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Readings (password protected: contact Roderick_Campbell@Brown.edu for access)
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
Joukowsky_Institute@brown.edu
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology, Barnard College
In 1599, in the midst of the Spanish conquest of the Pueblo communities of the American Southwest, Don Juan de Oñate infamously ordered that the right foot of all adult males at Acoma be severed as retribution for the village’s defiant resistance to Spanish rule. This incident marked the Pueblo world’s most profound encounter with the logic of State violence during the early colonial period. The question we must critically ask, however, is how this incident would have been read in light of the logic of violence within Pueblo communities themselves. How did Oñate’s spectacular cruelty articulate with the deeper genealogy of bodily torture and brutality toward deviants among the indigenous communities of the pre-colonial Southwest? This question leads me to revisit Pierre Clastres’s analysis of “primitive torture” more generally and to rethink the deployment of violence in so-called egalitarian societies organized around the prohibition, rather than the consolidation, of the power of the State.