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Book Review
| Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. By IRENE SILVERBLATT. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. 299 pp. $79.95 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
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This book delivers much of what it promises so boldly in the title: a well-reasoned and richly documented argument as to how the Spanish Inquisition in the seventeenth century viceroyalty of Peru became the agent of the kind of "state-thinking" and "race-thinking" that were essential to the full fledged "modern" European nation-states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historical anthropologist Irene Silverblatt departs from Hannah Arendt's notion that the classificatory schemes of power and statecraft visited by European colonial empires upon colonized others during the nineteenth century created the type of totalizing control that modern, fascist states perfected in the twentieth. She pushes Arendt's paradigm back to the seventeenth century and places it in the New World center of the first modern colonial empire, Spain. She follows Foucault in portraying the seventeenth century as the watershed moment of engendering and envisioning the state as autonomous, regulating its subjects and creating entirely new social categories. Bourdieu is the source of Silverblatt's notion about the formation of bureaucratic cadres that create new procedures, forms of reasoning, and knowledge that would challenge dynastic procedures. She especially stresses Philip Abrams's idea—later flushed out by Corrigan and Sayer—that the modern state was a historical construct that became fetishized and naturalized, thus covering up its ideological base as a new tool kit for fields of power. |
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