Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies:
Transformations in Indigenous Andean
Sovereignty
Cerros, Kurakas y Momias: Transformaciones de la Soberanía
Indígena Andina
Peter Gose
Abstract
This essay argues that Andean mountains have not always embodied
indigenous sovereignty as they do today. The lordly titles that mountains now
bear were, until the second half of the colonial period, held by ancestral
mummies and living indigenous political authorities in a previous
configuration of power. Case studies show how that earlier regime “returned
to the earth”, a development which eventually led to the rise of mountains as
sovereign entities. This essay explores the processes by which this complex
transition occurred and emphasizes the insurrections of 1780-4, which
replaced the earlier regime with a more democratic community-based
authority, to which modern mountain lords correspond.
Keywords: cerros; momias; poder; Andes; pachakuti
Resumen
Este artículo sostiene que las montañas andinas no siempre han encarnado la
soberanía indígena. Los títulos señoriales que tienen hoy las montañas
estuvieron en manos de las momias ancestrales o de las autoridades políticas
hasta la segunda mitad del período colonial. Varios casos muestran cómo
aquel régimen anterior “volvió a la tierra”, un desarrollo que llevó
eventualmente al surgimiento de las montañas como entidades soberanas. Este
trabajo explora esta compleja transición, y enfatiza que las rebeliones de 178084 reemplazaron el régimen temprano por una autoridad basada en un sistema
comunitario más democrático, que se correspondía con los modernos señores
de las montañas.
Palabras clave: cerros; momias; poder; Andes; pachakuti
Recibido: 15/09/2015 - Aceptado: 22/07/2016
Población & Sociedad, ISSN-L 0328 3445, Vol. 23 (2), 2016, pp. 9-34
Población & Sociedad, ISSN-L 0328 3445, Vol. 23 (2), 2016, pp. 9-34
Introduction
Indigenous Andean understandings of sovereignty have long taken
the form of localized divine kingship, in which a lordly figure not only
embodies political authority but orchestrates the circulation of life
across the landscape such that power and fertility become inseparable.
The form in which this lordly power manifests itself has varied
significantly over time, however. This essay explores those
transformations during the colonial period. The basic argument, which
I have made at length elsewhere (Gose, 2008), is that an early colonial
regime characterized by hereditary rulers (kurakas) and the worship of
their mummified ancestors gave way to a late colonial regime in which
mountains subsumed these previously separate manifestations of
political power and ancestral authority. In the process, mountains
appropriated such lordly titles as apu, wamani, mallku, etc. that earlier
belonged to the founding ancestors and living rulers of regional
political jurisdictions. As the ethnographic record shows in extensive
detail, mountains came to personify state power but link it to the
indigenous peasantry’s concerns with agrarian fertility. When viewed
historically, this ethnographic pattern introjected previously
independent human powers into the landscape. Arguably, mountains
represent an indigenous sovereignty that, according to the Andean
epochal formula of the pachakuti, “returned to the earth” within which
it may be subordinate but is still ongoing and capable of returning to
dominance. Indeed, the ambiguity of contemporary Andean mountain
lords is that they seem to embody both the latency and the towering
geographical presence of indigenous power.
Three groups of questions will organize this discussion. First: from
what baseline did these transformations occur? In what encompassing
regime did indigenous hereditary rulers and ancestral mummies once
exist as entities independent of their later subsumption by mountains?
What role did mountains play in that earlier regime? Second: by what
historical processes did indigenous sovereignty “return to the earth”
during the colonial period? Was a catastrophic event involved, as in
Andean epochal narratives, or (as I propose) did a multitude of
developments combine to produce this result? Finally, I will return to
the ethnographic record as an outcome of these long historical
processes, and explore whether contemporary mountain deities are
really the result of a pachakuti that pushed indigenous sovereignty
underground.
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Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
Point of Departure: Precolumbian and Early Colonial
Ayllus
Before, during, and after the Inka empire, Andean society consisted
of localized ancestor-worshipping polities called ayllus. The cult of
mummified ancestors formed the core of Andean religion during this
time (Zuidema, 1973: 16, Conrad & Demarest, 1984: 89-90), but it was
equally a political and economic phenomenon. Ayllus were descent
groups that worshipped a founding ancestor who gave it a corporately
held resource base (usually land) and a genealogical reference point
for calculating rank within the group (Isbell, 1997: 98-9). Descent-based
ranking coincided with territorial subdivision to create a segmentary
system, in which larger ayllus hierarchically incorporated smaller
ayllus as components (Isbell, 1997: 115). Thus, ayllu designated units of
varying size within a system of recursive segmentary distinctions
(Gose, 1993, 1996a). To these territorial groupings corresponded a
ranked hierarchy of political offices, one of which was paramount in
the polity as a whole. Each of these offices gave its holder a specific
title, but the Inkas usually called them all kurakas (elders).
These grandees were exempt from tributary labour and directed
that of their peasant subjects. They oversaw the internal affairs of their
group such as the formation of domestic groups, the allocation of land,
public works, dispute resolution and ritual, and represented it to the
outside in diplomacy and warfare. Kurakas’ power arose from control
over these key mediations of group life: it was largely governmental
and collectivist in idiom but nonetheless conferred significant personal
privileges on the office holder. Various administrative, military, and
priestly positions proliferated around their office, all with some
exemption from tributary labour. Either the kuraka’s immediate kin or
talented commoners might occupy them, which could exacerbate or
ameliorate the class-like nature of the distinction between kurakas and
their subjects. The balance struck here varied but seldom excluded
commoners entirely. Notions of shared descent from, and dependence
on, ancestral deities undoubtedly contributed to notions of a common
good that inhibited the development of class sensibilities. Yet that
same ancestral ideology simultaneously underscored the ayllu’s
internal hierarchy and imposed several sumptuary markers that
rigidly separated kurakas from their subjects including rights to
polygamy, ritual sponsorship, the use of a stool of office (tiana), and to
receive worshipful gestures of obeisance (mocha) also due to
mummified ancestors (Martínez Cereceda, 1995). The privilege of
being carried in a litter marked the elite end of this spectrum, and
applied to both living rulers and ancestors, thereby further equating
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them (Martínez Cereceda, 1995: 91-101). Ancestors amplified kurakas’
social distinction into full-blown sacralization. By extension, they
made divine kingship into the basic cultural model of sovereignty for
Andean political units of all sizes.
Andean ayllus were above all descent groups. They mummified
their dead and conserved them in caves, where they formed a kind of
parallel society with whom the living interacted primarily during
seasonal rituals (Doyle, 1988: ch. 4; Mills, 1997: ch. 2). The premise was
that the mummified dead mediated the access of the living to distant
sources of water key to agrarian practice (Gose, 1993). During seasonal
events of ancestor worship, the living drank copiously on behalf of the
dead and even danced with them on their backs, hoping for agrarian
fertility and oracular communication in return (Doyle, 1988; Gose,
1996b). As the head of an ayllu, the kuraka sponsored and officiated in
these rituals, thus linking his socio-political power to the broader
circulation of life that ancestors mediated. Indeed, the kuraka’s own
ancestors formed a direct link back to the founding ancestors (mallki)
who were thought to have initially colonized the ayllu’s territory,
established an agrarian patrimony there, left descendants, and turned
themselves into deities, often by spontaneous petrification. These acts
were highly interrelated (Isbell, 1997: 82, 98-9). The patrimony
sustained the descent group, which expressed its dependence and
unity by worshipping the founding ancestor, whose role as a deity was
to ensure the patrimony’s productivity and the descent group’s health,
increase and prosperity. Founding ancestors bore lordly titles (apu,
wamani, mallku, etc.) that passed down the chain of descent to the living
kuraka. The directive, animating qualities of the kuraka within the ayllu
thus derived from the founding ancestors, with whom the kuraka was
a privileged mediator.
Founding ancestors epitomized not only the ayllu’s patrimony and
sovereignty but its relations with the outside. Indeed, one defining
feature of the mallkis is that they always came from somewhere else
and journeyed to the places where they were to found descent groups.
Seasonal events of ancestor worship recalled these journeys in several
narrative forms. Ballad-like songs (takis) were probably the most
prominent. Their basic format was an itinerary, starting in Lake
Titicaca or the Pacific, maximal paqarinas (dawning points) where the
primordial ancestors of all Andean localities came into being and
began their dispersal towards the localities they were to colonize. From
these sites, they travelled underground or were taken up into the sky,
only to resurface or be deposited by lightning-strike at secondary
paqarinas, themselves usually large lakes (like Chinchaycocha or
Choclococha), from which further dispersal occurred. As they entered
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Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
a region on their subterranean or celestial journeys, progressively
smaller cohorts of ancestors would typically rejoin the earth’s surface
on a mountain top, also a paqarina, from which they further dispersed.
On arrival in a locality “some came out of caves, others from
mountains, others from springs, others from lakes, and others from the
feet of trees”.1 From such terminal paqarinas, ancestors built settlements
and agricultural infrastructure or conquered other groups already in
the area. Thus, they created a patrimony to sustain the localized
descent groups (ayllus) they established. With these exemplary deeds
accomplished, they ended their days as human beings, frequently by
turning into stone, an act that signified deification and a permanent
accumulation of life, not ordinary mortality.2
Several characteristics of mountains as paqarinas are worth noting
for future reference. First, mountains alone did not define paqarina
landscapes nor were they the highest-ranking parts of them. Rather,
mountains were a threshold or mid-point between the distant and
prestigious origins of the ancestors in large bodies of water and the
local polities they established at the end of their journeys. Second, the
whole of a mountain was seldom salient as a paqarina, since the latter
was always a fleeting, localized ancestral contact with the surface of
the earth, an outcropping or a lightning-strike in a journey that was
otherwise subterranean or celestial. The relevant site was usually a
specific shrine (waka), not the mountain as a whole.3 Many accounts
locate these shrines on the peaks of mountains, some normatively.4
Often they were built around a more particular feature such as a cave 5
or crag. More precisely, the term waka meant “holy place or object” and
therefore referred not only to shrines but also to the sacred relics they
contained, typically ancestral mummies or statues including sculpted
or unmodified crags on the mountainside, all of which represented the
founders of local groups.6 Albornoz mentions the snow-capped
volcanoes of Arequipa and Southern Ayacucho as paqarinas, and
stipulates that the Inka gave them retainers (mitimaes), fields, herds,
gold, silver and cloth, and rebuilt many of them (1967: 20-1).
Presumably he did not rebuild the mountains themselves but statues
or architectural sites on them, which probably represented the
ancestors and their points of emergence. Similarly, Albornoz burned
paqarinas on mountains (Millones, 1990: 265-8, 274-8, passim),
suggesting that they consisted of wooden constructions or statuary.
Third, mountains, like all other paqarinas, were not understood as
primordial geology indifferent to and outlasting human action, but
were made by the ancestors’ acts of emergence, their rivalries and
prodigious feats of strength.7 Mountains were not agents here but the
product of the ancestors’ subterranean burrowing and emergence.
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Alternately, celestial contact could create mountains, as in Cauri when
an ancestor fell from the sky onto a high plain, which swelled up like
a globe, and ultimately became a mountain. 8 In ayllu-based regimes,
the landscape took the ancestors’ imprint but remained distinct from
and subordinate to them. Consequently, it did not bear ancestral titles
like apu, which were confined to high-ranking kurakas and mummies.
Fourth and finally, founding ancestors never entirely emerged with
the land, despite undergoing petrification. Extirpation accounts affirm
that ayllus transported their ancestors’ bodies or statues, usually in
litters, from their shrines of storage to other ritually significant sites. 9
Under the Inkas, Andean people carried their wakas on localized
pilgrimages and rituals, to imperial oracular congresses and into
battle, or had them taken hostage and held in Cuzco. 10 Thus, the
imperishable transformation of the ancestors did not imply fixity upon
the landscape, and in no way precluded their ongoing participation in
significant journeys across it. Through such mobility, ancestors
remained political actors capable of further intervention in worldly
affairs.
Colonial Transformations
Under the Inkas, ayllu organization as described above remained
fundamental as a system of indirect rule through local hierarchies and
the kurakas who oversaw them. To be sure, the Inkas also devised and
imposed their own specifically imperial institutions on the non-Inka
ayllus they conquered. But they could never have expanded as rapidly
and as far afield as they did without utilizing what they found in place,
nor, as members of the same milieu, would it have occurred to them to
do otherwise. Thus, they subsumed local tributary relations into their
own revenue system, local ruling hierarchies under their own
governors, and local deities into their own pantheons as a line of least
resistance. With the collapse of the Inka state and the Spanish invasion
following the death of Wayna Qhapaq around 1528, two decades of
extreme violence ensued during which Andean society essentially
underwent a segmentary retraction to ayllu-level organization that
provided the only functional governance. When Pizarro took the first
tentative step towards the foundation of a colonial state by assigning
encomiendas in Cuzco, he explicitly paired particular conquistadores
with provincial Andean kurakas in a system of indirect rule through
indigenous political units that institutionalized elite inter-ethnic
alliance (Pizarro, 1926, Urteaga, 1920: 36). Spalding (1984: 108) and
Stern (1982: ch. 2) show that encomenderos largely relied on their
kuraka counterparts to extract their subjects’ labour, and could not
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Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
prevent them from becoming important economic players in their own
right. Contemporary Spaniards were perfectly aware of this reality,
and routinely complained that the kurakas were the main beneficiaries
of the Inka state’s collapse, taking its lands, sumptuary privileges, and
haughty bearing for their own.11 For all its centrality, however, ayllu
organization remained largely invisible in Spanish accounts during the
first four decades of their invasion. A system predicated on conquest
found no honour in publicly proclaiming dependence on indigenous
institutions, and some advantage in withholding insider knowledge of
them to fellow Spaniards, who were competitors in the plunder
economy.
Only with the Toledo reforms (1569-1581), most notably reducción,
did indigenous ayllu organization start to become visible, and worthy
of documentation, mainly as an obstacle to colonial policy. Most
modern commentators understand reducción somewhat reductively as
church-based settlement consolidation, which for Toledo and his
contemporaries was merely means to the end of rational persuasion,
religious conversion and political subjugation: the primary meanings
of reducción at the time. The policy’s foremost announced goal was to
improve Indians’ evangelization (Levillier, 1921-26 III: 492, IV: 111-2)
but also to introduce them to what Spaniards called policía: organized
public life. By relocating and rebuilding Andean towns, advocates of
reducción hoped to reconstruct their inhabitants similarly, and to
replace indirect rule with Spanish fiscal, administrative, and religious
organizations. Early-modern Spaniards, whose intellectual culture
strongly linked ideas of urbanism, civilization, and religious propriety
(Pagden, 1982: 18, passim), readily saw an intimate connection
between consolidated settlements and the true faith. Thus, viceroys
could assign reducción to the ecclesiastical as opposed to the secular
branch of government (Levillier, 1921-26 IV: 397). Reducción’s true
referent was the ethico-political agenda that underwrote settlement
consolidation as a physical operation. It condensed the entire Spanish
colonial mission of civilization, the desire to thoroughly reconstruct
indigenous life around Iberian standards. Not surprisingly, it collided
with the ayllu as an impediment to its own realization and treated it as
an already-existing order that it had to understand in order to
overcome. Indirect rule, by contrast, had no such epistemic imperative
and arguably worked best by discouraging such inquiry.
When reducción put parish priests in a better position to observe
their Andean flock on a daily basis, the challenges this policy faced
soon became clear. No sooner were these new settlements established
than, in many areas, they began to empty as indigenous tributaries
drifted away to escape the tasa and mita obligations that Toledo
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assigned as part of his overhauling of Andean society. Priests and
corregidores blamed kurakas for hiding tributaries but soon their own
extractive demands emerged as a cause of indigenous flight. A
discourse of “crisis” and “failure” arose around the reducciones even as
they were being implemented and continued for over a century. It
redefined the pre-existing power of kurakas and their informal alliances
with local Spanish authorities as “corruption” that defrauded the
Crown of revenues and subverted its reformist initiatives (Gose, 2008:
128-139). A further elaboration was to link indigenous flight to the
persistence of idolatry, now understood in spatial opposition to the
reducciones. The primary culprit was Indians’ attachment to their
“pueblos viejos”, which typically belonged to minimal ayllu segments
and held their ritual apparatus: a paqarina, ancestral burial caves, a set
of mummified founding ancestors, etc. (Arriaga, 1621 [1968]: 219-20).
Once construction of a reducción began, Indians were to destroy their
“pueblos viejos,” not only to salvage building materials but also to
make the new settlement definitive and irreversible. Yet people
continued to work their fields and pastures near the old towns, and
often tried to rehabilitate them, for which they were treated as idolaters
even when they built chapels and maintained active cofradías there
(Gose, 2008: 138-9). Thus, reducción and the extirpation of idolatry
became intimately related, as Toledo himself had intended them to be
(Toledo, 1986: 135-6, 245-9).
Burial was an early and continuing flashpoint in this struggle to
consolidate the reducciones against the “pueblos viejos”. Reducción
was, among many other things, a mortuary regime dedicated to the
Christian salvation of its dead subjects through the spiritual
ministrations of the living, most notably burial near the altar where
they could benefit from the eucharist (Gose, 2008: 123-8). Yet many
accounts in the decades immediately following reducción describe
Indians clandestinely removing the bodies of their dead from where
they had been interred in the floors of their newly-built churches and
taking them to ayllu mortuary caves associated with the pueblos viejos
where they could join the larger community of ayllu ancestors.
Sometimes, bodies circulated between churches and these distant
mortuary caves, participating in both ancestral regimes, whereas
others, people established new mortuary caves above the reducciones
for the ayllu’s Christian dead. Andean parishioners even presented
ancestors from the mortuary caves for baptism, in what appears to
have been an attempt to unite an ancestral community divided by
Christianity (Gose, 1995a, 2008: 139-155, 212-227). Perhaps more than
anything else, this struggle over burial established a concentric spatial
antagonism between the reducciones and their immediate periphery,
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Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
initially represented by the pueblos viejos but later by the countryside
in general and more specifically mountains (Gose, 2008: 161-5), all
equally godforsaken and threatening to the true faith.
The differentiation of Christian from pagan burial caves reflected
this antagonism, but also suggested that Christianity was nonetheless
beginning to animate the landscape. Thus, in 1656 the extirpator
Noboa reported that:
quando cubren las casa asen mocha [reverencia] a los idolos malquis
llamados Pomachagua Tunsuvillac [y] Yngavillac porque tienen
tradicion que estos malquis fueron los primeros progenitores deste
ailllo Julca Tamborga que tubieron su origen y nasieron del serro
grande de este que es pegado a este pueblo de Mangas que llaman
apuhurco [señor cerro] San Cristobal (Duviols, 1986: 341-2).
Here San Cristóbal seems to participate in two landscape regimes
simultaneously. On the one hand, it was the paqarina from which three
ancestral brothers emerged, and the site of a cult to their mummies and
statues, as were several other mountain paqarinas in the same locality
(see Duviols, 1986: 340-3). On the other, its name and location on
Mangas’ immediate periphery suggests that it was becoming
Christianized, probably by the placement of a large cross (visible from
town) on its peak, and perhaps by housing Christian burial caves. San
Cristóbal seems to have reconciled these contending regimes by
adopting the title “lord mountain” (apu urqu). In this historical period,
apu normally applied only to senior ancestors and kurakas within a
region. Later, mountains adopted this title as they absorbed ancestral
functions that mummies and idols embodied, as they still do here. By
taking on their lordly title, then, San Cristóbal was not so much
replacing these mummified brothers as drawing them into
Christianity. Reciprocally, San Cristóbal’s sainthood became fully
ancestral in the process.
