Doing the Same But With Different Arguments: Matrimonial Dispensations in the Indigenous and Spanish Population of Colonial Charcas

Abstract

This paper deals with the use of matrimonial dispensations to marry relatives in prohibited degrees by Canon law, mainly among the indigenous peoples of Charcas (present Bolivia) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a source to understand social and religious practices, the dispensations provide a privileged place of observation, insofar as they constitute a gap between the norm and the social practice, and a space of interaction and agency, from the anthropological point of view, since the request for dispensations was part of the social and material reproduction strategies of indigenous groups. Even when, in this sense, the use of this legal recourse does not seem to differ much from what the population of European origin did, which secularly employed the same resource, this paper proposes that the reasoning behind the use of matrimonial dispensations, as well as the arguments employed varied in both socio-ethnic groups. From the vantage point of a global history of law which involves the Tridentine Church, expanded around the globe, dispensations are an example of the accommodation in terms of »time, place and circumstances«. Taking into account that the Council of Trent had extended matrimonial impediments, the granting of dispensations among the indigenous population serves as an example of the paradoxes of the Christianisation of marriage in colonial Hispanic American territories, which frequently forced the Church to dissimulate and make concessions rather than to restrict and discipline.

Keywords

• Dispenses
• Indian marriage
• impediments
• Council of Trent
• cultural hybridity