salary “eating, drinking, and dancing without rhyme or reason,” which gravely deteriorates their physical health. On top of  In fact, like all other enlightened thinkers, Caldas thought that Indigenous ways of life and knowledge were things of the past. We know, for example, that Caldas was interested in studying and preserving statues of Saint Augustine, since he considered them valuable antiquities (Pineda Camacho, 2000: 26). That is to say, Caldas adopts an enlightened attitude where he does not see manifestations of the devil and idolatry in the artistic and cognitive production of the Indians, which needs to be destroyed, but rather the expression of forms of life and thought that belong to the past and should be “monumentalized.”

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this he added the unnatural practice of their women, such as voluntary sterilization10 and the killing of newborn daughters.11 This idea that the unhealthy habits of the castes explain most of the depopulation of the viceroyalty formed part of the habitus of the criollo elite. In his Reflexiones sobre el origen de las comunas enfermedades que despueblan este Reyno, enlightened criollo Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez, who was very careful to hide his African roots,12 maintained that popular use of the fermented corn drink chicha was the main cause of the diseases ravaging the New Granadian population: The barbarism that all of the Nations of the Americas lived in during the centuries of their heathendom, their savage customs, their natural laziness toward agriculture, and their total neglect of all arts that aim at the rational and solid preservation of the species, have made them so prone to drunkenness that almost all of their physical observations are directed towards those plants, fruits, and roots that can give them the harshest substances suitable for making countless strong concoctions, with which they feed their vicious propensity for drinking. It is seen as a heroic action amongst them to discover a new way of making this sort of wine or beer. The most loved man of the Homeland, the most useful to humanity was the one who invented a new kind of Chicha stronger than the ones known previously . . . The man who reflects and applies himself to investigating the physical causes of having so few elders in this Kingdom with respect to the total number of inhabitants, will certainly come to know that there is no other cause than the generalized use of Chicha. It is the terrible origin of countless diseases that lead the majority of the people directly to the grave. (Rodríguez, 1978 [1795]: 983; 985)

As can be seen in Rodríguez’ text, criollo elites attributed “countless diseases” that devastated the people to the cognitive obscurity in which Indigenous  “American women take a more certain means, oppressed by their melancholy, or exasperated by seeing foreign people in their lands; or as some have said: to not give birth to servants for these foreigners, many decide to sterilize themselves with herbs or drinks that they ingest for this aim . . . I say many because I have effective proof of it; and of the proof of the fact, in some provinces of islands the same can be inferred without recklessness, where the same motive and blind barbarism of the American women persists” (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 313). 11  “after feeling the first pains, the Indian woman secretly goes to the meadow by the river or the stream nearby, to take care of the birthing on her own; if a boy comes to greet the light, she washes him beautifully and happily . . . but if it is a girl who comes out, she breaks her neck, or without harming her (as they say) she buries the baby alive; later she bathes for a while and then returns home, as if nothing had happened . . . And even if the birth is within the house in front of her husband and relatives, if the creature comes out with any defect…, be it girl or boy, nobody is opposed, and all consent to the death that is carried out in this way” (Gumilla, 1994 [1741]: 209). 12  According to the historian José Torres Revello, Rodríguez “was a native of Bayamo, in Cuba, where he was born in 1754. His parents Manuel Rodríguez and Antonia de la Victoria were considered Spanish, or white, but they branded Manuel del Socorro a mulatto” (cited by Ortega Ricaurte, 2002: 128). 10

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people lived. The knowledge they produced was not “rational,” since their experiments were not directed toward scientifically understanding the processes of nature, but satisfying their own passions. That is to say, the Indians never managed to situate themselves at the zero-point that would guarantee them objectivity in their comprehension of the origin of disease, instead their knowledge was rooted in the impulsive domain of subjectivity. Curiously, Rodríguez would incur the very objection that he criticized: the inability of the observer to establish an “epistemological break” from their own habitus. As I have been showing, in “scientifically” observing the medical practices of Black and Indigenous people, enlightened criollos were in fact projecting their own “spontaneous sociology” onto the observed object. Late eighteenthcentury New Granadian science thereby acts as technology through which the “other” is named, classified, and stripped of all rationality. From the zeropoint at which the criollos believe themselves to be situated, the cognitive practices of the castes were declared to belong to the domain of myth, and its practitioners condemned to occupy a subordinate position in social space. 4.1.2 Contagious Ethnicities Let’s return briefly to the question of smallpox discussed in the previous chapter to exemplify the way elites projected their own aristocratic imaginary of blood purity when it was a matter of “scientifically” observing the behavior of others. One of the questions that most intrigued enlightened doctors was that of the ethnic and geographic origin of smallpox. Was it a disease known to ancient people or was it a recent disease? Was Europe its place of origin or did it instead come from Africa or Asia? Within which European, African, or Asian people did the disease have its origin? How did the virus arrive to the Americas? All of these were questions that affected not only the diagnosis but also the prevention of the disease. In his Disertación físico-médica, Doctor Francisco Gil argued that smallpox could not have originated in Europe, since Greek and Roman doctors did not give any accounts of it (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 4). Neither Galen nor Hippocrates nor Celsus ever spoke of the disease; on the contrary, the first doctors that described it were all Arabs—Al-Razi, Avicenna, and Averroes— proof that this was a relatively young virus. Although this would lead one to suppose that smallpox originated in Asia, Gil preferred to give credit to the hypothesis that the virus appeared in Africa, extending from there into the Arab countries and later coming to Europe: I stated above that smallpox had its origin in Ethiopia; and this news will be no surprise to he who knows that Africa always gave birth to the worst plagues that we have seen in Asia and Europe. Pliny the Elder observed it in his time. Thucydides, in his remarkable description of the plague of Athens, states that

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it began in Ethiopia, moved on to Egypt, and from there to Persia until finally it arrived in Greece. They claim that the great plague also had the same origin, which spread across the world in the time of the Emperor Justinian and lasted 52 years. And lastly all of the traders and travelers that come from Turkey, say that it is common to feel in that Empire, that many plagues that destroy those domains come from Africa. (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 6)

Africa is therefore the cradle of the most horrible diseases that have devastated humanity throughout history. How is this claim supported? Certainly not with scientific arguments—Gil supported his claims with “texts” and not the “oracle of experience”—but rather with what I have called here habitual representation. In the habitus of dominant groups, formed and solidified during more than 200 years of colonial dominion, the idea becomes anchored that Africa is a place of punishment for the world because that is where the “accursed children” lived. By contrast, it is from Europe that redemption for this punishment would come, since its inhabitants had been commissioned by God to show other nations the path to civilization. A disease like smallpox could not have originated in Europe but, on the contrary, it is from Western knowledge that the correct diagnosis and antidote to the disease will come. Gil does not even recognize the fact that the inoculation was discovered by the Chinese and adopted later by Turks. In his opinion, such a discovery was not motivated by genuine scientific rationality, as it is found in Europe, but by vanity. The Chinese, lovers of physical beauty, did not want their faces to be disfigured by the disease when they reached adulthood and therefore inoculated their children. The Circassians also adopted this practice due to the fact that they trafficked slave women and needed to preserve their beauty: “It is said that we owe this invention to the women of Circassia and Georgia for being the most beautiful in the world.” This also explains, Gil adds, “the many decorations, jewelry, and ointments with which they adorn themselves; and even as the Missionary Capuchin Fathers preach out against their abuse, they have not been able to stop it” (Gil, 1983 [1784]: 33). The doctor from Quito, Francisco Javier de Santa Cruz y Espejo, also claimed that the silence of classical authors toward the disease and the fact that the Arabs were the first to describe it is irrefutable proof that smallpox had exerted its tyrannical reign over the human body for the span of only six centuries.13 He added that there are three reasons to believe that smallpox originated in Africa: “its burning hot climate, its lands filled with filth, and its inhabitants, perhaps the most negligent and idle of all the earth” (Espejo, 1985 [1785]: 41, author’s emphasis). On the other hand, the fact that the  We now know that smallpox is one of humanity’s oldest diseases, first known and documented over 3,500 years ago.

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sovereigns of all of Europe have implemented inoculation as an antidote against smallpox is proof that “Europe is clean of [the disease] due to its customs and policies, and that perhaps we would not see it in any region were it not for the squalid laziness of the Africans and the effeminate delicateness of the Asians” (Espejo, 1985 [1785]: 36–37, author’s emphasis). It is clear, then, that the tripartite schema of the world according to which Europe is the central transmitter of civilization while Asia and Africa are peripheral transmitters of barbarism, seeps into the “scientific” arguments of enlightened doctors like Gil and Espejo. Due to their barbarous customs, the inhabitants of Asia and Africa are marked as the epicenter of contagious diseases, while Europe discovers the antidote and combats the disease due to its “better customs and policies.” It is not strange that Espejo would see members of the American castes—who the spontaneous sociology unconsciously represented as the “children of Ham”—as diffusion foci for the virus. Their sordid customs encourage the contamination of the air—the vehicle of the virus’ transmission14—with “fetid and pestilential vapors”: [The common air] is too fetid and filled with strange rotten bodies, and the reasons for this are, first: the pigs that roam through the streets during the day and sleep in the shops of their owners at night, who are generally Indians and mestizos. Second: these same people relieve their basic necessities in the small plazas and most public streets of the city without the slightest shame. (Espejo, 1985 [1785]: 58)

The constant surveillance of the activities of mestizos and Indians, coupled with a strict control of excrement, are the two strategies Espejo proposed to safeguard public health in Quito. The “unhealthy air” that spreads epidemics comes from the castes, who are solely responsible for the overcrowding and filth in which they live. For this reason, the sanitary policy of the state was directed toward the gathering of beggars, as discussed above, with the aim of cleaning the streets and resocializing the work force, but also to fight against all foci of infections: stagnant water, cemeteries, toilets, and trash dumps. For enlightened thought, however, all of these foci were “spontaneously” related to the activities of the castes. Espejo knew, for example, that pig breeding in the city was a necessary evil, because lard was used by commoners in all food preparation, but he recommended that its sale be regulated by the

 Espejo argues at length that air is not the focal point of the disease, but only the vehicle of its transmission: “the entire mass of air, is nothing other than a vehicle apt to transmit to diverse points the heterogeneity with which it is filled . . . You can see here how infection takes hold of the air with the strange particles that fluctuate within it, causing all of the destruction that is warned of in all epidemics” (Espejo, 1985 [1785]: 49).

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establishment of butchers and slaughterhouses that comply with minimal sanitary norms. Thus, “lard will be sold in pure form without mixture, which the fraudulent Indians add to get a bigger profit.” Chicha bars, where the “lower classes” congregate to get drunk, Espejo identified as potential foci of infection. To increase profits, Indians and mestizos used not only corn chicha in the making of “spirituous liquors,” but also added “two narcotic herbs called huantug [angel’s trumpet], and chamico [devil’s snare], that disturb the mind and make you crazy” (Espejo, 1985 [1785]: 68). Thus, the state needs to “extend the investigation everywhere, dump out liquor where it is found, break the glasses that contain them, and require the vendors of shavings to make note of who they sell to, so that it can be known who buys them most frequently” (69). Enlightened thinkers expressed a profound suspicion about the hygiene of the castes in Bogotá as well. Mutis in particular was disgusted by the attitude of the “worthless masses” toward the inoculation campaign organized by the government during the 1782 epidemic. The doctor from Cadiz reported that around nine thousand people openly resisted inoculation and preferred to remain exposed to contagion, attributing this resistance to the barbarous customs dominating the behavior of these people: Of all these people, the majority were from the worthless masses; miserable, indigent, poorly governed people, terribly inclined toward fermented drink… All of these people of the lower strata, who are not governed by the right use of reason and counsel, conduct themselves with a kind of indifference and abandon that would be unbelievable among rational people. Everything interests them more than their own health, which they look upon with scorn and carelessness. Counsel has not been enough to get them to abstain in advance, or when ill, from fermented drinks that they see as an antidote to all ills. Unfortunately, such people will always be the victims of their own caprice in any epidemic: though I am not sure if it can be said, the state loses little with them. (Mutis, 1983 [1783a]: 205–206, author’s emphasis)

Once more we see that scientific observations are infused with the habitual seeping-in of spontaneous sociology: if nine thousand Black, Indigenous, and mestizo people refuse inoculation, this is not because they possess another kind of knowledge or set of values that allows them to legitimately understand the disease in a different way, but rather because they are people governed by caprice and not by the correct use of reason. The unhealthy practices of these “miserable people,” especially their natural tendency to drink, become a dangerous site of disease transmission. Their absolute lack of moral judgment and public responsibility—“everything interests them more than their own health”—is actually an obstacle to the implementation

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of health policy. Thus, even though “the wise Mutis” shouldn’t say it (but he does say it!), it would be preferable for these nine thousand infected people to die, because in any case that are useless for strengthening the productive capacity of the viceroyalty. 4.2 THE CUNNING OF BOTANICAL REASON In the fifth chapter of The Order of Things, Michel Foucault claims that natural history opens a “new field of visibility” for science in the eighteenth century, due to the fact that, for the first time, living beings begin to be classified according to a mathematically constructed order (1994: 132–133). Writing the history of a plant or an animal no longer meant simply enumerating its elements, pointing out its similarities with other living things, or describing what modern travelers and sages of antiquity had written about them, but rather it was the more geometrico establishment of an order in which botany and zoology could treat their objects in the same way as mathematics, algebra, or geometry. The great variety of living things would be reduced to a universal language that would allow any individual, in any part of the world, to observe empirically different things in the same way. Elephants and horses, for example, could now be observed through a language that established formal similarities between them (both are mammals, quadrupeds, vertebrates, etc.), and the same occurred with plants, which are classified according to abstract categories like genus, class, and species. In this section, I will analyze how this process of the unification of the gaze noted by Foucault runs parallel, on the one hand, to the political economy of the Bourbon state in its efforts to centralize knowledge of nature, and on the other hand, to the epistemic expropriation of the castes by the criollos. It will become apparent how the language in which the meaning of health and disease was enveloped before the eighteenth century was perceived by enlightened thinkers as the source of all errors and ambiguities of traditional knowledge, and should be replaced by the precise, mathematical language of science. 4.2.1 Rules for Guiding the Mind I raised a point earlier that will be fundamental for the purposes of this investigation: until the eighteenth century, work was above all a strategy to defend human existence from the power of nature, which was always considered alien and hostile. It was a matter of creating an always fragile environment for protection against the omnipotence of the external world. Available knowledge and technology appeared to recognize that scarcity was

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a sine qua non curse on human reality and work therefore became associated with the idea of survival. However, the birth of the new science, the creation of the modern state, and the development of new technologies allowed this perspective to change: rather than being hounded and subjected to hostile and arbitrary nature, people began to think of themselves as “owner and lord” of the land. There thus appears an idea (an obsession, perhaps) that modern people still have not abandoned: that abundance might replace scarcity as the original situation and foundational experience of human existence on the earth. Starting in the eighteenth century, work is no longer geared simply toward survival, but rather toward the creation and accumulation of wealth with the goal of achieving the great modern utopia: the definitive overcoming of scarcity (Echeverría, 2001: 151). In this sense, the eighteenth century was, as Foucault points out, a moment of rupture in European and World history. It is the moment in which the state takes on the task of eliminating scarcity through the rationalized production of wealth, which unleashed a fierce battle between dominant powers (France, England, and Spain) for control over markets. The French Bourbon dynasty that ruled in Spain from the beginning of the eighteenth century introduced a series of reforms aimed at turning science and technology into pillars of economic growth. The control and appropriation of nature was to be implemented in the colonies through the institutionalization of an ensemble of sciences that allowed the state to recognize, evaluate, name, classify, export, and commercialize those natural resources considered useful for the project of wealth accumulation. In this sense, natural history, and botany in particular, was one of the sciences most appreciated and promoted by the Spanish state for realizing these goals. Michel Foucault attributes an epistemological preeminence to botany over sciences related to natural history like mineralogy and zoology. According to the French philosopher, the study of plants—more than that of animals or minerals—allowed one to better “make visible” the (unmediated) correspondence between the order of discourse and the order of nature; between words and things (Foucault, 1994: 137). Nevertheless, and in agreement with Foucault’s thesis on the preeminence of botany over other disciplines in natural history, I argue that the reason for this preeminence is not in itself epistemological, but rather economic.15 The commercial utility of vegetal  We could add a less obvious reason for this: for elites in Europe—the social location where scientific knowledge was produced and centralized during this period—it was easier to collect exotic plants than to collect animals brought from the colonies. That is to say, it was much easier and cheaper to have herbariums than zoos. Interest in animal fossils had still not appeared in the eighteenth century, since it would coincide with the birth of biology. At the same time, as I will argue in the next chapter, scientific interest in minerals was very limited due to the influence of physiocratic theories in the economic domain.

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products—for example, in medicine—was much greater than that obtained at the time from animals or minerals, which led the state to allocate greater resources to research in the field of botany. In the case of the Spanish Empire, the organization of scientific expeditions in the colonies, the creation of botanical gardens in the metropole (in Madrid there was no Royal Zoo but rather a Royal Garden), and the centralization of the medical-pharmaceutical structure (The Royal Pharmacy and the Protomedicato) are clear tendencies in this direction. The same process that I described above with respect to medicine began to occur with botany: knowledge of the properties of plants is stolen or “expropriated” from private hands (healers, untrained doctors, priests) and centralized in the hands of the state. The reason for this epistemologicalpolitical transfer is not hard to understand: if what was sought was to overcome the terrible scarcity of the past, then the “archaic” knowledge of those subjects who had been incapable of replacing scarcity with abundance had to be slowly “emptied.” Different forms of life that for centuries had coexisted as self-enclosed kosmoi now had to be integrated into a single model of civilization and production. The multiple “premodern” humanities had no alternative but to modernize or disappear, to integrate into the global process of commodity production and circulation. In the same way, the diverse ways of knowing nature, the human, and society produced within these “archaic” humanities would have to give way to the hegemony of a single form of true knowledge, scientific-technical rationality. In the face of this, all other forms of producing knowledge appeared to be tied to ignorance, superstition, and barbarism. For this reason, the traditional method of classifying plants used by Indigenous Americans—based on the religious, spiritual, and medicinal meaning of each specimen—would appear illegitimate to the classification system developed by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, a system that allowed one to identify, name, and catalog in a unitary fashion every specimen of the vegetal realm. Indeed, Linnaeus declares all the names used prior to him to classify inhabitants of the vegetal realm—in all times and places—to be illegitimate.16 His classification system is based on the allocation of a unique name to each genus and species of plants.17 Each plant has a compound name: the first identifies the genus and the second the species to which it belongs. That is to say, each individual specimen ceases to have value of its own. What is  Linnaeus is clear on this point: “I have fundamentally reorganized the entire field of natural history, elevating it to the stature it now has. I doubt that anyone could make any advances in this domain today without my help and guidance” (Cited by Beltrán, 1997: 33). 17  The sexuality of plants is the cornerstone on which Linnaeus’ entire classificatory edifice rests. The type of sexual organs (stamens and pistils) is used to identify and differentiate the classes, species, and last, genera. 16

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important now is determining similarities among different individuals, whose result is the species, and similarities among different species, whose result is the genus, to then later group everything into a system of universal classification. The great success of Linnaean taxonomy was due precisely to the fact that it offered the possibility of establishing a systematic inventory of existing natural resources, which was very useful for the commercial interests of the state. Botany and politics now had a universal language that allowed them to know the “truth” of the natural world over which humans should exercise their mastery. In fact, Linnaeus did not consider his system to be an artificial construct, but rather believed it corresponded directly to nature “in itself.” The order of the system is nothing but a reflection of the intrinsic order of the world. As it was said at that time: Deus creavit; Linnaeus disposuit. Michel Foucault makes the following comments with respect to Linnaeus’ system: The Classical age gives history a quite different meaning: that of undertaking a meticulous examination of the things themselves for the first time, and then of transcribing what it has gathered in smooth, neutralized, and faithful words. It is understandable that the first form of history constituted in the period of ‘purification’ should have been the history of nature. For its construction requires only words applied, without intermediary, to things themselves. The documents of this new history are not other words, texts or records, but unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed: herbariums, collections, gardens; the locus of this history is a non-temporal rectangle in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analysed, and bearers of nothing but their own individual names. (Foucault, 1994: 131, author’s emphasis)

Naming nature meant ordering it, placing it under the systematic control of scientific language. The naturalist is therefore like a new Adam: by naming the world for the first time he discovers it, making manifest the systema naturae designed by God himself. But naming the world scientifically also meant establishing a “pathos of distance” toward any other possible way of naming it, since modern science demands the erasure of all linguistic indeterminacy. The words that name the world should be “smooth, neutral, and faithful,” such that they can be applied “unmediated” to the things themselves. So, for example, the name given by a botanist to a newly discovered plant species ought to be so universal that any scientist in the world could recognize the object it describes without ever having seen it. The particularities of common language give rise to error and confusion in the world of science; thus, the ideal of the modern naturalist is to distance oneself from everyday

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language in order to reach the “zero-point” that allows one to describe the world objectively. The names of plants could not refer to their religious or medicinal use, as with the names used by Indigenous people and peasants, and they must moreover be in Latin, the language of the cultured elite and bureaucratic power (Nieto Olarte, 2000: 119).18 Describing the natural world from a single viewpoint and a single platform, and using a universal language valid in all place and time: such was the enlightenment ideal of the zero-point. This would also be the ideal that would inspire the great scientific explorations of the eighteenth century. 4.2.2 The Voyage of the Criollo Adams After having pioneered the great voyages of exploration in the sixteenth century, Spain remained at the margins of such initiatives for most of the seventeenth century. It was now France, England, and Holland who invested great resources into overseas exploration campaigns. What motivated these efforts was no longer the discovery of unknown lands and new commercial routes, but rather the discovery of primary materials that the metropole could capitalize upon economically. England had created the properly modern imperial model: it was not only about exploiting the mineral riches of the colonies, as Spain had done, but of creating and maintaining a commercial infrastructure that would allow the colonies to produce and export raw materials while the metropole manufactured industrial products to then be distributed to other countries. The modern/colonial project of overcoming scarcity through the accumulation of wealth thus required the creation of a complex network including promoting the free exchange of commodities between the metropole and its colonies, financial incentives for private businesses, and strengthening the bank, along with the rationalization of industry and agriculture. It is in this geopolitical context that scientific expeditions began to play a fundamental role. The powers competing for hegemony in the world system of the eighteenth century had begun an ambitious plan for the systematic knowledge of the natural and human resources in their colonies, and Spain could not fall behind in this project.19 It was necessary to carry out  In fact, this ideal of a pure (apolitical and metacultural) language was never accomplished, as Mauricio Nieto clearly shows with respect to the names given to plants by enlightened scientists. In many cases, these names refer to influential figures from Spanish history and politics, for example, the genera Carludovia (which refers to the marriage of Carlos III to Queen Ludovica), Floridablanca (the count of Floridablanca), Godoya (minister Manuel Godoy), and Juan Ulloa (uniting the names of the officers Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa). Not to mention, of course, the genus named Bonapartea in honor of the great political figure of the era (Nieto Olarte, 2000: 1201–1121). 19  José Alcina Franch (1988: 195–198) notes nineteen Spanish scientific expeditions undertaken during the reign of Fernando VI (1746–1759), Carlos III (1759–1788), and Carlos IV (1788–1808), 18

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an exhaustive inventory of the flora of the new world and to scientifically determine which exotic species could be rapidly transformed into “exchange value.” Determined to put an end to Spain’s scientific indifference and its economic disadvantage vis-à-vis England, the Bourbons implemented a series of measures to evaluate the economic potential of its American colonies. To avoid the Spanish economy’s continued dependence on the importation of precious metals, the state needed to know which vegetal species could be useful in developing agriculture, strengthening commerce, and promoting health reform throughout the empire. For this reason, Carlos III ordered all the overseas viceroys to gather objects of natural history and to promote the discovery of “useful trees, bushes, and plants.” How much the examination and methodical knowledge of the natural products of my territories in the Americas is worthwhile for my service and the good of my vassals, not only to promote progress in the physical sciences, but also to uproot doubts and falsifications in medicine, tincture, and other important arts; but also to increase commerce and establish herbariums and collections of natural products, describing and delineating the plants found in my fertile provinces in order to enrich my Cabinet of Natural History and the Botanical Garden of the Court, by sending the seeds and live roots of the most useful plants and trees to Spain, especially those that are used or should be used in medicine and in naval construction. Thus these can become acclimated to our various conducive climates, while we also gain geographical and astronomical observations so as to take steps to further these sciences. (cited by Hernández de Alba, 1996: 154)

The Spanish Crown was not interested in grand theories and scientific debates, but in the practical aspect of science, its potential to become a source of economic, political, and military capital. This is why botany turned out to be the biopolitical project’s greatest ally: botanical activity in the periphery and the political needs of the metropolitan state became mutually dependent phenomena. Criollo botanists needed state support to elevate the prestige of their practice and increase their social distance from the castes, just as had occurred with doctors; the state, meanwhile, needed the botanists to fulfill its goal of classifying the natural resources under its jurisdiction. The King’s order to gather “the seeds and live roots of the most useful plants and trees” could not be accomplished without the help of a local group of botanists trained in the new classification system designed by Linnaeus. In the same way, the state needed a team of experts in the metropole capable of organizing the botanical cabinets and gardens, so the exotic plants brought from the without even counting the innumerable expeditions carried out in the American viceroyalties throughout the eighteenth century.

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colonies could become acclimated to Spanish soil, since it was only in this environment that they could carry out a systematic study of their possible uses for agriculture, commerce, and medicine. Added to this was the expert knowledge required on both sides of the Atlantic by the sailors and officials charged with sending, transporting, and receiving these agrarian riches from the colonies (Puerto Sarmiento, 1988: 22; Nieto Olarte, 2000: 53–54). In a word, around the mid-eighteenth century, botany had become a matrix for the production of expert knowledge tied to geopolitical power apparatuses. One of Spain’s first efforts to explore the vegetal wealth of its American colonies was the Limits Expedition to the Orinoco, which took place between 1754 and 1761. The main objective of the expedition was to precisely demarcate the borders between Spain and Portugal in the Americas, in order to put an end once and for all to the long dispute between the two Iberian powers that began with the Treaty of Tordesillas.20 To this end, the expedition included a commissioner from each nation accompanied by geographers, cartographers, and expert illustrators. But in addition to this, the expedition also had an economic objective: to explore the routes of the Orinoco river, catalog economically useful plants from the region, establish new settlements, and subdue Indigenous populations that impeded commerce. At this time, the territory of Guyana was already seen by the empire as a kind of natural “El Dorado”; a factory of natural resources capable of giving Spain an economic and commercial advantage over its European competitors. The expedition thus sought to set the stage for the definitive integration of Guyana as a Spanish territory, so as to counter the presence of the English, French, and Dutch in the area (Lucena Giraldo: 1998: 25–38). Among the members of the Limits Expedition was the Swedish botanist Pehr Löfling, a favorite disciple of Linnaeus who was contracted by the Spanish state to head the scientific team in charge of exploring the vegetal world of the Amazon. Löfling’s presence was due to the mutual economic benefit that Spanish and Swedish authorities expected to receive. Sweden, at the time a peripheral country in Europe, was fighting to gain a position in international trade and saw the expedition to the Orinoco as an opportunity to acclimate some medicinal American plants to their territory. Linnaeus himself had convinced the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences of Stockholm to sponsor Löfling’s voyage, arguing that American products like cinchona bark and cinnamon could generate lucrative profits for the Swedish economy (Nieto Olarte, 2000: 45). Spain, meanwhile, was interested in taking advantage of Linnaeus’ new botanical system, which Löfling knew firsthand. At the end of the day, enlightened technocrats saw nature in the Americas as an  In the next chapter, we will see how these kinds of expeditions formed part of the new economic and political practices at the end of the eighteenth century.

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immense “chaos” that needed to be ordered according to a precise nomenclature in order to subject it to the dictates of economic rationality. Löfling left Cadiz for the northeastern part of New Granada, what is today Venezuela, believing himself a sort of enlightened messenger and without knowing hardly anything of Spain and its colonies. He carried a copy of the French translation of El Orinoco ilustrado in his luggage, and I suppose it was through Father Gumilla that the Swedish botanist got his first “view” of the Amazon. The two years that he spent in the region were marked by constant illness, difficulties of communication (he did not speak Spanish and his Spanish colleagues did not speak French), and restrictions on writing his notes in Swedish, because the Spanish authorities were afraid that he might be sending secret information. In the end, far from his homeland and unable to complete his enlightened mission, Löfling died of malignant fevers in February 1756 (Amodio, 1998: 63–71). But the Spanish empire would not give up easily on their goal of exploring the territories of the New World. The Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada (1783–1817) was also framed by the eighteenth-century Bourbon’ state’s will to know. After the Seven Years’ War with England, Spain felt the need to make its colonies into gigantic zones for working and producing primary materials, with the goal of breaking the economic monopoly of its competitors. The colonial administration, a disastrous business up to this point, needed to become a source for wealth production and accumulation. The Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada, like those organized to New Spain, Chile, Peru, and the Philippines, opened up the possibility of strengthening the internal economy of the empire through the discovery of new commercial products. Already since 1763, José Celestino Mutis had tried to persuade the King to finance a botanical expedition in New Granada, using political and economic arguments: I know, sir, that I would offend the great understanding of your majesty, if I were to relate in detail the great utility that could result from my prospective voyage with two assistants for scientific work, and two more for paintings, illustrations, and other material labors. No one would know better than your majesty, of course, the immortal glory that your majesty would acquire from this glorious enterprise executed with dignity, no other nation like Spain has been interested in knowing the admirable products with which Divine Providence has enriched the expansive territories that have the fortune to live under the happy command of your majesty in the New World . . . America, in whose blessed soil the creator deposited an infinite number of the most admirable things, has stood out not only for its gold, silver, precious stones, and other treasures that it hides in its bowels; it also produces exquisite dyes on its surface for use and commerce that industry will continue to discover in its plants; cochineal dye is in abundance in

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this kingdom, even though the natives of these provinces in their indolence do not cultivate it; there is also the precious wax of a bush called laurelito and that of the palm; many glues that could be used by the arts; admirable wood to make musical instruments and furniture; they also produce many other trees, herbs, resins, and balsams for the good of humanity, that will eternally preserve the credit of their as yet unknown fertility. (Mutis, 1983 [1763]: 127–128)

The “glorious enterprise” Mutis advocates would revolve around the activity of botanists and illustrators. The botanists, led by Mutis, traveled the countryside to take systematic samples of every kind of plant, root, bulb, and tuber. The collection of samples was not arbitrary, since it followed the parameters for classification and observation established by Linnaeus. His vision trained to see universals, the botanist grouped and classified the samples gathered, proceeding to organize nurseries, herbariums, and experimental modes of cultivation (like those developed by Mutis and his assistants on Mariquita estate). The name and common use that people of the region might have for the samples taken were not relevant to the universal aims of the botanist, since all local knowledge had to be legitimated by appearing before the court of botanical reason. At best, Indians and peasants were consulted as “native informants” to provide leads for locating certain plants and animals.21 And although the vernacular name of a sample often appeared in botanist’s reports the drawings of the illustrators, this information was more of organizational than scientific interest, since it allowed the authorities to quickly find the species in question. For their part, the illustrators represented the gathered samples according to the strict specifications of the botanist. As the illustrations were not meant to appeal to the aesthetic sense of the observer but to the analytic rationality of the scientist, the illustrator’s function was to emphasize only those elements of the sample (the shape and color of the leaves, structure of flowers and fruits, type of seeds, etc.) that could facilitate its inclusion in Linnaeus’ universal taxonomy; that is, so that they could be presented in the court and before the international scientific community as the discovery of new genera and species.22 We could say that these drawings were equivalent to the  We know that some Indigenous people were used on the expedition as “herbalists,” that is, as people who knew the flora and fauna of the region and were capable of finding and transporting and kind of sample no matter how difficult its location might be. 22  Mauricio Nieto helpfully notes that these drawings had the function of “bringing closer” and making intelligible to the European observer the “savage” habitat of the New World: “The specimens had to be packed and preserved not only so that they would remain unaltered on long journeys, but also so that they could be presented in Europe as new discoveries. The jungle, the tropics, and the New World were places where plants and animals proliferated, but not knowledge. This was produced and certified in European institutions: laboratories, museums, gardens, and printing presses. The objects of nature should be removed and accumulated within these institutions where 21

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sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles: both types of documents were proof of entry into a universality defined by and from Europe. In the first case, a new kind of humans made their entrance onto the stage of “Universal History,” as Hegel would propose, while in the second, the exotic objects in question are not humans but plants entering into “Natural History.” Entrance into the world of the universal thus takes on the character of discovery, and the illustrators are chroniclers who testify faithfully to the feats of the new conquistador: the botanist. Thus, the authority of the drawing, like that of the chronicle, rests on the realism of its testimony. The illustrator must “copy nature with exactitude, especially plants, without seeking to adorn or augment anything with their imagination” (Nieto Olarte, 2000: 70).23 From this point of view, the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada was an Entdeckungsreise, a sort of “second conquest” organized and executed no longer directly by Europeans but by their American descendants, the criollo botanists.24 They embarked on the task of finding, distinguishing, and naming every single species and genus, bringing to light the immanent order of creation. In addition to “discovering” objects that supposedly no one in history had previously known, these criollo Adams incorporated the objects into a universal language that could only be understood by the community to which they themselves belong: that of enlightened men who make legitimate use of reason. Knowledge of the vegetal world rooted in local practices and traditions is thus considered botany’s “prehistory,” an ensemble of the naturalist, the man of science, could work in a suitable and familiar environment. In the cabinet, herbarium, or museum, the [European] botanist would take on a central and privileged position that would grant him ‘direct experience’ of a number of objects that nobody could have examined in the field” (Nieto Olarte, 2000: 69–70). 23  Foucault’s claim that “the blind man in the eighteenth century can perfectly well be a geometrician, but he cannot be a naturalist,” is very interesting in this respect (1994: 133). Foucault is referring to the privilege that scientific observation gives to vision over touch, sound, and taste in its eagerness to eliminate all possible uncertainty. This is a technically controlled visibility “restricted, moreover, to black and white”: “Displayed in themselves, emptied of all resemblances, cleansed even of their colours, visual representations will now at last be able to provide natural history with its proper object” (Foucault, 1994: 133–134, author’s emphasis) Foucault’s statement here contrasts markedly with the vivid colors of the more than five thousand prints sent by Mutis’ nephew to Spain in 1817. Color was very important indeed for the criollos of New Granada, such that in some cases (e.g., with cinchona) this detail could determine who was in charge of the commercial monopoly over a new product. As we will see later, Mutis, who claimed to have discovered a new species in New Granada, distinguished between four types of cinchona according to the color and size of their leaves. 24  Unlike all the other eighteenth-century American expeditions, which took place under rigid peninsular oversight, the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada was a local criollo enterprise that grew out of Mutis’ initiative and was concretized thanks to his friendship with viceroy Caballero y Góngora. All of the scientists and illustrators that took part in it, with the exception of Mutis who himself had spent over thirty years living in New Granada, were criollos (Puerto Sarmiento, 1988: 115–118). Included among the most distinguished scientists that participated in the botanical expedition were figures such as: Francisco José de Caldas, Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Francisco Antonio Zea, José Joaquín Camacho, Miguel Pombo, José María Carbonell, Sinforoso Mutis, and Eloy Valenzuela.