Elsewhere in the same year of 1656, reducción’s antagonism to the
ancestral landscape was not so easily reconciled, and generated its own
“idolatries” as in the following report from an unspecified town in
Huamanga:
en esta prouincya de Vilcas donde quedo confirmando y descuuierto
unos rastros grandes de ydolatria en una doctrina donde vn yndio se
finjio ser Santiago y dixo a los de su pueblo que se ausentaren de el
porque se auia de asolar y destruyr con que todos lo desampararon y
me a ynformado el cura de ellos se fueron a vn zerro a ofrecer
sacrifiçio.12
This outburst resembles the traditional ancestral narrative of
Pariacaca, who destroyed valley towns with the highland arsenal of
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rain and hail (Taylor, 1987: ch. 6). Yet it occurred in a late- or postextirpation setting, with few or no mummies, “idols,” or preColumbian settlements left to articulate a ayllu-based alternative.
Lacking these traditional idolatrous foci, the mountain emerged as the
site and perhaps even the object of an activist devotion that aimed to
destroy the valley town. That goal neatly inverted the extirpation of
idolatry’s destructive forays into the countryside, and so was
intelligible within its own present, without need of ancestral
narratives. Whatever this mountain’s status may have been within a
paqarina-based ancestral regime, its opposition to the valley town was
clearly what mattered in this context. This mobilization confronted
reducción’s morally dichotomized geography which presented the
town as a beacon of Christian righteousness and the surrounding
landscape a repository of idolatrous darkness. It clearly opposed the
church-based settlement, but not through an unreconstructed idolatry.
Rather, its leader proclaimed himself Santiago and operated from the
mountain, asserting the Christian status of the despised periphery but
also its power to destroy the centre. In short, we are dealing with a
transformed and evolving idolatry here, one that was coeval and
intertwined with missionary Christianity, and contested its
stigmatising of the undomesticated landscape in terms that were
partially Christian.
This same opposition of mountains to church-based towns figured
in a 1661 dispute between Juan de Salazar Montesinos, parish priest of
Ambar, and don Juan Rodriguez Pilco, the indigenous governor of
Cajatambo. They had already been quarrelling for several years when
matters escalated after Indians performed a mock baptism and mass
during the qashwa dancing that followed the priest’s celebration of
Corpus Christi. Each party blamed the other’s faction for these
sacrilegious acts but the outcome was settled in advance when an
idolatry inspector, Juan Sarmiento de Vivero, was assigned the case.
Sarmiento clearly took the priest’s side and appointed his sacristan and
compadre Agustin Capcha as “fiscal maior de todo el arsopispado” in
which capacity Capcha launched a barrage of accusations that shifted
blame for the qashwa dancing onto Rodriguez Pilco’s faction. The
main insinuation was that a group of five “hechiceras” (including the
kuraka’s mother and aunt) had arranged the dance and performed
amorous magic associated with it (García Cabrera, 1994: 395, 408-412,
415, 455-458). A subsidiary suspicion was that the dance was really a
disguised ancestral idolatry:
puedo denonsiar todas las osansas que usan los endios de sus
antividades como son a ponerse a baylar con las mugeres cantando en
sus lenguas alabandoles a los hombres por sus desendentes o cerros o
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Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
punas desindo que fue nasidos de tal cerros o punas y que las dichas
mugeres con los tamboriles en las manos tocando y cantando con ella=
Y asemismo tienen de costumbres los endios de ponerse a baylar en los
dias de fista en una osansa de antividades que se llama guacon con unas
mascaras lo mas feio que se puede de ber puestas las cara con unos
combes que les cirven de camiseta” (García Cabrera, 1994: 459).
These cerros and punas were clearly paqarinas. Unlike Bernardo de
Noboa in the neighbouring towns of Cajatambo during the same years,
however, Capcha documented no traditional commemorations of ayllu
ancestors or their journeys through a chain of origin points. Try as they
might, he and Sarmiento did not manage to shift the dispute into an
extirpatory register and it remained one between a priest and an
indigenous governor, each determined to remove the other from office
by defending Catholic rectitude.
In describing this struggle, the priest attributed to Rodriguez Pilco
the following appeal to his people as their hereditary governor:
venid aca qual es mas dificultosso mudar este cerro que esta en frente
o esta torre de la yglesia y auiendo dicho los indios que el cerro que no
era posible mudarle por ser fijo y muy grande y que la torre aunque con
dificultad la pasarian a otra parte les respondio vien abeis dicho pero
adbertid que este zerro que desis que es inmudable y fijo soy yo que
soy buestro casique y gouernador que naci aqui y e de morir aqui y
nadie me podra echar de aqui y essa torre que desis que con algun
travajo la passareis a otra parte son los curas que aunque con dificultad
los echamos a otra parte con pleitos y capitulos y assi ved si es mejor
tener al curaca por amigo que a de vivir y morir con vosotros o al cura
que se va mañana o lo podemos echar de aqui.13
In a pitched battle for allegiances, Rodriguez Pilco is thus alleged
to have rhetorically modelled his own power and permanence on the
mountain. If this account still aimed to smear Rodriguez Pilco as an
idolater, it was no longer by presenting the mountain as the site of an
ancestral cult, as Capcha did above, but rather by opposing it to the
church tower in town, associated with the priest.
Thus the construction of church-based towns seems to have singled
out mountains from pre-existing paqarina landscapes and brought
them to the fore as their pagan antithesis (Gose, 2008: ch. 5). Prior to
the colonial reducciones, as origin points on the journeys of founding
ancestors, mountains were not images of permanence as they are here,
but relatively mutable objects of catastrophic ancestral deeds (Gose,
2008: 168, 174, 178-179, 240-241). Only by contrast to the newness of the
colonial reducciones then, did mountains come to signify the
primordial. So the rhetoric attributed to Rodriguez Pilco here is more
Spanish than indigenous, but above all colonial in how it reflects this
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reordering of Andean landscapes. As Monsalve (1998: 393) correctly
notes, this passage does not prove that in the 1660s, kurakas’ authority
had already fused with mountains as it was to do towards the end of
the colonial period. However it does exemplify some of colonial
pressures that were ultimately to effect that transformation including
compulsory Christianization, the reorganization of spatial and
settlement regimes, persecution of indigenous religious practices,
erosion of indirect colonial rule through hereditary indigenous
authorities, endless divisive factional struggles, etc. Thus, Rodriguez
Pilco’s very claim to immutability openly acknowledged his own
people’s wavering loyalty and so enacted the increasingly fragile and
less traditional nature of his power. Despite putting up a convincing
defence, he lost the case and was exiled from Ambar for six years,
during which time he lost the indigenous governorship. By the 1680s,
however, he had returned and regained it, as shown in further
disputes with priests.14 Neither as solid as the mountain nor wholly
absorbed into it, his power continued to reside in a beleaguered
hereditary office that he fought tenaciously to retain.
A further variation on the theme of decomposing traditional
solidarities emerges from a case in the town of Pomacocha, Canta, in
1650. As so often happened, the case arose from a quarrel among
Andean people. Pedro Curichagua accused Juana Ycha of witchcraft,
illicit worship, and divination. Apparently, she had threatened
Churichagua’s son, who was having an affair with her daughter.
