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.

Comments prepared for the Andean Studies Section Roundtable

CLAH/AHA, San Diego, CA

7-10 January 2010

Let me preface these comments by noting some limitations. It’s not my intention here to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of Andean History at the end of this first decade of the twenty-first century. It’s also not my intention to engage any number of specific works that currently define the field.  Rather, I’d like to reflect on some issues of ethnohistorical method and the social-cultural history endeavor as a provocation for future work in the field. Additionally, I come to this as someone who works, as it were, from the margins of the traditionally conceived heartland of Andean History—I’m a historian of Quito and the north Andes who generally works on the casta plebeians of the city in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. As a colonialist, I find myself on the margins of that periodization. As an Andeanist, I find myself on the margins of the heartland of Upper Peru and the Viceroyalty of Lima. And, as an Andeanist, I find myself on the margins of the area of scholarship I find most exciting- ethnohistory of the post-conquest period. And yet, that position within the scholarship gives me, I hope, an interesting perspective on the Future of the Andean Past.

Andeanists have produced an impressive body of literature over the past twenty years. In the course of thinking about these comments and out of curiosity, I prepared a bibliography using Zotero of journal articles published since 1990 in the HAHR, The Americas, the CLAR, the LARR, and the Revista de Historia de América. (Sorted by publication, by date—warning, I didn’t clean up the entries at all, and sometimes Zotero is a bit messy.). All told, there were 165 articles published in those journals that substantially dealt with the Andes.  Our production has been consistent in these venues (chosen as generalist journals on colonial and modern Latin America), with a spike in the early 2000s.

Apropos my comments above, this word cloud of titles and authors demonstrate the centrality of subjects dealing with indigenous peoples in Peru, with appropriate caveats. Wordle.net only allows you to control for common words from one language. And if the image is hampered by the prevalence of certain common Spanish words, a quick review of articles published since 2000 demonstrate the continued interest in indigenous topics. Out of ninety-two total articles, forty-one of them (45%) analyze subjects dealing with indigenous peoples. If we divide by our traditional disciplinary periodization, twenty-nine of sixty-three articles on the colonial period (46%), and twelve of twenty-eight articles on the modern period (43%), deal with indigenous issues. (The two other most frequently appearing topics are African and Afro-descendant issues, and gender, amongst many more. It’s worth noting that in the dynamic between Mesoamerica and the Andes, it seems Andeanist have been much more involved in gender history and ethnohistory.) Now, as a colonialist I am happy to note our out-production of our modernist colleagues. I don’t think that it is accidental that many people who go into Latin American history and are interested in the Andes gravitate towards the colonial period, in part because the historical problems of the colonial Andes still resonate. In fact, the vast majority of modern pieces counted above deal specifically with the so-called “Problem of the Indian” and indigenous peoples political engagement of the nation state.  The special place that indigenous people have in our literature points to the larger issue I’d like to broach in these comments.

In 1972, and again in 1989, James Lockhart reflected on the emergence and evolution of the social history of early Latin America.[1] In the essay, Lockhart suggests that the social history of early Latin America is marked by “a cycle of sources, from the more to less synthetic, with corresponding kinds of history,” moving through 1. Chronicles; 2. Official Correspondence; 3. Institutional Records; 4. Litigation; and, 5. Notarial records.[2] In 1972, he proffered that the history of Early Latin America was entering the end of its first phase of movement through the cycle, and social history based on notarial records was fairly dominant into the 1980s. Interestingly, Lockhart’s own trajectory from the late 1970s into the 1990s was to replicate in his own work this cycle now with indigenous language sources. The emergence of the New Philology, so to speak, as the leading form of ethnohistory in early Latin America led Lockhart away from Peru, where his original work was centered, and too Mesoamerica, where a large and complex body of indigenous language sources were available.[3]

