Thinking through performance practices in nineteenth-century Latin America

This chapter makes the case that performance practices played a vital role in the redefinition and reorganization of knowledge in nineteenth-century Latin America-both as objects of intellectual reflection and as modes of knowledge production and transmission in their own right. As political upheaval and economic expansion led to the intensification of unequal encounters between different systems of belief and social codes, performances became sites of encounter, entanglement, and (often violent) conflict where contradictions between different epistemologies, cosmologies, and mediating practices were enacted. For this very reason, however, they were integral to the creation and codification of knowledge about science, medicine and healing, morality, religion, race, law, and other aspects of society.