The "Contagious Stench" Of Idolatry

The Rhetoric of Disease and Sacrilegious Acts in Colonial New Spain

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2796972
AutoresAmara Solari (autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen96
Número3
Páginas481-515
Fecha de publicación2016-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-3601658
OpenAlexW2480802030
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas50

In the colonial theater of New Spain, multiple actors utilized the rhetoric of disease to discuss and describe the ongoing discoveries of indigenous traditional religion, which they termed idolatry. Focusing primarily on Yucatán, this article closely analyzes these usages, arguing that the two primary modes of understanding the spread of illness in the early modern world, that of miasmic factors and that of contagion, provided rationalizations for the perseverance of idolatrous practices, informed the institutionalized prevention of these heretical acts, and ultimately provided models for their possible cure. As the definition of idolatry was expanded to include all religious crimes committed by New Spain's indigenous population, it was severed from the material aspect (idol worship) that had originally defined it. The result was the conceptual conflation of two of the defining characteristics of early colonial experience: epidemic disease and ongoing idolatries

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Biology · Colonialism · Conflation · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Idolatry · Indigenous · Political science · Population · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Worship · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Ecology · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychedelics and Drug Studies · Religious studies