Allison Margaret Bigelow. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 376 pp. Ill. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5438-6.
Reviewed by Heidi V. Scott (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Published on H-LatAm (October, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Iberian colonial archives abound with a wealth of materials, visual as well as written, that shed light on the mining, refining, and circulation of metals, a phenomenon that was central to the economic and symbolic functioning of empire. The sheer volume of these records, many of which still await scholarly study, calls to mind Arlette Farge’s evocative description of archival repositories and the experience of working in them as “excessive and overwhelming, like a spring tide, an avalanche, or a flood.”[1] Nevertheless, their partial and fragmentary quality is acutely apparent in the frequent absence of the voices and experiences of Indigenous and African miners who, individually and through diverse communities, profoundly shaped mining ventures in Spain’s and Portugal’s New World domains.
Archaeologists and historians of Iberian colonial mining have begun to counter these archival lacunae through the study of colonial and precolonial material cultures. In this deeply researched and original monograph that focuses primarily on Iberian and especially Spanish spheres of colonization in America, Allison M. Bigelow advances the project of bringing Indigenous and African mining knowledge into view through the deep study of linguistic clues that are contained within the written record as well as through the complementary analysis of visual images. At the same time, the author deploys linguistic study to shed light on the racial logics that emerged from and were fortified by the colonial mining industry. Far from disregarding material culture, Bigelow’s approach demonstrates how the analysis of mining vocabularies can strengthen scholarly understandings of the material aspects of extractive activity in different geographical arenas of the Iberian colonial presence and at different moments between 1492 and the early nineteenth century. Indeed, this emphasis on materiality is reflected in the structure and organization of the book.
Tracing a rough chronological arc of three hundred years from the earliest years of Spanish conquest to the late eighteenth century, Mining Language is wide-ranging in its geographical scope, encompassing the Caribbean islands, parts of the circum-Caribbean including Florida and Venezuela, Mexico and the southern Andes, and—looking beyond America—South Asia. Rather than geography or chronology, however, it is metals (gold, iron, copper, and silver, in that order) that provide the principal organizing structure for the study. The opening chapters focus on the exploitation of gold within the first century of the Spanish invasion in the Caribbean islands and Central America and demonstrate how Taíno expertise in gold extraction and working, and the place of this metal within Indigenous societies, shaped the geographies, vocabulary, and even the temporal rhythms of colonial gold mining, despite the intensely destructive impact of Iberian colonization in this region. Drawing on an array of manuscript and published sources that includes maps and illustrations as well as written texts, Bigelow sheds light on the ongoing erasure of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous gold-mining knowledge in early sixteenth-century print culture—one of the ways in which the destructive impact of colonialism was made manifest. If these chapters risk portraying Iberians and other Europeans as an undifferentiated group in their understandings of metals, mining, and non-European peoples, the second section deftly avoids this pitfall by examining the varied ways in which early colonial Spanish and Portuguese commentators attached value to iron and its use in human societies, and how these ideas variously meshed with or suppressed non-Iberian forms of knowledge.
The third section turns to copper, a metal that—although frequently overshadowed by gold and silver in early modern narratives—was sought, worked, and variously valued by African, Europeans, and Indigenous communities throughout America. The chapters examine how copper surfaced in and shaped Spanish and Portuguese narratives of early colonial ventures in Florida and the wider Southeast, and how an early seventeenth-century proposal envisioned the formation of a copper-mining community in Venezuela that would rely on African technical expertise even as enslaved African workers were imagined primarily as “embodied labor” (p. 225). The fourth part of the study is dedicated to silver. By drawing on varied archival sources, mining treatises, and dictionaries, Bigelow seeks to demonstrate that Indigenous knowledges and political formations, in Mexico and the Andes alike, were vital to the silver-production process to an extent that has not been fully recognized by scholars. Further, through a deep linguistic study of early and mid-colonial Andean mining vocabularies, the author traces the intertwining and mutual shaping of the silver industry and the circulation of ideas about race, color, and caste. The concluding chapter, which examines the differing meanings that metal refiners in Europe and the colonial Americas attached to technological terms, foregrounds the distinctive amalgamation technologies that emerged in the New World and the ways in which those technologies became reimagined as European in origin in the eighteenth century.
Just as the four sections of this study demonstrate how Indigenous and African knowledges became incorporated into the colonial mining and refining milieux, so too they provide evidence of how those knowledges were continuously effaced or marginalized: these phenomena, Bigelow observes, are “two sides of the same imperially minted, globally traded coin” (p. 324). In the early colonial gold frontiers of the Caribbean islands, linguistic patterns reflect the speed with which Indigenous gold-mining knowledges were incorporated into colonial practices: among other examples that could be cited, Bigelow argues persuasively that the verb xamurar or jamurar, which means “to bail water” (an important part of the gold-mining process), has Taíno rather than Catalan roots—an origin that was quickly forgotten precisely because of the speed with which the term, and the action it describes, became integral to colonial gold mining.