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superstitions toward which the scientist must establish a linguistic and epistemological pathos of distance. In the journal of the expedition, the rapporteur Eloy Valenzuela describes the discovery of a plant as follows: Drawn here is a Melastoma polyandra. The perianth can be seen as one piece; cylindrical in the part that fills the germ and sharp in the upper part . . . Petals 6, a bit narrow later widened, plunging obliquely toward the tip and curving toward the pedicel, white, two or three time larger than the germ and attached internally on the edge above it. At their base the stamens number 24 or more, three for each petal and one in each clear, filiform, some broken, of the same length as the petal. Cylindrical style, straight, larger than the stamens. Fruit: round berry, atropurpureum, very shiny, spattered with little atoms of dust, hollowed out at in the apex by the receptacle of the flower, succulent, of 6 loculaments formed by the flesh, and 6 receptacles of many seeds nested lanky and slightly compressed. Solitary peduncles, terminal, the subordinate, alternatively opposed, subdivided in 3 tri-flowers: under the axil of each decussation another single tri-flower is born. (Valenzuela, 1983 [1783–1784]: 210–211)

Valenzuela’s description of nature must conform to the mathematical precision of expert language. Like the illustrator with their lines, the rapporteur must use sterile language, purified of all sensory and cultural contamination, thereby ruling out any possible indeterminacy. In a plant where the peasant sees similarities with the familiar world surrounding him (using names like “lion’s tooth,” “mouse ear,” “candlestick,” “cow’s tongue,” etc.), the criollo botanist sees only numbers and geometric figures. Familiarity with the environment, reflected above all in popular language, constitutes an epistemological obstacle that must be eliminated to access true knowledge. The criollo expeditioners, proud to belong to the white race and trained in the use of a language inaccessible to the castes, knew that they had the power to name the world over which they would exercise dominion. As new Adams in the middle of paradise, blessed with universal language and vision, the expeditioners had the sensation of seeing the territory of New Granada for the first time, and thus assuming the right to name the plants and animals. Even the most familiar places appeared before their eyes as something unprecedented, as Caldas put it in a personal letter: “What a new and unusual object for me, for me who has passed through these places three times, how much they had amused and amazed me, and I had not noticed! Here I came to understand the value of the Enlightenment and to see with philosophical eyes. Before I did not notice the layers, the angles, in short, the Comte de Buffon’s theory of land, but now everything calls me, everything interests me.”25  Cited by Díaz Piedrahita, 1997: 75.

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“To see with philosophical eyes” means taking distance from the world in order to see it for the first time and from a universal perspective. What used to be closeness, face-to-face, familiarity with local language and culture, now becomes an “epistemological obstacle”; a veil that prevents one from seeing “the thing in itself.” The only way of pulling back this veil to achieve certainty is to break with the smells, colors, tastes, and all other “barbarous” ways of seeing the world. Settling in the sterile environment of the universal thereby allows the criollo scientist to see with “clarity and distinction” what all the other inhabitants of the colony cannot see; discovering what for other mortals forms an integral part of their daily life. Local knowledges, traditional practices through which the natural world is seen, named, and governed, are relegated to the past. For the criollo scientist what exists is only the present of a territory revealing its secrets for the first time to the human gaze, and the future of a policy promising the establishment of a Regnum Hominis on earth. 4.2.3 Mutis’ Magical Brew Perhaps the clearest example of how scientific knowledge, colonial power, and the discourse of blood purity became tightly linked in New Granada was the famous dispute between Mutis and Sebastián López Ruiz over who had discovered cinchona. I already briefly mentioned this dispute in the previous chapter with respect to divisions within the criollo elite toward the biopolitical designs of the state (scholastic vs. enlightened). But it is necessary to broaden this reflection with the example of cinchona since this will allow me to illuminate the link between zero-point hubris, the epistemological expropriation of traditional knowledges, and the economic interests of the criollo elite. Economic interest in cinchona bark was not new in the eighteenth century. It was already known from the sixteenth century on that cinchona from the Loja region near Quito was very effective at curing all types of fevers (or “calentures,” as they called them at the time).26 Legend says that around 1630 the Cacique Pedro de Leiva of the Malacatos tribe in Loja province gave an infusion of cinchona bark to a Jesuit missionary sick with a fever. The missionary, cured almost miraculously, provided the remedy to the mayor of Loja, and also being cured of his ills, he informed the vicereine of Peru about it, who distributed it to the sick and poor of Lima, with the remedy coming  The doctor from Quito, Eugenio Espejo, summarized the economic and medicinal interest in cinchona in the eighteenth century as follows: “The bark is an essential necessity for intermittent fevers and even when feeling physically well, for all types of fevers; to cure hydropsy; to eradicate the effects of scurvy; to guard against gangrene and cancer, and finally for very many and easier uses . . . Cinchona is like a distinct and precious currency with which you can buy human health” (Espejo, 1985 [1786]: 31).

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to be known as the “powder of the countess” (Jaramillo Arango, 1951: 247). Word of the quasi-miraculous recovery of the viceroy quickly echoed through the European courts. The powder of the vicereine, better known as Jesuit powder, since it was they who first sold the product, began to be requested by pharmacies on the old continent. “Loja bark” became famous in the global core for its proven curative properties, and in the periphery (the viceroyalties of Peru and New Granada) for the abundant profits gained by its exportation. What was new in the eighteenth century was not, therefore, the marketing of cinchona, but rather the legitimation of the trade by scientific knowledge and state biopolitics. Competition for the commercial monopoly on cinchona and the expansion of English and French colonial powers (and the consequent need for antidotes against terrible tropical fevers) unleashed a scientific debate over the real medicinal properties of cinchona, the supply of adequate doses, and the different varieties of trees that produced it. The Spanish state, hoping to limit contraband of the product and monopolize its sale in Europe, turned to botany and medicine to establish with certainty what types of cinchona were useful for curing which types of illnesses. The unification of criteria around these questions was due to two factors: first, the growing claim by different exporters in the colonies that they possessed “the best” kind of cinchona. Second, the increased cost of harvesting, transporting, and marketing the product. The Spanish state could not afford the luxury of investing so much money in the exportation of a poor quality product, exposing itself to rejection by the demanding European market. Expert scientific knowledge would allow the state to decide which type of cinchona was best, where it was located, and how best to harvest and transportit without affecting the medicinal properties of the bark. The dispute between Mutis and López Ruiz in New Granada took place in this geopolitical context. Since his arrival in Bogota, Mutis knew that discovering the best type of cinchona was more than sufficient reason for the state to finance a botanical expedition in the New Granadian territory. In his presentation to King Carlos III in 1763, Mutis states that The greatly useful cinchona bark: a treasure uniquely bestowed on the territories of your majesty, whose distribution to other nations is in your hands, like the position of the Dutch distributing cinnamon from Ceylon. Those who have a certain horror, unjustly conceived by some doctors in Europe, who have not taken the caution to separate the true and the fresh from the false and vile, a horror introduced through ignorance or ambition, will know how to act with greater confidence, free and certain, when my observations reach the public, which I make public in some European academies where they propose new discoveries, for the anticipated good of the human species. A remedy that is so remarkable that they dispute its superiority compared to the few known antidotes, and that

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Divine Providence has put in the hands of your majesty for the universal good of humanity…, will come to be scarce in the third century of its happy discovery, if your majesty does make the most opportune decisions in time . . . It is very frightening, my lord, that we could come to lack cinchona, as it seems every day by experience. Your majesty would not permit that the ambition of those who trade in this precious species multiply the miseries that we fundamentally fear. (Mutis, 1983 [1763]: 129–130)

In this text, Mutis claimed that modern science finds itself with the capacity to distinguish true and fresh cinchona from the false and vile, such that he tried to persuade the King to name him head of a scientific expedition to the interior of New Granada. The central purpose of this voyage would be to find a variety of cinchona to replace “Loja bark,” since Mutis feared that a hundred years of tree cutting in that region of Peru would end up ruining sale of the product, consequently harming the Spanish treasury and the “good of the human species.” The naturalist put all of scientific competency at the service of the King, convinced not only that he could discover an alternative variety of cinchona, but that he could also propose a completely new way of cultivating, processing, and transporting it. Without the necessary measures, that is, assigning Mutis the command the enterprise, Spain would not only lose out on the cinchona trade, but it would be the English and the Dutch who would fill the market with other products from the colonies, like cinnamon from Ceylon or lower-quality cinchona. The commercial future of cinchona bark thus depended on Mutis’ scientific activity in New Granada, at least as he himself described it. At this point, the second protagonist of this story entered the scene, the criollo doctor Sebastián López Ruiz. We know that Mutis’ early 1763 petition was rejected by the Crown, which was interested in the moment in saving the cinchona crops already existing in Peru. Things remained as they were until López Ruiz officially presented a document to the Crown in 1774 in which he claimed to have discovered of his own accord a new variety of cinchona in the Andean region of Tena, on a farm belonging to the recently expelled Society of Jesus.27 The discovery caused an uproar in botanical circles on the peninsula. Casimiro Gómez Ortega and Antonio Pallau, professors in the Royal Botanical Garden, carefully examined the samples and concluded that the New Granadian cinchona discovered by López Ruiz was of better quality than that produced in Loja. With this endorsement of the metropolitan

 Hernández de Alba (1993: 173–175) says that the discovery was officially presented to the Crown through the viceroy of New Granada Manuel Antonio Flórez, and that proof of the discovery (four crates containing samples of the new variety) was duly submitted to the Royal Pharmacy of Madrid.

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scientific community, López Ruiz was invited to Europe, made a member of the Royal Medical Society of Paris, and named Botanist of the Royal Order by the Spanish Crown, with the commission to oversee the monopoly and exportation of the new cinchona he had discovered (Hernández de Alba, 1996: 175). Mutis was infuriated by this unexpected appearance of the criollo López Ruiz. He felt that an “intruder” was usurping his right to be in charge of such an important botanical discovery, receiving corresponding honors from the international scientific community and supervising the establishment of the cinchona monopoly in New Granada. Who better than José Celestino Mutis, personal doctor of viceroy Messía de la Cerda, professor of mathematics at the Colegio Mayor del Rosario, friend of the “immortal Linnaeus,”28 graduate from medical school at the Royal College of Cadiz, and disciple of the famous surgeon Pedro Virgili, to receive official recognition to lead the scientific exploration of New Granada? It was intolerable for Mutis that an “upstart” like López Ruiz who had not even studied medicine in Europe but rather in the provincial Peruvian University of San Marcos, could take credit for the discovery of a new cinchona variety. If scientific knowledge was the legitimating instance for what could be considered “true,” who was this poor unknown man and moreover mulatto López Ruiz in the face of the international prestige of the “wise Mutis”? He expressed this bitterly in a personal letter written from his home in Mariquita in 1790: I am already tired of enduring political inflammations that have degenerated into a slow fever which will ultimately consume my life without the pleasure  We know that from distant Sweden Linnaeus corresponded frequently with Mutis, commending his scientific work in New Granada, promising to make him a member of the Uppsala Academy of Science, and consecrating the discovery of new species of plants in his name. It is not difficult to imagine the effect that these praises from the wise Scandinavian had on the ego of the doctor from Cadiz. Upon Linnaeus’ death, Mutis sent a letter of condolence to his son stating the following: “I have just learned with much pain . . . that your beloved father, whose loyal friendship I had the honor of cultivating over many years, overcoming the great distance between inhabitants of the North Pole and the Equator . . . You will know that since 1761 . . . I had the singular satisfaction of receiving his first letter, finding myself so far away, kissing for the first time his letters that were so important for the wise men of Europe. In them, as this great man was accustomed, I saw sweet expressions with which he admonished me to kindle the fire inside me for the study of nature as I was yet a young man. From then on I encouraged myself to embrace your father’s friendship; and from this time on I cultivated his friendship with much loyalty, continuing our correspondence for the long span of 18 years… I certainly do not find a similar genius across the ages dedicated to the contemplation of the works of nature, if I have any knowledge of these things, that I can justly compare to the great Linnaeus, the greatest prince of nature. I only have this comparison: as much as the great Newton achieved in the study of philosophy and mathematics, the immortal Linnaeus moved forward the study of botany and natural history . . . I hope, oh humane young man, that I do not offend your modesty, nor do these praises bother you; because if you inherit the greatest part of the right of blood, the least part is not due to me by the right of friendship” (Mutis, 1983 [1778]: 77; 79).

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of seeing the happiness for which I had yearned; and the only satisfaction that remains within me is not having numbered zero among mortals. The great charlatan adventurer of whom I speak is among the many mediocre of the profession: but with the grace of having given in to the madness of robbing me of my discoveries. I beg Your Merciful influence so that the ministry not be seduced by a man who has proven to do nothing in the long time of his commissions, of whom they know only his name and nothing more. It is one of many superficial understandings, swindling with the shamelessness with which he appears among the people in order to hide what he is and the race that he comes from. (cited by Pérez Arbeláez, 1998: 79; 81, author’s emphasis)

Mutis’ argument is thus that López Ruiz is a person of “bad race” and that his moral qualities therefore leave much to be desired. This would explain why López Ruiz “swindled” knowledge that only someone like Mutis could have of New Granadian flora. This was a veritable “intellectual heist,” as Hernández de Alba puts it, proper to someone from the lowest sectors of society. But God consoles the good and punishes the evil, which is why Mutis feels confident that one day his discoveries will be recognized worldwide and his name will figure in the annals of science as the wise man who revealed the secrets of cinchona bark to humanity, while López Ruiz will be recognized by posterity for “what he is”: a petty mulatto thief, so envious that he sought to “capture the popular spotlight” by stealing the intellectual labor of others better than himself.29 However, Mutis’ irritation was not only about the attack on his intellectual prestige. It also had to do with something that he does not dare mention in his letters or writings as it would be considered undignified for an enlightened philosopher: his obsession with power. What Mutis sought was to organize a commercial monopoly for cinchona in New Granada in which the state would be the sole buyer, exporter, and distributor of the product. This certainly impacted

 Caldas attests to the profound distrust and even contempt that Mutis felt not only for López Ruiz but for all the criollo scientists around him, complaining of how Mutis treated him when he preferred to place someone with inferior scientific qualifications but with full confidence, his own nephew Sinforoso Mutis (a criollo but of his same blood), at the front of the botanical expedition: “This wise man [Mutis] always fed me with hope and offers that he did not know how to fulfill while he was alive. I was not able to get him to even set up a single position on my behalf, or to follow through with what he solemnly offered in my presence to the Excellent Lord that rules us, nor did he take the smallest step in my placement . . . He told me many times in word and in writing that I would be his dignified successor, that I would be his political confessor, and the trustee of all of his knowledge, his manuscripts, his books, and his riches. How many times did he flatter me by calling me the fortunate Caldas! But his mysterious and untrusting character, that he could not get by without, always kept him in the silence of his own refuge. He never began the promised confession, he never lifted the veil, nor did he introduce me into his sanctuary. He always kept me in the dark as to the state of his affairs, and I have only come to know them superficially after his death” (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 143).

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the interests of the criollo owners of large cinchona estates—who aspired to become exporters—but it would favor the mercantilist interests of the Spanish state and of course those of people like Mutis, whose “scientific” counsel in the court and in the storage, packaging, and transport of the bark would undoubtedly be very well compensated by the government. Taking advantage of his close friendship with viceroy Caballero y Góngora, Mutis proposed an ambitious project for the cinchona monopoly that would include the construction of an immense factory at the Honda port (where they would store and package the product), the creation of a navigation system to allow the secure transport of the product from the Magdalena river to Cartagena, the employment of thousands of harvesters on the estates, and the massive importation of Black slaves who would be used as a cheap workforce. Mutis’ “optimism of the intellect” seemed limitless: New Granada would export two thousand crates of cinchona per year and the suffering of a sick humanity would be relieved for more than ten centuries! (Hernández de Alba, 1996: 195–196). However, there was the “mulatto” López Ruiz, overshadowing the enlightened dream of the Spanish scientist. His discovery of an alternative variety had been certified, he had been commissioned by Madrid to organize the cinchona monopoly, and he was not inclined to let Mutis usurp his legitimately acquired rights. Showing off his rhetoric as a lawyer trained in scholastic doctrine, López Ruiz maintained that the privilege of leading the Botanical Expedition and receiving 2,000 peso salary assigned to this position was rightly his. It was Mutis who was usurping the rights of an already certified discovery, such that his naming to lead the expedition was done in an illegal and treacherous way, taking advantage of López Ruiz’s trip to Europe: Having secured the protection offered by the Most Excellent Lord Archbishop Viceroy of this kingdom Don Antonio Caballero y Góngora, Don José Mutis was able to ponder much in order to plot his placement at my expense . . . Don José was triumphant, coronating his patrons with my dispossession as well as with honor, and a salary of 2,000 pesos that he enjoyed as the prize for my discovery, and for the Royal Commission conferred upon me by the Certificate and Royal Order of November 21 and 24, 1778 . . . He waited for my long absence in the Court, which kept me from defending myself against his harm, and favored claims to make people believe on his word that it was he who was the Discoverer of this Cinchona, to print it and publish it with my back turned, when after ten years deprived of salary due to his indefatigable persecution supported by the favor of Lord Góngora, I received a Royal Order to go to Madrid. At the cost of unutterable grief, opprobrium, indigence, sacrifice, and the sorrowful abandon of my wife and children, I could at last undertake such a costly and lengthy voyage to proclaim my grievances and devastation at the foot of the Throne. (López Ruiz, 1996 [1801: 103; 106)

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To counter this argument, Mutis claimed that he himself discovered the new variety of cinchona in 1772, two years before the appearance of the untimely López Ruiz, and that if he kept silent about it this was not to await the absence of his opponent, but simply because he was “buried in a profound philosophical lethargy,” engrossed in his work as a naturalist and professor without caring to certify his discoveries (Mutis, 1983 [1783b]: 139–140). His only consolation is recognition for his work by the likes of Linnaeus, Bergius, Logié, and Alströmer, all Swedish botanists of great international prestige. Mutis claims that it was the “prince of Botany” himself who, in a letter dated June 6, 1773, testified to his great discovery.30 He knows, however, that no argument, not even that of being the “son of a mulatto and mulatta”31 could prevent López Ruiz from being the new commissioner of cinchona in New Granada, so he decides to vindicate his name not before the fallible human court but rather before the higher court of reason. From then on, he prefers to be faithful to his “philosophical lethargy” and work on the volume that he believed would place his name alongside the greatest names in the history of science: El arcano de la quina revelado a beneficio de la humanidad.32 Published as a series in Papel Periódico, Mutis’ work is a pathetic example of what I have called in this book zero-point hubris. The very idea of a “mystery revealed” shows Mutis’ enlightened aspirations: to discover, to remove once and for all the veil that has for centuries kept men from obtaining true knowledge of the medicinal properties of cinchona. In his opinion, no European or American botanist had yet been able to pull back this veil. The proof of this is the great confusion reigning over the scientific community with respect to the names, species, and varieties of cinchona (Mutis, 1978 [1793]: 304).33 Mutis referred to the plant as the “second tree of life” and  “It would be too audacious on my part to abuse the time and patience of your excellency, repeating on this occasion the specificity of my discoveries . . . [But] so as not to neglect the duties bestowed upon me by the supreme office of your excellency, I will address you with the words of the gentlemen Linnaeus, in his common and familiar style: datas a te 6 Junii 1773 his diebus rite accepi, nec umquam gratius per totam vitam, cum ditissimae errant tot raris plantis, avibus &c. Ut plane obstupesceban, a clear indication of my innumerable discoveries” (Mutis, 1983 [1783b]: 142). 31  We know that one of the arguments used by Caballero y Góngora to discredit López Ruiz before the Council of the Indies was his condition as “son of a mulatto and mulatta, [since] his father married a Black woman in his second marriage, and had with her other children of the zambo color that lived there” (cited by Gardeta Sabater, 1996: 15). 32  For a study of Mutis’ much heralded work in terms of his relationship with Spanish scientific community, see: Amaya, 2000: 103–159. 33  It is worth reproducing here parts of a text by Mutis that is not well-known, a personal letter to the doctor from Quito, Eugenio Espejo, in which he summarizes the aims of his Arcano and details his plans for the cinchona monopoly: “The matter of cinchona has been a mystery for a century and a half and the moment has arrived to illuminate this for the benefit of humanity. It has been believed in Europe and also in America, that all cinchona and its general febrifuge virtues are the same, but of greater or lesser efficacy according to the conditions of climate, soil, season, age, and benefits . . . [I] work to show that the species of cinchona being several and truly distinct according to botanical rigor, that only Primitiva is directly febrifuge . . . Cinchona Primitiva has become rare, 30

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claimed to have discovered the secret of its medicinal properties, as well as the recipe for a “balm of life” to fight any kind of fever: The most natural, simple, and healthful preparation is fermented Cinchona. The liquor that results from this procedure is that Balm of life, or Universal panacea sought to offer throughout the centuries, that would provide permanent relief if bestowed on mortals. Far from flattering the weakness of man that vainly yearns for immortality, we only claim to announce the most universal and least troublesome treatment for his inevitable ailments. If any remedy merits such bombastic statements, none is better suited than that which in all times and with such imperfect knowledge of its beneficial preparation and its most precious virtues to the species, I name the Tree of Life. (Mutis, 1978 [1793] 438–439).

This “magic elixir” that Mutis spoke of with such enthusiasm was nothing other than beer made by fermenting cinchona. Gonzalo Hernández de Alba says that the formula for preparing it was more or less the following: “dissolve thirty-two pounds of cane sugar in water; evaporate by boiling until it attains the consistency of a syrup and dilute with egg white. Mix with fifteen bottles of water and add between one-half and three-fourths of a pound of ground cinchona powder, preferably white. Let the mixture ferment and it becomes beer” (Hernández de Alba, 1996: 238). In the end, the mystery that a sick humanity has been awaiting for so many centuries and that not even the greatest minds of Europe have been able to discover was simple and within reach: sugar water with eggs and cinchona powder. According to Hernández de Alba, even the wise Alexander von Humboldt tried Mutis’ magical drink in Bogotá and after emphasizing its fever-reducing and restorative qualities, exclaimed that not even the Germans themselves prepared such a fine brew. But while Mutis was convinced that his brew was an unprecedented contribution to the history of Western medicine, he recognized that it was

its availability exhausted by the ambitions of commerce; leading to the misrecognition and confusion of the Succedaneum and the Substitute, such that the blameless ignorance of the professors has reached the point where no one in Europe can distinguish and separate a cinchona primitiva branch if it is mixed with others, nor could they demonstrate what distinguishes them . . . My aim is to collect all of the cinchona primitiva that remains unused beyond the limits of the Royal Factory. I will also cover and collect all there is from this province of Popayán and I will show it to those who are interested in this trade as it could help inform them . . . To proceed with certainty, I should discover at your mercy that Divine Providence has not squandered the precious primitiva tree. According to my extensive experience and careful calculations, there is hardly one tree per thousand even counting the three remaining cinchona species together. It withered in its native soil, as they have continued taking advantage of its few offspring, or the trees of later discoveries will also quickly wither. There is still the means to collect what would always remain unused, and ultimately the strongest and most dignified resource of his Majesty the King and his power to set up gardens, with which I am charged by the Royal Commission” (Mutis, 1993 [1788]: 141–143.

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Indigenous Americans who had first glimpsed this great discovery.34 Not that Indigenous people knew the medicinal properties of cinchona and the right way to prepare it, since their savagery and rustic ways of living prevented that. But just as the “cunning of reason” is always at work to the benefit of humanity, it was this same savagery that curiously allowed Indigenous people to carry out their first great experiment with the magical brew. Due to their natural tendency toward drunkenness, Mutis conjectures that perhaps these people had used the cinchona bark to make their fermented drinks: Truly and in good faith, we confess that there exists no monument or tradition, with which we could grant our Indians, inventors of the remedy, the glory of having used fermented cinchona; but if we take note of their great passion for this kind of drink, and the primitive practice of brewing powders in wine, that the Spaniards developed according to formulas scattered across all of Europe, it seems very plausible that they could learn from what the Indians did, brewing the bark recently cut from the tree, and roughly crushed, keeping it in their chicha for several days . . . This speculation certainly seems plausible as the history of barbarous Peoples is universally well-known. Always occupied with their present necessities and never thinking of what is to come; nor tormented with foresight of future ills and so they only apply the simplest remedies to their sick that in such that in such conditions they use plants from the mountains. And thus this would be an exception never before seen that the Indians in their humble shacks recovered from their remedies, when we see their unhappiness and actual deplorable behavior despite the civilization and culture of our times. (Mutis, 1978 [1793]: 463–464)

Mutis prefers to recognize the “savage Indians of the past” as his most immediate predecessors in the discovery of cinchona rather than impertinent colleagues like López Ruiz. After all, neither could claim the glory of having been the scientist that revealed the mysteries of cinchona to humanity before the court of reason: the latter for being mulatto, and the former for being Indians. Constructing an imaginary prehistory of his discovery, Mutis ensures the necessary epistemological distance to reclaim his place in the history of science. The medical practices of Indians were mere doxa, knowledge

 “We love the favorable effects of this preparation more every day, obliging us to finally spread the benefit that we have announced to Humanity for years; and without going beyond the limits of an honest ambition for glory, we also judge this discovery to be original. We say it frankly: we certainly have not found any trace, in all of the pomp of medicine, from the happy age of the introduction of cinchona into Europe to the present, that could have led us to this gate. Even though we can guarantee that we have not learned these ideas from anyone else, we suggest that they were supported at first by certain empirical practices, and in other mixtures that perhaps the Indians would make with this bark” (Mutis, 1978 [1793]: 463).

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anchored in common sense or in the irrationality of their religious beliefs. Mutis contrasts these with the episteme of modern science, of which he is a recognized guardian. As an expert botanist, he occupies a position of authority in the scientific field that allows him to draw the border between legitimate and illegitimate knowledges, establishing enlightened nomos as the universal classification principle. In this way, enlightened scientific practice ensures the epistemological control of a body of experts that legitimizes the interests, values, and habitual worldview of the social group to which they belong. We should note finally that Mutis’ attitude toward knowledge was as Eurocentric as that of the aforementioned Caldas with regard to his “native informant.” Caldas wondered with amazement how that uneducated Indian could “accidentally” select plants within the universal taxonomy developed by Linnaeus, taken as the ultimate universal criterion of truth. If Caldas recognized the “vestiges of truth” in the empirical knowledge of Indigenous people, it was only because this knowledge could be legitimated by Linnaeus’ theories and understood as its “prehistory.” In the same way, Mutis never questioned the universality of Linnaeus’ classification, despite evidence that this system was built from the experience of European nature and it was difficult to extend its analysis to the tropical nature of the Americas. Without even considering the question of how one could “fit” such a completely different nature into the narrow molds created by Linnaeus, Mutis preferred to legitimate his own discoveries through the unquestioned wisdom of the “prince of botany.” Mutis professed such reverence for his Swedish colleague that he publicly boasted of maintaining correspondence with him and in some cases even cited parts of this correspondence in public documents. For example, in a letter to Archbishop Caballero y Góngora, Mutis wrote: It would be too audacious on my part to abuse the time and patience of Your Excellency, repeating on this occasion the specificity of my discoveries, Your Excellency having the goodness to have listened to them previously, when the heavy weight of governing this kingdom did not weigh on your shoulders. Yet so as not to neglect the duties bestowed upon me by the supreme office of Your Excellency, I will address you with the words of the gentleman Linnaeus, in his common and familiar style: “datas a te 6 Junii 1773 his diebus rite accepi, nec umquam gratius per totam vitam, cum ditissimae errant tot raris plantis, avibus &c. Ut plane obstupesceban,” a clear indication of my innumerable discoveries, when a few small communications caused such great admiration in that consummate naturalist. (Mutis, 1983 [1783b]: 142)

Mutis’ message is clear: one is “someone” in the history of science when one publicly receives recognition from the European scientific community and especially from someone as famous as “the gentleman Linnaeus.” One

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is “nobody,” on the other hand, when one has “the stain of the land” as in the case of López Ruiz, or when the knowledge obtained is not “legitimate,” that is, when it has not been learned in university lecture halls or remains unknown to Europeans. Mutis and Caldas are scientists of the periphery, that thanks to their social position there, they can delegitimize local knowledges in the name of a supposedly universal knowledge produced in Europe. Linnaeus, for his part, is a scientist of the global core who, thanks to the European administration of the modern/colonial world system, can establish and control international networks that give his particular work an aura of universality. Corresponding with scientists in the periphery like Mutis, offering to present his discoveries in Europe, citing his name in international publications, promising to make him a member of some prestigious scientific institution, or simply dedicating a plant in his name (Restrepo Forero, 2000: 205). Scientists of the periphery thus become mere cultural consumers, users who administer the “universal knowledge” that Europe produces and use it to distance themselves from the subalterns of their own localities.

