Osvaldo F. Pardo. Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico

Osvaldo Pardo’s Honor and Personhood in Early Modern Mexico focuses mostly on regular clergy—monks from Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit orders—and their role as cultural and social educators of native peoples in Mesoamerica. Pardo assumes that a necessary interconnectedness existed between ecclesiastical and secular authority. Therefore, ecclesiastical agents interacted with native peoples in a way that directly influenced how the local population construed the meanings of oaths, honor, and the nature of testifying before courts, and these same encounters (re)shaped how secular authorities understood the broader cultural significance of legally administered punishments. The work focuses on the period of first European colonial contacts in Mexico through the end of the seventeenth century. Pardo concludes that the great disdain expressed by clergy and legal scholars in the seventeenth century toward native peoples’ ability to uphold certain standards of honorable and legal conduct reflected the failure of the first efforts at education directed by mendicant religious orders beginning in the sixteenth century. His analysis, however, also offers the possibility that theologians had an interest in classifying natives as children in the eyes of the law as part of their paternalistic mission.

Ancient history · Art · Colonialism · Dignity · Ethnology · Honor · Humanities · Mesoamerica · Personhood · Political science · Population · Sociology · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies