martha few | Penn State University (original) (raw)

Papers by martha few

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2014

Ethnohistory

This essay focuses on New World birds caught up in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trade wit... more This essay focuses on New World birds caught up in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trade with other living wild creatures, destined for imperial metropoles. Manuscript sources describing this trade, written by political officials, ships’ captains, doctors, naturalists, animal caretakers, and inspectors who cataloged their arrival to Spanish ports, interacted with the animals, tried to keep them alive aboard the ship, and determined their ability to withstand further transport to their final destinations in Madrid and other cities in Spain. In the process, animals caged aboard ship for several weeks or more developed relationships with one another and with their human caretakers. Their lived experiences show the multiple and complicated ways in which individual captured birds and other creatures helped shape those shipboard environments, disrupting systemic human attempts to construct them as colonial animals who functioned solely as scientific or material objects in empire making.

Early Science and Medicine

Indigenous midwives and female healers who treated infants and children in late-sixteenth-century... more Indigenous midwives and female healers who treated infants and children in late-sixteenth-century Guatemala were medico-religious specialists who mediated the natural and supernatural realms to treat child illness. Their socially critical roles are examined through the lens of an Inquisition investigation in the tributary Maya town of Samayaq in colonial Central America into indigenous and mixed race women’s use of divination as a strategy to treat child illness, and in particular mollera caída, or fallen fontanel.

Women, religion, and the Atlantic world (1600-1800), 2009

206 Martha Few the age of exploration passed into the era of conquest and colonization of the New... more 206 Martha Few the age of exploration passed into the era of conquest and colonization of the New World, monstrous birth accounts describing such things as conjoined twins,'half-human, half-toad'babies, and other types of defor-mities were informed by both ...

Journal of Global History

This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonial... more This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, ch...

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2015

Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800, 2008

Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung, Jan 7, 2012

Mesoamerica, 1999

Este ensayo explora las políticas de violencia y poder en Santiago de Guatemala, capital colonial... more Este ensayo explora las políticas de violencia y poder en Santiago de Guatemala, capital colonial de Guatemala y la tercera ciudad más grande de la América española en los últimos años del siglo XVII y principios del XVIII. Argumento que las acusaciones de enfermedad contra curanderas y parteras, que se encuentran en los expedientes criminales y de la Inquisición, revelan que el cuerpo físico se volvió tema central de disputas de poder entre los individuos y el Estado colonial y entre los miembros de la comunidad en conflictos intracomunitarios. La descripción de tales males, y cómo fueron experimentados corporalmente por habitantes de todos los grupos sociales y étnicos de la capital, demuestra el papel central que jugaron las prácticas culturales locales, reflejando y redefiniendo la vida cotidiana bajo el régimen colonial. Sin embargo, las acusaciones de enfermedad también proporcionaron la oportunidad para el Estado, a través de instituciones como la Inquisición, de sacar provecho del sufrimiento de la población y usarlo para apuntalar el poder a través de la intervención en casos de enfermedad en la vida comunitaria.

Mesoamerica, 2007

Este artículo examina las actividades de las castas revendedoras, mujeres de raza mixta quienes e... more Este artículo examina las actividades de las castas revendedoras, mujeres de raza mixta quienes estuvieron en conflicto con las autoridades de Santiago de Guatemala por el derecho a ganarse la vida con la venta de carne de res en la capital. Las mujeres que lucharon por establecer un nicho en el comercio de carne utilizaron un lenguaje específico que invocaba a la maternidad y también a las nociones de género en el abastecimiento alimenticio cuando solicitaban las licencias para vender. Recurrieron así a las vías legales abiertas para denunciar lo que consideraban ser trato ilegal y violento por parte de los funcionarios coloniales. Para obtener sus provisiones, las mujeres aprovecharon las redes que las enlazaban con los comerciantes de ganado, carniceros y otros proveedores de carne de res, quienes frecuentemente fueron, al igual que ellas, descendientes de castas. Su papel en la economía local se encuentra en los documentos surgidos de los conflictos que tuvieron con los funcionarios del Cabildo de Santiago y con los de la Audiencia de Guatemala.

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2010

Drawing on the rich but mostly overlooked history of Guatemala&am... more Drawing on the rich but mostly overlooked history of Guatemala's anti-smallpox campaigns in the 1780s and 1790s, this paper interweaves an analysis of the contribution of colonial medical knowledges and practical experiences with the construction and implementation of imperial science. The history of the anti-smallpox campaigns is traced from the introduction of inoculation in Guatemala in 1780 to the eve of the Spanish Crown-sponsored Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition in 1803. The paper first analyses the development of what Guatemalan medical physician José Flores called his 'local method' of inoculation, tailored to material and cultural conditions of highland Maya communities, and based on his more than twenty years of experience in anti-smallpox campaigns among multiethnic populations in Guatemala. Then the paper probes the accompanying transformations in discourses about health through the anti-smallpox campaigns as they became explicitly linked to new discourses of moral responsibility towards indigenous peoples. With the launch of the Spanish Vaccination Expedition in 1803, anti-smallpox efforts bridged the New World, Europe and Asia, and circulated on a global scale via the enactment of imperial Spanish health policy informed, in no small part, by New World and specifically colonial Guatemalan experiences with inoculation in multiethnic cities and highland Maya towns.

Ethnohistory, 2005

Abstract. Chocolate, in the form of a hot chocolate beverage, was widely avail-able to men and wo... more Abstract. Chocolate, in the form of a hot chocolate beverage, was widely avail-able to men and women of all ethnic and social groups in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, the capital city of colonial Cen-tral America. At the same time, chocolate ...