Chapter 5

Striated Spaces Geography, Territorial Politics, and Population Control

One of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space. It is a vital concern of every State not only to vanquish nomadism but to control migrations and, more generally, to establish a zone of rights over an entire “exterior,” over all of the flows traversing the ecumenon. —Deleuze and Guattari

When Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Bogotá in July 1801, he brought a gift for the viceroy Pedro Mendinueta in his crates: eight cartographic documents including plans of the cities of Bogotá and Cartagena and exact maps of the Orinoco and Magdalena rivers. This was more than a simple act of personal courtesy: for the Spanish empire, geography held a privileged place in its geopolitical ambitions, as it allowed them to not only know and measure the territories they had conquered but to construct a general map of the population and natural resources of the colonies. Humboldt’s gift was a symbol of a new alliance between science and politics: greater scientific knowledge meant greater control over the population and its workforce; and greater prosperity in a territory meant greater freedom to produce scientific knowledge. Both the baron and the viceroy therefore saw the situation as mutually beneficial: the scientist because he could freely carry out his observations, and the politician because he recognized the new power that these observations generated. The viceroys, of course, did not have to wait for Humboldt’s arrival to recognize the power of geography. Seventy years earlier, the French Geodesic Mission had inspired great excitement in New Granada for the usefulness of geographic knowledge. In 1768, the attorney Francisco Moreno y Escandón 197

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informed viceroy Messía de la Cerda that geography, natural history, and agriculture required a dedicated department in the university curriculum. Likewise, one of the reasons Mutis gave viceroy Caballero y Góngora in 1783 for carrying out the Royal Botanical Expedition was the possibility of advancing “a program of astronomical, geographic, and physical observations,” since “his Majesty is lacking a detailed geographical plan of his expansive territories, with the exception of coasts and ports, we could form an exact map in the course of our voyage, without the immense expense usually incurred by an expedition of this kind” (Mutis, 1983 [1783b]: 143, author’s emphasis). This viceroyal interest in measuring space and representing it on a grid crisscrossed by meridians, parallels, longitudes, and latitudes corresponds to what Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 495) have called the striation of the earth. This notion refers to the imposition of a model of state organization and control over space that allows it to be converted into territory, which is to say a space subjected to the empire of logos and governmentality. The territorial politics implemented by the Spanish empire sought precisely to convert the space of the colonies and its populations into an objective, measurable, and thus controllable quantity. In what follows we will see how the geography of the eighteenth century became a “a royal science of striated space” (1987: 486) and what the epistemic and social consequences of this shift were. My hypothesis is that, seen from the perspective of the metropole, the territorialization of space was tied to the Bourbon dynasty’s interest in introducing the nascent logic of capitalist production into the colonies; however, seen from the perspective of the American periphery, this same territorialization obeyed the interests of criollo elites in controlling the nomadism of the castes and subjecting them to the criollos’ unquestioned ethnic superiority. Exploring the linkage between the biopolitical apparatus and the apparatus of whiteness from the other angle is therefore the aim of the present chapter. 5.1 GEOGRAPHY AS “RIGOROUS SCIENCE” During the entirety of the eighteenth century, geography enjoyed great popularity in Europe and the Americas, not only as an auxiliary science to navigation, which it had been linked to in previous centuries, but also for its ability to stimulate the imagination of adventurers, navigators, and the learned. In addition to having a clear economic interest, scientific expeditions financed during this century by England, France, and Spain, were seen as great adventurous journeys to exotic regions, such that the reports scientists wrote about their discoveries were simultaneously descriptions of territories and populations that did not have a “place on the map.” Expeditions like those of Cook

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in the Pacific, Humboldt in the Andes, or La Condamine in the Amazon made a true mapping of the world possible on a scale never before seen by humanity (Pratt, 1992: 15–37). Insofar as geography contributed decisively to this great mapping of the globe, it was also defining itself as a science of its own. The invention of instruments allowing for the precise measure of angles, distances, the position of the planets, heat, atmospheric pressure, and the elevation of the mountains, made geography a science desirous of its own identity, worthy of honorable inclusion in academic curricula. It was not in vain that Diderot and D’Alembert placed geography on their list of “sciences properly speaking” in the Encyclopedia, thereby elevating it to the same rank as physics and astronomy. Like the latter, geography had been able to detach from its mythological past and occupy the observational “zero-point.” Nevertheless, as we will see in this section, geography’s transition toward the zero-point is accompanied by its intrinsic connection to geopolitics, from which it gains its legitimacy. 5.1.1 From Cosmography to Geography In the first chapter, I referred to maps as cognitive schemas for classifying populations and I mentioned the map that divided the earth into three major regions, each inhabited by the sons of Noah and their descendants. For centuries, much of Western cartography was tied to a strategy of military and ideological control over other populations, but its ultimate aim was to show that the world, as it appeared on maps, was arranged according to higher divine designs. Thus, for example, the cartographer Hermann Schedel’s map from the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) shows the three known regions of the world—Asia, Africa, and Europe—under the dominion of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, respectively (map 1). Each major ethnic group that appeared after the flood corresponded to a specific place on the map. The German cartographer’s source for drawing the map is sacred history, the sole repository of the truth of human life. The topographical characteristics of the territory (rivers, mountains, seas) and their inhabitants (yellow, black, and white) have meaning only insofar as they refer to a metaphysical context. The message is clear: God himself, through unfathomable designs, attributes a moral and physical geography to each ethnic group that differentiates them from the others. Even after the ancient imaginary of the orbis terrarium became unsustainable thanks to the discovery of the Americas, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury European cartographers continued to read the information coming from the colonies through the imaginary of the orbis universalis christianus. One example of this is the cosmographies that circulated widely in various European state and intellectual circles at the time. Cosmographies consisted

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Map 1  Liber chronicarum, Herman Schedel (1493)

of a collection of reports on distant territories, usually accompanied by a map, whose purpose was to serve as a useful “source of knowledge” for the state that was more than a simple chronicle. In this sense, cosmographies used empirical sources and new measurement techniques to produce maps, placing less emphasis on the biblical representation of history. Despite this, cosmographers were still not able to detach themselves from the Christian imago mundi, and particularly the idea that there is a correspondence between moral and physical geography. This is the case with the mapa mundi produced by the cosmographer Simon Grynaeus in 1532, accompanied by a collection of reports on voyages to the Orient and the new world, published under the title Novus Orbis Regionum (map 2). Alongside a relatively advanced measure of the planet’s longitude, Grynaeus’ map is surrounded by illustrations of fantastical animals, sirens, and strange characters. The American continent now appears as a separate geographical entity, but its inhabitants, represented in the bottom left corner, are typified as cannibals. This belongs entirely to the medieval imaginary of the antipodes: monstrous beings whose “habitat” was situated outside of the orbis terrarum and who were not considered descendants of Adam. The representation of the Pillars of Hercules (on the lower right), symbolizing the end of the known world, indicates that all of these beings have their place

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Map 2  Novus Orbis Regionum, Simon Grynaeus (1532)

outside of properly human territory, which belongs to the sons of Adam to whom Christ explicitly directed his liberating message. They are therefore infrahuman beings who are beyond salvation by nature. The cosmographies used by the Spanish empire to “map” their colonial possessions in the Americas were somewhat more systematic. Alonso de Santa Cruz, the head cosmographer of Kings Carlos V and Felipe II, knew that the exactitude of maps depended on the precision of measures of terrestrial longitude. For this purpose, he prepared a geographic questionnaire to be filled out by governors and navigators, the source of the Relaciones Geográficas.1 The questionnaire sought to determine the longitude of the territories of the Indies astronomically, through observations including the position of the sun at midday, the position of solar and lunar eclipses, and the distance between different populations (Millán de Benavides, 2001: 80).2 In addition to these details, the questionnaire—which by 1573 included 135 questions—inquired into the customs of the inhabitants, the characteristics of the flora and fauna, and details of economic interest to the  The Relaciones were actually responses to the questionnaire that came included with the Royal Ordinances, and which were to be completed by the responsible authorities in each province. 2  The first major collection of all the information contained in the Relaciones was completed in 1574 by the head chronicler for the Crown, don Juan López de Velasco. In his Descripción y demarcación de las Indias Occidentales, López de Velasco produces an encyclopedia that includes historical, ethnographic, scientific, and geographic material, accompanied by fourteen maps of Spanish possessions in the Indies (Mignolo, 1995: 283–284). 1

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Crown like the whereabouts of gold and silver mines, location of ports, the depth of the waters, and so on. Spain began to see the exact delimitation of territories as an urgent necessity, due not only to economic competition with Portugal (recall the vague jurisdictional delimitation of the two empires established by Pope Alexander VI in the Treaty of Tordesillas), but also the demands of Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos themselves, who insisted on enforcing the precise limits of the territories that they discovered and administered before the Crown. An examination of the Audiencia de Quito’s seventeenth-century Relaciones Geográficas shows the Crown ordered that the information solicited in the questionnaire be divided into at least two parts: one part would refer to the “natural” environment while the other would concentrate on the “moral” sphere.3 Thus, for example, the chief magistrate of Jaen in Quito province, includes in the “natural” section information about the location of the city, climate, nearby rivers, different kinds of trees and fruits that grow in the area, mountains, animals, and gold mines. In the “moral” part, by contrast, he includes details about the population, the exact number of citizens [vecinos], foreigners, women, widows, children, encomenderos, Indians, Black people, mulattos, and zambos.4 The information contained in the Relaciones in the seventeenth century was still quite vague, however. The description of the population does not emphasize the type of economic activity being performed but rather their capacity to pay tributes and receive religious instruction. Nature is described according to its beauty and exoticism, underscoring its “savage” character: “There are turkeys, curassows, pheasants, parrots, macaws, ducks, wild boars, deer, monkeys, armadillos, and moose. There are venomous vipers, snakes, spiders, scorpions, and ants, along with predatory bats. Trees whose apples are lethal” (1994 [1606]: 72).5 Furthermore, the exact location of populations is based on their relative distance from neighboring populations, without using a universal measure. According to the chief magistrate of Jaen, They say they do not know the degree of latitude where the city is located, except that it seems to be in the southern zone of Paita, which is 170 leagues from Lima, 160 from Quito (to whose Audiencia it pertains), 30 from the city

 In some cases, two more parts would be added to the Relación: a “military” section that included details about the number of troops stationed, and another “ecclesiastic” section that included information on the number of parishes, priests, and encomiendas. 4  “Descripición de la ciudad de Jaen y su distrito en la provincial de Quito, sacada de las relaciones hechas el de 1606 por Guillermo de Martos, Corregidor” [1606], In: Pilar Ponce de Leyva (ed.), Relaciones histórico-geográficas de la Audiencia de Quito (siglos XVI–XIX). Quito: Marka/Abya Yala 1994. 5  Ibid. 3

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of Chachapoyas, 70 from the town of Sana, 40 from Santiago de Neiva (1994 [1606]: 72).6

But responding to the same questionnaire 150 years later, the governor of Quito don Juan Pío Montufar y Fraso begins his Relación with the following information: “This city is situated below the equinoctial line, at 13 minutes and 3 seconds southerly latitude, and 298 degrees, 15 minutes and 45 seconds longitude” (1994 [1754]: 324).7 In addition to this precision of geographic detail, there is a very meticulous description of the economic activities of the population,8 and of the available natural resources in the area. The view of nature is stripped of its wonder and is now an objectifying gaze that considers natural resources from the perspective of their economic utility: Since 1630, when cinchona was invented, that whole territory has been the most favorable to its production; its harvests are abundant, both for its consumption across the Americas as a febrifuge, and for its increasing shipments to Europe, where it is also used in the finest dyes. (1994 [1754]: 344)9

At the same time, mid-eighteenth-century maps abandon the “baroque” view characteristic of cosmography in prior decades, to instead become representations that see space as just one more fact of nature that can transmit objective information about a territory—like a falling stone, which can be understood without recourse to sacred history or cultural traditions. The artistic, sensuous, and fantastical representations still present in cosmography are set aside to make way for a rational and quantitative view of space. What then happened to the Relaciones Geográficas between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? The shift from Habsburg to Bourbon dynasties involved a radical change in the political economy of the Spanish empire. The fundamental concern of the Bourbon government was to respond to new exigencies of international commerce and politics, which required an increasing rationalization of the artisanal and agrarian infrastructure. Spain would not be able to successfully compete on the global market against France,

 Ibid.  “Razón sobre el estado y gobernación política y military de las provincias, ciudades, villas y lugares que contiene la jurisdicción de la Real Audiencia de Quito. Por Juan Pío Montufar y Fraso” [1754], in Pilar Ponce de Leyva (ed.), Relaciones histórico-geográficas de las Audiencia de Quito (siglos XVI–XIX). Quito: Marka/ Abya Yala, 1994. 8  “The most established fate of its inhabitants is weaving of cloth, cotton canvases, flags, and rugs, which they make in 12 workshops, sending these down the Guayaquil river and navigating from that port or traffic of the coasts of Peru . . . A great number of Indians of this jurisdiction work in the field, cultivating some very fertile lands, whose abundant production of grains and beautiful grass for livestock provide subsistence for this town” (1994 [1754]: 328). 9  Ibid. 6 7

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Holland, and England, if it kept its peasantry at the level of self-sufficiency with neither the buying power nor the surplus necessary to allow commercial growth and capital accumulation (in the hands of the state). As we saw in chapter 2, this meant that the administration of the Kingdoms of the Indies was now guided by the imperative of governmentality, the need to convert the vassal into a productive subject. For this reason, the mid-eighteenth-century Relaciones Geográficas shift their emphasis toward the economic activities of the population and the commercial use of natural resources. The location of gold and silver mines is no longer as important as it was in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Relaciones. What mattered most was the exact location of cinchona, cinnamon, and cochineal plantations—all primary materials amenable to exportation and even industrialization. Similarly, reporting the location of encomiendas and Indigenous populations loses its importance vis-à-vis the description of roads, ports, canals, and other transit pathways. A change in the status of geography also unfolds in parallel to this change in political economy. Scientific representations of space begin to be guided by zero-point hubris, by the idea that geography is only possible as a “rigorous science” insofar as it is capable of generating a strictly mathematical observation of territory. This required leaving behind any type of sensualism that could constitute an “epistemological obstacle,” interfering with the objectivity of the representation. Illustrations should be austere and calibrated to the strict rules of measurement, leaving no room for myth, fantasy, and imagination. Maps are no longer seen as “signs” of a sacred history that demarcate the meaning of a territory and its population prior to the intervention of the state. With the help of maps and under the imperative of economic policy, it is now the state that determines what a territory and its population mean. From the observational zero-point, territory appears as a tabula rasa, stripped of all transcendental meaning and thus ready to be filled with meaning by government action. The scientific representation of space and the state control of population are thus parallel phenomena, insofar as techniques of objectivation become instruments of economic power. 5.1.2 Voyage to the Center of the Earth Zero-point hubris demanded that scientific representation of space not be “smooth,” that is, it had to be decoupled from the “affective” representation of this space by its inhabitants.10 To do so required finding a universal  “Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived hings. It is a space of affect, more than one of properties . . . It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties. Intense Spatium instead of Extensio” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 479).

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measure to help determine the territory’s coordinates, allowing a scientist from anywhere in the world and independently of all cultural representations, to interpret the data and communicate it to their peers objectively. The space they sought to observe then was therefore not one in which social actors formed their personal or collective identities, but rather one that was outside the scope of human perception; an abstract space determined by the mathematic precision of degrees, minutes, seconds, angles, latitudes, and longitudes that no mortal was capable of seeing with their own eyes. This was a striated space that was therefore untranslatable into the everyday perceptual frameworks of social actors, but immensely useful for the governmental aims of the state. The 1734 Geodesic Expedition to the Audiencia de Quito organized by the French state was an important step toward this much yearned for universal measure. From a scientific point of view, the expedition emerged from the need to experimentally test which of the two competing theories about the “shape of the earth” was true. One thesis argued that the earth was a globe flattened at the poles and widened at the equator, while the other argued that the flattening occurs at the equator and not the poles (Lafuente & Mazuecos, 1992: 29–37). To elucidate this question, the French government decided to send two simultaneous scientific expeditions, one to the North Pole (Lapland) and the other to the equator, to carry out the relevant measurements. If after comparing the two measurements, the arc of the polar meridian turns out to be greater than that of the equator, it would prove that the earth flattens at its poles. This would of course have immediate consequences for the surveying of geographic maps, as it would allow a degree of precision never before achieved in the delimitation of territory. But precisely for this reason, the Geodesic Expedition had not only a scientific interest but a geopolitical one as well. France, which was competing with Spain, Holland, and England for control over key zones of influence across the planet, knew very well that the precision of maps was a fundamental tool for achieving military and commercials aims. The triangulation of French territory, ordered by Minister Colbert at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had already shown that the ordering of space turned out to be very useful for systematic tax collection and for establishing a communication network that would encourage trade, as well as for carrying out a complete inventory of natural resources. The French government thus decided to finance these very costly expeditions and entrust their organization to the Paris Academy of Sciences. The astronomer Louis Godin was designated as the head of the Expedition sent to Perú11 accompanied by, among others, the hydrographer  The territory of the Royal Audiencia de Quito, where the Geodesic Expedition arrived in 1736, was until 1739 a part of the Viceroyalty of Perú, after which it was incorporated into the newly created

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Pierre Bourguer, the botanist Joseph Jussieu, and the geometer Carl Marie de La Condamine. King Louis XV of France officially petitioned his Bourbon relative Phillip V of Spain to allow and facilitate the scientists’ mission to its territory. Even though the King of Spain was obligated by dynastic line from a family pact signed in 1733, from the beginning it was clear that the Spanish government was suspicious of the true motives surrounding the mission. Spain knew that if France possessed exact scientific knowledge of its colonial possessions, this could endanger their commercial sovereignty over these territories. Maritime contraband of French products was already a headache for Spanish authorities, to which the proximity of French possessions in the Caribbean and Guiana only added. This is why the Spanish government accepted the official French petition, but on the condition that the Parisian scientists be accompanied at all times by Spanish scientists. Two navy officers are named to this assignment: Jorge Juan y Santacilia, an expert in astronomy and mathematics, and Antonio y Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiral, an expert in geography and natural history.12 I have discussed the writings of both scientists in detail in previous chapters. In addition to closely monitoring the activities of their French colleagues, the two Spanish officials carried specific instructions from the government: They will draw up plans of the cities and ports, with their fortifications, where they are based, and they will inform them of the terms of the province and governance, of the peoples or places they contain, and the fertility or barrenness of their lands, as well as the inclination, industry, and skill of the natives, and the bravery or joviality of the unsettled Indians, and the facility or difficulty of settling them. (cited in Lafuente & Mazuecos, 1992: 90)

Like their French brothers, the Spanish Bourbons began to see science not as an activity reserved for aristocratic elites, but as a very useful tool of government. This is why the Geodesic Expedition in reality adhered to a geopolitics of knowledge in which the interests of economic and military powers were involved. Geography, as Harvey claims, had become a valuable instrument for European states competing for control of the still-nascent world market. The accumulation of power, wealth, and capital depended in part on a state’s exact knowledge of its cities, jungles, mountains, rivers, flora, fauna, and, Viceroyalty of New Granada. This means that part of the work carried out during the expedition, which lasted more than ten years, was officially carried out in the territory of New Granada. 12  Recall that in eighteenth-century Spain, astronomy and geography were taught in the Naval Military Academy of Cádiz, as auxiliary sciences to navigation. As part of the institution’s curriculum, Spanish naval officers read the Compendio de navegación by Jorge Juan and the Compendio de matemátics by Louis Godin, both members of the Geodesic Expedition (Capel, 1995: 507–509).

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above all, of the workforce in available in the territories under its control (Harvey, 1990: 232). This explains why the expedition was marked by constant ideological and political frictions. Perhaps the clearest example of this was the controversial pyramid episode. To determine the equatorial meridian, the French and Spanish scientists had to carry out complicated astronomical observations. To this end, they decided to build pyramidal observatories in Caraburo and Oyambaro on the plains of Puembo and Yaruqui, respectively, not far from the city of Cuenca. Apparently, when Juan and Ulloa took a short trip to Guayaquil, the French scientists decided to engrave a commemorative plaque on the pyramids that omitted their names and the Spanish emblem.13 In response to strong protests from the two Spanish scientists, the central government decreed the immediate demolition of the pyramids and the destruction of their commemorative plaques. Despite the fact that La Condamine thoroughly explained the reason for excluding the Spanish names to the authorities and solemnly promised to engrave the emblem, the plaques were destroyed, although they did not end up tearing down the pyramids (Villacrés Moscoso, 1986: 89–90). The remains of the original marble plaques were taken by a priest from Cuenca and later found by Francisco José de Caldas in 1804,14 who deposited them in the Astronomical Observatory of Bogotá, which later give rise to an unpleasant diplomatic incident between Colombia and Ecuador in the mid-nineteenth century.15  The inscription reads as follows: “Auspicus Philippi v Hispaniarum, El Indiar, Regia Catholici, Promovente Regia scientiarium Academia Paris Emir Herc De Fleury, Sacrae Rom, Eccl, Cardinal Supremo (Europa Plaudente) Galliar, Admistro Cels, Joan, Fred, Phelipeaux Com de Maurepas Regis Fr. A. Rebus Maritimis Et Omnigenae Eruditiones Mecaenate; Lud Godin, Pet Bourger, Car Maria de la Condamine Ejusdem Acad, socii, Ludovici xv Francor, Regis Christianissimmi Jussu Et munificentia in Peruviam missi Ad Metiendos In Aequinotiali plag terrestres gradus, quo genuine telluris figura tamdem innatescat” (Villacrés Moscoso, 1986: 24, author’s emphasis). 14  Caldas reports his experience in Cuenca as follows: “Here left Monsieur de La Condamine a slab of white marble of which there are many in the area. However, the new owners [of the hacienda] removed it from its place and allocated it to a much different fate than its origin. Instead of preserving the memory and the results of these observations in this piece of stone . . . it was used as a bridge over a ditch, buried in soil. What a fate! Is there perhaps an ingenious enemy of this celebrated voyage? All perishes, everything is ruined by barbarians… This is the state in which things were found when I arrived in Cuenca. All of my care was directed to figuring out the whereabouts of this precious plaque and the fate given to it by these barbarians . . . I thought of kindly requesting that they return this jewel to the astronomers to whom it belong; I also thought of showing it to the government so that they could free it of its fate and preserve it. However, the knowledge that I had gained of the litigious nature of these people, who make a case out of the smallest trifle, reflecting that nothing would improve, even in winning this astronomical lawsuit it would remain in the hands of the unenlightened and in 10 years it would once again be put to barbarous and miserable use, I was determined to take hold of it myself and relocate it Bogotá” (Caldas, 1942 [1809a]: 118–119). 15  It is worth recounting this incident, as it gives us an example of the complex relations between science and politics. In 1836, the president of the Republic of Ecuador, Vicente Rocafuerte, decided to save the pyramids from the oblivion that they had been in for almost 100 years. Rocafuerte’s 13

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It was not only major geopolitical issues that caused tensions around the Geodesic Expedition, however, but also internal battles within colonial society. When the French arrived in Quito in 1736, the governor was don Dionisio de Alcedo y Herrera, a very well-educated and erudite Bourbon functionary, who received the distinguished visitors with honor. However, that same year he was replaced by a criollo from Lima’s nobility, José de Araujo y Río, who from the beginning did not trust the presence of the foreigners in his territory. Perhaps due to the confrontation developing at the time between criollos and European newcomers [chapetones], or maybe due to the growing suspicion with which the criollo nobility viewed the avatars of Bourbon politics, the new governor ordered the arrest of the Spanish scientist Antonio de Ulloa simply because he called him “Your Grace” [Vuesa Merced] instead of his “Lordship” [Señoría] (Lafuentte & Mazuecos, 1992: 114–115). Not content with this, the criollo governor informed the viceroy of Perú that the French scientists had brought contraband merchandise in their luggage with the clear complicity of Alcedo y Herrera, which they were now publicly selling on the streets of Quito. Alcedo y Herrera was put on trial in Madrid for contraband and La Condamine in Quito for the illegal sale of merchandise, and while the latter suit was unsuccessful, it generated a climate of public hostility against the expeditioners. The fact that La Condamine and his colleagues were nothing more than “French libertines” in the eyes of Quito’s established nobility undoubtedly contributed to this. But let’s return to the relationship between science and geopolitics. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, the border between French, Portuguese, and Spanish territories in the Amazon region was not clearly interest was undoubtedly to attempt to strengthen commercial ties with France, which along with England had at that moment become the European power that the republican elites looked to. In addition to ordering the restoration of the pyramids and the engraving of a commemorative plaque, Rocafuerte gave a speech emphasizing the scientific labor of France and stating that the destruction of the plaques was due to the “dismal politics of the Spanish monarchs,” enemies of liberty and science. Fortunately, the glorious science of France, argued Rocafuerte, had been restored by a country that finally escaped the “despotism of the inquisition” and colonial slavery. The restoration of the pyramids was thus a symbol of the friendship that unified Ecuador with “the most enlightened part of the European continent” (Villacrés Moscoso, 1986: 123). However, in 1856, the governor of the Ecuadorian province of Azuay complained bitterly that the pyramids had been “profaned by a daring hand,” such that the remains of the original plaque were “robbed” from Ecuador in 1804 “to satisfy the vanity of a traveler.” As a result, the governor demanded that the Colombian government promptly return the plaque that at the time was still resting on the observatory in Bogotá. Informed of the incident, the Colombian foreign minister at the time, don Lino de Pombo, wrote a note in protest requesting an explanation from Ecuadorian government for their words. Governor Azuay responded that he had certainly acted hastily, but in any case the Ecuadorian government requested the return of the original plaque. Minister Pombo then presented a law to Congress that would return the original stone to Ecuador as a “donation” that had been “rescued” by the “wise and distinguished Granadian Francisco José de Caldas.” The law was finally passed in 1857 but the plaque was not returned until 1886, when it was brought to Cuenca where it rests today (Villacrés Moscoso, 1986: 129–131).

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defined. In accordance with the Alexander VI’s 1493 Papal Bull, the border between the territories conquered by the crowns of Castilla and Portugal was fixed by an imaginary line from pole-to-pole 22 degrees west of the Cape Verde islands. Everything west of this line belonged to Spain, and everything east of it to Portugal. However, faced with such an imprecise delimitation, jurisdictional conflicts between the two crowns were chronic, especially in unexplored regions like the Amazon. The issue was complicated further when the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht established a border that was supposed to separate French Guiana from Portuguese Guiana. France naturally hoped to expand its borders to the banks of the Amazon river (called the “Marañón” at the time), as this would give them the opportunity to capture part of river navigation and slave trade. On the other hand, constant incursions by the Portuguese by way of the Orinoco river endangered Spanish sovereignty over its territories. Thus, geographic knowledge of the region, and in particular exact knowledge of the network of rivers connecting the Orinoco to the Amazon and its Atlantic estuaries, became a geopolitical priority. And this is where the figure of La Condamine once again enters the picture. Once his measurement work was completed in Ecuador, La Condamine received instructions from the French government that he not return by the usual route (Quito-Popayán-Bogotá-Cartagena), but by crossing through the Amazon and reaching the Atlantic at the port of Cayena. The French sought to take advantage of the presence of a scientist like La Condamine to obtain firsthand information of the region’s natural resources. Certainly, a voyage of this sort through the Amazon jungle was no easy task at that time. For assistance, La Condamine decided to travel accompanied by a criollo scientist, the geographer and mathematician from Riobamba, Pedro Vicente Maldonado, whose Mapa de la Provincia de Quito had become famous among specialists of his time. Furthermore, Maldonado was a very good friend of the Jesuit missionaries of the Marañon river, which gave La Condamine access to valuable anthropological and geographical information for the trip. He not only had the opportunity to get to know the work of Father Gumilla (El Orinoco ilustrado) and Father Maroni (Noticias auténticas del famoso Río Marañón), mentioned in the previous chapter, but he also obtained the original map of the Amazon river drawn by the head of the missions, the German Jesuit Samuel Fritz (Map 3). Even though the map dated from 1691, La Condamine decided to give it to French authorities in 1752, who were surprised by the multitude of data it provided on the connection between the Amazon and other river systems, previously unknown Europe. In fact, the details provided by Father Fritz’s map—who lacked precise instruments of measurement at the time—were what made Maldonado and La Condamine’s trip across the Amazon possible.

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Map 3  Curso del Río Maranón, Samuel Fritz, S.J. (1691)

In his account La América Meridional, written as a report to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, the French scientist presented himself to his colleagues as the veritable Christopher Columbus of the Amazon: “I met there with new plants, new animals, and new men” (La Condamine, 1747 [1745]: 24). An entire virgin continent, unexplored, rich in natural resources, would now be at the disposal of European science, and particularly France, which could thus become a new “Amazonian power”: I will venture to say, that the multitude, and diversity of plants and trees, to be met with on the banks of the river of Amazons, during its whole course, from the Cordeliers des Andes to the sea, and on the sides of divers rivers, that lose themselves therein, would find ample employment, for many years, for the most laborious botanist; as it would also for more than one designer. I speak here, only of the labour it would require, to make an exact description of these plants, and to reduce them into classes, and range each under its proper genus and species. What would it be, if we comprehend herewith, an examination into the virtues ascribed to them by the natives of the country? An examination, which is undoubtedly the most attractive of our attention, of any branch of this study. It is not to be questioned, indeed, but ignorance and pre-possession have greatly multiplied and exaggerated these virtues; but, are the Quinquina, the Ypecacuana, the Simaruba, the Sarsaparilla, the Guiacum, the Cacao, and the Banilia, or Vanelloes, the only useful plants that America produces? And

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the singular virtues of these being well known, and sufficiently proved, is not this encouragement enough, to proceed to new enquiries? (La Condamine, 1747 [1745]: 37–38)

La Condamine paid particular attention to two of these natural products: cinchona and rubber. He wrote an illustrated report on cinchona that he sent to Linnaeus, and which would serve as the basis for its inclusion in the latter’s famous taxonomy under the name Cinchona. This report, written not by a botanist but a geodesist, was later translated in Bogotá by Sebastián López Ruiz and used as one of the arguments in the quarrel against Mutis, discussed above. But while cinchona was relatively well-known for its medicinal value, La Condamine thought that rubber, then unknown in Europe, could have an immense industrial value since its gum had such great elasticity with which one could make all kinds of unbreakable objects like boots, balls, and bottles (La Condamine, 1747 [1745]: 39). And although he recognizes that the “natives of this country” possess some kind of knowledge of rubber’s properties, the wise Frenchman does not recognize this knowledge as valid and argues that modern science is the only source of cognitive legitimacy. The natural resources of the Amazon should be extracted, but not the knowledge local inhabitants have of these resources. Such knowledge, as I stated above, is seen as the dark prelude to European science, and Native Americans as the anthropological past of humanity. The territories beyond Europe are thereby transformed into territories that are behind Europe. In fact, when describing the Amazon Indians, La Condamine proposes a curious equation between geography, intelligence, and skin color: the greater the heat and humidity of a territory, the less white the skin, and the lesser cognitive maturity of its inhabitants. The place one occupies in geographic territory thus corresponds to one’s place in ethnic, historic, and epistemic territory. This is in short the environmental thesis which I will discuss in the next section. Amazon Indians, despite the great variety of existing tribes and linguistic families, all have some things in common: they live in the humidity of the jungle, they have reddish skin, and they lack the words to express abstract ideas. The Indigenous people of this region thus all share a “common character, at bottom,” that La Condamine describes as follows: Insensibility is the basis; which, whether it ought to be honoured with the name of apathy, or branded with that of stupidity, I leave to others to decide. This proceeds, undoubtedly, from the small number of their ideas, which extend no farther than their necessities. Gluttons, even to voracity, when they have wherewith to satisfy themselves; yet moderate, when they needs must, even to shifting without any thing, or seeming to desire aught. Pusillanimous and cowardly to the last degree, if drunkenness does not transport them; enemies to labour;

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unmoved by an incentive to glory, honour, or gratitude; wholly intent upon the object that is before them; and always determined thereby, without any regard to futurity; incapable of foresight and reflection; giving themselves up, when not under restraint, to a childish joy, which they express, by skipping about, and immoderate flights of laughter, without either meaning or design: thus they pass their lives without thought; and grow old, without having taken leave of infancy; all the failings whereof they retain. (La Condamine, 1747 [1745]: 26)

However, the immaturity (Unmündigkeit) of the Indigenous people did not prevent La Condamine from giving credence to one of their most incredible stories: the existence of the Amazons. The Indians recounted that in the middle of the jungle there existed a community of warrior women called Amazons with amputated breasts who lived without men and went into combat naked. In Europe, the story became famous thanks to the report lieutenant Francisco de Orellana wrote to emperor Carlos V, where he stated that he and his troops had encountered and battled these women. From there, the details of the legend grew. It was said that once a year the Amazons left the jungle to find men who they would force to procreate with them, and that once the children were born they would kill the boys and only keep the baby girls. They also said that they chose the most valiant of them all as their singular leader, which was decided by ferocious battles between them. What is certain is that La Condamine, who definitely knew these stories, spent much of his scientific investigation in the jungle asking about the Amazons. What intrigued him was not only the existence of these women, which he took for granted, but their exact location on the physical map and on the map (tableau) of Natural History. Amongst the rest, an Indian of St. Joachim d’Omaguas told us, that might, perhaps, still find an old man at Coari, whose father had seen these Amazons; and on our arrival afterwards at that place, we were inform’d, that the Indian of whom he spoke was dead, but we saw his son, who seem’d to be about seventy, and commanded the other Indians of that district. He assured us, that his grandfather had actually seen those females pass by at the mouth of the river Cuchivara, wither they had come from that of the Cayamé, which disembogues itself into the Amazon . . . An Indian also of Mortigura, a mission adjacent to Para, offer’d to shew me river, which would carry one up to within a little distance of the country, now actually inhabited by these Amazons. (La Condamine, 51–52)

In the end, perhaps due to time constraints, La Condamine and Maldonado gave up following the clues given by the Indians to locate these strange women. Nevertheless, their scientific curiosity found comfort in the hypothesis that,

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while they would never find the land of the Amazons, this was not irrefutable proof of their nonexistence. Perhaps one fine day the strange women would grow bored of their solitude and come in search of men, forgetting their ancient aversion to them. In any case, La Condamine claims that if there is anywhere in the world where women could exist without men, it is America, “where the vagabond lives of women, who often follow their husbands to wars, and are not a jot happier in their domestic lives, might naturally give birth to this idea” (La Condamine, 55, translation modified). But while the Amazons were never found, the hope of discovering novelties and riches in this jungle region continued to mobilize state coffers. Forty years after the voyage of La Condamine, captain Antonio de la Torre y Miranda, accompanied by the Black illustrator Salvador Rizo, undertook a voyage to the eastern plains [llanos] to explore the territory of the old Jesuit missions. The captain had been sent by viceroy Caballero y Góngora and charged with drawing up a plan of the Meta and Orinoco rivers and exploring the territory of Guiana, near the border with Holland and Portugal. In mid-1783, after traveling nine months, De la Torre y Miranda returned to Bogotá and delivered to the viceroy the maps drawn up by Rizo alongside a full report describing the flora, fauna, trade, customs, and inhabitants of this immense region (Moreno de Ángel, 1983: 232–234). And while there are no remaining copies of this report, only the maps and the diary of the voyage, this might be what Caldas refers to when he cites a piece of writing by “one of our compatriots, who has traveled the Orinoco and made excellent economic and political observations of the trade and agriculture of the regions this mighty river bathes” (Caldas, 1942 [1808a]: 50). Caldas writes: This canal (the Orinoco), he says, will in time be the one that unites the most remote parts of our America with the capital of this Kingdom; its shores will surely be seen one day populated by rich factories and commercial cities, where the products of Asia and Europe will be united with those that can come from all of this Kingdom that can travel by way of the Mamo, the Apure, the Meta, and the Guaviare to the Orinoco; and those of Peru, Brazil, and Paraguay from different branches of the Amazon. (Caldas, 1942 [1808a]: 50)

Geography as a “rigorous science” continued to be something more than laboratory research carried out by experts. It was a key piece on the chessboard on which European powers competed to control the world. The addition of New Granada to the provinces adjacent to the Orinoco river sought to put the brakes on the expansion of the English and Dutch in the area, using the territories of Guiana as a beachhead. It was also hoped that this jungle region could become a pole of economic development for the viceroyalty, and even a kind of “Guantanamo Bay” or space for confining the “vagabonds, criminals,

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and incorrigibles” of the homeland. Recall that in his famous Proyecto Económico, Bernardo Ward proposed that the Spanish Crown definitively banish gypsies from the Iberian Peninsula to the banks of the Orinoco.16 5.2 THE CONSTRUCTION OF “ANTHROPOLOGICAL PLACE” According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 385), striated space is characterized by the artificial construction of fixed trajectories and well-determined directions that serve to control migration, regulate population flows, and regulate everything that happens in this space. In fact, without the striation of space the existence of the state itself would not be possible, since it exists precisely to establish law and order over a territory under its sovereignty. One reason that explains the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century hegemony of the Spanish empire was its ability to “striate the sea,” that is, to convert the Atlantic circuit into a “territory” where the circulation of commodities, slaves, and people between the new and old worlds could be perfectly regulated. But faced with the emergence of England, France, and Holland as new powers competing for control of maritime space, Spain was compelled not only to striate the sea but also the land, subjecting the physical space of the colonies to a strict organization of all flows. As I have sought to show in this work, the striation of space also, and primarily, included the extensive “mapping” of the population. In what follows, I will investigate one of the most widespread modes of population mapping during the Age of Enlightenment: the construction of “anthropological place.”17 This basically involved examining certain physical and moral characteristics of ethnic groups in the colonies (Black people, Indians, mestizos, Spaniards), to later establish a causal relationship between this “identity” and its geographical setting. I will focus on the role played by  Ward’s text states the following: “In order to remove the bad example and avoid the prejudices caused by the gypsies in advance, the most certain way appears to be purify the Kingdom of all of these men and women, large and small, all at once; which can be done in a pious way very useful to Spain, with the King indicating a spot in the Americas, far from other Spanish vassals, where they could form their own colony, with the hope that it would be useful. This could be on the banks of the Orinoco river . . . The same providence could be taken with the other vagabonds, criminals, and incorrigibles, not being able to make a career with them in the Hospices, and threatening the danger of causing disturbances or corrupting others with their bad example” (cited by Varela y Álvarez, 1991: 101). 17  Marc Augé says that anthropological place is one of the foundational myths of modern ethnology. From whence comes the spatial notion of culture, which will later constitute the object of study of a new discipline: anthropology. The idea is that: “To be born is to be born in a place, to be ‘assigned to residence’. In this sense the actual place of birth is constituent of individual identity” (Augé, 1995: 53). 16

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modes of knowledge like geography and economics, and particularly the way in which the scientificity of these nascent disciplines is shot through with imperial aims of striating colonial space and “mapping” its populations. 5.2.1 The Project of the Economic Atlas In the first issue of the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada, Caldas declared that “geographic knowledge is the thermometer with which we measure the enlightenment, commerce, agriculture, and prosperity of a people” (Caldas, 1942 [1808a]: 15). Caldas’ great project was, in fact, to make geography “the fundamental basis of all political reflection” through the development of a great Economic Atlas of the viceroyalty. He imagined “an economic map that, by presenting in a glance, our products, fields, forests, mountains, population, and the wealth and poverty of its parts, would put the politician, magistrate, and minister in a position to judge things, their worth, and their true relations: this is what we need to be happy.”18 The geographical encyclopedia Caldas dreamed of was a totalizing representation of the territory that would illustrate the natural characteristics, climate, economic potential, populated and depopulated areas, roads and trade routes of each region, and as we will see later, “the temperament and customs of its inhabitants.” His hope was to provide the central government with this encyclopedia as the basis for developing economic policy in the viceroyalty since, according to the geographer from Popayán, with its help “we will see the steps we have taken, what we know, what we do not know, and we will measure our distance from prosperity” (Caldas, 1942 [1808a]: 16, author’s emphasis). But since Caldas’ category of “prosperity” was by then an economic category, we need to approach this subject from the perspective of the new economic science that he and his enlightened colleagues had in mind, and that in those days had a concrete name: physiocracy. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the theses of French economists like Quesnay, Turgot, and Mirabeau enjoyed considerable influence over enlightened circles in Spain and its American colonies. The central concern of the Bourbon leaders with respect to their economic policies was in reality a dilemma: how to link the demands of international trade with a rural and artisanal caste society without having to modify its hierarchical relations of production? In a word, if the Spanish empire wanted to successfully compete for control of the world market, it had to transform the structure of its agrarian and artisanal production in accordance with modern values like output, efficiency, and utility without calling into question the absolute power of the

 Cited by Díaz Piedrahita, 1997: 141, author’s emphasis.

