I apologize, first, that I withdrew from this round table because I couldn’t come to San Diego. I wish I were there for what would be for me a fascinating discussion. I don’t know how useful it is at this point to add my 2 cents to the discussion, but I will.
Chad’s post from two weeks ago interested me very much. They seem right on target. (The chart of the rise and relative recent drop of Andeanist publications is a striking piece of quantitative research!) Building on part of what he wrote, I want to argue that the last several decades of colonial Andeanist historiography have focused disproportionately on these themes:
-indigenous ethnohistory, especially the question of pre-conquest cultural survival in the colonial period;
-cultural and religious history;
-the geographic area of what are now southern Peru and Bolivia – the Inka and Aymara heartlands;
-the sixteenth century on the one hand, and the eighteenth-century indigenous rebellions on the other.
Joanne Pillsbury’s wonderfully useful “Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530-1900” (2008), for instance, has a strong emphasis on the above themes. Two of the biggest inspirations to the scholarship of the last 30 years were John Murra (the long assimilation of brilliant and continuing work by anthropologists) and Guaman Poma (whose drawings launched a thousand book covers).
The two polls of primary-source historians in this blog, all of them Spanish priests and indigenous authors with a strong interest in Inka history – would be a good foundation for surveying the last 30 years of colonial Andean historiography. Reading recent historiography might give one the impression that the primary inhabitants of the colonial Andes (especially in the early period) were Spanish priests, Inka aristocrats, and kurakas.
To be clear, I have been under the spell of these same protagonists and themes since I started grad school. I’m finishing revisions on my book about the Reducción General de Indios of the 1570s. The scholars of ethno-cultural and religious history are the historians I most admire and have sought out as mentors, who worked on these themes before they became as commonplace as they are now. Also (as Chad made clear), many people have done and are increasingly doing important work outside these topics – especially Peruvian historians.
The themes of ethno-cultural and religious history sometimes are rooted in North Americans’ and Europeans’ romance of Andean space and place. To be embarrassingly confessional, I first fell in love with the Andes, traveling and meeting people as a post-college backpacker. Without rejecting the emotional roots of my own scholarship – stark mountains, Inka stonework, baroque churches, green parrots in colonial plazas, hours I spent talking to a cloistered Franciscan nun through a grille in Ayacucho – I’m trying to think about historical themes I’ve ignored.
After reading over the posted thoughts, I found myself wondering what we mean when nowadays we talk about the “Andean past”…where does it start, where does it end, what does it contain? So far, the only ‘safe harbor’ seems to be ethnohistory. In how far — in assuming this — are we excluding the possibility of , for example, visualizing migration as part of the evolution of the Andean past? When we shift our outlooks from an accent on lines of continuity to observing changes, we will find asking ourselves — like recently proposed by Rodrigo Montoya — about the future of the Quechua culture in Villa El Salvador and Puquio….
See you on Saturday! Saludos, mientras.
It occurs to me that the question of migration is linked to that of ethnogenesis. Whether from Puquio to Villa El Salvador, from Cabanaconde to Washington D.C. (in Gelles’ and Martinez’s “Transnational Fiesta”) or from Otavalo to the street markets of Seattle, Berlin and Tokyo, part of the future of a region’s past, in a globalized age, is the way migrants can become more self-conscious about their past and perform or re-invent their national / ethnic / cultural / regional identities through migration.