Performing Local and Regional Level Administration and Politics: Ceremonies, Rituals and Routines (16th-18th c.)

Performing Local and Regional Level Administration and Politics: Ceremonies, Rituals and Routines (16th-18th c.)

Organisatoren
Hanna Sonkajärvi, Universidad del País Vasco, Leioa
Ort
Leioa, Basque Country, Spain
Land
Spain
Vom - Bis
12.12.2014 -
Url der Konferenzwebsite
Von
Uta Protz, Institut für Gestaltungspraxis und Kunstwissenschaft, Universität Hannover; Hanna Sonkajärvi, Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, Universidad del País Vasco, Leioa

What role did ceremonies, rituals and routines play in early modern local and regional level administration and politics and how does one best approach these practices in research? This was the question the one-day workshop, organised at the University of the Basque Country and supported by the research group ‘Calendario, conmemoraciones y nación: imaginario colectivo y lugares de memoria en el País Vasco (siglos XIX y XX)’ headed by Professor Jesús Casquete and financed by the Spanish Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación (HAR2011-24387), sought to address.

HANNA SONKAJÄRVI (Leioa) opened the workshop with a summary of recent discussions in the pertinent German historiography. She drew special attention to the work of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger1 and her notions of ceremony, ritual and performance, but also underlined that the latter term most likely needed closer definition.

The first section then addressed questions concerning the symbolic communication and performance in administration and local politics in Germany and the Netherlands. Starting off, BIRGIT NÄTHER (Munich) discussed the routines and forms of symbolic communication in Bavarian mid-level administration in the seventeenth century. Based on the administrative procedure of visitations, conducted in Bavaria between 1579 and 1774, she showed how routines were substantially inscribed into administrative files. Indeed, in an effort to present their own definition of the visitation procedure, the mid-level administration (Rentämter) consistently produced more information than was requested by the court in Munich. In this way visitations came to be organized on the basis of earlier documentation and took on a pre-defined form. Consequently, files, formed by routine, were not ‘passive’ documents simply containing information, but had an ‘active’ impact on the visitations themselves. The purpose of visitations, however, changed in the mid-seventeenth century when they evolved from a procedure intended to provide ‘good police’ at the local level to a procedure meant to raise broad and detailed information for the central administration. This change also had a direct impact on how the mid-level administration henceforth worked: Instead of manipulating documents, administrators now faced an ever-growing amount of standardised information compiled in response to the greater importance attached to financial issues. To counter the impression that procedures were changing and thus perhaps less reliable, the bailiffs decided to underline their personal role in the compilation process and started to add their names, positions and titles to file entries.

In her presentation on the emergence of a new type of portrait painting – the regents’ group portrait – in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, UTA PROTZ (Hanover) demonstrated how the combination of art historical and archival research can turn works of art into as reliable as valuable historical sources. To this end she criticized Giora Sternberg 2 who recently warned on the basis of an isolated example, the ‘Histoire du Roi’ tapestries from seventeenth-century France, that ceremonial records are generally manipulated in pictures and prints. To support her counterargument Protz compared and contrasted a series of regents’ group portraits from Haarlem, all well known to art historians, with a series of lesser known regents’ group portraits from Amsterdam. Whereas there exists only little archival evidence for the famous portraits painted by Frans Hals in Haarlem, more comprehensive archival records can be found for the works painted by Cornelis van der Voort in Amsterdam in 1617/1618. For the latter, showing the regents of various charitable institutions, it is possible to determine the commissioners and the sums paid for the individual portraits. The representative and performative function of the portraits was accentuated by the fact that they were not only very large in size, but also hung in public spaces, on festive days possibly even outside. In line with Svetlana Alpers 3, Protz therefore concluded that the aforementioned regents’ group portraits truthfully described ceremonies rather than manipulated them.

The second section considered the performance of ceremonies, rituals and routines in an intercultural context reaching beyond Europe. LORENA ALVAREZ DELGADO (Santander) examined the cultural exchange between various ethnic groups in the Spanish Philippines in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Following a general introduction to the topic, she focussed on the Spaniards’ construction of the ‘Chinese’ as a distinctive and increasingly stigmatized minority, the so-called ‘Sangleyes’ (meaning businessmen in Hokkien Chinese). The stigmatization was especially visible in the territorial isolation of the Sangleyes, concentrated, by decision of the governor, outside the Manila city walls from 1580 onwards. In addition, the Chinese population of the Philippines was classified into different groups, depending on whether they were baptized or not. The difference between Christian and non-Christian Chinese was made visible by the types of clothes and specific haircuts they were made to wear. The Spanish authorities were also concerned with Chinese festivities as these allowed for interchange between the different ethnic groups and thus were considered a potential source for the moral corruption of the majority population.

