The Search for ‘Truth’

1. The Search for ‘Truth’ Bureaucracy and State Building through the Spanish Inquisition in Peru in Irene Silverblatt’s Modern Inquisitions

2. Hannah Arendt • Irene Silverblatt takes Arendt’s insights into the origins of a modernity that allowed “civilized” people to embrace fascism and applies them to the 16th and 17th centuries, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe (ix) • Imperial powers governed their colonies as despotic bureaucrats, argued Arendt, and racial ideologies turned mere bureaucrats into members of a superior caste. Arendt’s fear was this: intertwined, ‘race thinking’ and bureaucratic rule could unleash “extraordinary power and destruction,’ a destruction all the more terrible since it was bathed in an aura of rationality and civilization. (3)

3. Race Thinking • Race thinking helps us to see what the race vs. caste division hides: that race and caste are not separate systems, but interpenetrating. (17) • Arendt was especially concerned with how race thinking could become embedded in the bureaucracies of state and colonial governments. (18)

4. Bureaucracy • Arendt • Weber • Foucault • Bourdieu • Silverblatt

5. Inquisition as Bureaucracy • As an institution it was developing a structure and logic apart from dynastic boundaries; it was formally organized according to principles of rationality; it was imagined as being greater than the sum of its individual office holders; and it was careful to legitimate its practices through an appeal to public welfare. In sum, the Inquisition was a bureaucracy that typified the evolving institutions of the emerging modern world; it was a state structure in the making. (11) • The Inquisition was the centurion of national security. (90)

6. Bureaucracy and State • Through modest rites as well as the more dazzling, inquisitors were promoting an institutional persona: Inquisitors as a unified and autonomous, just and rational political being, an institution of State. (81) • Bureaucrats were not outsiders, insinuating discipline into their subjects’ being; bureaucrats were also constituted in the dialectic of state-making. (82) • Working for the benefit of the state, bureaucratic practices put blinders on officeholders, clients and subjects alike. Thus, our attention became focused on the state as an independent being, with its own, autonomous rationale. (96)

7. Fallible Human Beings • The Inquisition was not an all-powerful institution directed by divine-like magistrates; it was manned by fallible human beings. (85) • The tribunal, like other bureaucracies, projected two images: on the one hand, it was an independent, irrefutable force of state; and on the other, a human organization made up of magistrates both upright and despicable. (88) • Example of Dona Mencia de Luna, Manuel Henriquez and Manuel Bautista Perez

8. Violence and Civilization • Arendt – violence is as much a part of our Western legacy as the most uplifting of civilization’s values, and we forget that at our peril. Violence and civilization: they are inseparable. They need each other, they feed on each other – a realization that can stop your heart. (14). • Max Weber defined the modern state in terms of its monopoly over the legitimate control of violent means, and thus recognized its latent savagery. The right to physically brutalize citizens was part of that equation, and torture has played a role in the development of modern institutions of government. (75) • On a more intimate level, they (tribunal correspondences and archives) tell a story of how human beings, made bureaucrats, used bureaucratic procedures in their quest to determine the “truth” of imperial subjects, i.e., the state truths that were party to civilization’s violence. (75)

9. Auto-da-fePedro Berruguete. Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fe, painted around 1495 Artistic representations of the auto da fe usually depict torture and the burning at the stake. However, this type of activity never took place during an auto da fe, which was in essence a religious act.

10. Auto-da-fe • Auto-da-fe’s were momentous events, sparking a deluge of emotions – fear, awe, respect, even love (or so it was hoped) – and the auto celebrated in 1639 was the most grandiose, perhaps most infamous, that Lima ever witnessed. (80) • The auto-da-fe’s performed the tribunal’s illusions of unity on a grand scale. (81) • In the great theatre of power, the auto-da-fe – and in smaller, daily theatres of reputation and fear – the Inquisition clarified cultural blame by presenting who, among the colony’s non-Indian populace, held beliefs or engaged in life practices that were considered threats to the colony’s moral and civic well-being. (7)

11. Search for the ‘Truth’ • But nowhere was the inquisitors’ attachment to procedure more evident than in the fervour to find (and make) the truth. (83) • Not only absorbed by rules and regulations, not only structured by offices in clear hierarchy of society (except Indians), regardless of social standing, wealth, or power, Nobleman or slave, governor or labourer, Spaniard or black could be brought before its bench and strapped to its racks. In this sense, the Inquisition was the empires fairest court. (6) • Unlike other state offices, argued GuamanPoma, the Inquisition did not shy away from punishing Peru’s rich and powerful: the Inquisition was mindful that all, regardless of caste or class, were equal before God (92)

12. Questions • Arendt on Bureaucracy: “Bureaucracy was the organization of the great game of expansion in which every area was considered a stepping-stone to further involvements and every people an instrument for further conquest.” Do you find Arendt’s definition of bureaucracy applicable to the Spanish Inquisition in Peru in the 17th century? How has Silverblatt moved beyond Arendt’s ideas of bureaucracy? • Do you agree with Silverblatt that the Spanish Inquisition is a modern bureaucracy? Or does its religious fervour and corruptible nature in the search for ‘truth’ place the Inquisition as a ‘traditional’ bureaucracy? (8)

13. Questions contiuned... • Silverblatt discusses various theorists whose work she draws insights from (Arendt, Weber, Foucault, Bourdieu) with regards to state building and race thinking, but none have regarded the Spanish Inquisition as an institution of race thinking and state building. Why do you think this piece of history has been overlooked? Does it have anything to do with the stereotype associated with the Spanish Inquisition as an ‘implacable, pre-modern institution, manned by greedy fanatics who gleefully and brutally defended Spain’s religious purity?’ (5)