Vernacular and Refined Astrology: Two Wares in the Market for the Future in Colonial Mexico

Is it possible to study popular and elite practices in the same analytic field? Scholars in religious studies have long debated this issue, with some offering terminologies and rationales that question a clear divide between "high" and "low" or elite and popular religion. Usually, these alternatives remain mired in an implicit dyad of some sort, such as domination and resistance, authorized and unauthorized, or "local and universal (non-local?). Inspired in part by Eric Van Young's call for cross-fertilization between economic and cultural analysis, this essay examines forms of astrology and quiromancia (palm reading) in seventeenth-century New Spain. By considering all such practices as part of a broader market of the future, we are better able to understand the cultural practices surrounding this form of "futuremaking," but also how colonial subjects created and maintained the boundary between high/low, popular/elite, and authorized/unauthorized.