Rituals and notarization were at the heart of the presentation delivered by AUDE ARGOUSE (Santiago de Chile). Taking Santiago de Chile in the second half of the seventeenth century as her case study, she questioned the relation between notarization and the historian’s use of notarial archives and discussed the possibility of considering their construction a ritualized process. She noted that even though notarial records are remains (vestige) of the very moment they were written, neither the public at the time of their creation questioned their truth nor do historians today question the way they were created and used by contemporaries. Accordingly, what notaries actually did appears to have been largely left outside historical studies. What is known is that the Santiago notaries (escribanos) were not learned jurists (letrados), but worked and were widely consulted as legal facilitators and mediators in everyday life. Given that several people – the subjects, attorneys and interpreters, if not others – were involved in the creation of a notarial record, it actually is difficult to make out what exactly it represents. What emerges from Argouse’s study of five Santiago notaries is that notaries did not necessarily need manuals, but often resorted to their own archives for guidance and reference. It thus can be argued that archives – and not just the writing of notarial records – formed part of a repetitive process in which something was preserved for the purpose of an archive. For Argouse, notarial records therefore are not so much records of negotiations, but records that allowed people to behave in conformity with their beliefs and needs.

CHRISTINA BRAUNER (Bielefeld) approached ritual and writing by way of intercultural treaty-making on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gold and Slave Coast of West Africa. According to Brauner, the English 1753 treaty with the polity of Fante was a ‘paper fetiche’, combining writing and ritual, that is European techniques of obligation and African concepts of the sacred. Therefore, it is incorrect to argue, as much historical scholarship continues to do, that ‘the African’ was forced into the European legal form. Rather, events such as the conclusion of the 1753 treaty should be interpreted as intercultural encounters, characterized by mutual adaptations of ritual and writing. At the local level, actors took pragmatic attitudes towards the treaty and new hybrid forms of ritual emerged. Indeed, the Africans not only passively received the written documents, but also actively asked for European mediation and jurisdiction, even in intra-African conflicts, to set out decisions, agreements and compromises in writing. What follows is that practices and routines used in intercultural diplomacy, moreover when evolved over time, can be understood as ‘transcultural’, as some kind of new practices and routines existing ‘in between’ European and African cultures.

The third and last section focused on local and regional level administration on the Iberian Peninsula. THOMAS WELLER (Mainz), who chose to somewhat simplistically equate administrative procedure with ritual, discussed the rituals of inclusion and exclusion of foreign merchants in Iberian trading port cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He analysed the practices of their control and classification and their demarcation from the local community, whereby both the secular authorities and the Inquisition carried out highly formalized procedures of classification. However, examined more closely, these were actually the result of negotiations between various interested parties. The procedures equally served as symbolic demonstrations of the authorities’ efforts to keep the body politic clean form undesired elements. In fact, the line between foreign merchants, especially Protestants, and natives was drawn by ritual inside the Spanish territory. The acceptance by a community was less a matter of meeting formal criteria than of general consent. However, the silent consent of the community that often protected foreigners was fragile and could be broken by just one unfortunate incident.

The paper by HANNA SONKAJÄRVI (Leioa) provided an analysis of ceremonies and rituals around the reception and farewell of the judge-administrator and highest ranked royal officer of the province of Biscay (corregidor) by the political and administrative body of the Juntas y Regimientos de Bizkaia in the seventeenth century. The paper commenced with a ‘thick description’ 4 of a ceremonial sequence recorded in the accounts pertaining to the corregidor’s inauguration into office and the former corregidor’s farewell by the General Assembly of the province in 1625. Taking the division of symbols proposed by the sociologist Karl-Siegbert Rehberg 5 as a starting point, Sonkajärvi then analysed the case study in greater depth. What emerged was that the acts and symbols related to this ritual sequence contributed to a specific type of community building, permitting the Juntas y Regimientos, as an assembled political and administrative organ, to embody the government of the province. Therefore, the rite and, even more so, the presentation of the rite reproduced how the Juntas y Regimientos, through their clerk, saw themselves and how they wanted to be seen. The standardized language of the minutes can be interpreted as routine-bound behaviour, but of a kind which reflects the values and the expectations of the society as to the institutions to be enacted by the ceremony.

