Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter 1 Contested Powers: Gender, Culture, and the Process of Colonial Rule -- Chapter 2 Society and Colonial Authority in Santiago de Guatemala -- Chapter 3 Magical Violence and the Body -- Chapter 4 Illness, Healing, and the Supernatural World -- Chapter 5 Female Sorcery, Material Life, and Urban Community Formation -- Chapter 6 Conclusion -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index

"For All of Humanity examines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease"--

"This article analyzes the introduction of smallpox inoculation in 1780 to the Audiencia of Guatemala, an area that roughly encompassed what is today modern Central America and the Mexican state of Chiapas. This first inoculation campaign was led by a modernizing sector of Guatemala's colonial elite, who considered it their moral responsibility to apply the new medical innovations of the era to cure and prevent disease among Guatemala's inhabitants, including the majority indigenous Maya population. Guatemala's first smallpox inoculation campaign provides an important case study for analyzing how discourses of health and moral responsibility towards Indians and other colonized peoples changed during the enlightenment once an effective preventive therapy against smallpox began to be employed." (author's abstract)

In her book Geneological Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, María Elena Martínez traces the ideological and legal history of purity of blood categories from their initial appearance in the kingdom of Castile in the mid-fifteenth century, to their transatlantic circulation to colonial Mexico, and their transformation there until the early nineteenth century. This important and meticulously researched work takes on the historiography that argues that the modern Western conception of race had its origins in nineteenthcentury scientific constructions of race as a biological category. Martínez deftly and persuasively shows a much earlier and more complicated historical genesis, arguing for "no single, transhistorical racism but rather different types of racisms (her emphasis), each produced by specific and historical conditions" (11).