Within three days proceedings against her began: the investigating
priest Antonio de Caceres impounded her meagre belongings,
captured and brought her before him. In her confession, she described
herself as a widow, and admitted to learning “brujería” from Catalina
Suyo and Alonso Caxa Guaranga, starting about ten years previously.
Caxa Guaranga promised to teach her how to cure the sick by privately
consulting and feeding a quarter-sized silver “idol” of a person seated
on a mold-casting (piña), which represented Apoparato, the trial’s
featured “demon.” Early in Ycha’s apprenticeship, however, Caxa
Guaranga died, leaving her and Catalina Suyo as this deity’s only
priests. Ycha and Suyo mention no collective rites for Apoparato: they
approached the deity only for individual patrons (mingadores). The
most frequent requests were from women who wished to make men
enter or stay in conjugal relationships. Nearly as common were
requests for the deity to cure sicknesses, intervene in difficult births, or
find lost property. Other requests came from a man who wished to
change tributary jurisdictions, another who wished to avoid
prosecution, a coca vendor anxious to make sales, a native tax-collector
seeking an Indian who owed him tribute, and woman who wished to
20
Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
depose her unpopular son-in-law Francisco Pomacondor as kuraka.
According to Ycha, Apoparato generally granted these requests if
appropriate offerings accompanied them. Ycha also made offerings to
maintain her relations with Apoparato. Strikingly absent are any
descriptions of collective, semiannual ayllu observances for
Apoparato, although people called him “yaya [padre] o criador” and
requested favours that ancestral deities typically provided. 15 Possibly
selective testimony concealed collective ayllu rituals here, but probably
they no longer existed. The kuraka Pomacondor’s collaboration with
the prosecution suggests he disliked such rituals, and his attitude can
only have hardened when testimony revealed that idolaters schemed
to remove him from office. Pomacondor’s antipathy could well explain
the absence of corporate support for Apoparato’s cult and this kuraka’s
personal unpopularity within his ayllu. When indigenous political
authorities and corporate structures no longer sponsored or cohered
around ayllu rituals, only these more individual forms of worship
sustained the deities.
Lack of a collective cult seems to have underwritten Apoparato’s
occasionally violent behaviour toward Ycha. He came to her
periodically as a whirlwind that transformed into a dark Indian man
in a black cape: he demanded food and corn beer and would rage and
beat her if she did not serve them promptly. While Alonso Caxa
Guaranga was still alive, Apoparato ate and talked quietly with him,
and did not beat Ycha like this. During nocturnal visits, Apoparato
sometimes took the form of Ycha’s dead husband, and slept with her
if her grandchildren were not present, ejaculating a cold yellow fluid.
Leading up to the trial, other more recently deceased kin joined him,
also to demand food and drink that she could scarcely provide. Ycha
noted that Apoparato worked her fields when no men, Spaniards, or
priests (whom he feared and avoided) were present, revealing his thin
black legs and rooster-like feet. She then returned to the beatings he
gave her and the destitution she experienced since becoming his
priestess. Ycha dwelt on his stinginess, and refusal to give her any of
the silver he sometimes brought in a sack, perhaps to elaborate his
statue. She could not recruit others to serve Apoparato, and so
remained trapped in this increasingly onerous office. 16
Silverblatt (1987: 185, 1988: 184-185) invokes Andean people’s
material impoverishment and the breakdown of reciprocity with their
ancestral deities under Spanish colonialism to explain Ycha’s
estranged relation to Apoparato. She argues that Andean people
accepted their deities’ demonization because their own relations with
them became highly problematic. Griffiths (1996: 116-119, 126-127, 131)
and Mills (1997: 228-240) dispute this interpretation. They note that
21
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Apoparato still acted as a tutelary deity, and regard his demonization
as an imposition of the investigating priest. I think both positions are
largely correct, and the drama of this case derives precisely from
Apoparato’s traditional ancestral functions on the one hand, and the
collapse of his ayllu-based cult, with its corresponding resources and
specialists, on the other. By treating Apoparato as a traditional
ancestor whose cult was in decline, we can reconcile these
interpretations. Only the most senior ancestors in a region held his
prefixed title of apu or lord (Doyle, 1988: 52-4). The requests that Ycha
referred to Apoparato are all typical of those that Andean people made
of their ancestors. His appearance as Ycha’s dead husband suggests
that he still oversaw ayllu mortuary processes. The quasi-conjugal
relationship Apoparato maintained with Ycha was also typical of that
between other Andean deities and their chosen women that many
idolatry documents and chronicles describe. Priestesses like Ycha were
part of most Andean deities’ traditional retinue. However, the rest of
this entourage was missing, particularly after Alonso Caxa Guaranga’s
death. Ycha admitted that she had not mastered all of the divinatory
techniques he practised, which may partly explain Apoparato’s more
abusive stance toward her after his death. That nobody else would
replace either Caxa Guaranga or Ycha suggests a cult in crisis. People
still wanted these specialists’ services, but no longer supported them
sufficiently to attract new recruits. The paramount question was how
to provide for such a deity when there were no longer fields or flocks
dedicated to its sacrificial maintenance. Ycha’s increased ritual
responsibility and material destitution speaks eloquently to this point.
She and other followers may not have demonized him definitively, but
their relationship certainly changed in a less harmonious direction. It
was less a question of reciprocity breaking down than of it shifting into
a negative mode, in which the ancestor asserted an ongoing
relationship punitively, when his living adepts failed to maintain his
cult adequately. These circumstances destabilized the deity’s
behaviour, but also his physical form and geographical location, which
are remarkably pliable in this document.
Apoparato existed as a silver idol, a whirlwind, and an Indian man,
but also appeared through a pair of spiders, and the coals of a fire.
Various adepts worshipped him in their houses, Pomacocha’s
irrigation canal and two different mountains (Julcan and Cochayoc).
When asked if she hid any other illicit practices or worshipped any
mountains, Ycha replied that she did not but once went to Mt. Julcan
to invoke and give Apoparato offerings on a straw surface. When
asked if she and Catalina Suyo had a pact with him there, she replied
that they only fed him. One midnight while she was imprisoned in
22
Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
church during the trial, Apoparato appeared to her. Ycha said she was
now in the hands of God, and he replied “yo quiero bolver donde estoy
arriba de Cajapalca a un zerro grande que tiene una cocha o laguna
enzima”. He had previously asked her to accompany him to this place,
but she refused.17
When rebuffed by one of his last remaining mediums, Apoparato
significantly announced his wish to “return” to his mountain of origin,
probably the paqarina from which he first emerged. With an eery
awareness of his fate, he may have been announcing his immanent
transformation into a mountain deity there. That his name contains the
prefixed title apu by which mountain deities in the Cuzco region are
known today, tempts this presentist reading. In nearly all mid-colonial
cases, apu refers to an idol (or a mummy) in a regime of ayllus and
paqarinas, but here, that regime’s disintegration is so patent that we can
no longer assume its salience. Even if Apoparato was merely returning
to his paqarina, this may have been the mechanism by which a new
landscape of mountain deities swallowed a previously independent
ancestral manifestation. While no such transformation occurred on
Ycha’s watch as priestess, this farewell clearly marked the end of an
era, and hinted at the beginning of another.
