Writing Entangled Histories of Early Modern Latin America

The word “entanglement” first appeared in Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martry d’Anghiera’s Of the New World. It is also a term of the zeitgeist, finding favor among physicists, philosophers and historians, among others. The paper will explore why “entangled” is a metaphor that is “good to think with” when considering Latin America and early modernity, and how it allows us to escape re-inscribing Eurocentric narratives into global histories. Entanglement’s connection to textiles reminds us of sophisticated technologies allowing the transformation of plant material into objects with stunning aesthetic properties as well as a multitude of other uses: clothing, storage and transport (baskets), furniture (hammocks), recording devices (quipu and wampum belts) which were developed in a multitude of Native American and African, as well as European, societies over millennia. In turn, textiles themselves became a source of powerful metaphors for understanding the nature of existence, such as the spider webs depicted in the Codex Borgia. Centering these technologies and interlinked ontologies allows us to take a stance of equality before cultures and to escape Eurocentric paradigms of stagist development and cultural progress. The connotations of “obstruction” and “confusion” embedded in “entangle” help us keep in mind the destructive, as well as generative, nature of the entanglements and radical asymmetries of power that have often accompanied early modern globalization. The metaphor of multiple threads forming a new mass attached to the 16th-century meaning of “tangle” encourages a genealogical rather than teleological approach to phenomenon, and the impossibility of keeping separate various kinds of agency in an interdependent world. And the 21st meaning used by physicists reminds us that seemingly disparate people, places, and events can be inextricably connected, and that “particles” matter.