Alcira Dueñas. Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City”: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru.

How to Approach Indigenous Law?

“…These actors' capacity to travel to and meet in specific places, such as the house of the indigenous town council in Lima, or the Royal court in Madrid, contributed to the configuration of interethnic and transatlantic networks through which information circulated and pressure was put on the Crown. 133 Consequently, the frontiers between distinct types of documents were often blurred, since some ideas that appeared in treaties could also be used in the trials filed before colonial courts of justice. 134 There is little doubt that indigenous peoples and their allies often succeeded to obtain royal decrees that met their demands, thus showing that they played a role in forging the law in the Iberian empires, even beyond the local sphere.…”

El (contra-)archivo de la Abadía del Sacromonte y las incursiones del gobernador Cristóbal Vaca de Castro ante la justicia del rey

“…Aunque ambos giros tienden a confundirse bajo la denominación de archival turn, el primero consiste fundamentalmente en un «giro documental»: considera el archivo como un objeto de historia social, política y cultural, es decir, como un lugar de producción del discurso donde actores contemporáneos y posteriores ejercieron y negociaron una agentividad, un poder y/o una identidad (Walsham, 2016;De Vivo, Guidi y Silvestri, 2016;Poncet, 2019). Los subaltern studies han contribuido en gran medida a este giro, revelando el papel decisivo de categorías socio-profesionales y socio-étnicas invisibles de actores del archivo colonial (Burns, 2010;Dueñas, 2010;Cunill, 2016). Arndt Brendecke (2016), por su parte, escribió un libro importante sobre la historia del saber en el imperio español; su enfoque es praxeológico, es decir, que examina la producción efectiva del saber por diversos actores solicitados por la Monarquía para conseguir informaciones fiables sobre sus territorios distantes.…”

Decentring the Lettered City: Exile, Transnational Networks, and Josué de Castro’s Centre International pour le Développement (1964–1973)

“…Yet, historical works have recently confirmed the complexity of the notion of the Lettered City and the need to avoid generalisations. These works “have complicated traditional ways of understanding intellectuals and the general transmission of knowledge in colonial and modern Latin America” (Dyck 2015:266) showing that “the world of letters in colonial Spanish America was a terrain of cultural interaction and contention” (Dueñas 2010:1), more populated by people of indigenous or African origin than what was assumed. This included “political or cultural resistance to colonial rule in the Andes” (Dueñas 2010:1) since the 17 th and 18 th centuries, when early lettered indigenous people subverted cultural impositions (Rappaport and Cummins 2012).…”