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monarch.19 Spain wanted to become a modern economic power while maintaining social stratification and traditional relations of production. To achieve this aim, the state needed the power to completely regulate the economic life of the empire in accordance with policies legitimated by geography and nascent economic science. The physiocratic theories defended in Spain by enlightened functionaries like Floridablanca, Campomanes, and Jovellanos gain importance in this context (Elorza, 1970). The physiocrats basically posed the idea that economic prosperity is rooted in a natural order preestablished by providence, so that for a state to govern rationally it should turn to economic science to understand and develop this order adequately. Given that human subsistence depends on the relations we establish with the land and given that the majority of the population was still concentrated in the countryside, the physiocrats singled out agriculture as the fundamental sector of the economy. The “wealth of nations” thus depends on the development of agriculture, which thereby constitutes the basis of commerce (Villanueva, 1984; Fox-Genovese, 1976). The state, as the sole administrator of national assets, should promote the cultivation of lands and the occupation of its inhabitants in agricultural activities, with the aim of making agriculture the most productive sector of the internal market while facilitating the exportation of grains to the external market. From an economy based on subsistence agriculture (everyone eats what they cultivate), society should shift to commercial agriculture, where production should be geared toward strengthening the internal market between regions, and surplus directed toward the exportation of products needed by other countries. This entailed a transformation of the unproductive habits of the feudal nobility, for whom the land was above all synonymous with social distinction. But the laboring habits of peasants, for whom it was enough to produce what was needed for them and their family, were also transformed. It also entailed that the state exercise strict control over agrarian production, defining in advance which products were desirable for “public utility” and monopolizing their distribution through licenses known as estancos. In New Granada, where agriculture revolved around the large hacienda, the theses of the physiocrats were warmly welcomed by enlightened

 The absolutist Spanish state rested on the assumption that all inhabitants of the Empire, regardless of sex, race, or social distinction, were equally vassals of the monarch. The “social pact” discussed in Spain had nothing to do with the “social contract” of Locke and Rousseau. The absolutist conception of the state understood the social pact only regulated the obligations of vassal to their monarch and vice-versa. From this perspective, all vassals, the Church included, should submit to what the monarch considers appropriate to “public utility,” in accordance with the latter’s “superior enlightenment.” The reforms introduced by the Bourbons did not seek then to undo social hierarchies but to harmonize those hierarchies with the governmental policies of the state.

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criollos toward the end of the eighteenth century.20 Luis de Astigarraga, in his Disertación sobre la agricultura (1978 [1792]: 26), writes that “agriculture [is] the most solid and fundamental basis for the happiness of the people.” This opinion is shared by the criollo Diego Martín Tanco in his aforementioned Discurso sobre la población, for whom agriculture “is the golden foundation on which the happiness of empires is based” (Tanco, 1978 [1792]: 196). Pedro Fermín de Vargas uses the same metaphor as the Physiocrats to illustrate the “natural connection” between different branches of the economy, in his Memoria sobre la población. He writes that, “The political body can be compared to a tree, whose roots are agriculture, whose trunk is the population, and the branches, leaves, and fruit are industry and commerce” (Vargas, 1944 [1789c]: 95). And also using an organic metaphor, the criollo lawyer José María Salazar compares agriculture and commerce to “the two breasts that raise and feed the state” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 220). Agriculture, now understood as the foundation that upholds the economy, thus becomes an object of philosophical study and reflection for the New Granadian criollo elite. The governor of Santa Marta at the time, don Antonio de Narváez, recommends utilizing the immense agricultural resources of the Atlantic coast with the argument that “one cannot have commerce without agriculture, which provides fruits and materials, especially here where there are no arts, or factories that benefit them” (Narváez, 1965 [1778]: 20). A “scientifically based” economic policy cannot begin at the end (branches, leaves, and fruits), rather it should concentrate on the foundations (roots). Thus, rather than continuing to focus on extracting minerals for commerce, the government should encourage the cultivation of wheat, cacao, cotton, and tobacco. This would not only generate new sources of work for the native population, but it would also promote “import substitution.”21 Since the population is the trunk that strengthens the entire tree, Narváez believes that the state should develop a population policy that would allow hundreds of potential workers, hitherto concentrated in unproductive regions, to move favorably toward cultivation zomes. As rich and fertile as land may be, is worthless if there are not enough hands to cultivate it. Like Vargas, Narváez suggests a “natural connection” between agriculture, trade, and population, using the metaphor of a chain:

 Despite the fact that trade was traditionally seen as a “mechanical trade,” many figures among the criollo nobility tended toward this kind of activity to fight the poverty into which they had fallen. In this respect, see Renán Silva’s case study of the commercial ideology of the family of Camilo Torres in Popayán. Silva, 2002: 408–409. 21  José Ignacio de Pombo wrote in this regard: “It is shameful to say, but we receive the sugar, cacao, and tobacco we consume from elsewhere, brought in immense quantities every year, when we could provide a considerable part of these fruits from the land if we cultivated them, and also bring ourselves great wealth by trading them (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 194). 20

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But if it is given that without agriculture there can be no trade, it is also true that without population there can be no agriculture. Trade, agriculture, and population are like three rings of a chain that must all be unified and linked; or like the three sides of a triangle, without any of which there remains only an angle or an open space, without forming a shape. (Narváez, 1965 [1778]: 41–41)

The criollo José Ignacio de Pombo also argued in a similar vein to Narváez, but in his Informe al Consulado de Cartagena he complains bitterly of the state’s neglect of economic policy. Closely following Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’ 1794 Informe en la expediente de la ley agraria, a text heavily influenced by the physiocrats, Pombo refers to the political, moral, and physical obstacles facing agricultural progress in New Granada. Among the “political obstacles,” Pombo mentions the state’s abusive taxes on products such as tobacco, sugar cane, and indigo, as well as the lack of a state population policy, as his colleague Narváez pointed out. But among the many obstacles that Pombo identifies, I am particularly interested in one that relates to the aforementioned project of an Economic Atlas: the lack of a geographic map of the province. In Pombo’s view, it is useless to boost the population of productive regions without first educating the farmers in the diverse kinds of arable lands and the different crops that grow well at different elevations and temperatures. Pombo therefore claims that the making of a geographic map is not tangential but rather fundamental to the economy of the province of Cartagena (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 139). Pombo’s geographic map and Caldas’s Economic Atlas are thus convergent projects. Both set out from the same assumption used by the physiocrats with their metaphors of the tree, the two breasts, and the chain: physical nature and human society are not two different orders but are instead governed by the same eternal laws, such that sciences like economics and geography are far from marginal or useless for the life of the public. On the contrary, both can offer the state valuable information about things “in-themselves” just like physics. Both Pombo and Caldas believe that the order of the polis should faithfully reproduce the order of the cosmos, and that science is the key to carrying out this project (cosmopolis). With this in mind, both offer their judgments to the statesman to design economic policy on a strictly scientific basis. In fact, Caldas and Pombo are convinced that without scientific knowledge of the geography of regions, populations, and plants, the statesman will be unable to develop coherent economy policy and the state will remain condemned to “groping in the dark.” The geographic encyclopedia seeks to generate a table (tableau) in which all of the items indicated by the physiocrats appear: agriculture, trade, industry, and population. The link between these elements is not part of the politician’s common sense, which tends to consider these as separate phenomena,

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but rather must be unraveled by the analytic-synthetic reason of the scientist. Caldas claims that the relationship between them is given by laws of nature and varies according to the climatic zone in question. His thesis, which is very similar to that of Humboldt, is that variations in altitude bring changes in temperature affecting vegetation types, land fertility, and even the moral character of a population in a specific region. The task of the geographer would be to determine the different environmental levels or “floors” (Caldas argued there were twelve)22 and establish a classification system that differentiates these according to altitude, humidity, temperature, luminosity, atmospheric pressure, and the chemical composition of the soil (map 4). In this way, topographical and climatic variables establish the boundaries of the chart within which the triangle of agriculture-population-commerce is drawn. Caldas is convinced that the agriculture, trade, industry, and the population of New Granada will benefit greatly from his encyclopedia. Since in this region of the planet all possible climates exist, it would therefore be sufficient

Map 4  Nivelación de una montaña de Ibarra by Francisco José de Caldas

 Caldas writes: “Would it not be at once novel and beautiful to divide all arable parts of the earth into twelve zones, with one inch on the barometer corresponding to each one? Would it not be novel to assign demarcations to each plant and to say exactly and concisely: ‘inhabits the first zone’, ‘inhabits the third to the fifth zones’, and so on for all the rest? I have projected barometricbotanical levels similar to those construed by baron von Humboldt, with sole aim of giving an idea of the diverse altitudes of the terrain. I divide them into twelve zones that are not of equal width, because the upper ones gradually increase their elevation; I also place the plants that live in each zone on the chart” (Caldas, 1942 [1810b]: 190).

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to determine at which level this or that plant or animal develops best, including elephants and dromedaries,23 with the aim of importing them and “acclimating them” to our environment: New Granada, in the heart of the torrid zone under the Equator itself, with territory in both hemispheres and divided by the different branches of the Andes, has hot plains at its base, cool temperatures on the flanks, polar regions at the peaks. It has all climates and every elevation. Thus, all of the fruits of the earth and all the animals of globe can live and prosper, as if in their own country, within the limits of the Viceroyalty of Santafé. You wish to bring Lichen rangiferinus from Lapland, this algae precious to the northern people of Europe? Put it in the extreme regions in the frigid part of our mountain range that produces only cryptogams. Do we want reindeer? Put them on the snowy peaks. We want to acclimate the dromedary or the elephant? The plains of Neiva, the banks of the Orinoco, and the solitary jungles of the Amazon await them. Do we prefer the cinnamon, cloves, or betel nuts that abound in the Orient? These same countries, these same jungles could produce these species alongside ivory. It is enough to know what temperature, what degree of humidity this or that product has in its native country, in order to be able to point your finger to where it could prosper among us. (Caldas, 1942 [1810a]: 166–167)

However, it is not the politician but rather the scientist that points to the precise place agriculture should occupy in relation to population and trade. Caldas recalls the efforts made by viceroy Flórez in 1777 to promote the cultivation of cochineal in New Granada, an attempt that found no reception at all among landowners and farmers. This proves that no matter how good the intentions of a leader or how enlightened his economic policies may be, he will be unable to uproot old agriculture practices solely by decree. Making such changes requires a systemic education of peasants, which should be carried out by a “body of wise patriots.” Caldas refers concretely to establishing an Economic Society of the Friends of the Country like those already flourishing in Spain, whose task would be to establish and extend the branches of trade, agriculture, and industry. The viceroyalty’s economic policy should thus be a joint project toward which both the scientist and the politician work, with each assuming their proper function: “the wise should aid the

 Even though Caldas does not explicitly mention it, this principle also applies to the importation of “suitable” populational groups for the industrial and commercial development of the country, who will substitute for Black, Indigenous, and mestizo populations, as would occur during the nineteenth century in various Latin American countries.

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government in this respect, and the government should lend them their help and all of their protection (Caldas, 1942 [1810a]: 162).24 However, the article published by Caldas in 1810, that is, twenty-five years after Campomanes founded the first Economic Society in Madrid, proves that this project had definitively failed in New Granada. Some sixty-eight such societies existed in Spain by 1791, and some societies were also operating in other colonial cities like Mexico City, Havana, and Buenos Aires at this time. In New Granada, however, these societies would never be anything more than a “beautiful thought” (Caldas, 1942 [1810a]: 163). As early as 1784, some people, mostly soldiers and hacienda owners, had wanted to found an Economic Society in the city of Mompox, and they requested an operating license from the central government without success. Then, in 1801, the viceroy Pedro Mendinueta, under pressure from influential figures like Mutis and Tadeo Lozano, finally issued a license approving the operation of an Economic Society in Bogotá. The first meeting, held in Mutis’ own house, appointed a committee of prominent members to draft statutes for the society on the model of the peninsular societies. But while the statutes were approved by Mendinueta in 1802, the society was never operational, due perhaps to fears expressed by Mutis that it could become a nucleus of criollo dissent and resistance against the economic policies of the empire (Jones Shafer, 1958: 237–238). Nevertheless, it is worth collecting here the opinions of those thinkers who supported the foundation of an Economic Society of the Friends of the Country in Bogotá, since this project represented, so to speak, the institutionalization of Caldas’ geographic ideas. In chapter 3, we saw how as early as 1791 don Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez had already become an ardent defender of the creation of a hospital for the poor and an Economic Society in Bogotá, as means to overcome the moral decadence into which the city had fallen. For Rodríguez, one of the central functions of the society would be studying the means for uprooting poverty, idleness, and mendicancy in New Granada. Acting as sort of “police committee,” the society should develop censuses to determine the number of idlers in the city, implement adequate means to “gather them,” and establish workshops where they could learn a trade “useful to the homeland” (Rodríguez, 1978 [1791]: 97). The criollo Diego Martín Tanco also argued that a Society of Friends of the Country  Caldas is thinking of a relative autonomy for economic societies that was never achieved in the Spanish empire. The societies of the friends of the county founded in Spain during the eighteenth century were always under the direct control of the government and subject to the political imperatives of its foreign policy (Jones Shafer, 1958). The lack of criollo participation in state economic policy, also demanded by Camilo Torres in his Memorial de Agravios, was one of the causes behind the discontent that developed against Spain in the colonies around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

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should focus all of its attention on extirpating idleness and increasing the Kingdom’s economically active population, since “a country of vagabonds will always be a country of the poor” (Tanco, 1978 [1792]: 185). To achieve this goal, the Economic Society should exclude “all ideas of nobility, elevated birth, distinguished descendants, and honorific employments,” and instead favor “talent, determination, judgement, and integrity” (194). In other words, Tanco thinks the society should not be composed of aristocrats with their contempt for manual labor and trade, but rather of individuals capable of stimulating the three central branches of economic life: agriculture, arts, and commerce, without granting priority to any one of them.25 The opinion of the chief magistrate of Zipaquirá, don Pedro Fermín de Vargas, moves in the same direction, while leaving aside any reference to the police function of the Economic Societies. In his Pensamientos políticos sobre la agricultura, comercio y minas del Virreinato de Santafé de Bogotá, the criollo thinker claims that “the first measure for the advancement of agriculture and by all means the only that should be employed is the establishment of an Economic Society of Friends of the Country, like the many that exist in Spain” (Vargas, 1986 [1789b]: 29–30). This society should be composed of a “patriotic body” charged with traveling to Europe and purchasing machines necessary for promoting agriculture. It should also encourage the writing of scientific treatises on the best methods for cultivating wheat, indigo, cacao, cotton, and many other agricultural products with competitions. Like Tanco, Vargas thinks the Economic Society should not, however, neglect to promote trade, because “a country composed of farmers and deprived of trade will be the poorest of any known” (35). But perhaps the most well-supported opinion on the suitability of founding an Economic Society of Friends of the Country was that of the criollo aristocrat Jorge Tadeo Lozano, one of the strongest proponents of the project. Under the curious pseudonym “the Indian of Bogotá,” Lozano presents his ideas in various issues of his own journal, the Correo curioso, erudito, económico y mercantil de la ciudad de Santafé de Bogotá. Despite taking from the Physiocrats the thesis that agriculture is “the first and most noble of  Tanco is polemicizing with those criollo aristocrats who, like Mirabeau, dreamed of a strictly agrarian economy, and even claimed, in an almost Rousseauian manner, that commerce was the cause of the moral decadence of society. Tanco appears to refer directly to the aforementioned Disertación sobre la agricultura, published a few months prior in Papel periódico by don Luis de Astigarraga, where phrases such as the following appeared: “The greenness of the countryside, the song and simplicity of the birds, the land’s reward for the farmer’s work, and that entire natural way of living, instills love toward the Creator and charity toward men. The countryside is where our understanding is most free to know and praise the supreme omnipotence of God: it is there where times is passed with utility . . . Unlike what happens in cities and courts. There the understanding is distracted by useless diversions and tormented by mundane objects; the Creator is regularly forgotten and his ultimate end is rarely remembered” (Astigarraga, 1978 [1792]: 34–35).

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all the arts,” Lozano concurs with Vargas and Tanco that the promotion of agriculture should go hand-in-hand with the development of trade. Toward this end, he proposes the creation of a “Patriotic Commerce Company” whose function would be to make the trader into something more than a simple merchant, elevating them to the category of “professional” (Lozano, 1993 [1801b]: 107).26 With this in mind, one of the central objectives of the Economic Society was to dignify those professions considered “vile” by the nobility; seeking to modify the value scale derived from Spanish colonial society and point it toward a positive evaluation of productive labor: A wise and prudent government does not fail to protect those who dedicate themselves to an honorable occupation. The Noble who passes his days in shameful laziness is viler, than the Artisan who has a trade, no matter how humble it may be. Useful Arts are seen as despicable and their Artificers are treated with nothing less than vilification; they would rather perish from hunger and educate their children in the same principles than make them learn a trade or apply themselves to work in the field; there are even those who blush at the thought of learning the Science of commerce. This undoubtedly comes from contempt toward the Arts and Agriculture, and the vanity displayed by a birth qualified with a piece of paper. (Lozano, 1993 [1801c]: 176, author’s emphasis)

In addition to promoting trade, the Economic Society should offer drawing classes for artisans and devote itself to public instruction in all kinds of manufacturing. On the other hand, Lozano thinks the primary activity should be drawing the geographic map of New Granada in the sense proposed by Caldas. As this kingdom has within it “all of the climates in the world,” the society should dedicate itself to studying the “most suitable [way] to receive a universal culture of the all the plants of the globe” (Lozano, 1993 [1801c]: 177). Lozano proposes the development of a “rural calendar” that will indicate not only to the politician but above all to peasant when, where, and how to sow what kind of seeds.27 Depending on the elevation, variation of winds, time of year, humidity of the terrain, and air temperature, it would be advisable or not to promote the cultivation of certain plants. In a similar project, José Ignacio de Pombo suggests from Cartagena that the Patriotic Society should begin publishing a newspaper dedicated exclusively to the rural economy, “giving precise rules for discerning different kinds of lands, their  For Lozano, commerce is not a contemptible activity typical of the lower classes of society, but rather “a practical art comprising many rules and combinations” (Lozano, 1993 [1801a]: 107). Commerce is a science more than a trade. 27  The editors of Correo curioso offered a prize of one ounce of gold to the author of this rural calendar and the winner was apparently Caldas, who presented himself under the pseudonym “Silvio” (Pacheco 1984: 84). 26

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preparation and fertilization, for the cultivation of plants most suited to each, their benefits, and the most productive species according to temperature” (Pombo, 1965 [1810]: 170). Like Pombo and Lozano, Caldas was aware that this major project for scientific and technological guidance could not be accomplished without the help of his geographic encyclopedia. Thus, nine years later, and in light of the failure of the Patriotic Society of Bogotá, he nostalgically writes: In a body of wise, eternal patriots, that rejuvenates like nature, that continues on despite the vicissitudes and inconstancy of human affairs, industry is linked with commerce, and how much it can do for numerous, rich, and happy people . . . We know that there was excitement in this capital a few years ago around the project of a Patriotic Society; we know that a dossier was compiled for this interesting purpose; and we know that it did not become anything more than a beautiful thought. Is there perhaps an enemy of New Granada who hinders and ruins us? . . . I hope these reflections make an impression on our fellow citizens! I hope that they rekindle the ideas of a patriotic Society! (Caldas, 1942 [1810a]: 163)

5.2.2 Nomadic Populations While the project of an Economic Society of Friends of the Country was never realized in New Granada, the populational politics designed by the Bourbon government were. A policy of spatial reorganization began during the administration of King Carlos III (1759–1789) whose first steps had already been taken with the creation of the viceroyalty of New Granada in 1739. There was a dual objective in this territorial and politico-administrative reorganization: in the first place, to guarantee the military defense of the empire against continued external threats (English attacks) and internal threats (Indigenous and maroon attacks); and in the second place, to exercise control over dispersed settlements, those inhabiting unproductive and “empty zones,” with the aim of relocating them to centers of agricultural production. Advised by their team of physiocrats and technocrats, the Bourbons wanted to take full advantage of the labor force of the economically active population, concentrating it in areas where they could work as farmers or artisans. Combating the “sedentarism and nomadism” of the population was thus one of the central objectives of Bourbon territorial policies (Herrera Ángel, 2002: 66). In New Granada, however, while these policies were enthusiastically embraced by a sector of the criollo elite, the possibility of accomplishing these aims with the existing population was viewed with pessimism. The environmental thesis predominant among enlightened criollos held that there

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existed a direct correspondence between geographic place and anthropological place. As with plants and animals, the characterology of populations varied by humidity, altitude, atmospheric pressure, and the conditions of the climate in which they live. From this perspective, various thinkers insisted on the need to carry out a kind “blood transfusion” in the populational habitat of New Granada. We already saw how the criollo economist Antonio de Narváez argued that without populational politics it would not be possible to develop agriculture and trade in the provinces of Santa Marta and Riohacha. Increasing the population of areas that were especially agriculturally rich was thus a first-order imperative, but Narváez warns that not just any kind of people will be useful for carrying out this policy. Bearing in mind the influence of the climate on work habits and even on people’s mental capacities, Narváez thinks that the province’s existing population is not suitable for the economic development of the region: There are very few pacified and taxpaying Indians in the province. Their natural abandon and tendency toward idleness, in which they are born and raised, has led them to contract a kind unshakeable aversion to work, that has become characteristic of them. Mulattos, sambos and Blacks, freed slaves, mestizos, and other castes of common people in this country (who make up almost the entirety of the population), partake greatly of this character, and even the climate contributes to forming and strengthening it among them, because such a hot climate dissipates strength through continual sweat, makes work more repugnant and more sensible in cold countries. At the same time, they manage to live easily without work in such a wonderfully fertile land . . . The whites, and above all the Europeans born in the most temperate, benign, and dry climates cannot withstand the difficult and heavy work of farming in this hot and humid climate. (Narváez, 1965 [1778]: 45–46).

However, if the native population of New Granada is useless for advancing the government’s economic policy, if the majority of them exhibit an “unshakeable aversion to work” that is explained by racial and climatic factors, then what is to be done? Narváez proposes a “scientific” solution to this problem: the importation of Black people from Africa. In the same way that Caldas would suggest taking into account scientific studies showing the geographic characteristics in which different types of plants and animals develop in order to “acclimate” them to New Granada, Narváez suggests that the climate of the Atlantic coast corresponds directly to that of Africa, such that it would be convenient to populate this region with slaves brought from the African continent. Black people born in Africa are more accustomed to working in hot climates, are “naturally docile,” and can apply themselves to any

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kind of domestic or agricultural labor. “Not earning a day’s wage, nor causing other expenses, after their purchase, maintenance, and clothing, which is very limited,” Narváez claims that Black slaves “make labor much less costly and therefore much more useful” (Narváez, 1965 [1778]: 46). However, Narváez’s “scientific ideas” were not in harmony with the practices of hacienda owners, militia leaders, and mine owners in New Granada. Throughout the eighteenth century, hundreds of Black slaves were imported from Africa relocated to the Cauca Valley or the Atrato region, but they were never given preference over Black and mulatto slaves born in the Americas. They were all equally seen as commodities destined primarily for the mines, and only secondarily for agricultural labor. In fact, and against all enlightened physiocratic and environmental ideas, while Black slaves had been farmers and had knowledge of advanced agricultural technologies (raising cattle, use of iron plows), in New Granada they were employed in mining, using only rudimentary technologies (Werner Cantor, 2000: 95–101). On the other hand, state economic policy was challenged by a number of illegitimate Black settlements known as palenques. Palenques were communities of fugitive slaves (“maroons”) surrounded by a defensive stockade and located in inhospitable and swampy areas in the savannah, far from the economically productive regions—communities that could never be fully subjected to state control (Conde Calderón, 1999: 43–54). As for the Indigenous population, enlightened thinkers saw them as a veritable obstacle to the economic development of the viceroyalty. Due to their ethnic and geographic characteristics, Indians were completely unsuited to the disciplined productive labor the new times demanded. According to Pedro Fermín de Vargas, the strategy for getting rid of these “undesirable populations” was not to replace them with more suitable ones from abroad, as Narváez suggested, or to exile them to a faraway place, as Bernardo Ward wanted, but rather to “mix them” with a superior race in order to permanently eliminate all of their negative characteristics: In order to increase our agricultural production, it would be equally necessary to Hispanize our Indians. The general indolence, stupidity, and insensibility that they show toward all that motivates and encourages all other men, leads one to think that they come from a degenerate race that deteriorates with distance from its origin. We know from repeated experience with animals that races improve through mixing, and we can even say that this observation can equally be made with the people we are speaking about, since the intermediate castes resulting from the mixture between Indians and whites are acceptable. In consequence . . . it would be very desirable if the Indians became extinct, confusing them with the whites. (Vargas, 1944 [1789a]: 99, author’s emphasis)

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Vargas’ ideas were certainly in line with the population politics of the Crown in the eighteenth century, which sought to permanently do away with the traditional separation between a Republic of Spaniards and a Republic of Indians. As we know, as early as the 1512 Laws of Burgos and the 1542 New Laws, a regime of Indian protection was established that would eventually be concretized in an institution called the Resguardo (or reservation). Resguardos sought to end the abuses of the native population by the Spanish conquistadors (so-called “personal service”), while at the same time guaranteeing the exploitation of the Indigenous labor force. To this end, Indians were organized into communities separate from the Spanish, assigned to specific non-marketable territories that were to be cultivated in order to pay tributes in kind. In turn, Spaniards were forbidden from settling in “Indian land,” and Indians were forbidden all dealings with the other castes, be they Blacks, mulatto, or mestizo. This policy of racial separation was intended to ensure satisfactory agricultural development and to give Indians a “fixed place” in colonial economy (González, 1992: 25–36). However, beginning in the late seventeenth century, things began to change. The Crown’s segregationist measures were undermined by the increasing process of mestizaje, which I mentioned in the second chapter, but also, and above all, by the increasing importance of the hacienda economy. In effect, with the accelerating of mestizaje and the progressive depopulation of the Indigenous resguardos, in addition to the crisis of the mining economy (as a result of international geopolitical and economic shifts), the hacienda started to become the center of commercial activity in New Granada in the eighteenth century. Many Indigenous people, seeking to escape the tribute, posed as mestizo peasants so that they could be hired on haciendas. In fact, mestizos enjoyed many prerogatives unavailable to Indians: they could move freely, buy, sell, and work as a “peon” on farms since there was no legislation that specified their function. If we add to this the state’s support for economic activities in the agricultural sector (through physiocratic ideas), we see that Vargas’ argument about the extinction of the Indigenous population is more than just a philosophical proposition. The liquidation of resguardos (now seen as “unproductive” lands) and the growing process of mestizaje brought with it the crisis of an economic system in which Indigenous people were at least able to legally preserve their forms of communal organization. In the name of the enlightenment and progress, the undesirable Indigenous population not only lost its traditional ties with the land but also the juridical protection that Crown had hitherto granted it (González, 1992: 115–124). Even the enlightened Spaniards Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, upon seeing the miserable labor conditions that the Indians had fallen into with the crisis of resguardos, preferred to temper their judgment a bit with respect to the supposed natural incapacity of these populations for work:

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Undoubtedly the Indians now show very little affinity for work. Undeniably they are naturally slow, indolent, and lazy. But it is to their own advantage to be slothful. The political and economic system they live under is so bad that they earn the same whether or not they work hard. Thus, it is not strange that they are more inclined to laziness than to work. This is natural in all men. A survey of even the most primitive peoples of the world would prove that no one will work without the incentive of personal gain. Those most stimulated by personal enrichment will be the most industrious. The Indians’ situation is such that it makes no difference whether or not they earn money by their sweat and toil, since they never see what they earn. The value of work is a vague ideal; the harder they toil, the more they see flowing into the hands of the corregidores, priests, and hacendados. The labor of the Indians simply does not redound to their own benefit. In view of all this, what reasonable men can attribute sloth and debility to the Indians without blaming extortion, greed, and ruthlessness of the Spaniards? (Juan and Ulloa, 1978 [1826]: 142–143)

This is not, however, the opinion that would prevail in the enlightened community of New Granada. The majority believed that the aversion to work was a “natural vice” of the Indians and that this would not change simply by improving work conditions on the hacienda. Even if the Indians had labor guarantees, no change at the political, social, or economic level would prevent their natural condition from continuing to be “Indian.” However, some criollos thought that not all Indians were equal by nature, since their condition varied according to the climate in which they were born and raised. In their opinion, it was necessary to advance toward a scientific populational policy that takes account of the natural relationship between geography, race, and economics. 5.2.3 Racial Geography This pessimism toward the character of the New Granadian population was not seen by these criollo authors as anchored in their own “spontaneous sociology,” but rather in objective data produced by sciences like natural history and geography. For this reason, the debate over where each specific population type should be located in the viceroyalty became one of the favorite subjects of conversation among criollo elites. It appeared clear that the Bourbon government’s desired policy of spatial and populational reorganization required “scientific support” at the local level in order to be carried out. And even though the project of the economic societies failed, criollos did not cease to harbor the illusion that science and politics would finally be united in New Granada. The idea of constructing the polis according to the model of the cosmos, continued to serve as a powerful imaginary that brought together

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the desires of figures like Caldas, Lozano, Ulloa, Vargas, Salazar, Restrepo, Narváez, and Pombo. All of them were convinced that if the goal was to relocate populations in order to boost agriculture and trade, then the state needed to have an encyclopedia at its disposal that would allow it to know which geography corresponded naturally to a specific racial type. While as we will see in the next section, the idea of a racial geography was very widespread all across Europe and formed part of the enlightenment project of the “sciences of man,” for some New Granadian thinkers, particularly Caldas, it seemed to be linked as a corollary to Humboldt’s geography of plants. When the German scholar visited Bogotá in 1801, his project of developing a “physical table” of the plants of the New World was already in a mature stage. Humboldt believed he was founding a new branch of science that organically united physics, botany, geography, and natural history, resulting in a classification of all plants according to the zones and different altitudes where they were found. The study of the influence of the physical environment (considered in terms of levels of humidity, temperature, and atmospheric pressure) on the life of plants, was thus Humboldt’s great scientific project. In a sketch published in the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada translated from French by Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Humboldt presents his encyclopedic project in the following way: I have proposed to unify in a single table the totality of physical phenomena presented to us by the equinoctial regions from sea level in the South to the highest peak of the Andes. This table shows: the vegetation of animals, geological phenomena, culture, air temperature, the threshold of permanent snow, the chemical constitution of the atmosphere, electric tension, barometric pressure, the decrease in gravity, intensity of blue in the sky, the depletion of light as it crosses layers of air, horizontal refraction, and the boiling point of water at different altitudes. (Humboldt, 1942 [1808]: 49)

At first sight, it would seem that Humboldt’s proposed encyclopedia coincides precisely with Caldas’ economic Atlas. Both sought to develop a taxonomic table showing the relationship between the geographic environment and the development of life. Both, moreover, sought to influence the political decisions of governments.28 However, a more careful look reveals the following: Humboldt does not include human populations among the forms of life that  In this respect, Humboldt writes the following: “The extent of agriculture, its diversified objectives according to the character and customs, and frequently the imaginary superstitions of the people, the influence of more or less invigorating nourishment on the energy of the passions, the history of navigations and wars undertaken to procure the production of the vegetal kingdom, are among many considerations that link the geography of plants with the moral and political history of man” (Humboldt, 1942 [1808]: 49).