A clearer case of ancestral deities returning to the earth occurred in
Santiago de Maray in 1677 (see Gose, 2008: 227-232). The local priest,
Juan de Esquivel y Aguila, presented a detailed picture of ayllu-based
ancestor worship including seasonal sacrifices for rain, good
agricultural conditions, and at the harvest. A regionally important
ancestor, Caruayacolca, also had his shrine and an active cult in this
locality. Nonetheless, Maray had been subject to prior rounds of
extirpation in which it lost most of its ancestral mummies, and had
replaced them with stone monoliths as objects of worship. By 1677,
witnesses consistently described Llaullactullu, the local founding
ancestor whose mummy was burned in 1614, as their pacarina.18 This
term suggests an identification with the landscape underlined by his
intimate relation with a spring and mountain. Apparently people
conflated the ancestor with his point of emergence on the landscape,
and might even have thought he disappeared into it. Such metonymy
occurs elsewhere in the idolatry corpus, and Doyle treats it as a normal
part of Andean ancestor worship (1988: 94-95). However, the sequence
of events in Maray suggests that the Extirpation could have caused this
conflation. We must explore that possibility before accepting Doyle’s
interpretation.
Significant evidence elsewhere in this document suggests that the
landscape was taking on functions that ancestral mummies previously
embodied. The latter still existed, at least in Llaullacayan’s shrine, but
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previous rounds of extirpation and defensive relocation had destroyed
many important bodies. Other important shrines such as
Caruayacolca’s had no ancestral mummies but were replete with
surrogate stone monoliths. Gonzalo Paico, one of the three ayllu priests
accused of idolatry, mentioned making offerings to the mountains
Caruayacolca and Guampucani before consulting his mallkis, who then
appeared to him as a man and a woman in dreams. He also added that
mountains and rivers gave good advice about where to find lost objects
because they “tenian correspondenzia con el mar y los caminos y que
unos a otros se avisavan de lo que por ellos pasava y que los zerros a
quienes ymbocava se lo dezian a sus malquis para que se lo avisasen.”
Here the landscape actively interceded with the mallkis who no longer
occupied the locality. The document confirms that impression
elsewhere when a witness said the sun transported the souls of the
dead to where their mallkis are, presumably their distant original
paqarinas. Everything suggests that extirpated ancestors had somehow
returned to the earth through their paqarinas, perhaps retracing their
original subterranean journeys. To the extent that the ancestors were
no longer present, the landscape assumed agency: previously the
passive infrastructure of ancestor-focussed narratives, it now acted in
their stead. Thus, while making offerings to the sun for a patient, Paico
intoned “arroyos puquios zerros tierra que aveis entrado a hazer mal
en el cuerpo deste enfermo salid fuera y tornad sano a este enfermo”.
Similarly, when asked if she were an idolater, María Quillay answered
affirmatively, confessing to worshipping the sea, the earth and all
springs.19
How far did the landscape’s absorption of the ancestors extend?
Griffiths (1996: 207-208) believes that mountain deities existed in
Maray by 1677, and even states that Paico addressed them as apu (lord),
a term that appears nowhere in the document. This amounts to a claim
that this document features an ethnographic pattern of mountain
worship, in which landscape features wholly absorbed ancestral
functions previously embodied in mummies and statues. Although
just such a process eventually occurred, it is at best incipient in this
document. Some mountains do figure as agents, but many retained
their traditional role as paqarinas or sites for shrines and idols. The most
important of these mountains, Caruayacolca, took its name from the
crag-statue that represented the petrified body of that founding
ancestor. This mountain continued to house an entirely traditional
ancestral form, whose presence precluded any development of the
mountain as an autonomous, quasi-ancestral agent. Moreover, the
proliferation of stone monoliths in the document suggests that when
previous extirpators destroyed ancestral mummies, people probably
24
Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
remade them in this form (see Doyle, 1988: 66). This strategy contrasted
with that of letting the landscape swallow previously distinct ancestral
forms in that it kept the latter present in the locality and therefore
available for ayllu-based worship. Both strategies were present, but not
equally. Those that conserved or reconstructed the ancestors in forms
distinguished from the landscape predominated, as did the corporate
forms of worship they articulated.
In 1697, the Aymaraes-Cotabambas region, now part of the
Peruvian Department of Apurímac, provides an unambiguous break
out of this earlier regime into one in which mountains indisputably
embody the ancestral functions previously invested in mummies and
statues. At earlier moments, this area generated the Yanahuara (1596)
and Moro Oncoy (1599) movements, both of which featured separatist
prophets who acted on mountains, and identified them as places of
proper ancestral worship, as opposed to Christian towns in the valleys
worshippers. Atop a local mountain, however, the Yanahuara prophet
exhorted the people of Piti and Maras to destroy a cross and erect an
“idol” in its place (Ramos Gavilán, 1621: 56-58; Calancha, 1639 [1972]:
712-720; Torres, 1657 [1972]: 63-65). Thus, no matter how important the
opposition of mountain to valley town may have become, the “idol”
remained the focus of ancestral worship: as of 1596, mountains had yet
to supplant idols in this regard. During the century after this
movement, this area largely escaped extirpation of idolatry campaigns
but in 1697 a spontaneous local denunciation revealed a remarkably
transformed ancestral panorama in Haquira (see Gose, 1995b).
Several disgruntled indigenous neighbours reported an indio
forastero named Pasqual Haro for trying to increase his herds, ensure
his work’s success, and cure the sick through sacrifices of llamas, corn
beer, coca, sanco, rock scrapings and coloured powders. He prepared
these offerings on various surfaces: gunnysacks, carrying-cloths
(llicllas), straw, and a stone “altar,” complete with a cross and images
of the Virgin and San Juan, to intercede with the mountains who
received the sacrifices. Several local mountains figured in the trial, but
Haro had particular affinity with one named Asoca, whom he
addressed as “lord” (apo). He also invoked and sacrificed to more
distant and influential mountains like Salcantay and Qoropuna. One
witness described Haro as an oracular medium for several local
mountains, and someone who helped and advised other householders
in making offerings to them. Besides curing the sick, he kept toads,
which he allegedly used in witchcraft. Once, he diagnosed a sickness
as the result of a waka entering a person’s body, but the reference is
clearly to Mt. Asoca. The document mentions no other wakas, nor any
ancestral mummies, monoliths or statuary, and is remarkably modern
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in its ritual vocabulary and sensibility. Mountains are the only deities
the document records, and they clearly dominate the local pantheon.