It’s not accidental that this shift in focus occurred. There is nothing exactly like the New Philology school of ethnohistory in the Andes because, well, we have nothing like the density and luxuriousness of indigenous language sources from the colonial period that Mesoamerica has. And it is that absence of written native sources that has forced early Andean history, and early Andean ethnohistory in particular, to maintain an adventurous relationship with anthropology and the tools it offers to analyze the process of Spanish empire-building and its impacts on indigenous states, communities, and individuals. The anthropological encounter in early Andean history has been sustained by anthropologists and historians alike from the early days of our discipline, through the work of people like John Rowe, Franklin and Mariana Pease, Maria Rostworowski, John Murra, Karen Spalding, Steve Stern, Irene Silverblatt, Frank Salomon, Brooke Larson, Thierry Saignes, Karen Powers, Ward Stavig, and many more.

The modus operandi, in a generalized sense, of this encounter perpetuated a sort of reconstruction of the dual republics in the interest of identifying indigenous social, cultural, economic, and religious practices through Spanish imperial documentation. I say reconstruction, because ethnohistorical methods traditionally applied to this documentary corpus have sought to find that which is authentically indigenous with the laudatory aim of restoring Andean participants to their own history. Reading against the grain of the documentary record, Andean ethnohistorians have been able to develop sophisticated analyses of processes of acculturation, ethnic identity formation and even ethnogenesis, the penetration of market forces into the indigenous world, ayllu resistances and ayllu sufferings, the mingling of literary forms, changing gender and sexual practices, and more. In effect, the social and cultural historians of the early Andes have extensively documented indigenous agency in the complex processes of conquest, imperial formation, and imperial crisis. There is, of course, a caveat to be inserted here. Writing in 1995 on the issue of native market participation, Steve Stern suggested that the ethnohistory of native intervention in market mechanism is too complex to analyze under a simply rubric of a static European market logic, opposed to a Traditional Andean logic.[4] The difficulty of identifying and fully grasping native motivations for market intervention, according to Stern, diminish our ability to simply bifurcate the European and the Andean, and instead point to the need to mine from the documents what he calls a third “colonial cultural logic.”

Indeed, I would argue that Stern’s warning from the case of native intervention into the market form could be generalized out into the many forms of historical inquiry that currently define early Andean history. Interestingly enough, I came to this conclusion in my own work re-reading Lisa Sousa’s ethnohistorical treatment of Mixtec and Zapotec women’s use of criminal courts in colonial Oaxaca.[5] As a beginning graduate student in the late 1990s, I had found Sousa’s article an exciting application of ethnohistorical methodology to understand native women’s own particular use of Spanish institutions (in this case criminal litigation) to further a traditional Indigenous cultural logic. I was surprised by the extent to which women in colonial Oaxaca utilized the courts, the types of disputes they brought there, and the logic of argumentation they utilized to defend themselves in court. In particular, Sousa claimed that, “The fact that women brought criminal suits without the approval or representation of a male authority figure further highlights the absence of a patriarchal tradition in which women’s identity is shaped by her relationship with a patriarchal figure, either her husband or her father.”[6] The active participation of Mixtec and Zapotec women in Spanish courts was interpreted through the filter of assumed prescriptive norms of Spanish patriarchalism, and thus as evidence of the preservation of native values of gender complementarity.

I returned to Sousa’s piece many years later after reading hundreds of cases of women’s litigation from Quito dating form 1765 to 1830. And, I was startled at the similarities between Sousa’s Mixtec and Zapotec women, and my own casta, African, and Andean litigants from the Barrios of Quito. The same utilization of the courts, the same logics of argumentation, the same types of disputes, and notably, the same regularity of women acting in criminal (and civil) suits without the permission or representation of male authority figures forced me to reconsider the extent to which a binary of European/Andean cultural logics gets us any closer to real social practice.