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he attempts to study. When he includes culture in his list, he is not referring to the different cultural forms of people and the influence of geography on these, but to the different ways of “cultivating” the products of the land according to their relation to the physical environment. On the contrary, Caldas from the beginning expresses that his geographic encyclopedia will cover the influence of the climate not only on the animal and vegetable kingdoms but on all “organized beings,” in general, including the distinct human races. In effect, Caldas establishes a direct correspondence between the geography of a territory and the moral character of its inhabitants. Differences in altitude, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, and the chemical composition of the atmosphere have direct consequences for the morality of people and thus for the economy of a region since it is impacted by work habits, intelligence, and the practice of virtue. However, Caldas makes it very clear that even though his position is environmentalist, it is not determinist and much less materialist, because it does not see man solely as a body nor does it grant geography unlimited power over the will. He accepts, like Descartes, the Christian postulate according to which the human being is a composite of two substances, body and soul, meaning that “the body of man, like all animals, is subject to the laws of matter” (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 139). But with the soul, there exists a dimension in humans that does not respond to the logic of a machine, and which thereby escapes the power of nature to become a free being. Caldas’ conclusion is that “it is true that the climate has an influence but only in increasing or decreasing the stimuli of the machine [the body], with our will always remaining free to embrace good or evil. Virtue and vice will always be the result of our choice in all latitudes and temperatures” (140). However, reading Caldas’ text gives the impression that his concession of the influence of the environment over intelligence and morality is much greater than he himself wishes to recognize, above all when this influence has to do with the biological and racial constitution of people. Consider the following passage, for example: Instinct, docility, and in a word, the character of all animals depends on the dimensions and capacity of their skull and brain. Man himself is subject to this general law of nature. Intelligence, profundity, broad views, and the sciences, like stupidity and barbarism; love, humanity, peace, all of the virtues, as well as vengeance and all vices, are continuously related to the skull and the face. A spacious dome with a large brain beneath it, a high and prominent forehead, and a facial angle close to 90 degrees signal great talents; the heat of Homer and the profundity of Newton. On the contrary, a narrow forehead compressed toward the back, a small brain, a thin skull and a sharp facial angle, are sure indications of small ideas and limitation . . . When this level increases, all the organs destined to exercise intelligence and reason grow; when it decreases,

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these faculties decrease as well. The European has 85 degrees and the African 70 degrees. What differences there are between these two races of the human species! Arts, sciences, humanity, and reign over the earth are the heritage of the first; stupidity, barbarism, and ignorance are qualities of the second. (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 145–146)

Caldas’ position is very similar to Kant’s, which I examined in the first chapter. He is not saying that some races are “naturally immoral,” but that some races, due to their physical constitution (brain size, facial angle) and the geographic characteristics where they live (cold or temperate climates), are intellectually and morally immature. The Black race, for example, not only comes from hot climates but also has a small brain and a sharp facial angle, making their struggle against natural determinism much more difficult and complicated than individuals from the white race. This is why the Black race has difficulty cultivating their abilities for the humanities (“the heat of Homer”) or the sciences (“the profundity of Newton”), and will confront innumerable obstacles to rejecting vice and choosing virtue. The white race, by contrast, possesses all the natural and geographical conditions for cultivating intelligence and morality, which is why, according to Caldas, they enjoy a “reign over the earth.” Stupidity and barbarism are not therefore the natural condition of the Black race, but the perverse result of an endowment that blocks the development of their moral nature. In other words, differences in moral and intellectual character between people result from the greater or lesser capacity that these groups have to overcome the determinism of nature. Caldas puts these “scientific ideas” into practice to examine the moral and intellectual state of the inhabitants of New Granada according to the geographic environment they inhabit. The Black person that inhabits the hot regions of the coasts will have the following characteristics according to Caldas: Simple and talentless, they concern themselves only with the objects at hand. The imperious necessities of nature are followed without moderation or restraint. Lascivious to the point of brutality, they surrender themselves without restraint to the trade of women. The latter, perhaps more licentious still, become harlots without shame or regret. Idle, they hardly know the comforts of life, despite possessing a fertile country . . . Vengeful, cruel, jealous with their compatriots, they let the European use their woman and their daughters. Yams, plantains, corn, these are the objects of their labor and the products of their miserable agriculture. (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 147)

The “wise Caldas” has nothing to say about the horrendous slavery imposed on Black people by their European masters, the cruel abuse they have

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perpetrated against Black women, or the ethnic prejudices that permeate his own words. Observation and experience, central elements of the modern scientific method, have allowed him to situate himself in the observational zero-point and rise above his own doxa. This is why, paradoxically, Caldas takes himself to be describing an objective situation that has nothing to do with human decisions. It would be of little use for the government to implement educational programs or decide to train Black people on the coast in new agricultural techniques. Physiological and climatic conditioning weigh too heavily on their capacity to learn. Caldas’ latent suggestion is that state educational policy should be focused on the populations inhabiting the more temperate regions of the viceroyalty, that is, the Andes, where there was a greater possibility of overcoming the determinism of nature. In this sense, the historian Alfonso Múnera is right to claim that Caldas’ text favors a centralist national imaginary focused on Bogotá, in which civilization and progress are only possible in the serenity of the Andes mountains (Múnera, 1998: 54). In fact, the Andes, with their oscillation between dry and humid weather, their abundance of pastures and their pleasant mountains, are much more favorable to the development of the intellectual and moral capacities of the population. “The people who live there are agricultural, industrious, and sagacious . . . Here under a serene climate with occupations more suited to their constitution, man has multiplied marvelously.” “Robust men and beautifullycolored women are the patrimony of this happy soil” (Caldas, 1942 [1808a]: 29; 20). Note that Caldas is including the Indigenous and mestizo population in this description, confirming what we noted above regarding Black people: that Indians are not an immoral race by nature, but the development of their faculties depends in large part on their geographic habitat. This is why Caldas introduces the distinction between Indians who live in the Andes and those who live in the hot areas or the jungle. While the latter are “savages” who live off of hunting and fishing, the former are “civilized” because they practice agriculture and “live under the fine and humane laws of the Spanish monarch.” Caldas even claims that Indians of the Andes are “whiter” than the coastal Indians, because the mountains protect them from the constant wind from the east and “they spend their days in a land where perfect calm reigns, that the slightest murmur has never interrupted” (1942 [1808b]: 156). As an example, he cites the Indigenous communities of Otavalo, at the foot of the snow-covered Cotacachi, who spend their days on industrious activities and have white skin, as opposed to the other Indians of the viceroyalty who have reddish skin (157). Proof that the Andes are more favorable for the humanization of the castes can be found in the fact that the mulattoes who live there are much more measured in their customs (and whiter!) than their coastal counterparts. According to Caldas,

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These [mulattoes] are whiter and have a sweeter character. The women are beautiful and one can see the delicate features and contours of this sex. Decency, honesty, dress, domestic occupations, regain all their rights. There is no fearlessness here, they do not battle with waves and beasts. The fields, the harvest, the flocks, the sweet bread, the fruits of the land, the goods of a settled and industrious life are spread across the Andes . . . Love, that torrid zone of the human heart, does not have those furies, those cruelties, that bloodthirsty and ferocious character of the mulatto of the coast. Here there is equilibrium with the climate, here perfidies are mourned, sung, and take on the sublime and pathetic language of poetry . . . All of the castes have yielded to the benign influence of the climate, and the inhabitant of our cordillera is distinguished by their brilliant and determined character from those below their feet. (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 166–167)

But Caldas is not the only one who defended the environmental thesis and its consequences for the Andes. The criollo thinker Francisco Antonio Ulloa also argued that the geography of the Andes had a positive influence on moral development.29 In his 1808 Ensayo sobre el influxo del clima en la educación física y moral del hombre del Nuevo Reyno de Granada, Ulloa confirms Caldas’ thesis in the sense that the cold climate of the mountains stimulates the development of intelligence more than the hot coastal climate. As one rises from sea level toward the mountains, the physical and moral perfection of the inhabitants also increases. At sea level, we find “colossal, pallid, brutal, and languid men, stained with the color of copper, without energy or liveliness in their movements, who barely seem to be animated at all . . . No poet, orator, musician, painter, nor any bold genius capable of honoring his country will ever emerge from these hot regions” (Ulloa, 1808: 294). By contrast, in the heights of the Andes everything seems different. Even the animals are more hardworking and robust, the trees more majestic, and the vegetation richer than in the hot regions. The intermediate region of the Andes seems to be a zone similar to what Virgil described in his poems: “the most appropriate habitat for man”: This is where the imagination is exalted and heated, and where the festive genius of poetry must burn with the noblest sparks of enthusiasm. Here painting and music, cheerful and comforting arts, will sow flowers and bravely explain

 Ulloa gives Caldas credit for having been the first to systematically reflect on this subject: “Even though another pen has already sketched valiant tables on the influence of the climate on the beings organized under our Kingdom, I will trace my brush strokes over these same objects, insofar as suits my proposed ends” (Ulloa, 1942 [1808]: 292–293).

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all the majesty of feeling. Under this mild heat man develops tranquilly. (Ulloa, 1808: 299)

Ulloa seeks to derive from all these reflections practical suggestions for the central government toward what would be a scientifically based population policy. If the population best endowed by nature is that of the Andes, state policy should be aimed at protecting this population and to improving its health, with the goal of strengthening its physical and moral development. Above all, attention must be paid to the health of the young population, since children constitute the future workforce needed by the region’s economy, which requires implementing a special public hygiene program. Ulloa suggests that newborn babies in the Andes be bathed in water warmed to the exact temperature of the mother’s womb, in order to avoid abrupt changes that might affect not only the “machine” of the infantile body but also their future moral constitution. In the same way, as they grow, Andean children should not be protected excessively from the cold, as rich families tend to do, because this would mean neutralizing the beneficial influence of the climate on their temperament. Even children should be bathed in freezing water, like strong Scottish peasants were accustomed to do in the middle of winter, and as history also confirms: men as intelligent as Seneca and Horace bathed every day in cold water, even in their later years (Ulloa, 1808: 301–307). The moral: cold water, like the cold climate, stimulates the development of poetic and philosophical abilities. But just as the positive influence of cold climates should be encouraged, the bad influence of hot climates should be corrected. Children from hot zones should be raised completely naked in order to counteract in some way the harmful effects of heat and perspiration on their moral constitution. Ulloa takes the example of the inhabitants of the island of Malta, who are robust and hardworking despite the intense heat because they have lived nude since their earliest infancy. Similarly, since the milk of women from hot climates is “less succulent and less dense” than that of women from cold climates, infants should be fed exclusively with donkey, goat, or cow milk (Ulloa, 1808: 311–312). One should be especially cautious to avoid the use of wet nurses from “the dregs of the people,” since all of the moral and physical defects of the castes are transmitted to the child through milk: How many times have I seen a child nursing on the breast a beast warmed with fury! How many times have I seen a wetnurse who is sick, or drunk, feeding her noxious milk to a child that was born as beautiful as love . . . It is true that the disastrous consequences foul milk causes in the machine of children is not immediately apparent. But time discovers all of these seeds and prepares them a life filled with disease . . . The germ of the diseases bad milk carries stays hidden

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for a long time, as with hereditary diseases or certain poisonous substances, which once introduced into the human body remain dormant and idle for a time until they wake up and return to life when least expected. (Ulloa, 1808: 315)30

Regarding how children from hot climates should sleep, Ulloa thinks that neither hammocks nor cradles should be used, because their movement increases the centrifugal force of the blood and circulation to the brain, which is already quite high and harmful in hot areas. One need only take a chicken by its feet, whirl it around in the air, and then put it on the ground to see how a child from a hot climate could be affected by the cradle’s motion: the chicken’s eyes will turn red and the animal will fall heavily to the ground, without strength or moving its head (Ulloa, 1808: 316). This shows that the nervous system of children in hot climates is weaker than those in cold climates, which is why they tend to wake up startled at the slightest noise. In any case, and despite their excessive sensitivity, they get used to sleeping very few hours from a very young age, because excessive heat generates apathy and promotes laziness (337). Yet, apathy can also be a problem in the Andes. Ulloa points out that one of the disadvantages of a cold versus hot climate is the melancholy it often arouses in the spirit. Since the movement of blood slows with altitude, women tend to be very quiet and depressive, and pass on a general feeling of sadness to their children. However, the enlightened criollo thinks that this disadvantage can be corrected by periodic exercise, frequent bathing, and the consumption of food that thickens blood flow (323). One of the central points that a scientific population policy must keep in mind is precisely the kind of nourishment that children consume. In hot climates, where blood circulation is faster, children should not eat fish (the preferred food of the “low people”) as it reinforces the natural tendencies of the organism in these hot regions: it ruins the imagination and disorders the nerves. Rather they should adopt the diet Lycurgus imposed on the Spartans: eating many vegetables to stimulate discipline. In addition to sleeping little and becoming quasi vegetarian, children from hot regions should not eat too much, since this increases their natural tendency to sweat. They should instead follow the example of young Roman soldiers, who ate only once a day and remained strong and courageous regardless (Ulloa, 1808: 333–335). However, to prevent sweat and heat from weakening their bodies and causing them to collapse, Ulloa recommends that schools give them lots of milk or “a bit of watered-down wine, which enlivens and revives” (346).  Ulloa’s argument against the castes is the same that the Spanish used against the criollos, claiming superiority over the latter because they were nursed by Black and Indian women, which left them prone to “inherit” their racial defects: “he who suckles lying milk comes out a liar” (Lavallé 1990: 123). As we will see later, this argument was also used by de Pauw, Robertson, and other European philosophers to show the inferiority of all inhabitants of the Americas.

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State education policy also needed to be based on how children’s natural dispositions differ according to climatic variation. Since people from temperate climates like the Andes possess a stronger sensibility for the arts, the state should create schools there to give classes in architecture, painting, and drawing.31 And since nothing is better than combining the fine arts with natural history, Ulloa recommends that Andean schools incorporate into their curriculum the design methods developed by the Dutch educator Petrus Camper, who would have his sculptors and illustrators take the heads of animals and men of distinct races as their models in order to appreciate the differences and similarities of their physiognomies. Ulloa even ventures to reproduce the following fragment from Camper because he considers it “very useful”: By comparing the heads of diverse peoples such as a Black, a Kalmyk, a European, and a female Monkey, I observe that a line stretched from the forehead to the surface of the face to the upper lip, indicates a difference between the physiognomy of these peoples, and allows one to see a distinct analogy between the head of a Black and the Monkey. After having formed the design of each one of these heads around a horizontal line, I add their facial lines with many angles, and at the same point that I lowered the facial line towards the front, I had a head that was a member of the ancients. But when this same line gave an indirect angle, it formed the physiognomy of a Black, and invariably the profile of a Monkey and a Dog. (Ulloa, 1806: 354)

It would not be an overstatement to say that beyond the openly racist connotations of this fragment, it also reveals a “white” and Hellenocentric conception of what beauty means. Ulloa who, like all enlightened criollos, had incorporated the discourse of blood purity into his habitus, believed that the ideal of physical beauty had been forever established by Greco-Latin sculptors and thus he affirms that Camper, like Winkelman, takes the Greek model as the foundation of aesthetics (Ulloa, 1806: 355). I conclude this section by stating that both Caldas and Ulloa thought that climate exercised an influence, be it positive or negative, on the moral character, but they also believed that the negative influences could be corrected and the positive ones strengthened by scientifically directed policy. In this sense, both wanted to distance themselves from the suspicion of “geographical determinism” raised by their colleague Diego Martín Tanco, who in a letter

 Ulloa complains that in Bogotá there was still no public school of fine arts, and that the few classes taught on drawing were only for women who studied in Colegio de la Enseñanza. However, he claims that the natural talent of “a certain very commendable youth of the capital” whose name he omits “is proof that we can make progress in drawing even without teachers” (Ulloa, 1806: 353). The cold climate naturally produces potential artistic geniuses.

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sent to the editor of the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada as a polemic against Caldas, argued that it was not climate and race but the lack of education and good policies that should be taken into account when considering the morality of the New Granadian population (Tanco, 1942 [1808a]: 61–68).32 But if Tanco, Caldas, and Ulloa agreed on one thing, it was precisely on the need to give politics a scientific foundation, and in their aspiration to put the “wise criollo” in a position of moral and intellectual authority over the Spanish politician. 5.3 THE CRIOLLOS IN THE “DISPUTE OF THE NEW WORLD” We have said that the construction of anthropological place was one of the most widely disseminated strategies for populational mapping in the Age of Enlightenment. Assigning a collective identity inextricably linked to territory to determinate human groups ultimately contributed to imperial aims of organizing or “striating” colonial space. It was not only Spain that was interested in this kind of mapping, however, but also the other emerging powers of the world system. In his classic 1955 book, The Dispute of the New World, Antonello Gerbi takes up the history of the enlightenment debate on the inferiority of man and nature in the Americas (Gerbi, 2010). This debate, which involved the activity of three important academies of science—that of London (the Royal Society), Paris, and Prussia—and which revolved around the writings of the philosophers Hume, Voltaire, Buffon, de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson, was not a purely academic exercise, however. What was at stake in the background was something much greater: the redefinition of political power between European courts (England, France, and Prussia) which animated the dispute right at the moment in which the Spanish empire was losing its hegemony in the world system. What was particularly interesting for these imperial courts was to develop maps in which the space of the American man appeared as “inferior” to the space of European man because it allowed them to legitimize their colonial ambitions over this and other regions of the worlds.

 Tanco summarizes his position as follows: “it is not the climate that shapes men’s morals, but opinion and education, and such is its power, that they always triumph in the latitudes and even in the temperament of each individual . . . In a word: climate, nourishment, nation, family, temperament do not absolutely destine man to embrace vice or virtue; everyone in all places is free to make the choice. This is my opinion and that of those whom I follow: my reason persuades me that the contrary is conducive to moral error; by giving climate and nourishment such an absolute and powerful influence, neither vice nor virtue would be actions in men worthy of blame or praise” (Tanco, 1941 [1808a]: 67–68).

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However, the population maps drawn from Europe did not coincide point by point with those made by enlightened criollos in the colonies. The criollos, as we have seen, also had an interest ad intra in constructing the anthropological place of the castes to legitimate their ambitions to dominate them. But European maps did not distinguish between the space of criollos and the space of the castes. Instead, they represented both as inhabitants of the same “unhealthy” space, and as expressions of a single degenerate and corrupted nature. The tension generated by the clash between the European and criollo population maps is thus the subject I will examine in this last section. 5.3.1 The Imperial Gaze: Savages and Europoids The thesis that geography has a decisive influence on morality and intelligence does not originate in the “second modernity” (the eighteenth century) but rather the “first modernity” (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).33 Recall that one of the arguments made by the friar Bartolomé de las Casas in his polemic against Sepúlveda in support of the American Indians was that the “natural capacity for good understanding” depends in part on the “disposition and quality of the region” and on the “mercy and mildness of the weather.” It is worth citing the passage where Las Casas describes the six natural causes that favor the development of rationality and morality: It is to be considered that men have natural abilities for good understanding which can be born of the concurrence of six natural causes or some of them, and these are: first, heavenly influence; second, the disposition and quality of the region; third, the composition of the members and organs of the senses; fourth, the mercy and mildness of the weather; fifth, the age of the parents; and the goodness and mildness of sustenance also helps, which is the sixth. (Las Casas, 1958: 73)

Las Casas concludes from this that the nature of the Americas is capable of producing rational beings and not simply half-men or “homunculi,” as Sepúlveda argued. Recall as well that the latter’s thesis was that Indians could be legitimately enslaved because they were manifestly inferior to Europeans in terms of their physical, moral, and intellectual capacity. From the polemic between these two Spanish thinkers, we can conclude that colonialism and environmental theories have been linked since the sixteenth century, such that when Buffon and his colleagues put forth arguments about the inferiority of American man, they found themselves treading already well-known

 See my reflections on these two categories in the first chapter.

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epistemic territory. The difference is that whereas Las Casas and Sepúlveda thought of racial superiority or inferiority in synchronic terms, eighteenthcentury enlightenment thinkers understood it in diachronic terms, introducing the variable of time as a criterion of judgment. In this case, the inferiority of the Americas is not based on an ontological difference but on a historic difference that eliminates the spatial coexistence of different societies in the name of temporal and progressive linearity, with modern Europe at the vanguard. American man can and should be colonized because he occupies an inferior evolutionary stage compared to that currently experienced by European man. The latter, for his part, has the mission and moral responsibility to bring civilization to every corner of the planet, thereby promoting the progressive “humanization of humanity.” What Buffon will do is to think of European superiority in terms of the history of the Earth, with geographic influence as the hinge of his argument. In effect, it was Buffon who first elaborated a theory of the earth that sought to explain the planet’s successive geologic and climatic changes from its formation to the present, and he was the first to conclude on this basis that the nature of the Americas is openly hostile to the development of civilization. When Buffon wrote the The Epochs of Nature in 1779, he had already spent several years working on an encyclopedic natural theory of the earth (in nine volumes) which put him into various difficulties with the theologians of the Sorbonne. The Count’s scientific explanations did not align with the seven biblical days in which God supposedly created the universe. For Buffon, the earth’s geological and climatic history had begun 76,000 years ago and not 4,004 years before Christ as was believed in theological circles. And seven epochs had passed between the establishment of its current form and the emergence of civilization. His thesis is that it is not possible to understand human civilization without first understanding the history of the geologic conditions that have served as its condition of possibility. Buffon supposes that civilization is the result of a long process that began when the earth, like other planets, entered a primitive state of liquefaction (Buffon, 2018) During that first epoch, and as a consequence of its greater proximity to the sun, the earth rotated around its axis faster than the more distant planets and it thus acquired the shape recently discovered by La Condamine and his colleagues on the geodesic expedition: a globe flattened at the poles and widened at the equator. This first fact would determine the successive climatic development of the planet, including the birth of civilization. With two-thousand nine-hundred and thirty-six years having passed, according to Buffon’s modest calculations, a second epoch began marked by the progressive solidification of the globe and the formation of the first mountain ranges. Since the globe is not a perfect sphere and the activity of the sun is stronger at the equator than the poles, we can assume that the

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northern regions cooled before the southern regions, creating ideal conditions for the flourishing of life and its natural environment: water. A vast sea formed around the poles gradually expanded to overtake the entire surface of the earth, placing the entire planet under the rule of the sea, initiating the third epoch. Seashells found on top of the highest mountains are proof of this universal flood and can no doubt “be regarded as the first inhabitants of the globe” (Buffon, 2018 [1779]: 51). I am particularly interested in the fourth epoch because this is when, for Buffon, the conditions existed for the emergence of terrestrial fauna, and particularly gigantic animals. His thesis is that water did not recede from the surface of the earth uniformly, but rather first happened in the northern regions: the high mountains of Siberia, the entire territory of Europe, and vast parts of Asia. This is why these dry lands in the north were the first to be fertilized with life, which explains its immense vital superiority over the humid lands of the south: All these considerations suggest to us that the regions of our north, whether the sea or the land, not only were the first made fertile, but it was also in these same regions that living Nature was raised to its greatest dimensions. And how can one explain this superiority of force and priority of origination given to this region of the north exclusively among other parts of the Earth? Because we see by the example South America, in the lands where only small animals are found, and in the seas solely the manatee, which is as small by comparison with a whale as the tapir is by comparison with the elephant. We see, I say, by this striking example, that Nature never produced in the lands of the south, animals comparable in grandeur with the animals of the north. (Buffon, 2018 [1779]: 95–96, author’s emphasis)

Since the quantity of organic material is greater in the North that in the South, it was there that the largest and strongest animals appeared.34 There had never been animals the size of the rhinoceros, mammoth, elephant, giraffe, camel, hippopotamus, or whale in South America. All the animals one finds in the Americas are weaker and smaller. When life was overflowing with strength in the North, the Americas were a swampy and barren region where only mosquitoes and reptiles lived. Buffon’s conclusion is that life in the Americas “was born late and never existed there with the same force and active power as in the northern regions” (Buffon, 2018 [1779]: 93).

 Gerbi attributes Buffon’s fascination for elephants, rhinoceroses, mammoths, hippopotamus and other giant animals to Buffon’s own formidable size. He was a large well-built man who looked more like a marshal than a scientist. On the other hand, Gerbi attributes Buffon’s contempt for insects and other small animals to another of his physiological qualities: shortsightedness, which prevented him from using a microscope (Gerbi, 2010: 16; 18–19)

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But if America is a continent that remained submerged for much longer under water, what kind of civilization could arise there compared with that of Europe? Buffon’s response is unequivocal: the nature of the Americas is not only unfavorable to the development of animals, but also to the development of civilization. There life is still young and untamed, and so human populations have to resign themselves in the face of the overwhelming power of untamed nature. The people who live in the Americas are passive and indolent, incapable of rational control over the forces of nature. Like the higher animals, the people of the Americas are small in size and tend to get smaller, they are infertile and hardly sexually active, they are fearful and cowardly, and they lack all moral force. Even the European colonists suffer upon settling in America the inevitable organic degradation that results from the atmosphere and become Europoids. As we will see, it was precisely this thesis—the degeneration of Europeans in America—that provoked not only the apologetic reaction of the New Granadian criollos but also the indignation of enlightened elites in the United States.35 Even more fervent in his denigration of the Americas than Buffon was the Dutch cleric Cornelius de Pauw, who served on the court of Frederick the Great and was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Due to his undeserved fame as an “expert in exotic cultures,”36 Diderot commissioned de Pauw to draft an article on the Americas that would be published in 1776 in the second edition of the Encyclopedia. The cleric, however, had never visited any of the countries about which he wrote with such elegance. His sources were taken from the writings of the Inca Garcilaso, Las Casas, Acosta, La Condamine, and Gumilla, among others.37 What is striking is that he reads all of these sources according to the Buffonian thesis of the immaturity of the American continent. Thus, for example, where speaking of the scarcity of population and civilization at the moment of the conquest, de Pauw claims that The near complete lack of agriculture, the enormity of the jungles, the plains of these same lands, the water of the rivers scattered in their basins, the swamps and the lakes, multiplied to infinity, the mountains of insects as a consequence  We know that once independence had been achieved, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin traveled to France to get Buffon to retract his injurious claims, but even though the Count promised to correct “some errors,” not a single amendment was issued from his pen in the final volumes of his Natural History. 36  At this time de Pauw had already published his A General [Philosophical] History of the Americans (1768) and his Investigaciones filósoficas referents a los Egipcios y a los Chinos (1774), which were much appreciated by the editors of the Encyclopedia. 37  As Abel Orlando Pugliese points out so clearly, “The ‘recherches’ of C. de Pauw are precisely ‘philosophical’, and not empirical nor historical; that is to say, research (without case studies, so to speak) on the experiences and reflections of others” (Pugliese, 1994: 1362). 35

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of all this, make the climate of America an unhealthy element in certain zones, and much colder than it should be due to its latitude. (de Pauw, 1991 [1776]: 6)

The echoes of Buffon resound here, in the sense that the southern regions cooled later than the northern ones and that the water from the universal flood took much longer to recede. He concludes from this that American nature, due to its jungly and swampy character, holds back any effort at civilization. This is also why the Indians fell ill at the moment of the conquest and disappeared upon the slightest contact with Europeans. Their weak physical constitution prevented them from developing resistance against venereal diseases. Moreover, the rugged character of the geography prevented contact between them, making population increase and the development of agriculture difficult (de Pauw, 1991 [1776]: 10). All species of domestic livestock brought from Europe degenerate in America, which explains why women in the Americas produce such weak milk. It would seem as if all the food that one consumes there, instead of producing strong beings, creates people inclined to laziness, partying, and drunkenness. “One suspects,” de Pauw writes, “that the cold and phlegmatic temperament of the Americans leads them to these excesses more than other men, which we could call, following Montesquieu, a national drunkenness” (20). So that what explains the lack of civilization in the Americas it is not so much the technical inferiority of the Indians visà-vis the Europeans, nor the economic backwardness of the Spanish empire vis-à-vis the other European powers, but the natural degeneration that the American climate produces. Not only the living beings native to the Americas but also those implanted in the Americas from Europe, become degenerate beings: It is possible that there are particular causes in the American climate that lead certain species of animals to be smaller than their counterparts on our continent like wolves, bears, lynxes, wild cats, and other. It is also in the quality of the soil, the air, and the food that M. Kalm believes you can find the origin of this degeneration that also extends to livestock brought from Europe to the terra firma English colonies. (de Pauw, 1991 [1776]: 19, author’s emphasis)

The only possible conclusion from this line of reasoning is that: “the criollos have suffered some kind of alteration due the nature of the climate” (de Pauw, 1991 [1776]: 22). In effect, the conditions of geography and salubrity are so bad in the Americas that no person or animal from Europe can keep their faculties intact there. Not even the criollos, who pride themselves on being superior to the savage natives, can escape this environmental degeneration. De Pauw argues that the criollos share the same vice as the natives: “they expect everything from nature and nothing from their own hands.” Instead

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of transforming the rugged climate by felling forests and drying up swamps, the criollos prefer to boast of their inactivity and be served by the labor of the Indians. The cleric mocks that it is Spanish writers like Feijoo who take up the defense of the American criollos: “If the criollos had written works capable of immortalizing their name in the intellectual world, we would not have had to take up the pen in their defense in the pompous style of Jerónimo de Feijoo, which only they can and should do” (23).38 Others, such as William Robertson, were more favorable to the qualitative distinction between criollos and natives. A priest from Edinburgh and chaplain to the King of Scotland in the time of Hume, Robertson was the author of the well-known History of America published in 1777. The reason for this distinction between criollos and natives is methodological: against Buffon and de Pauw, Robertson considers it an error to establish a categorical difference between the climate of the two hemispheres and to attribute such an absolute effect to geography on the development of morality and intelligence: But in inquiries concerning either the bodily or mental qualities of particular races of men, there is not a more common or more seducing error, that that of ascribing to a single cause, those characteristic peculiarities, which are the effect of the combined operation of many causes. The climate and soil of America differ, in so many respects, from those of other hemisphere, and this difference is so obvious and striking, that philosophers of great eminence have laid hold on this as sufficient to account for what is peculiar in the constitution of its inhabitants. They rest on physical causes alone, and consider the feeble frame and languid desire of the Americans, as consequences of the temperament of that portion of the globe which they occupy. But the influence of political and moral causes ought not to have been overlooked. (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 56)39

Robertson’s opinion is thus the same as that defended by Diego Martín Tanco in his polemic against Caldas: in addition to climate and geography (physical factors), it is necessary to consider the influence of moral and political

 As Gerbi rightly notes, Father Feijoo had expressed his admiration for the criollo culture of the American viceroyalties, even claiming that education flourishes there more than in Spain and that people born in the Americas have greater intellectual energy than those in Europe (Gerbi, 2010: 186–187). 39  The reference to Buffon and de Pauw’s writings is direct, as can be seen more clearly in this passage: “Struck with the appearance of degeneracy in the human species throughout the New World, and astonished at beholding a vast continent occupied by a naked, feeble, and ignorant race of men, some authors of great name have maintained, that this part of the globe had but lately emerged from the sea, and become fit for the residence of man; that every thing in it bore marks of a recent original; and that its inhabitants, lately called into existence, and still at the beginning of their career, were unworthy to be compared with the people of a more ancient and improved continent” (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 48–49). 38

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factors, like, for example, different levels of social evolution, in order to judge the constitution of the different races of the Americas scientifically. And this is precisely where the methodological crack opens that allows us to mark a qualitative difference between criollos and natives. Even though the Europeans and Indigenous people share the same geographic habitat and are subjected to the same climatic influence, the way they respond to this influence is qualitatively different. Since they occupy a higher level of social evolution, Europeans intervene actively to control nature and subject it to the imperatives of reason, while Indigenous people, immersed at a lower level, appear passive with respect to the “laws of the climate”: The talents of civilized men are continually exerted in rendering their own condition more comfortable; and by their ingenuity and inventions, they can, in a great measure, supply the defects, and guard against the inconveniences of any climate. But the improvident savage is affected by every circumstance peculiar to his situation. He takes no precaution either to mitigate or to improve it. Like a plant, or an animal, he is formed by the climate under which he is placed, and feels the full force of its influence. (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 204)

The Buffonian thesis of the European’s degeneration in American territory is thus undermined. Even if a European changes geographic habitat, he will never become a Europoid because his nature is already instilled with cognitive, moral, and social competencies that are evolutionarily acquired and cannot be reversed. Thus, in order to understand a specific population’s capacity to respond to geographic imperatives, it is more important to investigate their level of social evolution than the climate. Robertson yields on this point to the dominant opinion of the eighteenth-century enlightened community: there is only one humanity but it exists at different levels of evolution. Just as an individual transitions gradually from infancy to maturity, the same goes for the development of the species, only that while some people have reached maturity, others remain stuck in infancy. What is interesting about the Americas, according to Robertson, is that it allows the scientist to observe the coexistence of different evolutionary levels, making possible an a posteriori reconstruction of human history. In that history, the “American savage” occupies the lowest rung, insofar as they represent the most primitive stage of human evolution: In order to complete the history of the human mind . . . we must contemplate man in all those various situations wherein he has been placed. We must follow him in his progress through the different stages of society, as he gradually advances from the infant state of civil life towards its maturity and decline. We must observe, at each period, how the faculties of his understanding unfold, we

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must attend to the efforts of his active powers, watch the motions of affection as they rise in his breast, and mark whither they tend, and with what ardor they are exerted . . . [T]he discovery of the New World enlarged the sphere of contemplation, and presented nations to our view, in stages of their progress, much less advanced than those wherein they have been observed in our continent. In America, man appears under the rudest form in which we can conceive him to subsist. We behold communities just beginning to unite, and may examine the sentiments and actions in the infancy of social life. (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 43–44)

For Robertson, human history is not a simple extension of the history of the earth, as Buffon presumes, since there is something that qualitatively separates people from nature and all other living beings: the capacity to think, or what some call “spirit” (or Mind). But this spirit is not given once and for all but has a history, and the Native American is important for the human sciences precisely because they expand our knowledge of this “history of the spirit.” From Robertson’s long-distance ethnology (he had never been to the Americas), this analysis of “savage thought” helps us reconstruct the history of this first stage of the human mind. Thus, his essentially phenomenological explication differs from that offered by Buffon and de Pauw on the following point: the natural weakness of the Indians is not due to the detrimental influence of the climate but to the incipient evolutionary level of their cognitive capacities. Robertson accepts that the Indians were unable to resist the Spanish conquest despite their overwhelming numeric advantage. He also recognizes that the majority of them died from diseases that were common in Europe, or performing physical labor that would have been done by a European without major health consequences. Buffon and de Pauw argue that this proves the great physical inferiority of the Americans with respect to the Europeans. Unlike them, however, Robertson believes that this weakness cannot be explained by physical factors alone, but that there also exists a psychological factor that his colleagues did not account for: the limited development of intellectual capacities. If Indigenous Americans lack virility and strength, this is not only due to the (hot, humid, or jungly) geographic location they inhabit but due to the fact that their thought cannot rise above sensory stimuli. “The thoughts and attention of a savage are confined within the small circle of objects, immediately conducive to his preservation or enjoyment. Everything beyond that, escapes his observation, or is perfectly indifferent to him” (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 75). This means that if Indigenous people are not inclined to productive labor, it is not because they are physically weaker than Europeans but because they do not have the mental capacity to detach themselves from the present and plan for the future. Their infantile mind is

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anchored in the here and now, such that any kind of anticipatory or forwardlooking activity is completely foreign to them: His thoughts extend not beyond what relates to animal life; and when they are not directed towards some of its concerns, his mind is totally inactive. In situations where no extraordinary effort either of ingenuity or labor is requisite, in order to satisfy the simple demands of nature, the powers of the mind are so seldom roused to any exertion that. The rational faculties continue almost dormant and unexercised . . . Hence the people of several tribes in America waste their life in a listless indolence. To be free from occupation, seems to be all the enjoyment towards which they aspire. They will continue whole days stretched out in their hammocs, or seated on the earth, in perfect idleness, without changing their posture, or raising their eyes from the ground, or uttering a single word . . . The cravings of hunger may rouse them; but as they devour with little distinction, whatever will appease its instinctive demands, the exertions which these occasion are of short duration. (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 79–80; 82–83)

