Since pre-Incan times, native Andean people had worshipped their ancestors, and the custom continued even after the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Ancestor-worship however, did not exclude members of other cultures: in fact, the Andeans welcomed outsiders as ancestors. Invaders as Ancestors examines how this unique cultural practice first facilitated Spanish colonization and eventually undid the colonial project when the Spanish attacked ancestor worship as idolatry and Andeans adopted Spanish political and religious forms to challenge indigenous rulers. In this work, Peter Gose demonstrates the ways in which Andeans converted conquest confrontations into relations of kinship and obligation and then worshipped Christianized and racially "white" spirits after the Spaniards invaded, though the conquering Spaniards prevented actual kinship bonds with the Andeans by adhering to strict rules of racial separation. Invaders as Ancestors explores an alternative response to colonization beyond the predictable resistance narrative, presenting instead a creative form of transculturation under the agency of the Andeans. Invaders as Ancestors is a fascinating account of one of the most unusual transcultural encounters in the history of colonialism.
Author(s): Peter Gose
Series: Anthropological Horizons
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 404
City: Toronto
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Orthography
1 Introduction
Theorizing Colonial Power
Andean Ancestral Cultures
Early Modern Spanish Ancestral Culture
Theorizing Interaction
2 Viracochas: Ancestors, Deities, and Apostles
Brief Chronology of the Spanish Invasion
Conquest or Alliance?
Spaniards as Viracochas
Viracocha as Apostle
3 Diseases and Separatism
The Taqui Oncoy, 1564–65
Vilcabamba
The Rediscovery of 1569
The Taqui Oncoy, 1569–71
Aftermaths
4 Reducción and the Struggle over Burial
Reducción: Settlement Consolidation as Holistic Civilizing Project
Reducción as a Mortuary Regime
Crisis and 'Corruption'
Struggles over Burial
Aullagas, 1588: An Inquisitorial Quasi-Ethnography
Mangas 1604–05: Power Struggles within an Ayllu
Huachos and Yauyos, 1613–14: Circulating Cadavers
Checras, 1614: Baptizing the Ancestors
Syntheses of the First Campaign
5 Strategies of Coexistence
Reducción as a Spatial Regime
Ayllu Landscapes
Chinchaycocha
Pachacuti Yamqui and Guaman Poma: Updating Myths of Coexistence
Reducción and the Second Anti-Idolatry Campaign
More Struggles over Burial
6 Ayllus in Transition
Cajatambo, 1656
Santiago de Maray, 1677–1724
The Ayllu Eroded
7 The Rise of the Mountain Spirits
Yauyos, 1607–60
Canta, 1650–56
Cuzco, 1596–1697
Huamanga–Huancavelica, 1656–1811
Arequipa, 1671–1813
Analysis
8 Ancestral Reconfigurations in the Ethnographic Record
Differentiating the Ancestral: Mountain Spirits and Gentiles
The Ethnographic Mountain in Historical Perspective
The Ethnography of Death
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