The province of Biscay was equally the focus of IMANOL MERINO (Vitoria-Gasteiz), who discussed the funeral rites of the Spanish royal family and the proclamation of kings in what he called ‘the composite province’ in the seventeenth century. These were analysed at two levels: the provincial and the local one. The province consisted of four main political entities, each with their own government institutions. This structure mirrored in the ceremonies marking the death of a king or queen and the proclamations of kings, since they were supposed to take place not only in Guernica, the seat of the provincial Juntas y Regimientos, but equally in prominent places in the other three entities. Similarly, the body politics of the city of Bilbao, which gathered at the City Hall, consisted of several and sometimes competing actors, such as the city council, the corregidor and the Consulado (representing the merchants guild). Not surprisingly, rivalries between different authorities and issues of social distinction emerged in public ceremonies. In the eighteenth century, for example, a dispute between the Bilbao city council and the local church authorities materialized regarding the ever more sumptuous funerary services, emulating royal funeral ceremonies. In the end, the civil authorities imposed a restraint on mourning.

To conclude: Most of the papers dealt with the way ceremonies, rituals and routines were presented, either by contemporaries or later generations, rather than with the events themselves. One of the main points of discussion, addressed by Birgit Näther, Aude Argouse and Hanna Sonkajärvi, was the way administrative actions and practices of archiving not only documented but also (re)shaped further actions through rituals and routines. The question of how ceremonies and rites were communicated was equally discussed by Uta Protz, who pointed to the wealth of reliable information harboured in paintings and prints and advocated an interdisciplinary approach, combining art historical methods with archival research, to unlock this potential, but also spot eventual factual manipulations. Lorena Alvarez Delgado and Christina Brauner, exploring ceremonies, rituals and routines in the Philippines and in West Africa respectively, underlined the usefulness of working with the concept of ‘transculturalism’ when dealing with the interaction between Europeans and non-Europeans. Considering a case study closer to home, Imanol Merino showed how royal ceremonies were negotiated between the provincial and local level in ‘the composite province’ of Biscay, at times requiring the civil authorities to step in to restore order. Overall, the papers – most of which presented the results of research in progress – demonstrated how ceremonies, rituals and routines played a great variety of roles in early modern local and regional level administration and politics. They also provided an insight into a number of research approaches, but equally underscored that important theoretical issues still need to be resolved.

Conference Overview:

Hanna Sonkajärvi (University of the Basque Country), Introduction

Section I: Symbolic Communication and Performance in Administration and Local Politics in Germany and the Netherlands

Birgit Näther (University of Munich), Routines and Forms of Symbolic Communication in the Seventeenth-Century Bavarian Intermediary Level Administration

Uta Protz (University of Hanover), Charity in the Dutch Republic: Philanthropy or Performance? – Reflections on the Emergence of a New Genre, the Regents’ Group Portrait

Section II: Performing Ceremonies, Rituals and Routines in Intercultural Context

Lorena Alvarez Delgado (University of Cantabria), Cultural Misunderstandings in the Spanish Philippines: Manila in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Aude Argouse (University of Chile/ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales Paris), Rituals and Notarization in Santiago de Chile, c. 1650-1700

Christina Brauner (University of Bielefeld), Ritual and Writing in Intercultural Treaty-Making on the Gold and Slave Coast, 17th-18th c.

Section III: Local and Regional Level Administration and Politics on the Iberian Peninsula

Thomas Weller (Institute of European History, Mainz), Exclusion or Inclusion? Foreign Merchants and Ritual in Iberian Trading Port Cities

Hanna Sonkajärvi (University of the Basque Country, Leioa), Receiving and Rejecting the Corregidor: The Ceremonies of the Juntas y Regimientos de Bizkaia in the Seventeenth Century

Imanol Merino (University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz), The Funeral Rites and Proclamation Ceremonies of Kings in Seventeenth-Century Biscay

Notes:
1 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Rituale, Frankfurt 2013; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne. Begriffe – Thesen – Forschungsperspektiven, in: ZHF 31 (2004), pp. 489-527.
2 Giora Sternberg, Manipulating Information in the Ancien Régime: Ceremonial Records, Aristocratic Strategies, and the Limits of the State Perspective, in: The Journal of Modern History 85 (2013), pp. 239-279.
3 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago 1983.
4 Clifford Geertz, Thick Description, in: Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York 1973, pp. 3-30.
5 Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Präsenzmagie und Zeichenhaftigkeit. Institutionelle Formen der Symbolisierung, in: Gerd Althoff (ed.), Zeichen – Rituale – Werte, Münster 2004, pp. 19-36.


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