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2014

Ethnohistory

This essay focuses on New World birds caught up in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trade wit... more This essay focuses on New World birds caught up in the eighteenth-century transatlantic trade with other living wild creatures, destined for imperial metropoles. Manuscript sources describing this trade, written by political officials, ships’ captains, doctors, naturalists, animal caretakers, and inspectors who cataloged their arrival to Spanish ports, interacted with the animals, tried to keep them alive aboard the ship, and determined their ability to withstand further transport to their final destinations in Madrid and other cities in Spain. In the process, animals caged aboard ship for several weeks or more developed relationships with one another and with their human caretakers. Their lived experiences show the multiple and complicated ways in which individual captured birds and other creatures helped shape those shipboard environments, disrupting systemic human attempts to construct them as colonial animals who functioned solely as scientific or material objects in empire making.

Early Science and Medicine

Indigenous midwives and female healers who treated infants and children in late-sixteenth-century... more Indigenous midwives and female healers who treated infants and children in late-sixteenth-century Guatemala were medico-religious specialists who mediated the natural and supernatural realms to treat child illness. Their socially critical roles are examined through the lens of an Inquisition investigation in the tributary Maya town of Samayaq in colonial Central America into indigenous and mixed race women’s use of divination as a strategy to treat child illness, and in particular mollera caída, or fallen fontanel.

Women, religion, and the Atlantic world (1600-1800), 2009

206 Martha Few the age of exploration passed into the era of conquest and colonization of the New... more 206 Martha Few the age of exploration passed into the era of conquest and colonization of the New World, monstrous birth accounts describing such things as conjoined twins,'half-human, half-toad'babies, and other types of defor-mities were informed by both ...

Journal of Global History

This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonial... more This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, ch...

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2015

Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800, 2008

Historical Social Research Historische Sozialforschung, Jan 7, 2012

Mesoamerica, 1999

Este ensayo explora las políticas de violencia y poder en Santiago de Guatemala, capital colonial... more Este ensayo explora las políticas de violencia y poder en Santiago de Guatemala, capital colonial de Guatemala y la tercera ciudad más grande de la América española en los últimos años del siglo XVII y principios del XVIII. Argumento que las acusaciones de enfermedad contra curanderas y parteras, que se encuentran en los expedientes criminales y de la Inquisición, revelan que el cuerpo físico se volvió tema central de disputas de poder entre los individuos y el Estado colonial y entre los miembros de la comunidad en conflictos intracomunitarios. La descripción de tales males, y cómo fueron experimentados corporalmente por habitantes de todos los grupos sociales y étnicos de la capital, demuestra el papel central que jugaron las prácticas culturales locales, reflejando y redefiniendo la vida cotidiana bajo el régimen colonial. Sin embargo, las acusaciones de enfermedad también proporcionaron la oportunidad para el Estado, a través de instituciones como la Inquisición, de sacar provecho del sufrimiento de la población y usarlo para apuntalar el poder a través de la intervención en casos de enfermedad en la vida comunitaria.

Mesoamerica, 2007

Este artículo examina las actividades de las castas revendedoras, mujeres de raza mixta quienes e... more Este artículo examina las actividades de las castas revendedoras, mujeres de raza mixta quienes estuvieron en conflicto con las autoridades de Santiago de Guatemala por el derecho a ganarse la vida con la venta de carne de res en la capital. Las mujeres que lucharon por establecer un nicho en el comercio de carne utilizaron un lenguaje específico que invocaba a la maternidad y también a las nociones de género en el abastecimiento alimenticio cuando solicitaban las licencias para vender. Recurrieron así a las vías legales abiertas para denunciar lo que consideraban ser trato ilegal y violento por parte de los funcionarios coloniales. Para obtener sus provisiones, las mujeres aprovecharon las redes que las enlazaban con los comerciantes de ganado, carniceros y otros proveedores de carne de res, quienes frecuentemente fueron, al igual que ellas, descendientes de castas. Su papel en la economía local se encuentra en los documentos surgidos de los conflictos que tuvieron con los funcionarios del Cabildo de Santiago y con los de la Audiencia de Guatemala.

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2010

Drawing on the rich but mostly overlooked history of Guatemala&am... more Drawing on the rich but mostly overlooked history of Guatemala's anti-smallpox campaigns in the 1780s and 1790s, this paper interweaves an analysis of the contribution of colonial medical knowledges and practical experiences with the construction and implementation of imperial science. The history of the anti-smallpox campaigns is traced from the introduction of inoculation in Guatemala in 1780 to the eve of the Spanish Crown-sponsored Royal Maritime Vaccination Expedition in 1803. The paper first analyses the development of what Guatemalan medical physician José Flores called his 'local method' of inoculation, tailored to material and cultural conditions of highland Maya communities, and based on his more than twenty years of experience in anti-smallpox campaigns among multiethnic populations in Guatemala. Then the paper probes the accompanying transformations in discourses about health through the anti-smallpox campaigns as they became explicitly linked to new discourses of moral responsibility towards indigenous peoples. With the launch of the Spanish Vaccination Expedition in 1803, anti-smallpox efforts bridged the New World, Europe and Asia, and circulated on a global scale via the enactment of imperial Spanish health policy informed, in no small part, by New World and specifically colonial Guatemalan experiences with inoculation in multiethnic cities and highland Maya towns.

Ethnohistory, 2005

Abstract. Chocolate, in the form of a hot chocolate beverage, was widely avail-able to men and wo... more Abstract. Chocolate, in the form of a hot chocolate beverage, was widely avail-able to men and women of all ethnic and social groups in late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, the capital city of colonial Cen-tral America. At the same time, chocolate ...