Irene Silverblatt - Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

The written word always belies the many hands that have gone into its making. This project has been a long time coming, and many people over the years have been midwives to its extended birth. I hope I remember to acknowledge you all.

Without the generosity of several funding sources, I would never have been able to fully research this booktrack down the Peruvian Inquisition records, find early-print books, and uncover other relevant documents and records. A Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the University of Marylands Latin American Studies Center, whose director is Saul Sosnowski, gave me support and encouragement when the project was in its earliest stages. A Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, coming just when I needed it, let me finish all basic research and delve into the analytical process. Finally, with a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard Universityand benefiting from the great encouragement of and conversations with Drew Gilpin Faust, the founding Dean of the Institute, Judy Wishniak, Director of the Fellowship Program, and all my palsI managed to finish a first draft.

Several conferences and edited volumes provided the deadlines needed to jolt me into writing. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture cosponsored a conference exploring comparative colonial histories that resulted in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, edited by Robert Blair St. George. The Incas Witches: Gender and the Cultural Work of Colonization in Seventeenth-Century Peru, much improved by Roberts help, forced me to confront the witchcraft trials. Wonderful discussions at the Johns Hopkins Womens Studies Seminar contributed much to the revised version published here, and I owe a special thank-you to Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon for their insights and generosity.

The present books chapter New Christians and New World Fears benefited from several hearings: It was first presented, in very rough form, at the 1995 meetings of the Institute of Early American History and Culture at the University of Michigan; followed by a presentation at the John Carter Brown Librarys 1997 conference Jews and the Expansion of Europe: 1450-1800, ably organized by Norman Fiering; and then by a lecture at the University of Illinois for the Sheldon and Anita Drobney Program for the Study of Jewish Culture and Society, where I was afforded the insights of Helaine Silverman, Fred Jaher, Michael Shapiro, Nils Jacobsen, and Cynthia Radding. This paper was revised again for the Historical Anthropology Seminar at Emory Universitys Anthropology Department, headed by Don Donham, and it appeared in the ensuing collection From the Margins: Historical Anthropology and Its Futures, edited thoughtfully by Brian Keith Axel. Becoming Indian began as a paper presented in Trujillo, Spain (El surgimiento de la indianidad en los andes del Per central: El nativismo del siglo xvii y los muchos significados de indio ), and published in De palabra y obra en el Nuevo Mundo, vol. 3, La formacin del otro, edited by four towering scholars, Gary Gossen, Jorge Klor de Alva, Manolo Gutirrez Estvez and Miguel Len-Portilla. The Shelby Collum Davis Center seminar at Princeton University, organized then by Natalie Zemon Davis, was an extraordinary place to refine this paperas was the ensuing volume Imperial Aftermaths and Postcolonial Displacements, edited so well by Gyan Prakash. Ideas about American triumphalism were first tried out in Bogot at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and then published in Reestructuracin de las ciencias sociales en los paises andinos