Doing the same but whit different arguments: Matrimonial Dispensations in the indigenous and Spanish population in the colonial Charcas

IMOLESI, MARIA ELENA

Rechtsgeschichte Legal History

Jpurnal of the Max-Planck-Institut for European Legal History

Lugar: Frankfurt am Mein; Año: 2020 p. 131 - 142

1619 4993

This paper deals with the use of matrimonialdispensations to marry relatives in prohibited degrees by Canon law, mainly among the indigenouspeoples of Charcas (present Bolivia) during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As a sourceto understand social and religious practices, thedispensations provide a privileged place of observation, insofar as they constitute a gap betweenthe norm and the social practice, and a space ofinteraction and agency, from the anthropologicalpoint of view, since the request for dispensationswas part of the social and material reproductionstrategies of indigenous groups. Even when, in thissense, the use of this legal recourse does not seemto differ much from what the population of European origin did, which secularly employed thesame resource, this paper proposes that the reasoning behind the use of matrimonial dispensations,as well as the arguments employed varied in bothsocio-ethnic groups.From the vantage point of a global history oflaw which involves the Tridentine Church, expanded around the globe, dispensations are anexample of the accommodation in terms of »time,place and circumstances«. Taking into account thatthe Council of Trent had extended matrimonialimpediments, the granting of dispensations amongthe indigenous population serves as an example ofthe paradoxes of the Christianisation of marriagein colonial Hispanic American territories, whichfrequently forced the Church to dissimulate andmake concessions rather than to restrict and discipline.