Illness Accusations and the Cultural Politics of Power in Colonial Santiago de Guatemala, 1650-1720

Martha Few

This essay explores the cultural politics of violence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, capital of colonial Guatemala and the third largest city in Spanish America at that time. I argue that illness accusations, found in Guatemalan Inquisition and criminal records, reveal that the physical body became a central site of power contestations between individuals and the colonial state, and between community members themselves in intra-community conflicts. Descriptions of afflictions and how they were experienced bodily by inhabitants of the capital from all social and ethnic groups demonstrate the central role that local cultural practices played in reflecting and reshaping everyday life under colonial rule. Affliction accusations, however, also provided the opportunity for the colonial state to capitalize on the suffering of local populations and to use them to re-inscribe colonial power through the intervention into disease events in community life. [WP#98010]