Abstract
This chapter addresses the intricacies of modernization in late-nineteenth-century Bogotá, Colombia. Building upon recent postcolonial understanding of the complicated relationship Latin America holds with modern capitalist world-systems, this piece uncovers the particular way in which, in republican Bogotá, increasingly globalized patterns of consumption melt into stubbornly colonial social structures, which gave to local expressions of modernity their distinctive, hybrid nature. It is within this context that the archaeological rediscovery of the life-story of a long-forgotten crockery merchant, who would become the mayor of the city of Bogotá by the turn of the twentieth century, allows us to shed some new, provocative light on a complex process of social, political, and economic transformation that has intrigued generations of scholars so far, but which has rarely been linked to the investigation of changing patterns of consumption in the recent past.
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Notes
- 1.
The official denomination for the territory corresponding to the present-day Republic of Colombia changed several times throughout the nineteenth century, making it historically inaccurate to use only one name to refer to that geographical and political entity over the 1800s. In this chapter, to avoid confusions, I use the term “New Granada” to designate a succession of at least six republican states that were created after the fall of the Spanish empire in what was formerly known as the New Kingdom of Granada (1550–1717), or the Viceroyalty of New Granada (1717–1819). The last of these states was established in 1886, permanently adopting the name “Republic of Colombia.”
- 2.
A primary sociocultural legacy from Medieval Spain, the concept of “purity of blood,” was first popularized in times of the Spanish Reconquista (eighth to fifteenth centuries AD), when access to many civil rights were reserved to individuals who could prove that they came from long-established Christian lineages that had not been contaminated by either Jewish or Moorish blood. Above all, and mainly in plebeian spheres, the notion of “pureza de sangre” served as a social filter to limit social mobility. In colonial contexts, it became the basis for the establishment of a complex system of mestizo castes resulting from the recurrent practice of miscegenation in Spanish colonial society.
- 3.
In 1999, historical archaeology was still not well established as an anthropological discipline in Colombia. Consequently, the importance of the trash deposit in Bolívar estate was not immediately identified at the time it was discovered. A significant portion of the deposit was destroyed by workmen participating in the restoration of the house, and only its lower layers were excavated by professional archaeologists. However, because archaeologists in charge were not familiar with the depositional characteristics of historical sites, they did not apply a proper methodology to recover the cultural material in the cistern. Moreover, photographs and detailed records of the excavation were never produced or went missing before they could be analyzed. Therefore, the interpretation of the process of formation of the deposit was based on the labels found on unwashed bags of archaeological materials and on cross-mending sherds found in the collection.
- 4.
About 1,112 ceramic fragments were recovered in the deposit in Bolívar estate. Of these, about 10% corresponded to undecorated porcelain, and 17.5% to plain whiteware. About 42% of those whiteware fragments could be classified as ironstone (for an exhaustive description and analysis of all the artifacts found in the cistern, see Gaitán Ammann 2005a).
- 5.
Archaeological data available for the late republican period in Bogotá have increased significantly in the last few years, mainly thanks to the development of some rescue archaeology projects within the historical district of the city (e.g., Gaitán et al. 2007). However, a consistent pool of ceramics data is still unavailable for the area, principally because of the lack of unity in ceramic typologies.
- 6.
Fitts (1999: 50) indicates that to be considered a tableware set, an assemblage must contain at least three different vessel forms in the same pattern.
- 7.
Isolated data from archaeological deposits related to working-class sectors in Republican Bogotá suggests that these groups were much more likely to consume colorful transfer-printed ceramics than their elite counterpart (Therrien et al. 2004; Gaitán et al. 2007). More data is presently needed to test this hypothesis.
- 8.
More often than not, local elites justified their prominent social standing through their inherent capacity to behave according to Western, civilized canons. Travelers’ accounts, etiquette codes, and humorous vignettes describing bourgeois social life in late-nineteenth-century Bogotá all contain compelling examples as to the way in which the capacity to abide by civilized manners was considered inherent to white race and Catholic religion, a posture that was obviously inherited from colonial times (see Gaitán Ammann 2005b).
- 9.
Diario de Cundinamarca, Bogotá, February 26, 1886.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Sarah Croucher and Lindsay Weiss for inviting me to take part in the 2008 SHA session of which this volume derives. I am very much grateful for their unfailing patience, keen observations, and constant encouragement throughout this project. Thanks also to Daniel Castro and all the staff at the Casa Museo Quinta de Bolívar, in Bogotá, Colombia, for all their support during the research which, more than a decade ago, allowed me to amass the data I use in this chapter. Heather Atherton, Martin Hall, Zoad Humar, and María Lucía Vidart also provided important comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. Any lack of clarity or error in the arguments I expose here are, of course, my entire responsibility.
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Gaitán-Ammann, F. (2011). A Life on Broken China: Figuring Senses of Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Bogotá. In: Croucher, S., Weiss, L. (eds) The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0192-6_7
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