The inactivity of the body thus has more to do with the immaturity of the spirit than the influence of the climate. Climate is certainly a variable to account for since food is more abundant in tropical zones than cold regions, where the need to gather food in the winter stimulates the development of the intellectual faculties. This is why, Robertson argues, “the North-Americans and natives of Chili, who inhabit the temperate regions in the two great districts of America, are people of cultivated and enlarged understandings, when viewed in comparison with some of those seated in the islands, or on the banks of the Maragnon and Orinoco” (Robertson, 1790 [1777], 81). Even the Presbyterian pastor is inclined to divide American Indians into two broad groups according to the geographic zone they inhabit: one group that lives in North America between the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf of Mexico and also between La Plata river and Tierra del Fuego; and another group composed of Indians that lives in southern or tropical America, including the Indigenous populations of New Granada. In the first category, “the human species appears manifestly to be more perfect. The natives are more robust, more active, more intelligent, and more courageous.” In the second group, conversely, the Indians are “less vigorous in the efforts of their mind, of a gentle but dastardly spirit, more enslaved by pleasure, and more sunk in indolence” (205–206). Despite this concession to climate, however, Robertson believes that American inferiority vis-à-vis the European is better explained in terms of cognitive evolution. It is enough to look at the kind of language that the natives of America speak to notice that their capacity for reflection is quite limited. Directly citing La Condamine, Robertson says that the American Indian is

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unacquainted with all ideas which been denominated universal, or abstract, or of reflection. The range of his understanding must, of course, be very confined, and his reasoning powers be employed merely on what is sensible. This is so remarkably the case with the ruder nations of America, that their languages (as we shall afterwards find) have not a word to express any thing but what is material or corporeal. Time, Space, Substance, and a thousand other terms which represent abstract and universal ideas, are altogether unknown to them. (Robertson, 79)

If American languages do not allow for the articulation of abstract ideas, then any kind of social reflexivity is also impossible. Mentally abstracting from the present and projecting human activity into the future is also not possible, nor is the development of writing and the art of calculation: “There are many who cannot reckon farther than three; and have no denomination to distinguish any number above it . . . When they would convey any number beyond these, they point to the hair of their head, intimating that it is equal to them” (Robertson, 77). But worse still is that the lack of reflection also implies that inability to distance oneself from immediate needs, leading to the confusion of needs with sentiments. The Indians are thus insensible, cold, melancholic, dull beings who are hard-hearted and not excited by anything, not even the death of their kin or the ineffable pleasures of sexual love. Citing Gumilla, Robertson says that when an Indian gets sick, their family members abandon them to die, and he notes that the Spanish had to mandate them by law to care for each other in case of illness. Similarly, they appear to be completely indifferent to sex40 and despise any show of affection from their women, who they treat “no better than a beast of burden, destined to every office of labor and fatigue” (89). Their coldness of feeling is such that when the men get together to hunt or row, they spend entire days without exchanging a single word and it is “only when they are animated by intoxicating liquors . . . that they become gay and conversible” (196). 5.3.2 The Periphery Writes Back The criollos of New Granada reacted indignantly to these kinds of imperial representations of the population and territory of the Americas. Their irritation was not so much that Black people, mestizos, and Indians were denigrated (on this they agreed fully), but that they were themselves being dangerously “equated” with the castes. As we already saw in the second chapter, criollo  Opinions of this sort regarding the sexual indifference of Indians led Hegel to write: “I even recollect having read that a clergyman used to ring a bell at midnight to remind them to perform their matrimonial duties” (Hegel, 1975: 165)

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elites based their social preeminence on a discourse of ethnic superiority that was profoundly anchored in their habitus. This meant that the attack by the philosophes was intolerable for criollos not because it injured their nationalist ambitions, as Gerbi argues, but because it threatened their most sacred cultural capital: blood purity. We will thus see that the criollos’ reaction, rather than being a nationalist defense, is a defense of their own whiteness. 5.3.2.1 In the Belly of the Beast “On July 15, 1767 a writ from his Majesty was announced to all the Jesuits banishing them from Spanish territories, and even though I am not certain at present where we will go, it will likely be Italy.”41 These words, cited by the historian Juan Manuel Pacheco, were written from Mompox by Father Juan de Valdivieso on the eve of his forced exile to Italy. The Jesuits of Mompox and Cartagena were in fact the first to be expelled from New Granada, and all of the disciples of Saint Ignatius who were missionaries in the viceroyalty had to pass through Mompox. Among them was Juan de Velasco, a priest from Riobamba, who ran the philosophy program in the Jesuit College in Popayán, and who Gerbi identifies as one of the writers who “exposed” the doctrines of Robertson, Buffon, and de Pauw (Gerbi, 2010: 217).42 In effect, Velasco left New Granada for good in November 1767, without knowing that his Historia del Reino de Quito would become one of the central documents in “the dispute of the New World.” Upon arriving in Italy, Velasco and his companions from the order found themselves engulfed in an unexpected intellectual polemic. In 1768, a year after his exile, the first volume of A General History of the Americans by Cornelius de Pauw was published in French. Two years later, the Dutch Cleric’s work was openly critiqued by the Benedictine Priest Joseph Pernetty in his Dissertation sur l’Amérique et les Américains. The publication of Robertson’s History of America came later in 1777, a text that was quickly disseminated throughout Europe and greatly popularized Buffon’s environmental thesis. All of these works, in addition to profoundly affecting the image of the American criollo, among whom the Jesuits considered themselves a sort of “intellectual vanguard,” also drew upon a series of travel narratives written by priests of the Society like Lafiteau, Buffier, and Charlevoix, later compiled as Lettres Edifiants (Corvalán, 1999: 147–154).  Cited by Pacheco, 1989: 513. According to Pacheco, the Jesuits of New Granada were assigned Urbino, Italy as their place of residence. Others were allocated to small cities like Fano, Pergola, Fossombrone, and Senigallia. 42  Velasco was born into a prestigious aristocratic family from Riobamba. His father, don Juan de Velasco y López de Moncayo, was a sergeant major in the army, and his baptismal godmother, doña Teresa Maldonado, was the sister of the enlightened geographer and intellectual don Pedro Vicente Maldonado, who I have mentioned previously in this work. 41

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It is not surprising that the exiled Jesuits, still disturbed by the injustice of expulsion, felt attacked by these modern philosophers and decided to defend their missionary work. Although I will focus on the arguments of Father Velasco, I will also consider the work of the Mexican Priest Francisco Xavier Clavijero, who Velasco acknowledged as an influence. Taking advantage of their new homes in Europe, “in the belly of the beast” as Martí would say, the two Jesuits embarked upon an impassioned defense of the Americas and its people against the “slander” of Robertson, Buffon, and de Pauw.43 The point that the Jesuits criticize most strongly is the geographical determinism of modern philosophers. It is not true, Velasco argues, that the Americans are weak due to the negative influence of the climate on their bodies. The development of physical strength has more to do with work habits, than one’s place of birth and residence. Someone born strong in a cold climate can become idle and weak if they do not exercise through work; similarly, someone born weak in a hot climate can become strong if they apply their body to physical labor. “I knew an Indian named Chacha in the province of Ibarra,” he writes. “He was born and raised in a hot climate, and being over 30 years old, he dedicated himself to digging ditches for sugar mills. I saw him often working among more than one hundred Black Africans, who looked upon him with great respect and more than a little envy” (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 328). The New Granadian Jesuit thus appeals to experience as the ideal means to refute the theories of philosophers who have never been to the Americas. In this way, he seeks to uphold an idea that comes from modern science itself: general theories, as coherent as they may be, should be considered false if they cannot be validated by experience. Other examples show that it is equally erroneous to establish a direct relationship between climate and intelligence. Long experience as a missionary taught Velasco that the Indian could excel in any domain of human knowledge if provided with the “correct education.” Many came to study in the University and became scholars of law or philosophy, while others even became doctors in the Church. Such was the case of an Indian nicknamed Lunarejo, who was considered a saint and who joined the Dominican order and became the rector of the University of San Antonio Abad del Cuzco: The Dominicans from Lima have an original portrait of this Indian, famous no less for saintliness than erudition, as his excellent works show. He is in a very beautiful painting called the three doctors, hung in the grand salon where they

 Clavijero’s History of Mexico was published in Italian in 1781. Velasco, for his part, completed Historia del Reino de Quito in 1789, but despite his efforts to find support in Spain, the (incomplete) manuscript was not published until the mid-nineteenth century. On the polemic around the manuscript in Ecuador, see: Roig, 1984a: 93–96.

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hold literary events. In the middle is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor; to the left, Father Francisco Suárez, the Exceptional Doctor; and to the right the Indian Lunarejo, the Sublime Doctor. This is what M. de Pauw’s beasts can accomplish if they acquire an education. (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 347)

The climate therefore has nothing to do with strength or intelligence. Clavijero writes that “the Swiss are stronger than the Italians, and still we do not believe the Italians are degenerated, nor do we tax the climate of Italy” (Clavijero, 1807, [1781]: 337). And Velasco, for his part, points out that you do not see as many drunks on the streets of Quito in a year as you do in a single week in the major cities of Europe, without this implying that the European climate leads to drunkenness (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 341). We therefore have no reason to think that the American climate, as opposed to the European, is harmful to moral and intellectual development. On the contrary, as Clavijero ironically remarks, “If M. de Paw had wrote his Philosophical Researches in America, we might with reason apprehend the degeneracy of the human species under the Climate of America” (Clavijero, 1807, [1781]: 327). With regard to the thesis about the degeneration of criollos, Velasco and Clavijero take a firm position. The fine arts have flourished in both Quito and Mexico, and universities have produced prestigious American-born doctors whose works are recognized across Europe. Velasco says that nothing impressed the wise La Condamine more during his stay in Quito than the magnificent splendor of the churches. He also cites the case of a French doctor named Gaudé who decided to abandon Paris for Quito, attracted by its refined culture and the piety of the criollo families (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 355–356). Speaking about his own experience, the Jesuit relates the following episode that took place not in Quito or Bogotá but Italy: The case of Bologna was amusing and even comical, in which the modern philosophers represented the most ridiculous but well-deserved role. When the first group of Jesuits expelled from Spanish territory arrived there in 1768, they were visited by several people of distinguished character curious to meet them . . . Their sweet and agreeable manner lead one to ask what part of Spain was he a native of? He responded none, because he was American. They were stunned by this response, looking incredulously at one another . . . They believed without a doubt that the Americans, even if they were born of Europeans, were deformed dwarves, little different from the Indians, according to pictures they had seen of them. The left their error behind more disabused of it every day. With the familiar manner they maintained, they finally came to see that these witty people born in a climate deemed ill-fated, were capable not only of writing well; but of writing in such a way that demanded the admiration and attention of the enlightened world. (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 355)

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But in addition to extolling the intelligence of the criollos, a large part of Velasco and Clavijero’s arguments were dedicated to a defense of the Indians and their history. There are three slanders directed from Europe against the American Indians that the Jesuits wish to discredit: their alleged homosexuality, the quality of women’s milk, and the absence of universal concepts in their languages. Clavijero is indignant in the face of the first slander. No respectable historian has testified to homosexuality as a common practice among Indians, and on the contrary, almost all write that many communities have severe laws prohibiting the practice. And if some Caribbean people were once “infected by that vice,” this did not mean that all Americans practiced it. If this were true, then all European people would be culpable of the same, since the Greeks and the Romans were prone to such an “abomination” (Clavijero, 1807 [1781]: 360). With regard to mother’s milk, the argument had already been deployed by the Spanish against the criollos since before the eighteenth century: from birth, Spaniards in the Indies were nursed by Indian and Black servants who transmitted the defects of their own race and “bastardized them.” Clavijero simply responds that if Europeans and criollos take Indian women as wet nurses, it is because “they find that they are wholesome, faithful, and diligent in such service.”44 And against de Pauw’s accusation that Indian women menstruated irregularly, a clear symptom of their unhealthy physical constitution, the priest responds that he “can give no account,” commenting sardonically that: “M. de Paw, who has from Berlin seen so many things of America, has perhaps found, in some French author, the manner of knowing that which we neither can, nor choose to inquire into” (336). What Velasco and Clavijero can in fact “give account” of is that Indigenous languages are as expressive as any European language. The two learned Quechua and Nahuatl, respectively, as part of their missionary training. It is enough to cite Clavijero’s always ironic commentary: M. De Paw without leaving, without moving from his closet at Berlin, knows the things of America better than the Americans themselves, and in the knowledge of their different languages even excels those who speak them. We have learned the Mexican [language] and heard it spoken by the Mexicans for many years; but never knew that it was deficient in numerical terms, and words signifying universal ideas, until M. de Paw gave us that information . . . We knew, lastly, that the Mexicans had numeral words to express as many thousands, or

 This argument is also interesting, since Father José de Acosta, whom Clavijero very much admired, said that the Society of Jesus should take precautions in ordaining criollo priests, “due to the vices that stay with them from having nursed Indian milk and having grown up among Indians” (cited by Lavallé, 1990: 326).

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millions, as they pleased; but M. de Paw knows the direct contrary, and there is not a doubt but he knows better than us; because we had the misfortune to be born under a clime less favourable to the operations of the intellect. (Clavijero, 1807 [1781]: 394–395)

If Indigenous languages can articulate abstract ideas, this means that Indians were capable of developing scientific knowledge. Contradicting Robertson, Velasco argues that the ancient Peruvians invented sundials, constructed astronomical observatories, and developed complex methods for measuring time, which shows that “they were very proficient in gnomic science” (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 355–391). For his part, Clavijero affirms that while no American nation knew the art of writing, some had developed methods to preserve historical memory: “What were the historical paintings of the Mexicans but durable signs, to transmit to posterity the memory of events to distant places and distant ages?” (Clavijero, 1807 [1781]: 373). But despite recognizing this, Jesuit arguments in defense of the Indians have to do above all with their capacity to learn and assimilate Western knowledge. Buffon’s environmental thesis is not refuted by showing that the Indians produce a different science from the West, but by emphasizing that they have civilized their moral and political customs through Christianity, that they have studied in prestigious universities and even become doctors of the Church. For the two criollo exiles, Western knowledge continues to be the “canon” from which the moral and intellectual maturity of Indigenous people is judged. The question is therefore: what does this Jesuit “vindication” really consist of? Arturo Roig insists that although Velasco and Clavijero were members of the landowning criollo class, they represented the most progressive and intelligent sector of this class, because they used the figure of the Indian as an ideological resource to resist the excesses of Spanish colonial policy (Roig, 1984a: 242). I would add that the defense of the Indian advanced by two Jesuits is actually a defense of the mission of the Society of Jesus in the Americas (and the world), which in their opinion had been mistreated with the expulsion decree of the Bourbons. The latter acted unjustly because they now wanted to take advantage of the Indians as a productive labor force after it was the Jesuits (and not the goodness of the government or a favorable climate) that had taken on the responsibility of civilizing them. The Jesuits of New Granada, as we said earlier, had vast territories under their pastoral jurisdiction and allocated to missions in the Orinoco, the Amazon, and the Eastern Plains. Moreover, they owned immense haciendas and colleges where the wisest criollo elites were educated, with whom they maintained their close political, social, and blood ties. Thus, the Jesuit vindication of the Indian served as an “ideological resource” to show two things: first, that with their missionary work in the Americas the Jesuits (and no other religious order)

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were responsible for offering the West an opportunity to unite all human cultures45; and second, that it was the criollos educated in their colleges who were most suited to govern the destiny of the American colonies, and not a Bourbon dynasty corrupted as it was by an insatiable modernizing desire.46 In fact, and very much despite their adherence to the Jesuit project of cultural syncretism, it seems clear that Velasco and Clavijero participate in the same habitus of ethnic distancing that I examined in the second chapter. The social preeminence of the criollos over the castes, as I argued, is based in an apparatus for which “blood purity” is the symbolic capital functioning as an element of distinction. Velasco could respect the Indians because he believed they were racially pure, but he profoundly despised mestizos, mulattos, and zambos because they were mixed races. Curiously, after having dedicated many chapters to refuting Buffon, Robertson, and de Pauw’s theses, the Jesuit from Riobamba concludes by stating that mestizos (at the time fifty percent of the New Granadian population) constitute “the shame of the New World”! The vices of drunkenness, theft, and lying reign among the mestizo, Black, mulatto, and zambo masses, with the exception of the individuals who lack no good in any class. If any one of these four classes could reasonably be called the shame of the inhabitants of the New World, it is the mestizos, because they are generally idlers without employment or occupation, and not obligated like

 In this sense, the Ecuadorian philosopher Bolívar Echeverría is right when he says that the project of Jesuit universalization constituted a kind of alternative modernity (which he calls “baroque modernity”) against the hegemonic project of capitalist modernity. Despite being an order of the Catholic church, the Jesuits were not a medieval order (like the Franciscans and the Dominicans) but rather a modern order. This is why the cultural unification of the world that they proposed should not be confused with the medieval project of the “Christian Orb.” Rather, it was a gigantic project of “cultural syncretism” built on the material foundation of the modern world system, which sought prefigurations and signs of Christianity in the past of all human cultures. Echeverría says that this project, “seen in light of this end of the postmodern century, does not seem purely and properly conservative and retrograde; their defense of tradition is an invitation to return to the past or to premodernize the modern. It is a project that is also inscribed, albeit in its own way, in the affirmation of modernity” (Echeverría, 2000: 65). For his part, Octavio Paz comments that “The spiritual and intellectual nucleus of the strategy was a vision of world history as the gradual unfolding of a universal and supernatural truth . . . The road to that universalization led through the ancient beliefs and practices of India, China, and Mexico” (Paz, 1990: 35). 46  In this respect, Octavio Paz claims: “The awakening of criollo spirit coincided with the rise of the Jesuits, who displaced the Franciscans and Dominicans to become the most powerful and influential order in New Spain. The Jesuits were more than teachers to the criollos; they were their spokesmen and their conscience . . . Jesuit syncretism, joined to emerging criollo patriotism, not only modified traditional attitudes about Indian civilization but motivated a kind of resurrection of that past . . . Other theologians, among them a majority of the Jesuits, maintained that the Indians’ ancient beliefs—either by virtue of natural grace or because of the Spaniards—contained a glimmering of the true faith, even though only confused memory of the doctrine survived” (Paz, 1990: 36–37) 45

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others by the public authority to work, they give themselves without restraint over to vice, for which idleness is the fertile mother. (Velasco, 1998 [1789]: 357)47

Clavijero also took part in this “spontaneous sociology” when discussing Black people. In his eagerness to refute the thesis that the physical form of New World natives is contrary to the standard of Greco-Latin sculpture, the Jesuit argues that there is a race that is imperfect from the aesthetic point of view, it is not the Indians but Black people: What can be imagined more contrary to the idea we have of beauty, and the perfection of the human frame, than a man whose body emits a rank smell, whose skin is black as ink, whose head and face are covered with black wool, instead of hair, whose eyes are yellow or bloody, whose lips are thick and blackish, and whose nose is flat? Such are the inhabitants of a very large portion of Africa, and of many islands of Asia. (Clavijero, 1807 [1781]: 331)

In sum, the two Jesuits attempt to respond to the environmental thesis of Buffon and his followers through an exaltation of the criollo and the American Indian that nevertheless fails to escape the ethnic prejudices anchored in the habitus of criollo elites. Antonello Gerbi (2010: 183) says that their emphatic response was the result of their wounded pride because in the arguments of the European philosophers they seemed to hear the echo of the slander that they had received for centuries from the Iberian Peninsula. Even though the Spanish and criollos believe themselves to be equally white, Catholic, and pure of blood, their difference is rooted in the fact that ius soli prevailed over ius sanguinis. Due to sole fact of having been born in the Americas and not in Spain, criollos should be subordinated to the Spanish in all aspects of social life. Thus, as the Spanishness of the criollos was called into question in Europe, they were also involved in the same prejudices of which the Indians were victims. If we add the expulsion of the Jesuits to this resentment at the “equalization” to which the criollos were subjected, it is easy to understand why the members of the Society of Jesus who were, according to Octavio Paz, the “voice and conscience” of the criollos, reacted in the way they did. With their vindication of the intellectual and moral capacity of the criollos, the Jesuits sought not only to refute Buffon’s argument about the so-called  On the contrary, when Velasco speaks of the idleness of the Indians, his words take on a different tone. If the Indians don’t work, this should not to be considered a vice but a Christian virtue, because they are content with “a rag to cover themselves, what is needed to feed them, and they don’t aspire for more or want more. In this they are worthy of praise, and without knowing it, they adhere to the saying of the apostle: habentes alimenta el quibus tegamur, his contenti sumus” (Velasco 1998 [1789]: 340–341).

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“American degeneration.” In reality, their battle was more political than philosophical: to show that the criollos were called to govern the Americas independent of the Spanish. But, and this is the point that I wish to highlight, what they demanded was not just to govern a territory, but also above all to govern the American population: the criollos should govern over the castes, independent from Spain, because they have the right of an indisputable ethnic superiority. 5.3.2.2 Criollo Counterattack The echoes of this “dispute of the New World” taking place in Europe also resonated in New Granada. It was not only the exiled Jesuits who reacted to the denigration by European philosophers, but also the most prominent members of the New Granadian elite. The books of Buffon, Robertson, Raynal, and de Pauw circulated in their original languages among Bogotá’s enlightened community, as can be seen in the library catalog of don Antonio Nariño,48 meaning that the criollos had first-hand access to the central texts of the debate.49 Like the Jesuits in Bologna, enlightened criollos in Bogotá were also disturbed by those texts proclaiming “equality from below” between criollos and the castes. This equality strongly reminded them of the arsenal of arguments that the Spanish had leveled against them in previous decades. It is enough to consider, as an example, that one of the reasons given to deny the inheritance of encomiendas to criollos was that they were of “lower quality” than their Spanish parents for having been born in American territory. Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards argued that the influence of the tropical climate caused a kind of bodily and spiritual “mutation” in all Europeans born overseas. Despite being the children of Spaniards, criollos were not only born with bodily characteristics inferior to their parents, but also with a negative shift in their temper and morality (Lavallé, 1990: 16–21). Thus, for the most orthodox among the Spanish there was no difference whatsoever between a criollo and a mestizo, because both were equally contaminated by the “stain of the earth.” It is not surprising then that the criollos decided to counterattack and push back against the arguments of Buffon,  The historian Juan Manuel Pacheco reports that “Nariño hastily hid various compromising books after he was arrested for publishing The Rights of Man: Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and Persian Letters, and William Robertson’s History of Carlos V and History of America; the antiSpanish Historie philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dan les deux Indes by Guillermo Tomás Raynal; the work of Cornelius de Pauw denigrating the Americans, General History of the Americans, and the work of the materialist Baron d’Holbach, La morale universelle ou les devoirs de l’homme fondée sur la nature. Still remaining in his library, among others, are Condillac’s Logic, Buffon’s Natural History in 36 volumes, and the mathematical works of Christian Wolf” (Pacheco, 1984: 14). 49  In fact, almost all of the central works of the European enlightenment could be found in the libraries of educated New Granadians, as Renán Silva’s magnificent study shows (2002: 279–311). 48

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Robertson, and de Pauw, seeking to eliminate all suspicion of their equality with the castes. As Andrea Cadelo Buitrago has clearly shown, the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada, the journal founded by Caldas in 1808, became the stage for the criollo reaction against their foreign accusers. This is where articles by Francisco Antonio Ulloa, José María Salazar, Joaquín Camacho, Jorge Tadeo Lozano, and Francisco José de Caldas himself were published, in which, according to Cadelo, “the criollo refutation of a purported American inferiority was also made also through an climatic position that reproduced the theses of the European naturalists” (Cadelo Buitrago, 2004: 107). This “climatic” or environmental position as I have called it here is clearest in Caldas’ articles. Particularly, in his text Del influjo del clima sobre los seres organizados, he praises Buffon, who he does not hesitate to call “the Pliny of France” and elevate to the category of those “extraordinary geniuses . . . who have opened the doors to the sanctuary” (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 157). Caldas takes from Buffon the thesis that the climate of the Americas is not particularly favorable for the development of large animals, which explains why the llama, wolf, puma, and vicuña are small, malformed, weak beings compared to the animals of the old continent.50 In fact, Caldas believes that the discovery of the “bones of carnivorous elephants” in Soacha, rather than contradicting Buffon as might be expected, confirms his hypothesis of a universal flood that forever changed the planet’s climate. What was found in the savannah of Bogotá were not living elephants, but cadavers of elephants that were dragged there as the result of the catastrophe that belatedly submerged South America: In the surroundings of this capital, in the esplanade of Bogotá near Soacha, there are bones of carnivorous elephants, according to Humboldt. I have seen and exhumed many such oversized bones from the jurisdiction of Timaná in the headwaters of the Magdalena river. Don Manuel María Arboleda, friend of the sciences and the learned, sent a box of these bones to Humboldt himself in Quito. I had found prodigiously large teeth, and at the moment you can see a monstrous one in the hands of don Manuel de Socorro [Rodríguez], a librarian in this capital . . . What should we think of these spoils abandoned to chance, without attention to altitude, latitude, and climate? Could the temperature of our planet have changed over the centuries? . . . Could a general revolution have cast the cadavers of elephants, the tapir, and the tiger from the heart of Asia and Africa to the extremities of the globe? (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 157)

 “The wolf, perhaps the most ferocious animal in our temperate zone, is nowhere near as cruel as the tiger, the panther, and the lion of the torrid zone, nor the white bear, lynx, and hyena of the frigid zone” (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 157).

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However, Caldas is not inclined to go as far as the French naturalist with the hypothesis of a universal flood. The perpetual humidity of the Americas, which for Buffon is proof that only insects, reptiles, and strange inferior animals can grow there, Caldas only recognizes in the regions near sea level, and not in the high regions. As we already saw in the previous section, Caldas believes that the Andean climate is good for the development of life and the higher faculties, because this zone dried out more quickly after the flood than the coastal regions, albeit later than Europe. So while Buffon holds that the climate of South America is harmful to life, this claim is only a half-truth because the Count only accounts for latitude, not elevation. If one looks at the flora, fauna, and human life of the Americas from the perspective of altitude and not just latitude, then Buffon’s thesis would need to be nuanced: When you only pay attention to latitude, when you see nature in parts and on a small scale, when you don’t take into account all of its resources and its agents, then the law escapes, you only see contradictions, slander, and you come to monstrous conclusions. Instead of painting it, you degrade it, and instead of knowing it better, you spill obscurity over its august face. (Caldas, 1942 [1808b]: 155)

It is precisely in the heights of the Andes that the city of Bogotá is located, the most important civilizational center of New Granada, clear proof that Buffon’s accusations against American nature and culture are false. José María Salazar gives a passionate defense of the climate and history of this geographic zone in his Memoria descriptiva del país de Santafé de Bogotá. He is directly polemicizing with the French naturalist M. Leblond, who had read his memoir titled Memoire pour server a l’histoire naturelle du pays de Santa-Fe de Bogota relativement aus principaux phénomenes qui resultant de sa position in front of the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1786. There Leblond replicated Buffon and de Pauw’s anti-American arguments point by point, after having traveled himself to the Orinoco, New Granada, and the viceroyalty of Perú. Salazar begins by providing a rather detailed description of the savannah of Bogotá, highlighting the beauty of its landscapes, the fertility of its lands, and the salubrity of its climate.51 In the middle of this

 A curious fact is that one of the arguments Salazar uses to contradict Lebland is the great beauty of Tequendama Falls and the purity of the water of the Bogotá river! With an almost romantic emphasis, he writes: “The song of the birds, the sound or rustling of the leaves animates this bright aspect, which stirs the attention of the traveler at every turn, elevating their curiosity. Meanwhile, one hears the noise of the great waterfall in the distance, the pleasant roaring of the river as it falls, which imperceptibly increases becoming quite intense when nearby. Here, in serene days, one observes the most beautiful spectacle that can be seen or imagined and one feels exalted or filled up with those ideas that great works of nature always inspire in us. The high part of the river is

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paradise, a great city of thirty thousand inhabitants was erected that Salazar presents as a model of prosperity and culture. Bogotá is adorned with thirtyone churches, public buildings, universities, convents, hospitals, colleges, parks, gardens, fountains, libraries, ‘a theater with very solid architecture’, and an astronomical observatory which is ‘the first temple dedicated to Urania in the Americas’” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 218). In terms of the temperament of its people, Salazar asserts that The child of this climate is generally kind in character, the friend of novelty, very hospitable, and of tranquil heart, influenced not a little by his political situation, he craves rest and quiet. The eminent class of citizens, especially the literary class, speaks a language that is without doubt the purest of the Kingdom, uncorrupted by mixture with Indian words, as happens in other countries, and distinguished from other peoples by its particular accent. The women are generally beautiful, they have clear talent, and their rosy complexion, proper to the climate, animates all of their features. (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 219)

Bogotá is then distinguished as “one of the most cultured cities of the Americas,” contradicting the accusations of Leblond and the other European naturalists who purport to equate the savage with the criollo. For Salazar, the city’s culture is represented by “the eminent class of citizens,” those who speak pure Spanish, without “mixture with Indian words,” but with a different accent from the peninsula. It is the university-educated class that goes to the theater, that can use the libraries, send their daughters to convent and cultivate the fine arts of the West. Painters like Gregorio Vásquez “who has given us paintings filled with life and movement,” and young musicians “not content to repeat the admirable pieces of Hayden, Pleyel, etc. invent beautiful compositions from their own heart” belong to this class (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 223). This is, in sum, the robust class of criollos, which Salazar is so careful to distinguish from “the lower people of Santa Fe who are the most wretched of the Kingdom, abhor work, do not care for cleanliness, and are almost touched with stupidity” (219). But despite his profound contempt for the “worthless class of people” who “do not represent an important role in the majority of societies” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 228), the criollo lawyer is compelled to offer a defense of the Indians and the pre-Columbian past. This was due to the fact that it was not possible to delink his defense of high criollo culture from the benevolent influence of Bogotá’s climate, since his argument accepted the basic presuppositions of environmentalism. If Salazar asserted that the inhabitants of Bogotá had delightful with its pleasant shores, clear waters, the elevation of those mountains crowned by forests, and the rapid forming of fog or its momentary dissipation” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 213–214).

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developed a high level of culture due to the salubrity of the savanna climate, then he should say the same of the Muiscas, the ancient inhabitants of the region. Above all because one of Leblond’s arguments was that the unstable climate of Bogotá’s savannah, with its unexpected changes between hot and cold, sun and rain, often on the same day, was completely unfavorable to the development of civilization. Defending the criollos necessarily meant defending the Indians, although it was not the living but the dead: the oldest inhabitants of Bogotá’s savannah. Salazar argues that although they did not achieve the level of civilization of the Mexican and Peruvian empires, the Muiscas were far from the miserable and savage people that Leblond believed them to be.52 They had moral and economic laws, they possessed “immense riches and the most brilliant palaces and buildings,” they had a “harmonious and rather sweet and expressive” language, with which they could express ideas about a supreme uncreated being. Despite not having developed writing, they preserved the memory of the past through myths like that of Bochica, who Salazar identifies as “one of Jesus’ messengers who came to illuminate these regions by preaching the law of grace” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 201). Thanks to this early pre-Columbian evangelization, but above all the great goodness of the climate, the “ancient Bogotans” were much superior to all the other communities that lived in the present-day territory of New Granada: “The natives of Bogotá surpass the other Americans in their religious ideas and political institutions” (204).53 In his defense of the American climate and its beneficial influence on preColumbian civilization, Salazar and other criollo thinkers find support in the favorable opinions of Alexander von Humboldt, who was very impressed by his visit to the ancient monuments of México, Perú, and Cundinamarca. Humboldt was well-acquainted with the ongoing debate in Europe about “American inferiority,” but he immediately assumed a position opposed to that of Buffon, Robertson, and de Pauw: “Many Europeans have exaggerated the influence of these climates on the spirit and claimed that it is impossible to undertake spiritual work here; but we should assert the opposite,

 “The French writer pledges to degrade this region before the arrival of the Spanish, and he paints a sad picture of the unhappiness in which they lay until that memorable epoch. It was the most miserable and destitute country, he says, where the wretched Indian had no goods and no subsistence other than rivers without fish, birds in small number, one or two quadrupeds, and few vegetables. The uncultivated lands offered only some plants, some pitiful roots, quinoa, potatoes, and corn, perhaps misleading one’s expectations due to the instability of the climate. What could have been gotten from neighboring countries was not for lack of objects to exchange, and an armed force was needed to procure it. The houses appear made for animals and not for humans, etc.” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 201). 53  The most curious part of this apology is that Salazar uses Robertson’s History of America (!) as a source of information, an author that he considers “more worthy of our respect and more a friend of the truth than Leblond” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 203). 52

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and according to our own experience, proclaim that we have never had more strength than when contemplating the beauty and magnificence that nature offers here” (Humboldt, 1989 [1803]: 95). His five-year sojourn in the Americas (between 1799 and 1804), during which he toured jungles, mountains, deserts, rivers, seas, and plains, traversing all climatic zones and carrying out hard physical and intellectual labor, would be proof that the supposed insalubrity of the American climate was nothing more than a myth.54 Not even his stay in the humid region of the Orinoco, where fevers and malaria were usually endemic, managed to weaken his iron-like health.55 Nevertheless, reflecting on the reasons for the advance of civilization in some people over others, Humboldt writes the following: The civilization of peoples is almost always the inverse of the fertility of the country they inhabit. The greater the obstacles that nature presents, the greater the moral faculties of man develop. This is the case for the inhabitants of Anahuac (or Mexico), Cundinamarca (or the Kingdom of Santa Fe) and Perú, who formed great political associations and enjoyed a level of civilization similar to that of China and Japan, whilst man still wanders about wild and naked in the jungles that cover the plains east of the Andes. But if it is not difficult to conceive why the civilization of our species makes greater progress in Northern regions than in the midst of the fertility of the tropics, and why this began in the heights of the mountains and not on the banks of the great and mighty rivers, yes it explains why civilized and agricultural peoples do not come from inhabiting climates where nature spontaneously produces what one would not acquire under a less propitious sky without the most arduous labor. (Humboldt, 1942 [1808]: 131)

This passage from the article Humboldt published in the Semanario de Nuevo Reino de Granada reveals his opinion on the subject of the evolution of the human species. The Baron knew very well what he was talking about: he was a disciple of Blumenbach in Jena (1797) and was acquainted with his brother Wilhelm’s texts on the subject (Plan d’une Anthropologie comparée and  The idea that the American territories are endemically humid due to being submerged longer is also a myth according to Humboldt: “Closely examining the geological makeup of the Americas, reflecting on the equilibrium of fluids spread across the surface of the earth, it cannot be accepted that the new continent came out of the water later than the old one. One observes the same succession of stone layers as in our hemisphere, and it is likely that the granite, mica schists, and the different formations of gypsum and clay of the Peruvian mountains were formed in the same period as the analogous rocks in the Swiss Alps” (cited by Castrillón Aldana, 2000: 20). 55  In another letter, written to his brother Wilhelm from Havana in 1801, he comments on this theme: “My health and my happiness have visibly increased since I left Spain, despite the constant change in humidity, heat, and the cold of the mountains. I was born for the tropics, I have never been so constantly healthy as in these two years” (Humboldt, 1989 [1801b]: 66). 54

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Le XVIII siècle) published between 1795 and 1797. Both Blumenbach and Wilhelm basically followed Kant’s anthropological theses that I mentioned in the first chapter: the single trunk of humanity is divided into different races, each of which, achieves greater or lesser moral and intellectual progress according to their peculiar psychological temperament. Americans, Africans, and Asians are incapable of leading the upward movement of civilization, while only the white European race can lead humanity toward realizing its own moral nature. Disagreeing with this view, Alexander believes that the progress of humanity occurs in all people on earth, and that the difference in civilization between them has little to do with race.56 The factor that explains why civilization progresses more in northern zones than tropical ones is instead the degree of difficulty presented by nature. Where the fruits of nature are within arm’s reach during the entire year, man’s moral and intellectual faculties develop with less intensity. Life is simply enjoyed without greater concern, and it is not necessary to compensate for that which nature denies through the development of science and technology. But in the northern zones, where the seasons require methodical work and economic planning, said faculties reach much greater development: Thus the inhabitants of the equinoctial regions know all the vegetal forms that nature has placed in their favored country, and the land boasts before their eyes as varied a spectacle as the blue of the sky, in which there no constellation is hidden. The peoples of Europe do not enjoy such advantages, because the weak and sickly plants that the love of the sciences or the caprices of refined luxury make them cook in the stove hardly offer a shadow of the majesty of the equinoctial plants, and even many kinds remain unknown by them: but the culture and richness of their languages, the imagination and sensibility of their poets

 This does not mean that Humboldt was free of the racial prejudices characterizing enlightened Europeans of his time. He firmly believed in the superiority of the white race and Europe’s “civilizing mission,” but he was critical of the idea that race was the central factor in scientifically explaining cultural evolution. While white skin color contributes chemically to the development of intelligence (as Kant also thought), the evolutionary trigger is the degree of difficulty that they encounter in their struggle against nature. In his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, During the Years 1799–1804, the Baron writes: “If the variety and mobility of the features embellish the domain of animated nature, we must admit also, that both increase by civilization, without being solely produced by it. In the great family of nations, no other race unites these advantages in so high a degree as the Caucasian or European. It is only in white men that instantaneous penetration of the dermoidal system by the blood can produce that slight change of the colour of the skin which adds so powerful an expression to the emotions of the soul” (Humboldt, 1852 [1834]: 305). A passage like this helps demystify the figure of Humboldt a bit, whose beatification has been in large part due to Latin American historians themselves, and it confirms Abel Orlando Pugliese’s view that “with him the dispute [of the New World] did not end, but rather reached its culmination, revealing fundamental antinomies of the positions at stake. His paradigm for the objectification and thematization of the Americas continues being so European, perhaps even more so than those of the [other] parties to the controversy” (Pugliese, 1994: 1364).