One hundred and one years after the Yanahuara movement,
mountains were no longer merely sites of ancestral observations but
their primary object. In the intervening years, mummies and idols had
apparently disappeared as objects of veneration, and with them, ayllubased forms of worship. A 1689 parish survey of the Bishopric of
Cuzco reported four ayllus for Haquira, with only seventy men of
tribute-paying age but over eight hundred women. The Huancavelica
mita was killing many men and causing others to flee, as did the
corregidores and their forced purchases of goods. Haquira’s ayllus had
once grouped into larger moieties that formed the parishes of San
Pedro and San Martín de Haquira, but the latter had become so
depopulated that it ceased to have any functional ayllus and the priest
of San Pedro called for their amalgamation (Villanueva, 1982: 35-37,
40-41). As forasteros, Haro and his neighbours lacked any local ayllu
affiliation. His innovative form of worship reflected that fact: the
saintly images and mountain deities that Haro and his followers
venerated belonged to a more fluid religious universe no longer
organized around corporate descent groups. Outside an ayllu
framework, they offered the same ritual services that ayllu
functionaries typically provided: witchcraft, curing, and sacrifice for
the fertility of flocks and fields. This suggests that Haquira’s decimated
ayllus may have been on shaky ground as ritual units, and that Haro
was filling a void. As an unaffiliated practitioner, furthermore, Haro
threatened the local kuraka, who orchestrated his denunciation to the
parish priest and so initiated the investigation. Instead of reinforcing
the kuraka’s authority within the ayllu format, Haro’s services attracted
a personal following of his own, one that the kuraka tried to quash with
these idolatry charges. Clearly this new form of worship both
presupposed and promoted the ayllu’s breakdown as a ritual unit, to
kurakas’ detriment above all.
This is the earliest clear transition from a mummy- and idol-based
ancestral regime to one based on mountain deities currently known in
the historical record. Extirpators were probably not responsible for this
change, which had already occurred by the time they intervened.
Rather, the main cause was the ayllu’s reduction to its tributary
function and the consequent rise of forasterismo. To the extent that it
became a purely tributary unit, the ayllu could no longer command
ritual loyalties, and collapsed as a ritual entity. The individual and
domestic concerns it once addressed remained, however. New forms
of worship arose in their place, and reinvented notions of
ancestorhood around mountains and saints. Later, and by different
26
Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
routes, the same transformation was to occur elsewhere. Ayllu collapse
and residential mobility were nonetheless key processes by which new
forms of worship could spread. As both colonialism and indigenous
responses to it promoted migration, they not only undermined loyalty
to ayllus, but promoted interregional communication and new social
bonds. This case gives the first solid glimpse of what that new
synthesis would be.
An Ethnographic Conclusion
The seventeenth-century sources discussed here collectively show
an erosion of traditional ancestor worship in Andean ayllus under
Spanish colonialism, but only the beginnings of a new ancestral regime
focussed on mountains instead of mummies. Among the factors
responsible for this erosion were reducción, the extirpation of idolatry,
the conversion of ayllus into merely tributary units, forasterismo, and
the growing alienation of kurakas from their erstwhile kin and subjects.
It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that the last of these
developments reached the breaking point, as hereditary kurakas
increasingly came under attack both from the Spanish crown and their
own people, culminating in the great Andean rebellions of 1781-4. By
the eighteenth century, the colonial will to reform Andean society
through reducción and the extirpation of idolatry had largely
dissipated, resulting in a relatively impoverished record of ayllu
religious activity, ancestor worship included. Nonetheless, the sources
currently known show a continued decline of mummies and statues as
objects of veneration and further indications that mountains were
taking over their ancestral functions (Gose, 2008: ch. 7). After 1781-4,
this transition appears to have been completed and in retrospect, this
great insurrection can be considered a pachakuti that produced a new
order despite royalist victory in the short run. That hereditary kurakas
and traditional ancestor worship both met their demise at this moment
suggests a close functional relation between the two. The cult of
mummified ancestors clearly had legitimated kurakas’ power, so when
the latter was under attack from below, it is little wonder that people
also rejected the former. Long after the extirpators had given up,
Andean people finally accepted their critique of mummy worship, but
for their own anti-colonial reasons.
The result was the end of indirect colonial rule through indigenous
social forms, a blow from which Spanish colonialism in the Andes
would never recover. Andean ayllus fundamentally transformed
themselves when they overthrew hereditary kurakas and the worship
of mummified ancestors. Whereas previously they had been internally
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hierarchical and class-ridden descent groups, they became coresidential direct democracies in this late colonial upheaval. Tributary
relations with the state did not entirely disappear in the process, but
came to articulate emergent forms of indigenous republican
citizenship. As the sovereignty of these renovated communities
transferred to mountain lords, it generated a quasi-ancestral shadow
state modelled on actual holders of state power but unlike them, one
that remained deeply grounded in subaltern Andean interests in
agrarian fertility and the circulation of life (Gose, 2008: ch. 7). This
relocation of sovereign indigenous power in the landscape and beyond
the living human community diminished the possibilities for direct
collaboration with colonial power that characterized so many kurakas.
It also allowed a more critical stance towards republican state power
but at the cost of the withdrawal from it implicit in this telluric
transformation. In short, it was a strategic retreat that at least partially
took the form of a pachakuti in which a previously dominant order was
driven underground where it persists in a latent and subaltern form
capable of resuscitation.
Contemporary Andean people, however, express this notion of an
epochal break not in relation to the mountain lords but rather the
mummified dead that still remain on their territories. Variously known
as gentiles, machus (grandfathers) or chullpas (tomb-dwellers), they
view them as remnants of an earlier humanity banished by the rising
of a Christian sun that desicated (i.e. mummified) them and drove
them into the earth’s interior through springs and caves, where they
envy the living and conspire to re-take the earth’s surface from them.
Andean people now avoid and ridicule these mummies instead of
worshipping them as their ancestors did. They invoke notions of
idolatry, heresy and sin to explain why the sun eradicated the gentiles
and so underline Christianity as the moral-historical boundary that
separates them. Thus, some contemporary Andean people take offense
at the notion, which researchers often advance, that they descend from
the mummified chullpas found on their landscape (Abercrombie 1998:
117). By rejecting these mummies, stripping them of their ancestral
functions, and identifying them with a previous epoch, Andean people
conformed to the fundamental requirements of missionary
“conversion”: accepting Christianity but also rejecting “idolatry.” Yet
it is equally clear that this internalization of the Extirpation occurred
in fundamentally Andean terms, through the retention of the past as a
subordinate lower moiety (Gose, 1996a; 2008: 283-294).
