Scholars@Duke
Irene Silverblatt

Irene Silverblatt

Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
irene.silverblatt@duke.edu
Box 90091, Durham, NC 27708-0091
500 W 111th St, Apt 2B, New York, NY 10025

Selected Publications

Women

Chapter · 2015 Cite

Haunting the Modern Andean State: Colonial Legacies of Race and Civilization

Chapter · 2015 Contemporary Andean polities are haunted by colonial legacies. Looking at state-making from the off-centered view-point of emerging colonial institutions helps make sense of the trajectory of horrors and irrationalities – as well as idioms of political leg ... Cite

Acllacuna

Chapter · 2015 Cite

Jewish identification and critical theory: The political significance of conceptual categories

Conference Critical Research on Religion · August 1, 2014 This symposium examines how various discursive frameworks inform Jewish and non-Jewish interpretations of Jewishness. Although the specific characteristics of these frameworks are context-dependent, the underlying themes remain the same: Jewish identificat ... Full text Cite

Stained Blood in the Old World and the New: New Christians and the Racial Categories of the Colonial-Modern World

Journal Article Critical Research on Religion · 2014 Symposium, “Jewish Identification and Critical Theory: The Political Significance of Conceptual Categories" ... Cite

Prologo

Chapter · 2013 Cite

Threads Speak

Other Eccentric Archive · 2012 Exhibition in “Unauthorized”, Inter Arts Center, Malmö (Sweden); and “Reflecting Fashion”, Museum of Modern Art, Vienna. ... Cite

Confronting Nationalisms, Cosmopolitan Visions, and the Politics of Memory: Aesthetics of Reconciliation and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger in Western Ukraine

Journal Article Dissidences · 2012 Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, an eighteen year old, German-speaking poet, died in an SS labor camp in 1942. She left behind a hand-written album of 57 poems that miraculously survived the War. Selma was from Czernowitz (at the time, Cernauti, Romania and today ... Cite

Heresies and colonial geopolitics

Journal Article Romanic Review · January 1, 2012 Cite

Chasteté et pureté des liens sociaux dans le Pérou du XVIIe siècle

Journal Article Cahiers du Genre · December 1, 2011 Full text Cite

Forward

Chapter · 2009 Cite

Harvest of Blossoms: Poems from a Life Cut Short (Collected Poems of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger)

Book · 2008 Featured Publication Introduction by Irene Silverblatt and Helene Silverblatt ... Cite

Modern Inquisitions

Chapter · 2007 Featured Publication Cite

Colonial conspiracies

Journal Article Ethnohistory · March 1, 2006 Using records from the Lima office of the Spanish Inquisition, this article explores the cultural politics of Spanish colonialism in the Andes. Spain's imperial enterprise was rooted in the construction of new social beings at the core of modernity: (1) th ... Full text Cite

Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World

Book · 2004 Modern Inquisitions explores the cultural work of colonialism in the seventeenth century Peruvian Andes and attempts to address some of the complex, cultural practices that accompanied the institutionalization of state power in Europe and the colonial New ... Cite

Power and Memory in Latin America: The Uses of the Pre-Columbian Past

Chapter · 2001 This essay, published in the proceedings of an international conference on archaeology and memory in light of the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls, explores how conceptions of the pre-Columbian past have been used to support political agendas. It includ ... Cite

Definiciones de la Modernidad y Inquisiciones Modernas

Chapter · 2001 This essay explores the way in which “modernity” has been defined in the English speaking world and asks how that definition has excluded the participation of Spain and the Spanish colonies. I trace this process back to the 16th century and the propoganda ... Cite

The Inca’s Witches: Gender and the Cultural Work of Colonization in Seventeenth Century Peru

Chapter · 2000 Inquisitors considered "witches" to be a colonial plague. This essay explores the history of the charges made agsinst these women and, in the process, uncovers patterns linking discourses of gender and race to political ideologies. Accused witches, nearly ... Cite

New Christians and new world fears in seventeenth-century Peru

Journal Article Comparative Studies in Society and History · January 1, 2000 Spanish colonialism brought the Inquisition to the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1569, and from the end of the sixteenth century until Peru declared independence from Spain in 1820, Spanish Inquisitors prosecuted men and women for clandestinely practicing Jewish ... Full text Cite

The secret history of gender: Women, men, and power in late Colonial Mexico.

Journal Article COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN SOCIETY AND HISTORY · April 1, 1999 Link to item Cite

Honor, Sex, and Civilizing in the Making of Seventeenth Century Peru

Journal Article Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society · 1997 Cite

Amancebados, hechiceros, y rebeldes. Chancay, siglo XVII.

Other The Hispanic American Historical Review · February 1993 Full text Cite

Women in States

Journal Article Annual Review of Anthropology · October 1988 Full text Cite

Imperial Dilemmas, the Politics of Kinship, and Inca Reconstructions of History

Journal Article Comparative Studies in Society and History · January 1, 1988 Full text Cite

The evolution of witchcraft and the meaning of healing in colonial Andean society.

Journal Article Culture, medicine and psychiatry · December 1983 This paper explores the ways in which traditional beliefs of Andean peoples regarding health and sickness were transformed by the process of Spanish colonization. It also examines how the colonial context devolved new meanings and powers on native curers. ... Full text Cite

Latin America Otherwise

Book Co-Editor, 1995 - present ... Cite

Cristianos nuevos y miedos a proposito del Nuevo Mundo en el Peru del siglo xvii

Chapter Edición critica de Esperanza Lopez Parada y Maria Ortiz ... Cite