Anonymous indigenous at the dawn of global synchrony. Charcas, Tlatelolco, and Zhaoqing in 1584

Abstract

In 1584, in three distant places, three local histories of three anonymous Indigenous came into synchrony. They never had any contact and never considered the possibility of coinciding, although their shared interest in mechanical clocks and the Gregorian calendar led them to converge at the same time in the same temporal metric. This paper studies three cases that, due to the disconnection, serve to exemplify how the phenomenon of global synchrony was configured through multiple poles of irradiation. An old curaca from the province of Charcas who made a khipu with Christian dates, an indigenous drawn in front of a clock in the Codex of Tlatelolco, and an enigmatic Canarian clockmaker at the service of the Jesuits in Zhaoqing, challenge the idea that the global standardization of time is the result of imposed forces or a matter that only concerned of high science.