The struggles of Andean expertise: technical knowledge-production and the social origins of the Enlightenment in Bourbon Peru (1720-1770)

Dissertationsprojekt von Daniela Oyola-Valdez

Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Arndt Brendecke

Abstract
In the past two decades, scholars have resisted the myth of an allegedly purely European Enlightenment of the late 18th century populated by elite intellectual philosophes and underscored its luminaries’ engagements with global epistemological exchanges. Yet, as Alexander Statman notes, we still know little about this global dimension. How did non-European practices of knowledge-production move outside the confines of their local settings, to then disseminate across Europe and beyond? To what extent did these local knowledges change or acquire new meaning in enlightened circles? In my dissertation, I engage with this questioning of studying the Enlightenment as an intrinsic European phenomenon and within the field of intellectual history by exploring the Andean social origins of what has been recently termed the ‘Global Enlightenment.’

My research studies the bottom-up, global impact of a series of texts that were written by historical actors who were involved in the social clashes that took place in viceregal Peru between 1720 and 1770 regarding the necessity of a general technical improvement and imperial revitalization. Great struggles arose when these metropolitan experts sought to undermine of the more empirical, Andean-based technical knowledge – such as the azogue amalgamation method, the fabrication of astronomical clocks to predict earthquakes, etc. – in favor of a European, more centralizing one, which could ease – in the eyes of the Bourbon administration – the integration of the heterogenous American corporate bodies to the Empire – and ultimately ensure its survival. I argue that these textual polemics defending and attacking local, indigenous, corporate technical practices made their way to scholarly texts which circulated in “enlightened” European circles. By doing that, my research aims to trace the Andean conflicts which were often at the root of these emerging Enlightenment understandings of the world.