Ontologies of Personhood and the Body in Colonial Central America and the Caribbean

This thesis aims to examine ontologies of personhood and the body in the colonial Americas. Working from the idea that colonialism involves a meeting of different worlds, I will adopt a comparative approach to consider how different ideas about what it means to be a person - and to have a body - were negotiated across a section of the Spanish colonial world. I will synthesise and compare case studies from the Caribbean, Mexico and Yucatan - the Maya lowlands extending from Mexico into Belize and Guatemala (Graham 1998, 48) - examining a range of objects, sites and landscapes to consider the various ways in which colonial personhood was assembled. I aim to explore how differing ways of being a person affected the ways in which European and Indigenous groups related to one another, while developing a theoretical approach that offers a means to conceptualise and probe the various tensions and continuities that arose in historical periods of culture contact.
I will examine colonial personhood through three categories of case studies and materials: (i) the performance and presentation of the body; (ii) representations and imagery, and (iii) architecture and space, for example colonial churches and missions. This will be reinforced with ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence. I have the support of Dr Alice Samson (University of Leicester) and Dr Jago Cooper (British Museum) to draw upon the collections of the Mona Project on Isla de Mona in the Caribbean as well as data from the British Museum. Weaving between these three scales is essential, as looking purely at the human body would privilege Western knowledge systems. In many Indigenous communities, nonhuman animals, objects, architecture and landscape features may be regarded as people. I will therefore examine the role that other-than-human persons may have played in colonial interactions. The common identification by colonists of Indigenous practices as "idolatrous", for example, is fundamentally a failure to comprehend what constitutes a person in their world. Moreover, personhood is articulated and experienced in multiple ways even within a single context (Harris and Robb 2012); I therefore need to examine the diverse means through which it is materialised.
The recognition that societies possess different ways of being is an ontological issue. Ontological theories focus on the nature of being and highlight how the modern, Western world is one of many (Alberti and Marshall 2009; Alberti et al. 2011; Viveiros de Castro 1998). We therefore cannot assume that in contact periods there was an essential agreement as to what constitutes a body or person. I will question how communities engaged with radical difference and if personhood transformed over the period following contact. By drawing multiple regions together, I aim to compare local responses and developments, identifying any patterns. I will build upon the lack of focus in ontological theory on how multiple worlds intersect and affect, drawing upon the approaches of scholars such as Jane Bennett and Manuel DeLanda to explore ontologies as permeable and perpetually becoming.
At the heart of my project is a fascination with unpacking the origins of the modern world; studying the impacts of colonialism while acknowledging the historically and geographically contingent nature of modernist ontology is essential to this. By comparing diverse bodily encounters I aim to shed light on an understudied element of Spanish colonialism and gain an insight into historic events that have shaped the essential characteristics of modern society.