A01=Allison Margaret Bigelow
African diasporic mining communities
and medicine
Andes
artisan knowledge and practice
Author_Allison Margaret Bigelow
Caribbean
Category=JBSL11
Category=KNX
Category=NHK
colonial Latin America
comparative literature
copper refining
early modern Iberian empires
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gold panning
history of science
Indies
Indigenous knowledge of mining and metallurgy
iron medicine
linguistic data
literary analysis
Native South
projecting
scientific analogies
silver amalgamation
technical vocabularies
technology
translation
visual analysis
women miners
Product details
- ISBN 9781469654386
- Weight: 660g
- Dimensions: 165 x 238mm
- Publication Date: 18 May 2020
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism.
By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.
By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.
Allison Margaret Bigelow is assistant professor of colonial Latin American literature at the University of Virginia.
