Course Info: CSI-0225

This course considered the complex intersection of race and religion in Latin America. We began with an investigation of the hybrid proto-racial and religious categories (for example, Limpieza de Sangre or “Purity of Blood”) through which the Spanish and Portuguese conceived of human difference during the Early Modern Era. We then traced how these notions were re-conceptualized in the centuries following the encounter between Europeans, Africans, and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. The course continued with an examination of the ways in which nationalism and secularization transformed the Catholic Church, processes of racialization, and the links between them. During the final weeks, we read a series of ethnographies that explore the contemporary entanglements of race and religion in Latin America, with special attention to the consequences of recent indigenous political movements, neoliberalism, and indigenous peoples’ own frameworks for understanding human difference. Near the midpoint of the semester, students wrote two brief essays that required them to consider a variety of ways that proto-racial and religious categories intersected throughout the Early Modern Period in the Spanish Atlantic.