Which brings us back to the particular engagement of anthropology and history in the Andes.  Because of the close relationship between the two in the historiography of our disciplinary corner, history of the early Andes avoided many of the excesses of the more linguistic-theoretical path to the new cultural history. There already existed a long established practice of approaching indigenous culture through ethnohistorical means that continues to produce new and interesting work. See, for example, the recent and really compelling articles by Jeremy Mumford and Karen Graubart published by the HAHR, just to name two.[7] It’s also worth noting, from the perspective of Lockhart’s cycle of sources that Mumford’s article utilizes indigenous litigation, and Graubart’s notarial records. Are we approaching the end of another cycle? The thought brings me back to the future of the Andean Past. What I would like to call for in our roundtable is a return to institutional records, litigation, and the notarial books with the tools of ethnohistory to pick up where the social historians left off by re-examining the many varieties of rural and urban plebeians, castas, poor Spanish, Africans and Afro-descendant peoples, men and women. Andean ethnohistory, or as Mumford defines it, “the application of anthropological methods to describe Andean culture from historical documents,” offers us excellent methodological tools for getting at the lives of those not primarily responsible for making the documentary record.[8] This ethnographic approach must still avoid the tendency to posit any of the social groupings I’ve listed above as simply oppositional to a reified European cultural logic. Rather, ethnohistory could provide us the methodological means to grapple with the multivalence of social positions in early Andean society, where the large variety of subject positions that interacted in the individual, the barrio, the group, etc. were constitutive of and through each other.

Chad Black

University of Tennessee

[2] Lockhart (1999): 30.

[3] For a recent overview of the New Philology, see Matthew Restall, “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History,” LARR 38.1 (2003): 113-134.

[4] Steve J. Stern, “The Variety and Ambiguity of Native Andean Intervention in European Colonial Markets,” in Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris, ed., Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): 78-79.

[5] Lisa Mary Sousa, “Women and Crime in Colonial Oaxaca: Evidence of Complementary Genders Roles in Mixtec and Zapotec Society,” pp. 199-214, in Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett, ed., Indian Women in Early Mexico (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1997).

[6] Sousa (1997): 211.

[7] Jeremy Ravi Mumford, “Litigation as Ethnography in Sixteenth-Century Peru: Polo de Ondegardo and the Mitimaes,” HAHR 88.1 (2008): 5-40; Karen Graubart, “The Creolization of the New World: Local Forms of Identification in Urban Colonial Peru, 1560-1640,” HAHR 89.3 (2009): 471-499.

[8] Mumford (2008): ft.nt. pg. 8.

*Cross posted at parzcoydigo.

The problem that arose with the insights about the Andean ecosystem and its social and political implications was that most insights came about in the 1970s and early 1980s, with the examination of early colonial records by John Murra and the many anthropological studies done in the ¨ethnographic present¨ during the same time period. In addition to Murra, the work of the scholars associated with the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (where Murra published as well) were most influential and included work by Bolivianists as well, such as the seminal work by Tristan Platt and Thierry Saignes. In addition, with the notable exception of Platt, few scholars were preoccupied with the nineteenth century, but instead focused on the colonial period or the present. It meant that, with few exceptions, the post-independence period until the 1960s was mostly uncharted territory until very recently. At best, scholars who worked on this period used Andean paradigms developed for the late twentieth century or the colonial period tried to find continuities with those eras, bridging through ¨upstreaming¨ or ¨downstreaming¨ the vacuum in between. This worked to a large extent for the economic analysis of Andean peasant agriculture and behavior because, as mentioned above, the unique geography of the Andes created patterns that were discernible over the longe durée. It led to the insight that, for example, in many cases hacienda regimes in the highlands and valleys were based on Andean principles of economic exchange as well and that at times indigenous communities were becoming more hacienda-like as commercialization and class differentiation advanced in certain Andean villages.