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and painters, offer them an inexhaustible source of compensation. (Humboldt, 1942 [1808]: 44–45, author’s emphasis)

Humboldt thus rejects the idea that race and climate would allow for the straightforward condemnation of pre-Columbian people. Taking some arguments from Rousseau, the German scientist thinks that while civilization may be preferable to barbarism, the simple life of the natives has its advantages. They did not have to work to obtain food nor concern themselves too much with planning the future, but were able to enjoy a “natural life” in harmony with the environment. By contrast, the “caprices of refined luxury” seen in Europe have many moral disadvantages. The progress of civilization, despite compensating for natural want, also generates a series of miseries for humanity. Humboldt takes the development of agriculture as an example, and in particular those crops that the criollos saw as the great hope of the viceroyalty: coffee, indigo, and sugar cane. Instead of being content with natural cultivation, Europeans preferred to acclimate these products to American soil in the belief that they were contributing to the progress of civilization. “But these new agricultural crops,” Humboldt writes, “far from having been advantageous to humanity, have increased the immorality and the misery of the human species: the introduction of African slaves to the Americas has caused devastation on the old continent and endless discord and bloody vengeance on the new” (Humboldt, 1942 [1808]: 133). Therefore, while Humboldt’s arguments could support his defense of the criollos, the American climate, and its pre-Columbian past, his opinions were not completely welcomed. His critique of the introduction of African slaves to support the hacienda economy, his reservations about the belief that European civilization has brought only benefits to humanity, and above all his thesis that race cannot scientifically explain the superiority of some people over others, would be seen with great hesitancy by the enlightened criollo elite. We know about Caldas’ suspicion toward Humboldt and his work. And even though much has been said about the incident that provoked rumors of Humboldt’s alleged homosexuality and caused his break with Caldas,57 it would not be unreasonable to assert that this suspicion also reflected the distance the Baron maintained from the elite criollo habitus. Proud of his

 In early 1802, Caldas asked Humboldt if he could accompany him on his trip to explore the Ecuadorian Andes, but the Baron unequivocally refused, apparently because he wanted to climb Mount Chimborazo in the company of the young criollo Carlos Montúfar. Profoundly hurt by the rejection, Caldas wrote to Mutis that Humboldt had breathed the “poisoned air” of Quito, allowing himself to be corrupted by “obscene and dissolute” youth who would drag him “to their homes where impure love reigns.” Caldas’ resentment reached the point of claiming that Humboldt’s moral weakness directly affected his competency as a scientist and confirmed the fact that protestants were heretics. See: Castrillón Aldana, 2000: 33–37.

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Europeanness and his bloodline, Humboldt mocked their very tropical “criollo psychology,” with its passion for false nobility titles and ridiculous belief that darker skin color implied moral and social degradation (Minguet, 1985: 258–269).58 But unlike Humboldt, the most noble and preeminent scientists among the local elite (like Caldas and Lozano) certainly had an interest in emphasizing the superiority of criollos over the castes as a way of refuting the “slander against America.” In the fragment of his work Fauna Cundinamarquesa published in issue 48 of the Semanario, Jorge Tadeo Lozano distinguishes three races that constitute the population of New Granada: American, African, and Arab-European. Lozano recognizes that the three races have been affected by the American climate, but not to the same degree. Thus, for example, the American race, composed of those Indigenous to the new world, as the race native to these lands experiences the influence of the climate most strongly: “their moral character seems to come from the circumstances that surround them more so than their own nature” (Lozano, 1809: 357). The Black race, in contrast, has been transplanted from another continent but it has not been able to adapt to the hot climate of the Americas, and so maintains intact the moral character associated with its environment of origin: “Many naturalists have observed that all products of Africa reflect the roughness of the climate in which they were born in their customs and appearance. Black people are palpable proof of this assertion: their moral character comprises those passions that make man hard and unsociable” (365). Conversely, the Arab-European race is qualitatively distinct from the other two because it has been able to exercise rational control over the American climate instead of being affected by it. Although like Black people it is a transplanted race, climatic change has not affected its physical, moral, and intellectual capacity at all. Rather, Lozano claims that being transplanted to new climates has contributed notably to increasing its faculties:

 Take the following two quotations as an example, taken, respectively, from the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain and his Relación histórica, where Humboldt refers ironically to the colonial society of Spanish America: “In a country governed by whites, the families reputed to have the least mixture of negro or mulatto blood are also naturally the most honoured. In Spain it is almost a title of nobility to descend neither from Jews nor Moors. In America, the greater or less degree of whiteness of skin decides the rank which man occupies in society. A white who rides barefoot on horseback thinks he belongs to the nobility of the country” (Humboldt, 2014: 184–185). “In the colonies, the true visible stamp of nobility is skin color. In Mexico as in Peru, Caracas, and the island of Cuba, one hears someone say daily to a man walking barefoot: and this white is so rich perhaps he believes himself to be whiter than me? The population that moved from Europe to America being so large, one understands well that the axiom ‘every white is a knight’ singularly contradicts the aspirations of European families, whose notability and title date back very far” (cited by Minguet, 1985: 259–260).

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With the exception of some almost unnoticeable changes that the different atmospheric temperatures and altitudes have produced in them, they remain just as they were in Spain, whence the majority has emigrated in these regions. Therefore the assertion that the physical and intellectual faculties of Spanish Americans have degenerated and degraded, and that their nature is so weak that at forty years old they seem overwhelmed with the saddest decrepitude, should be seen as false and unfounded. To the contrary, it seems that the transplantation to these regions has granted them a degree of perfection in both their material organs and their intellectual faculties, whose perspicacity cannot be justly denied. (Lozano, 1809: 361)

However, Lozano is aware that his racial defense still did not account for de Pauw’s objection: American criollos still have not made any substantial contribution to the sciences and the arts, which would be proof of their inferiority and dependency on Europe. According to Lozano, two causes explain why criollos do not yet stand out in the philosophical and artistic fields. First of all, the Arab-European race lives primarily in the cities and administers the fruits of the fertile American soil, making it a kind of “idle race” enjoying pleasures and luxury more than manual and intellectual labor (Lozano, 1809: 363–364). Second of all, it is a “young race” that has needed to devote itself to subjugating nature and civilizing the Indians for 200 years, such that it has not had enough time to show its true capabilities. It was only very recently that they began the task of reforming their colleges and universities, cultivating the sciences and the arts, but it will not be long before the criollos “make their detractors see that the Americas, having known how to enrich Europe with its natural products, will also know how to imitate it in producing ingenuities comparable to the best of that part of the world” (362). Lozano’s latter argument was actually one of the favorites of the criollo elite. If one accepts the enlightened presupposition that all human societies progress with time, then the harsh judgment of European philosophers about the Americas should take into account its diverse racial composition and the current state of its temporal evolution in accord with this composition. The white race, represented by the criollos, is certainly the most evolved of all the American population (in its physical, moral, and intellectual aspects), but it is still not as culturally evolved as the white European race. Nevertheless, this comparative delay has nothing to do with an inferiority of faculties vis-à-vis the white man of the old continent. It is rather a temporal (and not ontological) delay since, due to the particular historical circumstances that the criollos have had to confront in the Americas, their faculties have had to be applied more to controlling nature than to cultivating of the humanities and sciences. José María Salazar presents the argument as follows, speaking of the high culture of Bogotá:

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Although the humanities have had more flattering success, and this city can be called one of the most cultured of the Americas, we do not yet find ourselves in that degree of splendor to which the present epoch aspires. Nations do not emerge so quickly from their first downtrodden stage onto the level of those that are in a position to enlighten them; and is only up to the movement of time, aided by the influence of circumstance, to dispel their obscurity. Society, like man, has its respective stages, even the wisest peoples of the universe have passed through them, and the progression of the centuries, capable of working the greatest wonders, has only been able to raise them to the degree of glory that we now see. Santa Fe is today an example of this dismal truth, and if the dawn of philosophy has shone on its horizon, the darkness that surrounds us has not fully dissipated. (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 223–224, author’s emphasis)

The “slandering of the Americas” is therefore an injustice because it is equivalent to punishing a child who has barely entered adolescence for not behaving like an adult. The Americas, led by its most evolved race, the criollos, will soon leave infancy and enter fully into the age of reason. When this occurs, “American genius, when fortune puts it in a position to express itself, will be perhaps the most loved by Minerva; and in this New World the works of the spirit will be as remarkable as the works of nature” (Salazar, 1942 [1809]: 226). It is only a question of time before the Americas arrive at what Kant called “maturity” since the region already has the appropriate race to do so. One needs to only wait for this race to mature a bit more to make “autonomous use of reason” and govern its own destiny. Then America will be able to form an independent nation in which criollo men can govern over the castes and trade freely with their white peers in Europe, just as the “dismal truth” of human evolution dictates. In the end, and despite the suspicion of European philosophers, the cunning of reason will end up finding its way.

Epilogue

I began this book by making reference to the relationship between the enlightenment science of language and the enlightened politics of language, in relation to a request sent in 1787 by the Russian Empress Catherine II to King Carlos III of Spain, and the decree promulgated by the latter twenty years earlier prohibiting the use of Indigenous languages in the Americas. I now hope to conclude by returning to the same history, with the goal of illustrating some of the themes and concepts utilized throughout this investigation. The 1770 decree promulgating Spanish as the sole and official language of the Empire led gradually to the elimination of Latin as the scientific language par excellence. This strengthened the ascent of a new criollo class legitimated by knowledge that spurned the scholastic and demonstrated an interest in Indigenous cultures that was more scientific than religious. From the pages of the Papel periódico, Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez led an offensive to banish Latin from the universities of Bogotá at the same time that he defended the reopening of the defunct chair in Chibcha, to be studied now as a historical curiosity. Equally, the criollo priest José Domingo Duquesne argued that Latin could no longer serve as the morphological basis for studying Indigenous languages—as had been the case with the grammar texts written by seventeenth-century missionaries—instead insisting that they should be seen according to a completely different logic from that of western writing.1 José Celestino Mutis himself, upon receiving his mission from viceroy

 Duquesne believed that the Chibcha language should be seen through the logic of ideographic writing, and even claimed to have decoded some Chibcha hieroglyphics referring to astronomy engraved on a stone. His linguistic theories were highly respected by Humboldt. See: Langebaek, 2001: 23–24; González de Pérez, 1980: 151–153; Ortega Ricaurte, 1978: 110–111.

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Caballero y Góngora to compile the manuscripts requested by the Empress of Russia, writes the following: Since my arrival in this Kingdom, I implemented my plans to collect printed books and manuscripts, principally in the languages of our Americas, and to establish lists of the most common words in the absence of complete vocabularies. My aim was to deposit these treasures in some Academy of Fine Letters, fearing how quickly these languages walked toward oblivion with the extinction of these barbaric nations, and seeing at the same time from afar that a taste for these precious antiquities should be reborn, but perhaps with the imponderable misfortune of neither finding them, nor knowing that they existed. (cited by Ortega Ricaurte, 1978: 95)

Enlightened criollos no longer saw Indigenous languages as useful instruments for conversion, but as “archaeological pieces” belonging to a distant past. As I have shown in chapter 4, criollos believed that Indigenous languages corresponded to a primitive stage of linguistic evolution, since they had no words for expressing abstract concepts. Mutis in particular hoped that Russian scholars would manage to advance the study of these “precious antiquities” and perhaps reveal to which specific moment in the human past Indigenous people and their languages belong. This narrative among enlightened criollos, which considered Indigenous languages and knowledge as doxa, as an expression of ignorance, or simply as the remote prehistory of the western episteme, has been analyzed in this book through the category of the coloniality of power. Now, the 1770 decree did not provoke as dramatic effects in New Granada as it did in Peru or New Spain, because by the late eighteenth century the Indigenous population had declined considerably and the process of mestizaje was very advanced. As I have shown in chapter 2, mestizos had incorporated the apparatus of whiteness into their habitus, such that before the decree many of them avoided using their languages of origin in order to eliminate any suspicion that they bore the “stain of the land.” This apparatus, which encouraged whitening as a means to obtain the privileges reserved for criollo elites, has been analyzed in this book through the category of blood purity. On the other hand, enlightened thinkers considered all particular languages to be a source of error and confusion, and that none was fully adequate for achieving the certainty of knowledge. No form of knowledge that mixed everyday words, local beliefs, and subjective opinions could be considered “science.” The ideal of the enlightened scientist was to distance oneself epistemologically from everyday language, breaking categorically with its “local grammar,” to situate oneself on a universal platform from which the world could be observed objectively and dispassionately. This epistemic

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technology, which claimed to mark a radical separation between the subject and object of knowledge to position oneself in an uncontaminated epistemic location, has been analyzed in this book through the category of zero-point hubris. The coloniality of power, blood purity, and zero-point hubris have therefore been three of the central categories used in this investigation. They have allowed me to analyze how enlightened criollos used the universal language of science in New Granada. Postcolonial theory has been useful for me in examining how the translation of a text whose language claims to be valid in the same way and in all places gains very different characteristics from the original when this translation takes place from a “colonial context” (Scharlau, 2002: 20; 2003: 106). In this book, I have shown that the translation by criollos of enlightened scientific language acquires an “ethnographic” character in New Granada. European science helps its criollo translators to describe the habits, customs, and history of “barbarian peoples.” One of the goals of this book has been to show the role that enlightened science played in the formation of criollo nationalism in New Granada. In fact, when I wrote the first outlines of this project at the University of Tübingen in mid-1998, I was planning to write about the birth of “criollo consciousness” in Latin America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, the subject was very vague, but at the time I was very much influenced by the work of philosophers like Leopoldo Zea and Arturo Roig, by Latin Americanists like Beatriz González Stephan, Hugo Achúgar, and Mabel Moraña, as well as by Ángel Rama’s The Lettered City.2 Since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities was very fashionable in those days among Latin Americanists, I thought it would be a good idea to link the idea of nineteenth-century nationalism to my interest in the question of criollo consciousness. But bit by bit, my initial framework began to falter as the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano reached my hands. These texts showed me that it made little sense to research the formation of criollo nationalism without keeping in mind the question of coloniality. Up to that point, I thought the colonial period had “ended” in Latin America with the advent of national states in the nineteenth century, but reading those postcolonial theorists forced me to revise this assumption. It was then that I began to read Anderson’s book in a different light. Almost all historians agree that “criollo consciousness” in Latin America began to mature during the second half of the eighteenth century, meaning that the nation began to be imagined (or symbolically invented) by criollos

 See my book Critique of Latin American Reason (2021).

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long before the establishment of national states. However, and still broadly agreeing with this thesis, I hope to have shown that the formation of “criollo consciousness” (which in this book I have preferred to refer to as criollo habitus) does not sink its roots solely in intellectual processes (travels to Europe, the circulation of books and ideas, the emergence of journalism, the critique of scholastic philosophy, etc.) as Anderson argues, but in the accumulation of a specific type of capital that dates back to the sixteenth century: the symbolic capital of whiteness. It was their sense of racial superiority over the “castes” that created the impetus for Latin American criollos to imagine the nation and their tutelary position therein. Of course, intellectual contact with the artifacts of eighteenth-century Enlightenment European culture (Aufklärung) is an important factor in understanding the formation of criollo habitus, but it only tells us part of the story. But the other part, that having to do with the internal link between nation and coloniality, falls outside of accounts like that of Anderson. So the main thesis of this book is that “blood purity” marks the location from which criollos translate and enunciate the Enlightenment in New Granada. I thereby argue that the enlightenment can be understood among us as a set of unique practices (and not only as a “belated reception” or an “inferior copy” of the European enlightenment), because its locus enuntiationis and its locus traductionis were marked by a local history of knowledge/power. The central goal of this book has been to try to understand the specificity of this phenomenon.3 On the other hand, Anderson is right to indicate that the expansion of spatiotemporal experience is an important factor in explaining the birth of criollo habitus, but he does not offer us many theoretical tools for understanding the problem. He limits himself to underscoring the role played by the circulation of ideas in the enlightened press, a position slightly reminiscent of Jürgen Habermas’ concept of Öffentlichkeit. This project, in contrast, has sought to show that the broadening of the spatiotemporal experience of criollos goes hand-in-hand with Europe’s colonial expansion and the struggle for geopolitical control of the world. It is the establishment of what Wallerstein calls the “modern world-system,” with its fundamental asymmetry between cores and peripheries, that sets the stage for the enlightenment in the eighteenth century. This point, which is often ignored by social philosophers and scientists, opens up the perspective of postcolonial analysis in which it is no longer possible to separate the emergence of criollo nationalism from the decline of an old world order in which Spain was losing its hegemonic position within the  I set out from the assumption that processes similar to those emerging in New Granada took place in all of the other viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth century, such that a case study focused on one of them might shed light on considering other particular cases. However, it would be worth engaging in a comparative study to validate or refute this hypothesis.

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world system. Now it would be France and England that would assume global hegemony, and toward whom “criollo consciousness” would be oriented from the end of the eighteenth century on. This book studies a “mixed” period (1750–1816) in which criollos identified with the enlightened biopolitics of the Spanish Empire during the Bourbon reforms (the colonial order), while at the same time looking for their place within the newly approaching hegemonon (the republican order). This is why the community they imagine is an order that contains both sides of the coin: the modern-colonial nation. And this is undoubtedly what gives the criollo nationalist imaginary the unique character that Anderson indicates. Something that always caught my attention in Anderson’s book is that he grants little to no attention to science in the formation of the criollo nationalist imaginary. But if we begin from the assumption that the modern/colonial world system provides the stage for the emergence of the enlightenment, it then becomes necessary to investigate the relationship between science, nation, and geopolitics. This is why I have emphasized concepts like biopolitics and the geopolitics of knowledge, attempting to show how imperial discourses of science were incorporated into criollo habitus since before national states were a political reality in Latin America. It is important to emphasize that when I speak of “science” I have not been referring to scientific ideas in themselves, but to science as a discourse, to the narrative legitimation that science offered for the implementation of certain population control practices in the eighteenth century. From this perspective, one of the conclusions arrived at in this book is that the locus of enunciation and translation for criollos, the scientific imaginary of the zero-point, and the colonial imaginary of whiteness coincided. In other words, the epistemological border separating enlightened science from lay doxa—and which allowed the imperial state to design its policies for governing the population—corresponded to the ethnic border separating criollos from the castes. This vision of science as discourse also explains the kind of sources utilized for this investigation.4 These were basically short articles written by the prevalent Enlightenment writers in New Granada, published in periodicals like Correo Curioso, Papel Periódico, and the Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada. We should bear in mind that at that moment the borders between  Although this is not a work of “History,” I have benefited greatly from the work of several historians. Many books have been written about the second half of the eighteenth century, some written by the “fathers” of modern historiography in the country (Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, Germán Colmenares, Gonzalo Hernández de Alba) and by prestigious foreign historians (John Leddy Phelan, Hans-Joachim König, Frank Safford, Anthony McFarlane), but for the purposes of this project, interdisciplinary works have been more important, above all those moving between history, the sociology of science, and the sociology of culture. In this sense, I should emphasize especially the work of Renán Silva and researchers like Diana Obregón, Mauricio Nieto, Luis Carlos Arboleda and Olga Restrepo.

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scientist and the lettered intellectual were still not clear, and that the majority of enlightened thinkers saw themselves as “philosophers,” that is, as learned people fluent in a very general set of knowledge geared toward the “public good.” The articles they wrote were seen to be of general interest and were published alongside everyday news, poems, sales announcements, and editorial commentaries. The borders between scientist and politician were also unclear, so several of the texts used are reports addressed to viceroys, governors, and mayors. It is precisely this lack of definition between the borders of science, literature, and politics that has compelled me to approach the subject from a transdisciplinary perspective. The question of the place from which the European Enlightenment was translated and enunciated in New Granada led me not only to analyze discursive practices but also to make incursions into terrains neighboring philosophy and the sociology of culture. The stress that postcolonial theories place on the locus enuntiationis of knowledge contradicts the pretension of modern western science that it lacks a locus of enunciation and translation, which explains my interest in the epistemological problem of the “zero-point.” On the other hand, the thesis that blood purity operated as an a priori for the cultural translation of the Enlightenment in New Granada—that is, as the condition of possibility for its articulation by New Granadian criollo elites—explains my interest in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology and specifically his concepts of habitus and cultural capital. All research requires the delimitation of the object of study, which necessarily displaces or even eliminates from consideration other subjects that could be relevant for the same research. In my case, there is an important question that could not be fully addressed, even though it touches the very heart of postcolonial theory. I refer to the persistence (and resistance) of subaltern knowledge. This project centered on criollos, on governmental state apparatuses, and on the hegemonic knowledge produced by these instances of power, but we need to bear in mind what Walter Mignolo has called “Border Thinking,” that is, the way that this hegemonic knowledge was resignified by subalterns to serve their own purposes. Some of this was mentioned in the second chapter with respect to mestizos, but a separate investigation would be necessary to show, for example, how vaccinations were culturally translated by healers at the time, or what active role Indians and Black people (and their specific forms of generating knowledge) played in scientific explorations like the botanical expedition, the geodesic expedition, or the Salvani expedition. Finally, this is where I thank all of the people and institutions that contributed to the completion of this project. In the first place, Professor Birgit Scharlau of the Institut für Romanische Sprachen und Literaturen at the University of Frankfurt, for wisely directing my doctoral thesis. Equally to the Faculty of Social Sciences and the PENSAR Institute of Social and

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Cultural Studies at the Universidad Javeriana, under the leadership of its director Guillermo Hoyos Vásquez, for the unconditional support received. This project benefited greatly from visits to consult the libraries of Duke University, the University of Pittsburgh, El Colegio de México, and the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Quito. I am grateful to Walter Mignolo, John Beverley, Mabel Moraña, and Catherine Walsh for facilitating my trips from Colombia to visit these libraries. I also want to express thanks to the DAAD and Colciencias for the research grant in Germany that allowed me to successfully complete this research.

Appendix The Eighteenth Century: The Birth of Biopolitics1

In Zero-Point Hubris, I sought to map the emergence of two technologies of power that coexisted in the territory of New Granada between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The first technological ensemble corresponds to what Aníbal Quijano and other authors have called the “coloniality of power,” and refers to the way in which colonial populations are governed according to a hierarchical distribution based on degrees of “blood purity.” This is, in other words, a sovereign government technology whose effectiveness requires the implementation of what we might call an apparatus of whiteness. The second ensemble, by contrast, corresponds to what Foucault called the “great technological mutation” of power relations that took place during the eighteenth century, which refers to the emergence of economic government over the life of populations. It is to this second technological ensemble, whose effectiveness required the implementation of security apparatuses, that I will refer in what follows. If there was a “mutation” in the eighteenth century, and if this produced the irruption of something truly new, it was the appearance of life on the political stage. For the first time, human life ceased to be seen as a gift from God, becoming an effect of political action. Life as something that can be produced, administered, and managed by the state; in sum, life as the result of human intervention and planning toward an “environment.” I don’t want to focus on the very interesting contemporary debates about the concept of biopolitics, nor do I want to repeat the arguments already made in Zero-Point Hubris. However, I want to return once again to the eighteenth  Some of these ideas were presented in Bogotá on May 6, 2009, at the International Workshop, “The Eighteenth Century: Ruptures and Continuities,” organized by the Ministry of Culture, the Church of Santa Clara Museum, and the Museum of Colonial Art.

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century to identify there the birth of the second technological ensemble mentioned in the book, taking advantage on this occasion of the publication of new literature on this subject and about this period. I refer above all to the publication of Michel Foucault’s 1977–1978 and 1978–1979 lectures at the Collège de France Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics; and also to the work of the philosopher Francisco Vásquez García, who has reflected on the history of biopolitics in Spain, closely following the research carried out in England by the History of the Present network under the leadership of the sociologist Nikolas Rose. Needless to say, my approach to the eighteenth century is not that of a historian weighing the evidence of the sources, but that of a philosopher looking for clues to understand the kind of power relations that historically emerged in Colombia and which still constitute our present. I will organize my presentation as follows: first I will focus on the way that the Spanish Empire deployed a biopolitical government toward the colonial population, in its eagerness to recover the commercial advantages it had lost with the rise of new global powers like England, France, and Holland. I will then show the importance of political economy in the eighteenth century, both for the enlightened Bourbon government and for New Granadian criollos. 1. BIOPOLITICS AND BOURBON REFORMS The key to understanding the emergence of biopolitics in the Spanish Empire is without a doubt the dynastic change that occurred at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The French Bourbon dynasty rises to the Spanish throne with the reign of Felipe V (1700–1746), after a war of succession that replaces the Habsburg dynasty, which ended with the death of Carlos II. What is important here is understanding that this was not merely about a change of government, but a change of governmentality. Unlike the Habsburgs, the Bourbons did not favor an imperial-territorial style of government, but an economic one. This means that what was important for them was not the acquisition of new lands and new subjects, but the efficient economic management of territories and populations that were already theirs. The Bourbons watched with horror as Spain was displaced from its old global influence by other European states and realized that the cause of this decadence was an internal one. It was not only the old bureaucratic and administrative structures of the Habsburgs that needed to be reformed, but also the habits of the population and the government of the colonies. The only way to achieve this was to centralize all power in the hands of the state at the expense of local powers. So the Bourbons’ main interest was to transform the state into a

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machine that did not seek to establish alliances with established territorial powers (the Church, the nobility, the courts, and municipal councils, etc.), but to strip these powers of their traditional codifications1 in the name of a sole and absolute “reason of state.” I should say, apropos of this, that in chapter two of Zero-Point Hubris I refer to the apparatus of whiteness linked to a particular system of alliances among criollo elites, who sought thereby to perpetuate their control over New Granadian social space and to avoid the centralization of power. This was therefore an apparatus geared toward the “expulsion of the state” through the constitution of familial and patrimonial powers. By contrast, the biopolitical apparatus that emerges in the eighteenth century is geared precisely toward dismantling this system of alliances in favor of the construction of the central state. We thus find two technologies of power confronting one another in the second half of the eighteenth century: one advocating the expulsion of the state in the name of particular interests (ethnic-racial codification) and another advocating the expulsion of those interests in the name of the sole power of the state (state overcoding). This was a battle of technologies that, while taking on different forms, would never again be absent in the history of this country. I want to briefly and schematically review the way in which the Bourbons sought to implement their absolutist biopolitics, taking three areas of intervention as examples—demographics, poverty, and disease—and mentioning how these policies were implemented in Spain and replicated in the New Kingdom of Granada. I should clarify that the reflections that follow do not seek to suggest a total rupture or a radical discontinuity between the policies of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, but merely to make conceptually visible the differences in emphasis between the two dynasties with regard to these three areas of intervention.2 I should say first that the eighteenth-century Spanish state began to see governing the population as a key element for increasing the power of the sovereign. I refer to the discovery that the life of the population is immanent to the state, which can intervene and regulate in its biological processes on the basis of scientific-technical knowledge. How many people there are in a territory, what types of illnesses afflict them, their death and birth rates, and  In Zero-Point Hubris I referred to this deterritorialization of codes through Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “expropriation of capital.” 2  In reality, the Bourbon government was cross-cut by multiple “truth games” that sometimes collided and at other times connected precariously: (1) the tension between the transcendent principle of the “Christian Republic” (theopolitics) and the immanent principle of “Reason of state” (biopolitics); (2) the tension between the government of souls (pastoral power) and the government of men (governmental power); (3) the tension between the territorial world economy (statism) and the non-territorial world economy (capitalism); and (4) the tension between disciplinary technologies (mercantilism) and security technologies (physiocracy and liberalism). 1

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so on, are no longer simply “natural data” but variables that can be altered by the state in its own interest. They are resources that the sovereign must administer and manage with the help of scientific knowledge. Even so, already in the seventeenth century under the Habsburg government, there were voices identifying depopulation as one of the central problems of the Spanish Empire. It was believed that the main causes of this depopulation were the corruption of moral customs, and above all prostitution, which drove young men away from their conjugal bed; the high number of priests and monks, which reduced procreation; in addition to high rates of emigration to the Indies. A 1623 Pragmatic Sanction by Felipe IV sought to counteract these problems and raise the number of vassals by creating new marriage incentives, prohibiting prostitution, lifting taxes from those with six or more male children, and raising the age of joining the priesthood (Vásquez García 2009: 27–30). However, Bourbon biopolitics functioned completely differently. Enlightened thinkers in the mid-eighteenth century like Ward, Jovellanos, Olavide, and Camponanes argued that the “population” did not refer so much to the number of subjects as to their quality. What they sought was not necessarily more people, but more qualified people capable of taking charge of the agricultural and industrial labor that the state required. Thus, it was not simply a question of increasing the number of births but of making existing vassals “useful.” In other words, we could say that the objective of the Bourbon biopolitical project was not the numerical increase of the population but the production of new subjectivities. With this objective, the Spanish Empire carried out some “demographic experiments,” perhaps the most important of which was the colonization of the Sierra Morena. This was a project conceived by Olavide and Campomanes during the government of Carlos III, which sought to populate the Spanish region with subjects capable of embracing productive work habits and of employing the most advanced agricultural techniques of the time. This society of settlers needed to be very closely observed by inspectors charged with meticulously controlling the daily production of each family, and thereby ensuring the fulfillment of the goals drawn up by the state (Vásquez García 2009: 44–45). These were subjects formed through the deterritorialization of their prior habits and their reterritorialization in controlled environments. And while we have no indication that similar experiments were carried out in New Granada, we do know that the depopulation of the kingdom was one of the most important subjects for the viceroys, men of letters, and members of the enlightened community. In 1791, the editor of the Papel Periódico de la Ciudad de Santafé de Bogotá, Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez, announced a prize of fifty pesos for the essay proposing a better solution to the depopulation of New Granada. The criollo thinker Diego Martín Tanco, administrator of the Bogotá Post and winner of the contest, begins his Discourse by

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asserting that “a kingdom should not be called well populated even if it overflows with inhabitants, if these are not laborious and usefully employed in those tasks that produce for man food, clothing, adornment and other things proper to the convenience of life ” (Tanco 1978 [1792]: 132). The quality of the population, not the quantity. Tanco refers to works by Ward and Campomanes to show that population quality is a matter of control and planning that should be addressed through a new science: political economy. I will take up this subject later. For the time being, we can say that Tanco’s Discourse addresses another problem perceived at the time as a principal cause of depopulation: poverty. If the goal is to safeguard the quality of the population, then it is necessary to replace idleness and “laziness” with productive labor, since “a country of idlers will always be a country of the poor” (Tanco 1978 [1782]: 185). Here, Tanco echoes the imperial biopolitics of the Bourbons, committed to poverty control and the correctional confinement of the poor. And while this was not a new problem in eighteenth-century Spain, its solution was. Since the sixteenth century, Erasmist writers like José Luis Vives had challenged the Christian idea that poverty was in and of itself proof of saintliness (the poor as symbol of Christ) and distinguished clearly between the pauper verecundus (“shameful poor”) and the pauper superbus (“phony poor”).3 Vives saw the latter as a mortal danger for the state, for which he proposed the creation of a beggars police charged with separating the shameful from the phony and forcing the latter to work or be locked up (Vásquez García 2009: 56–57). These reflections on the government of poverty were still framed within Habsburg theopolitics—reinforced by the Council of Trent—that associated poverty with immorality. If they wanted to lock up the “phony poor” or set them straight, this was to avoid the spread of sin and to promote the reChristianization of the wayward. What the eighteenth-century Bourbons propose is very different. Enlightened reformers linked to the Crown no longer see the problem of poverty as theological but as economic. The poor and beggars were not seen as an obstacle to salvation—a problem to be attended to by the Church—but as an obstacle to “public happiness” whose resolution lay in the hands of the state. But this was not simply a question of just any work, or for people to do the same work they knew how to do before, but of occupying them with those tasks most likely to increase the wealth of the state, using new techniques and ways of doing things—taking them off the street to put them in workshops and hospices where they would become “new subjects.” Again, we find two simultaneous movements, both coordinated by the state: deterritorialization

 See Vives’ 1526 treatise De Subventione Pauperum.

