| Abstract: | Colonial Latin American and Atlantic-world scholarship that does not explicitly concern indigenous, black, and other subaltern individuals and groups continues to marginalize, if not completely ignore, them. This lingering, if often inadvertent, Eurocentrism endures, according to this essay, for several reasons, including a preoccupation with modernization, notions of ‘nature’ that make it easy to ignore ‘culture,’ and models of culture that presume fixed boundaries rather than permeability. This essay suggests that a focus on ‘technology’—capaciously defined to include phenomena such as hammocks and chocolate, as well as mining and storm management—is one way out of this predicament. Investigating the myriad technologies that dominated colonial Latin America reveals the centrality of subaltern actors throughout the region and the Atlantic world more broadly. It also affords a fruitful way to explore the relationships between material and symbolic culture in the context of an ‘entangled’ early modern world. |