The emphasis on land tenure systems and economic behavior of peasants in the Andes has receded in the past few decades, especially as the Peruvian agrarian reform of the late 1960s and early 1970s faded once the political bankruptcy of the military-directed reforms became evident in the explosion of violence under the Shining Path and Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru in the 1980s. Instead, the focus of the debate shifted towards another problem: How was it possible that a guerrilla movement could have such great success in a region that had been under government control for centuries? The issue quickly zeroed in on what apparently had been the inability of the republican Peruvian state to incorporate politically the Andean peasantry. Florencia Mallon, who had engaged in the earlier debate of the economic incorporation of the peasantry in the Central Highlands of Peru, expanded her earlier study to show how the peasants in Junín had created their own nationalism during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), only to be suppressed afterwards by Andrés Cáceres, the very political ally who had earlier benefited from the peasant montoneras that rode to the rescue against the Chilean invaders during the La Breña campaign. Mallon’s work, which compared Peru to Mexico in the 1850s and 1860s, engendered a whole new field within nineteenth-century studies, the integration of subalterns (particularly peasants) into the nation-states of Latin America. It also revitalized the study of peasants in the Andes, where most studies agreed with Mallon’s results about the incapacity of the Peruvian state to incorporate indigenous peasants as full citizens. (Walker, Thurner) Only Cecilia Méndez recently has shown that this issue was more complicated than that, demonstrating that the indigenous peasants of Huanta, rather than having been marginalized, were able to rebel effectively and impose their leaders on the Peruvian state. They were able to do so because they had always been ¨plugged in¨ to the economy and larger Peruvian society as muleteers and coca traders.

In Bolivia, the debate has taken a different form and recent events, just like in Peru, have given the historical works a different twist than they had before. Two events dominate the historical analysis of the Bolivian peasantry, the 1953 agrarian reform and the election of Evo Morales in 2005. The 1952 Revolution, the context within which the agrarian reform occurred, created a different dynamic between state and peasantry. After all, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario after 1953 did integrate the peasantry into the body politic as clients of the government (admittedly, in certain areas such as Cochabamba with considerable difficulty (see Kohl, Gordillo)), but, as Tristan Platt asserted, as peasants rather than Indians. In fact, Platt’s work in 1981 showed that during the nineteenth century the indigenous communities engaged the Bolivian state in many ways, but through their own, Andean concepts attenuated by the centuries of colonial rule, in a complex relationship mediated by ideas of reciprocity and the application of binary concepts of different indigenous and creole-white spheres.

Since the publication of Platt’s Estado boliviano y ayllu andino, others have proposed other ways of looking at the relationship between state and the Andean peasantry. Most prolific in this sense has been Marta Irurozqui, who asserted in a number of works that indigenous communities rebelled effectively during the nineteenth century and thus were able to affect the constitution of the nation-state and also the ruling creole elites’ visions on the Indians. I have also argued that the Bolivian elite’s awareness of being surrounded by indigenous communities, especially in the mining regions, led to the application of a liberal solution to communal lands. The 1874 legislation provided for the measurement and distribution of lands to the Indians themselves rather than their forced sales to others because the mining elites realized that the state was too weak to do otherwise. Rossana Barragán’s review of legislation regarding citizenship rights and how they changed has also brought many new insights into the rights of indigenous peoples as citizens.

A number of transformative works on Andean peoples in twentieth-century Bolivia all show consistently the subversive use of memory and legislation that created a separate reality that the state later adopted. These works were inspired by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s slim book on highland indigenous resistance in Bolivia, Oprimidos pero no vencidos, published in the early 1980s. In a kind of manifesto of the Aymara-led Katarista movement that emerged in the 1970s against the military dictatorships of that decade, the book posits that the Aymara and Quechua created historical memories that persisted into the late 20th century and led to the creation of ethnic movements that pushed for a return to democracy and dignity for Andean peoples. The research done by the Taller de Historia Oral Andina (THOA), of which Rivera was one of the founders, led to many new insights into indigenous movements, most importantly that of the caciques apoderados, indigenous activists who moved from village to village trying to fight through legal means the usurpation of community lands after the liberal reforms of the late nineteenth century. Waskar Ari’s doctoral dissertation went into greater detail than anyone on this important movement. More recently, Laura Gotkowitz’s new book on indigenous movements centered on Cochabamba has shown the persistence of these leaders and how they created a parallel legal justification and apparatus that began to be put into effect with the 1952 Revolution.