Mountain lords, by contrast, predominantly associate with the
celestial realm, as their avian titles, including wamani (hawk), mallku
(condor) and condor mamani (condor-hawk), suggest. From that
28
Peter Gose. Mountains, Kurakas and Mummies
position, their association with the Christian heaven, abode of the
saints and God, and the sun that punished the gentiles is paramount.
Indeed, the mountain lord’s racially white appearance may derive
primarily from the iconography of the saints, and only secondarily
from their parallelism with state functionaries. As idealized rulerproprietors who use their power to adjudicate agrarian fertility and
their subjects’ health, mountain lords not only update earlier Andean
scripts of ancestorhood and divine kingship, but in so doing
necessarily occupy and order the earth’s surface and interior. They
receive sacrifices of surficial life forms and are expected to generate
new life from within the earth’s interior, and thus oversee a circulation
of vitality that connects their “Christian” heights with more terrestrial
processes (see Morote Best, 1956; Earls, 1973; Gose, 1986). Thus they
fuse traditional ancestral forms of material sustenance with spiritual
tutelage in a Christianized version of divine kingship, performing all
the important tasks that ancestral mummies once did, but as political
authorities in a Christianized republican order. By rearticulating
ancestral functions around communal assemblies and town councils,
Andean people gave the mountain lords a democratic inflection that
mummies lacked. This shift directly registers the historical overturning
of kurakas’ local rule and consigns it to the epoch of the gentiles.
Nonetheless, the mountain lords remain lords and interact with their
subjects in the hierarchical idiom of sacrifice, just as they must operate
within the infernal interior world of the gentiles. As dominant figures
in the current order, mountain lords do not simply occupy an upper
position but use it to drive totalizing circulations of life across surficial
and interior domains, where they must also be present.
When Andean ancestral sovereignty went telluric during the 18th
century, then, it did not go entirely or even primarily underground. By
rearticulating itself around mountains, it retained an upper position
associated not only with Christianity but the current political order.
Yet it also maintained a certain critical distance from that order
through its ancestral advocacy for Andean people and its synthesis of
life across the morally-coded vertical Andean cosmos. To that extent,
the mountain lords continue to impose a divine kingship formula on
the republican present, according to which political power is only
legitimate to the extent that it promotes the abundance and circulation
of life. The great genius of Andean politics has been to carry forward
these traditional ancestral expectations into the present, to fuse them
with actually-existing state power and not allow them to be
marginalized or driven underground.
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Notas
See Molina (1574 [1988]: 51), also Betanzos (1551 [1987]: chs. 1-2), Cobo (1653 [1956]:
151), Duviols (1984: 197), Pachacuti Yamqui (1613 [1993]: 199), Polo (1571 [1940]: 53-4),
and Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572 [1942]: 106-7).
2 See Arriaga (1621 [1968]: 201), Taylor (1987: 263-265), Duviols (1986: 154, 279, 452, 467),
Polia (1999: 207, 252, 259, 262, 306, 307, 324, 436, 506, 517-518, 539, 544, 545, 547, 555).
1
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3 See Duviols (1984: 206-214; 1986: 341, 343, 403), Polia (1999: 218, 232-2, 262, 307-9, 317,
351-2, 469, 486-7, 497-8, 508, 515-6).
4 See Álvarez (1588 [1998]: 74-5, 87), Polia (1999: 207, 208, 220, 222-3, 236, 253, 262, 271-2,
275, 280, 304-305, 315, 366, 409, 429-30, 430, 431, 442, 486-487, 488-9, 507-508, 513, 517,
519-21, 534-5, 545).
5 See Duviols (1984: 206-208, 211-213), AAL, Idolatrías 3/10 f. 26r; 4/14; 11/1 ff. 29r-v,
119r.
6 See Duviols (1984: 205-210, 21-214), Álvarez (1588 [1998]: 74-75, 77, 82), Anonymous
Jesuit (1590 [1968]: 159), Arriaga (1621 [1968]: 196, 227), Guaman Poma (1615 [1936]: 268269, 282), Polia (1999: 216, 243, 247-248, 252, 272, 280, 304, 305, 306, 318-319, 368, 385-386,
508, 539-541, 545).
7 See Betanzos (1551 [1987]: 18), Cieza de León (1553 [1984]: 150, 153), Sarmiento de
Gamboa (1572 [1942]: 123), Duviols (1986: 172), Taylor (1987: chs. 6, 8), (Polia 1999: 347348).
8 See AAL, Idolatrías 1/2 ff. 2v-3r, 4r-v, 6r, 7r-v.
9 See Duviols (1986: 274), Polia (1999: 330, 382, 460, 537).
10 See Acosta (1590 [1987]: 324, 423), Duviols (1984: 203-4, 207, 215), Cobo (1653 [1956]:
33, 38, 47), Guaman Poma (1615 [1936]: 256,261-263, 289) Murúa (1613 [1987]: 124, 176,
182, 187, 317, 321-322, 411, 421, 426, 444), Taylor (1987: 285-287, 295-297) and Sarmiento
de Gamboa (1572 [1942]: 134-135, 137-138, 163, 168, 265).
11 See Santillán (1553 [1927]: 51), Jiménez de la Espada (1965: 178), Polo de Ondegardo
(1561 [1940]: 144), Matienzo (1567: ch. 7).
12 AGI, Lima 308, letter from bishop Francisco to king, 10/07/1656.
13 See AAL Idolatrías 2A/12: 92v.
14 See AAL Idolatrías 2A/12: 354r-v; García Cabrera (1994: 419, 438); AAL Capítulos
23/4, 1682; AAL Causas de Clérigos 12/12, 1687.
15 See AAL, Idolatrías 3/1, ff. 2r-3v, 4v-5v, 6v-25r.
16 See AAL, Idolatrías 3/1, ff. 7v, 9r-v, 10v, 12r-v, 13r, 18r.
17 See AAL, Idolatrías 3/1, f. 15v, 30r.
18 See AAL, Idolatrías 7/14: 3r, 4r-v, 5v, 36v, 41v, 42v.
19 See AAL, Idolatrías 7/14: 3v, 4r, 36r-v, 42v, 50v.
Peter Gose is a Canadian anthropologist who did graduate studies at the
London School of Economics and works at Carleton University. His early
research as an ethnographer of the Peruvian Andes explored how peasant
mortuary and sacrificial rituals articulate relations of production, property and
political power. In the late 1980s, he turned to historical research on ritual and
political power under the Incas. From 1993 to 2008, he did archival research on
ancestor worship as a key mediating practice in relations of indirect colonial
rule in the Andes. More recently, he has conducted archival research for a
project on limpieza de sangre racism in Spain and its Andean colonies. Correo
electrónico: Peter.Gose@carleton.ca
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