Paper short abstract:

By analyzing a global institution entitled to identify the legitimate heirs of mobile individuals within the early modern Spanish world, this paper will examine how social interactions produced individuals’ personal identity, and how this was reconstructed by actors during judicial trials.

Paper long abstract:

My paper will analyze the documentary sources of the "Juzgado de Bienes de Difuntos," a global institution of the early modern Spanish Empire appointed to collect the assets of deceased migrants and identify their legitimate heirs. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how social interactions produced individual's personal identity, and how this was reconstructed by actors during judicial trials.

Firstly, I will examine how individual's social identity was created in actual spaces (e.g. the homeland parish, the workplace) through performances (i.e. acting like "father and child" or "legitimate groom and wife") widely and publicly recognized by their networks of people. Secondly, how this social personal identity was used both by heirs, in order to claim inheritance rights, and by institutions, for the purpose of identifying them. In effect, social networks were summoned by individuals in order to bear witness and certify their identity in Spanish tribunals; at the same time, without the aid of a network of people, the authorities could not identify migrants.

Therefore, the paper aims to show that social identity appears to some extent to be, "local knowledge," tied to actual spaces and places where individual's personal identity is recorded in the memory of those networks of people into which s/he is incorporated. However, people's mobility continuously creates new spaces, beyond the original place where individuals are recognizable. Thus, social identity proves to be also "trans-local knowledge," as embodied by people who are constantly on the move.