The emergence of Evo Morales and his movement that has astutely tied indigenous issues to his larger agenda of union-based socialism, has led to a revisiting of the meaning of Bolivia’s indigenous past. Gotkowitz’s book fits perfectly within this trajectory, as the 2009 Constitution in many ways has made reality what certain strains of the indigenous movements have proclaimed for so long. But the resurgence of indigenous peoples and peasants in general under the MAS banner, now as local officials and national legislators, has given new meaning to past events as the new regime creates new historical myths and also provides for a rereading of historical events. In addition to a natural interest in the Túpac Katari/Tomás Katari revolts of the 1780s, recently reanalyzed by Sinclair Thomson and Sergio Serulnikov (as well as new works on the Oruro Creole revolt by former politician/historian Fernando Cajías and historian Oscar Cornblit), the Federalist War of 1898-9 has warranted new interest. While the classic account by Ramiro Condarco Morales (1964) still provides much information, new works by Pilar Mendieta and Forrest Hylton show more clearly the indigenous separatism of a faction of the Aymara rebels who initially aided the Liberal Party in overcoming the ruling mining elites of Sucre and Potosí. In addition to putting a new spin on the Aymara-Creole oligarchy divide (seemingly so similar to political events in the early twenty-first century), both authors show the class divisions among the indigenous members as well, where the wealthy ayllu members were punished for their anti-communal behavior by the revolutionaries led by Juan Lero. This also shows us that we must pay more attention to economic factors in Andean communities, a task upon which I am now working.

Where does all of this leave us? The events of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first have provided the need for reflection over the role of Andean peoples since independence. It is clear that the Indians will not go away; they appear to be stronger today in many ways than in the past. It means that our studies into that past are more vital today than ever, for with hindsight we can see issues that we could not before, such as the importance of historical memory, as well as the persistence of institutions and ideas that, although transformed over the centuries, maintain their force today. In fact, some government officials in Bolivia are using the insights from THOA and anthropologists to establish what the customs of Andean ayllus were to incorporate into present-day laws. Nancy Postero has written about the use of Andean utopias in Bolivian politics. This vitality in Andean studies is, of course, a kind of “upstreaming” (or is it “downstreaming”?), as we reinterpret the past to make sense of the present. But it is precisely this kind of constant interaction between present and past that keeps this field so fascinating and so relevant today.

Erick Langer
Georgetown University

Thus far in the results from our last poll, on writers of the 16th century, Pedro Cieza de Leon is maintaining a commanding lead with seven of twelve votes cast. Up for your consideration now, “historians” of the 17th century. In deference to Noble David Cook’s comments on the first poll, I’ve added scare quotes to the word -Historian- to broaden its application. For your consideration, we have authors whose works were ethnographic, ethnohistorical, appeals for advocacy, and traditionally historical.

Cast a vote, and tell us why in the comments!

To kick things off for this year’s CLAH roundtable on the Future of the Andean Past/Futuro del Pasado Andino, we offer the first of a few polls of Andean “historians” of the Andean Past. We start with the sixteenth century, and a handful of chroniclers from the early days of the Spanish empire in the Andes. Please vote for the “historian” you think most important, and feel free to add your reasons with the comment link below.

Kathryn Burns (UNC), Erick Langer (Georgetown), Jeremy Mumford (OleMiss), and Chad Black (UTK) are currently scheduled to participate, along with panel organizers Rachel Sarah O’Toole (UCI) and Kimberly Gauderman (UNM). The panel facilitators will be posting short essays on the current state of the discipline in the months leading into the conference. These pieces are intended to provoke thought and discussion on the method, theory, and content of the future of Andean history. We welcome any comments and look forward to your participation.

So, please check back this Fall and join in the discussion, and then come participate in the live discussion in January. It should be a nice time to visit San Diego.