Between the South Sea and the mountainous ridges: biopolitical assemblages in the Spanish colonial Americas

Abstract

Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated. This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between 'core' capitalist processes like 'antimarkets', dispossession and the disciplining of labour with the specific biopolitical ecologies assembled through co-option, coercion and accumulation. This perspective is explored through two archaeological case studies from Peru and Guatemala, where competing concerns about altitude, climate, disease, violence and populations of differentiated labouring bodies (both human and non-human) came to the fore in unexpected ways. The resulting discussion challenges the reliance on abstract analytical totalities like 'capitalism' and 'colonialism', and shifts attention towards the diverse assemblages of actors that shaped and continue to shape the processes central to political economic analyses.

Caring labor and the affective economy in the making of the Caribbean

“…Archaeologically, encomienda is signaled by the start of unequal and nonreciprocal relations seen in many forms of extraction of people and goods and the end of gift exchange (Valcárcel Rojas, 2019). A recent analysis of encomienda in Guatemala maps it not just in terms of colonizer/colonized relations but as a biopolitical assemblage of humans, animals, and landscapes (Corcoran‐Tadd and Pezzarossi, 2018). Encomienda populations in the Caribbean were engaged in work in agricultural supply stations on Jamaica and Cuba (Shea and Woodward, 2019; Valcárcel Rojas, 2019), gold‐mining operations and supporting Spanish towns on Hispaniola (Deagan, 2004), and pearling off coastal Venezuela (Antczak et al., 2019), which led to the depopulation of other areas, like the Bahamas (Berman and Gnivecki, 2019).…”