H2020Индивидуална стипендия2015–2017

GLOBAL INHERITANCES · Personal Identification and Inheritance Rights in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2015-09-01 → 2017-08-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 185 076 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Накратко на български

Личната идентичност и наследствените права в Испанската империя (XVI-XVIII в.) се анализират чрез съдебни дела за наследства. Работата помага да се разбере как в миналото социалното признание от съседите е било по-важно от официалните документи за доказване на роднинство.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Global Inheritances: Personal Identification and Inheritance Rights in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

"The research focused on the analysis of evidence marshalled by individuals to prove their identities and parental relationships in the “Juzgado de bienes de difuntos” trials (Spanish Empire, 16th-18th centuries). The main result was to demonstrate how personal identity in the early modern period was linked less to the availability of official written records (in particular, to the use of parish records of baptism, marriage and death) than to the presence of written and oral evidence of how people behaved during their lives. As the sociology of contemporary family relationships demonstrates, the family bond is something socially constructed through recognition of certain actions qualified as “family practices” by a “relevant audience” (first of all, the neighbourhood networks). In other words, a Civil or Ecclesiastic authority did not fixed, once and for all, the individual identities of people and their kinship ties at birth through written registration. Personal identity required a constant operation of “ritual maintenance”, and it has to be conceived as “local knowledge”: it was not enough “to be a kin” to successfully claim the inheritance of a dead person in the Spanish colonial empire; it was necessary to “behave like a kin” during one’s life and be recognised as such by “relevant” neighbours (the official members of the community, i.e., the “vecinos”). In the last instance, this socially recognised kinship could be successfully used as a resource in a King’s tribunal in the event of an inheritance dispute. The main objective of the research was to contrast the theory of modernization and its anachronistic application to the pre-modern European World. At the same time, to show how, in the past, personal identity was conceived in a different way: this is useful in order to deconstructing the concept of ""personal identity"" and offering the scientific community, as well as society more generally, other ways of conceiving the process of identification."

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

The aim of the project is to study the ways in which the institutions of the early modern Spanish Empire identified the legitimate heirs of mobile individuals coming from the Iberian peninsula who died suddenly, often without making a will, while they were in the monarchy’s extra-European territories, thousands of kilometres away from their home towns and the places where their heirs lived. In the context of a global scale empire, and in the absence of reliable official documentation such as civil and property registers, both the property and identity of these mobile individuals was extremely uncertain. Who were the deceased? What property did they own? Who and where were their heirs? When they died thousands of kilometres away from Europe, how did the institutions transmit the inheritance to their legitimate heirs? How could the courts be sure who they were? How could heirs demonstrate their identities in order to safeguard their rights to succession? For those hundreds of thousands of subjects of the Catholic Monarchy now on the move around four different continents – and for their families too – identifying themselves and demonstrating their identities was an urgent and growing need.Demonstrating their identities in court was a fundamental pre requisite for heirs claiming inherited property and, even more importantly, ensuring legitimate property inheritance was a central priority of the institutions themselves. Over the course of the sixteenth century, in fact, the Catholic Monarchy set up specific courts, the so-called ""Juzgados de Bienes de Difuntos"" (courts charged with handling the estates of the dead), to take temporary possession of goods left without owners and for the purposes of identifying their legitimate heirs. This project will analyse the extraordinary and as yet little used documentation produced by these courts and concentrate its attention on the case of colonial Mexico, a crucible of empire building.""

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES · ParisКоординаторФранция