Unidad sin orden: milagros, rituales y caos en el Potosí barroco

This article discuses three threads of the narrative in Bartolomé de Arzáns’s Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí: the city’s mining wealth, natural disasters and, in the face of these, the negotiation between human being and the divinity. Arzáns interpretation of the events in Potosí remains religious, that is, in terms of its inhabitants’s sins and God’s intervention. In the two hundred years of history covered by Arzans, ethnic and power differences are presented as the cause of many of the constant tragedies and conflicts in the city. These in conjunction with their restoring miracles become landmarks of Potosí’s history. The back and forth between disgrace and miracle had an effect in the landscape of the city and the power practices staged in religious festivities and ceremonies, which, in turn, constitute a negotiation interweaving Giorgio Agamben’s ideas of liturgy as the real Christian politics with St. Agustin’s concepts of order and oikonomia.