Executions are fun….as long as you’re not dying

Everybody likes a good execution story…especially people who are going to write dissertations about them. I especially like his interpretation of violence as a receivable text. I study executions in terms of the text of the event. Though it is often gruesome, the process of imposing violence is often very informative. His accounts of the trials, tortures, and executions do a good job of showing exactly how violence was envisioned and used as a tool in the “vision of the victors”. Though I think he might have more usefully entitled this chapter: visions of the victors, since conceptually, he seems to aim at the multiplicity of perspectives over time.
His account of violence even helped me by illustrating the ways in which violence was linked to gender. Honor is the most important concept here. Previously I had looked at scenes of execution as purely political scenes, basically the first chapter of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. This adds an additional element. As a text one might use different inks to really a similar message: while the ultimate message might be political, the pictures on the lienzo of a violent scene might have different colored inks and pictures in addition to words.
The one quibble that I have with this book is the last chapter. Admittedly, Krippner-Martinez presented his book as a series of essays intimately tied to historiography, but while the last chapter was interesting in a very particular way and as an illustration of the ever-popular “shifting trends” in scholarship, I don’t know if it added greatly to my understanding of the conquest. Certainly this chapter has a specific purpose, which, it seemed to me, was to outline historiographical trends through the changes in fortune of the memory of Tato Vasco. My reaction here I think might also be because, until now we have only read sources concerning earlier eras and Krippner-Martinez takes his reader to the present with this chapter.