Ontology and Temporality: A History of Innovation in Early Latin America

Recent scholarship in the so-called "ontological turn" has critiqued Western historicism for its tendency to translate and distort previous historical experience into modes of understanding that are themselves products of historical change. Yet this move towards a kind of radical historicism also raises thorny problems of method, analysis, and narrative. What is lost when one rejects using contemporary categories of analysis to understand past times? Are certain forms of translation essential to the historical project? This paper examines these issues through a series of case studies focused on the experience of time, or temporality, in colonial Mexico (New Spain). It examines ideas and practices related to (what we would call) economic and religious activity and probes the way that historical subjects conceived of the future and innovation.