Bigelow’s painstaking comparative work suggests that subtle linguistic patterns in colonial sources, among them the writings of Cristóbal Colón (Columbus) and Francisco de Oviedo, reveal more than a straightforward colonial incorporation of Indigenous technical mining terms. That is, they may also offer glimpses of Indigenous understandings of metals that made their way into colonial writing, whether or not Europeans were aware of these perspectives, and that differed substantially from the notions that Europeans brought with them to the Americas. For instance, Cristóbal Colón’s neologism coger oro (to gather gold), which he used in his discussions of gold extraction in the Caribbean, may reflect the “metallic cosmologies” (p. 24) of the Taíno, for whom gold, like plants and other natural phenomena, was a substance to be harvested at particular times of year, in cycles that were associated with the continuity of life. Although this interpretation of Colón’s striking usage is strongly suggestive rather than conclusive, it is no less valuable as a consequence. Without shying away from the violence of invasion, Bigelow decenters the European search for gold and instead affords vital glimpses of the place of this metal in Taíno lifeworlds and of how Native ways of knowing gold shaped the colonial world even as colonialism wrought destruction on Caribbean societies.
Although Mining Language focuses strongly on regions of America that became arenas of Spanish colonization, the author looks beyond both Spanish and Indigenous writings and vocabularies to include Portuguese, German, English, and French texts. To a significant degree, this expansive approach affords unique critical insights into the lives of metals and the ways in which they were made to matter in early modern colonial worlds that otherwise would remain inaccessible. On the one hand, Portuguese, Spanish, and English sources reveal striking similarities in the ways in which Europeans valued copper in the context of New World colonizing ventures. By contrast, a detailed comparison of late sixteenth-century medical dialogues shows that European understandings of iron were far from homogeneous and strongly shaped by the contexts in which they were produced. García d’Orta, for example, a Portuguese physician who wrote about healing practices while resident in Goa, resisted dominant Portuguese understandings of the value of iron by making room in his dialogic text for South Asian views of iron as a metal that was associated with paradise. Here again, Bigelow’s careful attention to the evolution of texts in translation reveals how non-European ways of knowing, and even the variations between Iberian forms of knowledge, were rendered invisible: when d’Orta’s writing was translated from Portuguese into other languages, these voices and nuances disappeared. In comparable fashion, a comparative reading of German, French, and English translations of Álvaro Alonso Barba’s mining manual Arte de los metales (Art of Metals) reveals the extent to which Andean understandings of metals and their categorization were erased in the process of translation.
If ambitious juxtapositions and comparisons of sources that extend well beyond New World arenas of Iberian colonization are a hallmark of this study, so too are the author’s efforts to bring colonial knowledge of metals into conversation with realms of colonial life—among these, imaginative constructions of race—that tend to be treated separately in existing scholarship. In the section on silver, the reader learns that colonial mining and refining practices in the Andes were shaped by notions of color and caste and how these were also reinforced by the silver industry. The late sixteenth-century transition to refining silver ore with mercury required new practices of ore sorting and classification, as well as new expressions to categorize ore and the particular forms of labor that amalgamation required. As Indigenous Andean mining terms were incorporated into a constantly evolving colonial mining lexicon, they became divorced from their original associations and eventually were “replaced with an emerging discourse of color, casta, and race” (p. 292).
By tracing these linguistic and lexical shifts, thereby foregrounding the dynamic nature of colonial Andean mining practices, Bigelow makes a major contribution to a growing body of scholarship that resists the marginalization of Iberia and Latin America in histories of early modern science and scientific innovation, even as it brings to light the colonial erasure of Indigenous and African mining expertise. Especially notable is the author’s convincing demonstration that technical change in mining and refining was deeply and actively intertwined with, rather than simply adjacent to, the emergence and consolidation of colonial patterns in racial thinking and the identification of difference. Precisely because of the profound importance of mining in Iberian empires, both economically and symbolically, there is a need for scholars to explore more fully the ways in which it was interconnected with and formative of wider realms of colonial life and thought.
Although the author’s principal focus is on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the book may serve as inspiration for studies that pursue its lines of inquiry more fully into the eighteenth century. Building on her exploration of the colonial vocabularies of silver mining and refining in the Andes, Bigelow demonstrates that eighteenth-century European writers, along with some colonial writers, increasingly portrayed colonial Latin American scientific innovations such as mercury amalgamation as the products of European science. Iberian scientific knowledges, then, were marginalized, just as Indigenous knowledges had been obscured in colonial writings. Yet, despite discourses of decline and the gradual eclipsing of Iberian science, the era of Enlightenment witnessed diverse state-led and private efforts to revitalize and expand mining in Iberia and colonial America alike. In-depth study of the colonial language of mining and refining in this period may well bring to the surface more richly textured narratives that go beyond the story of marginalization.
Mining Language is an exemplary and erudite study in how deep attentiveness to language and to the challenging work of locating and comparing disparate and often fragmentary sources can yield new insights into knowledges and agencies that have been rendered invisible by colonialism. It is also a vivid illustration of how a literary approach can breathe life into material phenomena—in this case, metals and the physical landscapes in which these metals were mined and refined—by bringing into focus the rich and varied textures of meaning that they generated across space and time. The book is essential reading as much for historians and anthropologists who specialize in mining and metallurgy in early modern worlds as for linguists; indeed, it should encourage historians, historians of science, and other non-linguists who study early modern mining, in Iberian worlds and also beyond, to attend far more closely to language and linguistic change over time. More broadly, the book should be of great value to scholars and advanced students of early modern spheres of Iberian colonization whose principal interests lie in the formation of ideas of race, in material culture, and in critical archival studies.
Note
[1]. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 4.
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Citation:
Heidi V. Scott. Review of Bigelow, Allison Margaret, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56381
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