E-Book Overview
Crowning a decade of innovative efforts in the historical study of law and legal phenomena in the region, Crime and Punishment in Latin America offers a collection of essays that deal with the multiple aspects of the relationship between ordinary people and the law. Building on a variety of methodological and theoretical trends—cultural history, subaltern studies, new political history, and others—the contributors share the conviction that law and legal phenomena are crucial elements in the formation and functioning of modern Latin American societies and, as such, need to be brought to the forefront of scholarly debates about the region’s past and present.While disassociating law from a strictly legalist approach, the volume showcases a number of highly original studies on topics such as the role of law in processes of state formation and social and political conflict, the resonance between legal and cultural phenomena, and the contested nature of law-enforcing discourses and practices. Treating law as an ambiguous and malleable arena of struggle, the contributors to this volume—scholars from North and Latin America who represent the new wave in legal history that has emerged in recent years-- demonstrate that law not only produces and reformulates culture, but also shapes and is shaped by larger processes of political, social, economic, and cultural change. In addition, they offer valuable insights about the ways in which legal systems and cultures in Latin America compare to those in England, Western Europe, and the United States.This volume will appeal to scholars in Latin American studies and to those interested in the social, cultural, and comparative history of law and legal phenomena.
E-Book Content
Crime and Punishment in Latin America
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Crime and Punishment in Latin America Law and Society since Late Colonial Times Edited by ricardo d. salvatore,
carlos aguirre, and gilbert m. joseph duke university press
Durham & London
2001
∫ 2001 duke university press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Carter & Cone Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Contents
List of Tables and Figures, vii g i l b e rt m . j o s e p h Preface, ix Acknowledgments, xxiii
Introduction c a rl o s a g u i rre and ri c a rd o d. s a lva t o re Writing the History of Law, Crime, and Punishment in Latin America, 1
part i Legal Mediations: State, Society, and the Conflictive Nature of Law and Justice c h a rl es f. wa l k e r Crime in the Time of the Great Fear: Indians and the State in the Peruvian Southern Andes, 1780–1820, 35 a rl e n e j. d í a z Women, Order, and Progress in Guzmán Blanco’s Venezuela, 1870–1888, 56 j u a n ma n u e l r . pa l a c i o Judges, Lawyers, and Farmers: Uses of Justice and the Circulation of Law in Rural Buenos Aires, 1900– 1940, 83 lu i s a . g o n zá l e z Work, Property, and the Negotiation of Rights in the Brazilian Cane Fields: Campos, Rio de Janeiro, 1930– 1950, 113
part ii The Social and Cultural Construction of Crime c ri st i n a ri ve ra- ga rza The Criminalization of the Syphilitic Body: Prostitutes, Health Crimes, and Society in Mexico City, 1867– 1930, 147 d a i n b o r g es Healing and Mischief: Witchcraft in Brazilian Law and Literature, 1890–1922 181 k ri st i n ru g g i e r o Passion, Perversity, and the Pace of Justice in Argentina at the Turn of the Last Century, 211 pa b l o p i c c a t o Cuidado con los Rateros: The Making of Criminals in Modern Mexico City, 233
part iii Contested Meanings of Punishment d ia n a pa t o n The Penalties of Freedom: Punishment in Postemancipation Jamaica,