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from “old” ways of living and working, and reterritorialization in new work environments. So Carlos III’s 1775 poor laws established that the “useful poor” should be interned in hospices where they would learn a trade under state supervision, while the “useless poor” (e.g., the sick) would be interned in mercy houses that were now also administered by the state and no longer by the Church. The de-sacralization of poverty and the stratification of its administration. In eighteenth-century New Granada, disciplinary confinement was implemented as a means to combat laziness and poverty. With the founding of the Royal Hospice of Santafé, the measures sought by the Crown for definitively banishing idleness were finally implemented. In 1791, Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez said that all people interned in the hospice, women and children included, needed to learn to work in those trades useful for commerce: spinning, linen, the ginning of cotton, the production of wax candles, and so on (Rodríguez 1978 [1791]: 142). The goal was to classify and resocialize beggars, transforming them into a cheap labor force, to strengthen productive sectors of the economy, and to increase ranks of the population that were “useful” to the state. Such were the functions of the Royal Hospice that in the opinion of José Ignacio de Pombo it should be converted into a schoolworkshop equipped with modern instruments and machinery so that it would produce master craftspeople capable of establishing new hospices in other regions of New Granada (Pombo 1965 [1810]: 188). Disease also became a key area for the biopolitical intervention of the Bourbons, one closely tied to the two areas considered above, namely demography and poverty. If a state’s wealth did not consist only in the number of its inhabitants but in the usefulness of its labor force, then it was clear that this working population needed to be protected from the danger posed by diseases. If the population did not manage to stay healthy, it could hardly be trained to work. Spanish authorities therefore favored the implementation of a series of measures aimed at avoiding epidemic contagion, the propagation of diseases, and the increase in infant mortality. Of course, the Spanish Empire already combatted diseases prior to the eighteenth century, but the sick were primarily under the care of the Church. Hospitals managed by the Church were places that people went to die, where what was sought was not to cure the body but to cure the soul: spiritual relief at the hands of the priest rather than bodily well-being at the hands of the doctor. This is why under the Habsburg government hospitals were seen as “aid” institutions, framed within the evangelizing function of the Church. But things began to change with the arrival of the Bourbons in the eighteenth century. In the first place, medicine is no longer seen as aid, but as a population technology administered solely and exclusively by the state. In this context, eighteenth-century medicine acquires a new function: to contribute to the

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organization of society as a means for the physical and economic well-being of the population. The specific question of disease is thereby inscribed within a broader one: the physical health of the working population. And insofar as the health and physical well-being of the population become a key objective of state power, the status of hospitals as institutions also changes: the hospital is no longer a place where one goes to die, but where one goes to live. In the eyes of Spanish reformers, hospitals needed to become curing machines. Beginning with the reign of Carlos III, medicine becomes a means to improve the quality of the population of the Spanish Empire. The doctor comes to be seen as a “state functionary” whose mission is not only to fight the illness afflicting particular individuals, but also to contribute to improving “public health.” Illness is not something that only afflicts the individual body but the “social body” as well, the population as a whole. The Bourbons therefore implemented a series of measures to protect the life of that population. I will mention two examples of these measures, emphasizing their close links to eighteenth-century medicine: the fight against smallpox and urban hygiene; both are paradigmatic for illustrating the emergence of new technologies of power over life. Inoculation, a procedure utilized beginning in 1720 to combat smallpox, consisted of inserting the purulent material directly into a healthy individual, making their body resistant to possible future epidemics. In other words, instead of waiting for the epidemic to arrive to then treat the infected, what we see here is a preventative intervention in which smallpox is fought before it appears. In the hands of the state, inoculation and later the smallpox vaccine fall into what Foucault called “security apparatuses,” a technology of government that seeks to manage risks to life. Security apparatuses exercise control over apparently uncontrollable events like famines and epidemics through the calculation and reduction of risk, thereby protecting the finances of the state and preventing the death of the useful population. Thus, when the Bourbon monarch Carlos IV launched the “Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition” in 1803, also known as the Salvani Expedition, whose goal was to bring the Jenner vaccine to the American colonies, the objective was to reduce the high mortality rates of smallpox contagion, above all among infants, since this meant protecting the future labor force necessary for the preservation of the state. Such a biopolitical marriage between the calculation of risks and preventative medicine was also clear enough to New Granadian doctors like José Celestino Mutis and Eugenio Espejo, who decidedly supported inoculation even when this practice was the object of bitter polemics in Spain between the Protomedicatos and the Church. And what was at stake was no small thing: in the eighteenth century, we witnessed the battle between a biopolitical rationality that saw life as a manipulable and manageable object in the hands of the state, and a theopolitical rationality that defended the

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inviolability of a natural order created by God and protected by the Christian sovereign. On the one hand, the deterritorialization of life, wrenched from its cosmological codifications; on the other, its sacred territoriality grounded in natural law [ius naturalista]. The second example, related to urban hygiene, points in exactly the same direction as the previous one. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, a hundred years before Pasteur’s discoveries, the miasmic doctrine was predominant among doctors, according to which many contagious diseases were transmitted through the air. Protecting the life of the population demanded the implementation of security apparatuses capable of preventing contagious diseases, especially in those places where people congregate, and where the circulation of air is difficult: cities. Urban hygiene is thereby framed as a technology for controlling the circulation of water, air, people, and excrement. How to guarantee the ventilation of houses and streets in such a way as to avoid future epidemics? How to rationally construct cities, guaranteeing public salubrity in the process?4 What is the best place to build hospitals, cemeteries, and slaughterhouses so that the “fetid air” circulates freely? These were the questions that enlightened eighteenth-century reformers sought to resolve and which would lead to the development of concrete biopolitics: urbanism. The historian Adriana María Alzate (2007) has written a beautiful book where she shows how late-century viceregal authorities made hygiene in Bogotá into a matter of public policy; the cleaning and paving of the streets, the management of garbage, the construction of sidewalks, cemetery removal, the disinfection of hospitals, control of stray animals, and the channeling of water. All of these measures, as we have said, had a preventative character: they were technologies that sought to manage and administer the risk of contagion through the calculation of probabilities. Government over the life of the population, biopolitics, is in this case linked to the implementation of security apparatuses. 2. POLITICAL ECONOMY AS A TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNMENT It is not possible to talk about the eighteenth century without mentioning the importance that scientific knowledge acquired during this period, not only as an instrument for generating a vision of a world almost completely  Recall here that Foucault establishes a distinction between health and salubrity. Health refers to the state of the individual body, while salubrity is a biopolitical matter to be managed through a specific technique: hygiene (Foucault, 2001: 150).

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emancipated from theology but also as an instrument for the immanent government of that world. Natural scientists tend to speak of the incredible advances made by physics and astronomy, while historians and sociologists prefer to mention sciences like botany, medicine, and geography. This was the path that I myself followed in Zero-Point Hubris. However, I want to concentrate now on a science with tremendous importance for the formulation of government policy in that period: political economy. We will not understand what the entrance of life onto the political stage during the eighteenth century involved without taking into account the way that discourses of political economy contributed to generating the “governmental reason” that took the management of that life precisely as its objective.5 In what follows, I will briefly reconstruct the development of political economy during the eighteenth century, with a focus on mercantilism and physiocracy and leaving aside liberalism, a school of economic thought that would not have its greatest impact in Spain and the Americas until the nineteenth century. Mercantilism, understood as a set of doctrines and techniques for governing and managing the economy, was predominant in Europe from the early seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth. The mercantilists believed that in order to increase a nation’s wealth, the state should assume absolute control of all economic activities, and trade in particular. It granted international trade a central role in enriching nations and considered a favorable trade balance—that is, exporting the greatest quantity of commodities in exchange for the greatest quantity of precious metals—to be the thermometer measuring the prosperity of a kingdom. To accomplish this objective, it was necessary to incentivize the export of manufactured goods and restrict the importation of consumer goods, implementing severe control measures.6 The state needed to control (internal and external) trade through law, monopolies, price controls, quality standards, interest rates, and the prohibition of the cultivation and exportation of consumer goods. In sum, mercantilism proposes a totally regulated economy through what Foucault would call “disciplinary mechanisms.”7 The omnipresence of the state was needed to control trade and to strengthen the exercise of a sovereignty monopolized by the figure of the monarch.

 Here it is worth remembering that Foucault himself recognized that the concept of biopolitics remained unclear without considering that the “general framework” within which it is inscribed is what he called “governmental reason.” It was precisely political economy, expert knowledge, that contributed the most to delineating the limits of this “governmental reason” (Foucault, 2009: 383). 6  This policy would later be known in economics as the “import substitution” model. 7  We must make a conceptual distinction between the “disciplinary mechanisms” mentioned by Foucault in relation to the political-economic exercise of “reason of state” and the “disciplines” he reflects on in the second part of Discipline and Punish. 5

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In Bourbon Spain, and despite some trade reforms made beginning with the government of Carlos III, mercantilism was the prevalent doctrine throughout the eighteenth century. The main economists of the period were influenced by mercantilism. Thus, for example, Jerónimo de Uztáriz from Navarra,8 a fervent admirer of Colbert, believed that it was necessary to increase exports of manufactured goods to stimulate internal production and reduce as much as possible the importation of consumer goods. And since the goal was to increase manufacturing exports, it was also necessary to numerically increase the working population. Spanish mercantilists in the early eighteenth century established a directly proportional equation between the population and wealth: the greater the population, the greater the wealth for the state. The population is not seen as a set of natural processes but as itself a form of “wealth” at the complete disposal of the sovereign, and the sovereign treats the population as a father would his family. In fact, the familial metaphor was a favorite of the mercantilists: the king is the father and manufactures are the central source of familial wealth. To govern his home well, the king needs to ensure that the family produces what they themselves consume instead of importing them. And at the end of the day, the Spanish Bourbons of the eighteenth century always saw the economy as the government of the home. On the other hand, the existence of the colonies was a fundamental part of Spanish mercantilism, since it allowed the acquisition of cheap resources through monopoly. Colonial economies were required to work directly for Spain and the government forced them to consume products imported from the metropole. In his 1762 Reflections on Spanish Trade with the Indies, the Asturian Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes had established that Spanish possessions in the Americas needed to submit to the “colonial pact,” so widespread in mercantilist thought, which put them in a situation of economic dependency vis-à-vis Spain. According to Campomanes, this entails the need to prevent the colonies from becoming producers of consumer goods and also prohibiting them from trading directly with foreign countries so that all trade must be realized exclusively by the metropole and its ships. On top of this, and to increase imperial income, the government charged a tax on all sales—the much-hated alcabalas—which was not reinvested into the local economies but sent directly to Spain. In sum, and to simplify it to a phrase, mercantilism made colonialism a key factor for the accumulation of capital in the imperial European core. However, toward the middle of the eighteenth century there appeared in France a new type of economic thought: physiocracy. Thinkers like Quesnay

 See his text The Theory and Practice Of Commerce and Maritime Affairs (1724).

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argued that mercantilism was not key to increasing the wealth of nations. The problem with mercantilism was its excessive focus on trade, neglecting what the physiocrats saw as the fundamental sector of any economy: agriculture. The true agents of economic growth were not traders but farmers (fermiers), that is, the feudal nobility, the landowners, since agriculture was seen as the sole source of all wealth. Commerce and industry only transform the wealth generated with agriculture but do not produce new wealth. As a result, the good government would consist in favoring the prosperity of farmers, since a country will be richer as its agricultural production increases. To achieve this, the sovereign should eliminate all price control measures, allowing the agrarian cycles themselves to determine the quantity and quality of both production and consumption. In fact, one of the basic differences between the physiocrats and the mercantilists is that while for the latter the economy depends directly on state intervention, for the former the economy is anchored to a “natural order” that the state cannot and should not disturb. Any state intervention into the natural laws would be an alteration of the social order, creating dangerous disorder, so in terms of government, the state should simply let things happen without doing anything: “laissez faire, laissez passer.” Foucault is right to say that eighteenth-century physiocracy inaugurates a new technology of government that serves to limit state action from within. From this moment, government practice no longer consists of extending the tentacles of the “reason of state [razón de estado]” in all directions, but of deciding what should be governed and what should be left ungoverned. The limits of government action are thus sketched out between what should and should not be done: “between the agenda and the non-agenda” (Foucault, 2010: 12). In Bourbon Spain, physiocratic doctrines enjoyed a feeble reception and remained in any case within the limits of reason of state. We could say that physiocracy polished some elements of mercantilism, which continued to be the “official” economic doctrine of the Spanish Empire. Perhaps the most relevant part of this reception has been, as previously mentioned, the idea that the population is not just a matter of numbers but of quality, the thesis that the population is not a basic datum, a “raw” material over which the power of the sovereign is exercised, and nor is it a simple sum of the individuals inhabiting a territory. The population is a variable that depends on natural factors: climate, the richness of the land, the geographic environment, race, and so on. And these factors cannot be changed simply by decree, through the absolute will of the sovereign. There are things relevant to the population that escape the imperial control of the state and demand a different type of government action. This is just one of the reasons that explain the enthusiastic reception of physiocracy among New Granadian criollos. Personalities like Caldas, Lozano, Tanco, and Salazar emphasized the particularly rich American soil

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and the differential quality of its inhabitants. From their perspective, the wealth of the state would not be increased by burdening criollo interests with taxes—as the imperial government had done up to that point under the influence of mercantilism—but by strengthening their agrarian and commercial activities, because due the superior qualities of their race, they were the most productive sector of the population (above Black people, Indians, and mestizos). Moreover, they were slaveholders and the owners of large estates [latifundios], such that the physiocratic theses fit their economic interests like a glove. Some of them, like Pedro Fermín Vargas, José Ignacio de Pombo, and Antonio de Narváez, went beyond physiocracy to dabble in a nascent liberalism, demanding the elimination of state monopolies [estancos] and absolutely free trade. For all of them, a country’s wealth did not depend on the expanse or fertility of the territory or the diversity of its agricultural products, but on the productive labor of its inhabitants (Silva 2005: 189). To summarize, we can say that the absolutist biopolitics of the Bourbons sought to deterritorialize the traditional codes governing the social fabric of the Americas and while they succeeded in some cases, they were incapable of reterritorializing them. The argument presented in Zero-Point Hubris is precisely that the apparatus of whiteness managed to connect to the biopolitical apparatus but always under the hegemony of the former. What prevailed in New Granada, even after the wars of independence, was the struggle between a multiplicity of regional and hereditary interests seeking control of the state. But for a long time, the basic rationality of the apparatus of whiteness also prevailed: the social ordering of the population according to a hierarchy based on blood purity. The more efforts there were to subject social flows to the singular control of the state, the more difficult this task was revealed to be. The whole nineteenth century would be a testament to the struggle between the statification of hereditary powers and the hereditization of state power. Biopolitics was thus revealed to be a mirage, a dream of reason capable of producing monsters.

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Index

Adam(s), 40, 41, 159, 178, 179, 184, 185, 200, 201 agriculture, 22, 51, 80, 107, 109, 179– 81, 198, 213, 215–20, 222–23, 225, 229, 229n28, 231–32, 242, 262 Amazon, 160–63, 181–81, 199, 208–13, 220, 252 Americas, 1, 2, 4, 10, 21, 24, 34–35, 37, 39, 41–47, 52, 54–57, 60–61, 67, 79–83, 86, 89, 95, 110–11, 114, 119, 130, 159–62, 165, 170–71, 180–81, 195, 198–201, 203, 214, 226, 235–68 anatomy, 126n10, 137, 146, 148, 151n44 anthropology, 6, 24–25, 31–32, 214 apparatus, x–xiii, xvi–xvii, 6–8, 13, 19n9, 30–31, 42–43, 47–48, 51–52, 54, 60–61, 63–64, 69n29, 72, 75, 77, 80, 82, 87, 91, 93, 96–97, 103–4, 109, 115, 117, 118, 122, 126–27, 131, 134–35, 149, 157, 181, 198, 253, 268, 272, 275, 277, 281–82, 286 architecture, 136–37, 236, 258 Aristotle, 14, 16, 105 Audiencia, 56, 82, 83, 90, 113, 114, 202–3, 205

barbarism, 6, 22–23, 33, 153, 160, 162, 170, 173, 177, 230, 231, 262 biopolitics, ix, xii, xvii, 5, 8, 38, 75, 78, 80, 82, 88, 93–94, 103, 106, 108–9, 115, 117–18, 136, 139, 145, 148–51, 154–55, 187, 271, 275–79, 282–83, 286 blood purity, xii, xvi–xvii, 5–7, 38–40, 44, 51, 51n1, 52, 54–56, 61, 65–66, 70–71, 77, 85, 89–90, 93–94, 97–99, 101, 111–12, 117, 146, 148, 154, 158–60, 171, 186, 236, 248, 253, 268–70, 272, 275, 286 Blumenbach, Friedrich, 24, 26, 260–61 border(s): distancing, xvi; epistemological, 13, 195, 271–72; ethnic, 53, 98, 110, 118, 158, 271; legal/juridical, 150, 154; subjects, xvii; thinking, 272 botany, xii, 151, 154, 169, 175–78, 180– 81, 184, 187, 189, 192, 195, 229, 283 Bourbon reforms, xii, xvii, 6, 80, 82, 93, 94, 108–9, 117, 119, 121, 135, 271, 276 Bourdieu, Pierre, xi, 5, 45n29, 54, 57n9, 64, 64n21, 65, 83n45, 94, 97–98, 99n68, 106n80, 272, 277n2

307

308

Index

Buffon, George-Louis, 5, 43, 185, 237, 238, 239, 240, 240n34, 241, 241n35, 242, 243–45, 243n39, 248–49, 252– 57, 255n48, 259

cosmography, 105, 199, 203 Cosmopolis, 11–13, 19, 28, 48, 51, 218 critical theory, vii–viii, xiii, 28, 46, 163n5

Caballero y Góngora, Antonio, 2, 88, 125, 125n9, 126, 126n10, 127n12, 151n44, 184n24, 191, 192n31, 195, 198, 213 Caldas, Francisco José, 76, 100, 143– 45, 168–69, 169n9, 184n24, 185, 190n29, 195–96, 207, 207n14, 208, 208n15, 213, 215, 218–21, 219n22, 220n23, 221n24, 223–25, 223n27, 229–33, 233n29, 236–37, 243, 256– 57, 256n50, 262–63, 262n57, 285 Campillo y Cossío, José, 79–81, 80n41, 84–85 capital: accumulation of, 36–37, 284; cultural, 5, 54, 72, 74–75, 82, 93, 97–98, 149, 272; economic, 66, 75, 121; symbolic, 48, 66, 82–86, 89, 90, 95, 151, 253, 270; university, 103 capitalism, ix–x, ixn4, xvii, 11, 19, 35, 277n3 cartography, xvi, 44–46, 80, 199 cinchona (bark), 150, 168, 181, 184n23, 186–94, 186n26, 192n33, 194n34, 203–4, 211 classification, 24, 26n15, 39, 47, 59–61, 63–64, 103n75, 166, 177, 180, 183, 195, 219, 229 Clavijero, Francisco Xavier, 249–54, 251n44 climate, 24, 27, 124, 143–44, 172, 180– 81, 192n33, 202, 208, 219–20, 223, 225, 228, 230–37, 236n31, 237n32, 242–46, 249–50, 252, 255–60, 259n52, 262–63, 285 coloniality, viii, viiin2, x, xii–xiii, xvi– xvii, 6–7, 11, 28, 30, 32, 34, 46–49, 51–52, 56, 71, 77, 88, 93–94, 110, 115, 148, 268–70, 275 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, 4, 11, 20, 27, 28, 37

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, 197, 198, 204n10, 214 Descartes, René, xi, 11–13, 13n2, 15, 18n9, 22, 33, 142n35, 230 Diderot, Denis, 199, 241 discourse: of blood purity, xii, 7, 38–40, 51–51, 56, 61, 66, 90, 93, 97–98, 111, 117, 157, 159–60, 186, 236; colonial, xvii, 4, 9, 19, 28, 37–38, 42, 49, 51, 117; enlightenment/ enlightened, 4, 10, 43, 157, 158; of epistemic purity, xvii, 158; of the human sciences, 28 disease, 99, 117, 119, 121, 124–32, 126n11, 128n14, 130n22, 134–40, 140n32, 143, 145–46, 152, 158, 165, 169–75, 172n13, 173n14, 234–35, 242, 245, 277, 280–82 division of labor, 17, 21, 40, 60, 68, 123; ethnic, 42, 92n60 Dominicans, 95, 108–9, 109n82, 249, 253nn45–46 Dussel, Enrique, ix–x, xv, 6, 11, 28, 33– 38, 37nn20–21, 38n22, 43, 45–46, 49, 51, 157n1 Echeverría, Bolívar, 176, 253n45 economic atlas, 215, 218, 229 encomienda, 48, 48n31, 52–53, 55, 63, 68, 87, 102, 202, 204, 255 enlightenment, ix, xi–xii, xv–xvi, 3–11, 13, 19, 23–25n14, 28–29, 31–38, 45, 48, 49, 51, 60, 100, 109, 110, 117–18, 124, 126, 135, 142, 157–58, 162–63, 179, 185, 214–16, 227, 229, 237, 239, 255, 270–72 epistemic/epistemological: border, 13, 195, 271–72; break, 110; expropriation, xi–xii, 8, 115, 157–58, 175; purity, xvii, 158; violence, 48

Index

ethnology, 14, 31, 214n17, 245 Eurocentrism, xi, 33–34 evangelization, 118, 161, 259 expedition: botanical, 76, 164, 167, 182, 184, 184n24, 187, 190n29, 191, 198, 272; Geodesic, 205, 206, 206n12, 208, 239, 272; limits, 181; Salvani, 130n21, 272, 281 Fermín de Vargas, Pedro, 72, 100, 122, 136, 145–46, 166, 217, 222, 226, 286 Finestrad, Joaquín de, 59–60, 126n10, 135–36, 143 Foucault, Michel, viii, x–xiii, xn5, xv, 1, 3, 3n6, 5, 27, 31, 31n18, 38–40, 49, 60, 78, 80, 94, 175–76, 178, 184n23, 275–76, 281–83n6, 283n8, 285 Franciscans, 95, 114, 119, 123, 164, 253nn45–46 geoculture, 37–38, 43, 45 geography, viii, xii, 8, 24–27, 24n13, 31, 45–46, 107, 109, 121, 197–200, 204, 206, 206n12, 211, 213, 215–16, 218, 228–30, 229n28, 233, 238, 242–43, 283 geopolitics of knowledge, 9, 11, 31, 46, 206, 271 Gerbi, Antonello, 237, 240n34, 243n38, 248, 254 Gil, Francisco, 117, 128nn14–15, 129n18, 138, 138n29, 171–72 governmentality, x–xi, 6, 77, 104, 108, 121, 146, 198, 204, 276 Gumilla, José, 159–61, 159n2, 163, 165, 169, 170nn10–11, 182, 209, 241, 247 Habermas, Jürgen, 163n5, 270 habitus, xi–xii, 5–7, 29–30, 42–43, 57, 61, 64–66, 82, 84, 98, 103, 109, 117, 136, 157–58, 170–72, 236, 248, 253–54, 262, 268, 270–72 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 9, 11, 13, 18n9, 19

309

Hegel, G. W. F., 30–31, 39n23, 43, 184, 247n40 hegemony, xvii, 4–6, 8, 32, 37, 39, 42, 46, 57n9, 72, 77, 79, 141, 157–58, 177, 179, 214, 237, 271, 286 Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 20, 27, 37 hospital, xii, 118–20, 122–23, 134, 136–41, 141n33, 143–46, 148, 151, 151n44, 153n48, 221, 258, 281–82 Humboldt, Alexander von, 51, 109n82, 193, 229, 229n28, 256, 259–60, 260nn54–55, 261n56, 262, 262n57, 263, 263n58, 267n1 Hume, David, 4, 11, 13–19, 13n3, 15n5, 16n6, 23, 25, 28, 37, 237, 243 ideological apparatuses, 93, 122 immaturity, 9, 24, 48, 212, 241, 246; immature races, 24, 27, 231 Japheth, 40–42, 159, 161, 199 Jaramillo Uribe, Jaime, 67, 69, 91n58, 100–101, 271n4 Jesuits, 1, 95–96, 102–6, 108, 111, 114, 141, 151, 160–61, 164–66, 248–55, 253nn45–46 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de, 216, 218, 278 Juan, Jorge and Antonio Ulloa, 54, 61–63, 68, 79, 86, 139–41, 140n32, 179n18, 206, 206n12, 207, 227–28 Kant, Immanuel, xvi, 4, 9, 11, 24–28, 24n13, 26n15, 37, 231, 261, 261n56, 265 la Condamine, Carl Marie de, 162, 162n4, 206–13, 207nn13–14, 239, 241, 246, 250 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 11, 46n30, 238–39, 241 Linnaeus, Carl, 26, 154, 166, 168–69, 177–78, 177nn16–17, 180–81, 183, 189, 192, 192n30, 195–96, 211

310

Index

Locke, John, 4, 5, 16n7, 20–21, 20n11, 23, 27, 216n19 locus of enunciation, ix, 8, 10, 18, 38, 46, 51–52 López Ruiz, Sebastián, 150–54, 150nn41–42, 151n45, 152n46, 153nn48–49, 186–92, 194, 196, 211 maps, 12, 44–45, 61, 197, 199–201, 203–5, 213, 237–38 Maroni, Pablo, 161–62, 165–66, 209 Marx, Karl, xvii, 33, 64n21; Marxism, xvi, 3n6, 18, 56 Mendinueta, Pedro, 127, 138, 148–50, 197, 221 Mignolo, Walter, xv, 6, 11, 28, 38–49, 51, 61, 71, 94, 157, 161, 163, 201, 269, 272–73 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, xv, 5, 24, 242, 255 Moreno y Escandón, Francisco Antonio, 9, 106–9, 154, 197 Mutis, José Celestino, 2, 76, 109n82, 124, 127, 129–30, 129nn18–19, 130n20, 142, 148, 150–54, 152n46, 153nn47–49, 154nn50–51, 157, 164, 167, 174–75, 182–84nn23–24, 186–96, 189n28, 190n29, 192nn30– 33, 194n34, 198, 211, 221, 262n57, 267–68, 281 Nariño Antonio, 114, 255 Narváez, Antonio de, 217–18, 225–26, 229, 286 Negri, Antonio. See Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri Newton, Isaac, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 22, 25, 105, 107, 109, 130, 142, 154, 169, 189, 230–31 Noah, 40–41, 159–61, 199 objectivity, xi, 5, 14–15, 45, 118, 171, 204 Occidentalism, 29, 42–43 Orientalism, 6, 29–30, 33, 42–43

pathos of distance, 64–71, 90, 98, 110, 149, 178, 185 Pauw [Paw], Cornelius de, 10, 237, 241–49, 255–56, 259 Paz, Octavio, 70n30, 253n45–46, 254 Peru, ix, 1n2, 2n3, 46, 140, 147, 160– 62, 182, 186–89, 203n8, 205, 207–8, 213, 252, 257, 259–60, 263n58, 268 physiocrats, physiocracy, 176n15, 205– 18, 222, 224, 226–27, 277n3, 283–86 politics/policy: imperial, xii, 3–4, 6, 10, 29–31, 44, 82–83, 106, 145, 148, 168, 179, 215, 237, 271, 276, 279, 284–86; of language, 3–4, 267; of order, 137–39, 145–46; populational, 144, 224–28 Pombo, José Ignacio de, 100, 123–24, 133, 137, 217n21, 218, 223–24, 229, 280, 286 Pombo, Miguel, 130, 166n7, 184n24 postcolonial theory, viii, 3–4, 11, 28, 33, 42, 269–70, 272 poverty, 119, 121–22, 131–35, 146, 161, 215, 217n20, 221, 277, 279–80 power, viii, x–xiii, xvi–xvii, 6, 8, 12–14, 18–19, 28, 31–32, 37–38, 46–49, 53–56, 64, 70–73, 77–79, 81–82, 86, 88, 93–95, 104, 115, 117, 127, 130, 133n25, 134, 141n33, 148, 158, 164, 179, 185–86, 190, 197, 204, 206, 210, 215–16, 230, 237, 246–47, 268–70, 272, 275–77, 281 production: of knowledge, 3, 32–33, 46–48, 78, 107, 163, 172, 181; subjectivities, 94, 278; wealth, 6, 23, 81, 102, 129, 140, 154, 176, 203n8 public health, 121–22, 127, 129, 136, 139, 150, 152n46, 153, 173, 281 Quechua, 2n3, 76n40, 110, 161 race, viii, xi, 24–29, 47, 55, 57–59, 61– 63, 67n25, 72, 74, 76–77, 90–101, 145, 150, 159–60, 185, 190, 216n19, 226, 228, 230–37, 243–44, 251, 253–54, 261–65, 285–86

Index

race war, 77, 93, 95 Rama, Ángel, 94, 110, 141, 269 rationality, xvii, 6, 31, 35, 80, 82, 88– 102, 107–8, 121–22, 126, 131, 136, 139–40, 157, 171–72, 177, 182–83, 195, 238, 281, 286 representation, 3n6, 12, 29, 33, 44–45, 57, 61n14, 80, 172, 184n23, 203–4, 215, 247 Restrepo, José Félix de, 100, 142n36, 229 Robertson, William, 235n30, 237, 243– 49, 252–59 Rodríguez, Manuel del Socorro, 131, 170, 221, 256, 267, 278, 280 Roig, Arturo Andrés, xv, 111–12, 115, 249n43, 252, 269 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xv, 4–5, 11, 20–21n11, 24, 28, 37, 162n4, 222n25, 262 Said, Edward, viii, 6, 11, 28–33, 39, 42–43, 49, 51, 269 Saint Augustine, 40, 169n9 Saint Thomas, 105–6, 109n82, 250 Salazar, José María, 100, 217, 229, 256–59, 264–65, 285 science, xii, xvii, 1–4, 8, 10–12, 22, 24, 27, 35, 80, 103, 105–9, 113, 115n90, 117, 123–29, 154, 158, 163–64, 169, 171, 175–80, 188, 195, 198–99, 211– 31, 252, 261, 264, 267–72, 279, 283; of government, 78, 142–43, 197–98; human, 4, 6–7, 11–20, 25, 27–33, 37, 57n9, 245; modern, 33, 77, 115, 118, 121, 206–8, 249 Sépulveda, Juan Ginés de, 37, 238–39 Shem, 40–42, 60, 159, 199 Silva, Renán, 69n28, 98n67, 99–100, 108n81, 110, 118n1, 126n11, 127n12, 128n16, 138–39, 217n20, 255n49, 271n4, 286 slavery, 19, 41, 51, 53, 58, 62, 67–68, 70, 73, 76–78, 89n55, 99, 102, 111, 115, 131, 140, 160, 167, 169, 172,

311

191, 208n15, 209, 214, 225–26, 231, 238, 262, 286 smallpox, 124–30, 138, 140n32, 148, 151n44, 153, 166–67, 171–73, 281 Smith, Adam, 5, 16–19, 23, 28, 37 space, xi, 8, 12, 20, 23, 25–26, 44–45, 52–53, 64–66, 71n32, 72, 82, 102, 118, 136–37, 162, 171, 178, 197– 218, 237–38, 247, 277 Spivak, Gayatri, 28, 269 statistics, 80, 144–46 strategies, xvi, 4–5, 30, 53, 63–89, 98, 150–51, 173, 175, 199, 226, 237 subject, xvii, 19, 33, 78, 80–81, 84, 94, 103, 121, 136, 204, 278–79 subjectivity, viii, x, xvi–xvii, 29–30, 37–38, 43, 47–48, 51–52, 56, 61, 64, 71, 77, 80–82, 94, 103, 117, 171, 216, 278 Tadeo Lozano, Jorge, 63n17, 76, 100, 124, 166, 184n24, 221–24, 229, 256, 263–64, 285 Tanco, Diego Martín, 100, 134, 138n28, 217, 221–23, 236–37, 243, 278–79, 285 taxonomies, 26, 41, 45, 47, 56–57, 59–61, 158, 160, 168, 178, 183, 195, 211, 229 technologies, xvi, 176, 226, 277n3, 282; of control, 275, 277, 281, 285; populational, 81, 121, 145, 271, 280 territory, xvii, 6, 8, 10, 37, 40–41, 45, 78, 80–81, 121, 145, 185–86, 197–215, 224, 227, 230, 237, 239, 255, 276–86 theology, 8, 95, 105–8, 122, 124, 126– 29, 149n40, 239, 279, 283 Toulmin, Stephen, 11–12 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 4, 11, 20, 22–24, 27–28, 37, 215 Ulloa, Antonio de, 54, 61–63, 68, 79, 86n51, 139–41, 179n18, 206–8,

312

Index

227–29, 233–37, 256. See also Juan, Jorge and Antonio Ulloa utility, 15, 17, 80, 106, 130, 132, 137, 176, 182, 203, 215–16 vaccine, 124–30, 167, 281 Valenzuela, Eloy, 100, 184n24, 185 Velasco, Juan de, 160–62, 201n2, 248–54 Wallerstein, Immanuel, xvi, 19, 35, 37–39, 68, 79 Ward, Bernardo, 214, 226, 278 whiteness, xi–xii, xvi–xvii, 5–7, 43, 48, 51–109, 117–18, 149–51, 157, 198, 248, 263n58, 268, 270–71, 275, 277, 286 whitening, 58, 68, 75–77, 85–86, 93, 102, 268

work/labor: intellectual, 69, 96, 190, 260, 264; productive, 19, 22, 121–22, 133–35, 226, 245, 252, 279, 286 world-system, xi, 10, 35–39, 43, 46–47, 49, 68n27, 179, 196, 237, 253n45, 270–71 writing: alphabetical, 45, 163; of history, 22, 94, 175, 247, 252, 259, 267 Zea, Francisco Antonio, 100, 114, 118, 154, 184n24 zero point, xi–xii, 4–5, 8, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22–23, 25–26, 28, 32, 44–46, 51–52, 94, 117, 136, 157–58, 171, 179, 186, 192, 199, 204, 232, 269, 271–72