Taki Onqoy

Sixteenth-century Spanish evangelization was initially haphazard and varied, producing a patchwork of Andean Catholic converts whose formalized commitment to the new religion (baptisms, marriage rites, funerals) hinged on regional priests. In the 1560s CE, a revitalization movement known as Taki Onqoy (Quechua: “dancing sickness”) fostered a population of highland Andean peoples who actively rejected Spanish traditions, religious beliefs, and practices. This article presents results from the first archaeological study of Taki Onqoy. Ceramic, faunal, and mortuary data suggest that rather than a monolithic body of individuals who denied or rejected Catholicism, Andeans were entangled within the two religious sects.

The present article analyzes the developments generated by the Taki Onqoy movement, mainly in the regions of Ayacucho and Huancavelica in the final years of the 16th century. Initially we elaborated a biographical profile of the cleric Cristóbal de Albornoz. Next, we analyze their service information, composed of a description of the movement and ritual practices of the communities of the regions mentioned, seeking to present the mechanisms used by sectors of the Catholic Church to combat and repress the movement throughout the Colonial Age.

Sixteenth-century Spanish evangelization was initially haphazard and varied, producing a patchwork of Andean Catholic converts whose formalized commitment to the new religion (baptisms, marriage rites, funerals) hinged on regional priests. In the 1560s CE, a revitalization movement known as Taki Onqoy (Quechua: “dancing sickness”) fostered a population of highland Andean peoples who preached for the rejection of Spanish traditions, religious beliefs, and practices. This article presents results from the first archaeological study of Taki Onqoy. Ceramic, faunal, and mortuary data suggest that rather than a monolithic body of individuals who denied or rejected Catholicism, Andeans were entangled within the two religious sects.

Vilcabamba, the infamous "last holdout" of the Incas, and home to the penultimate, semi-sovereign Inca Titu Cusi Yupanqui, had become an "other space" in the Andean cultural imaginary leading up to, and in the years after, its final capitulation to the Spaniards in 1572. (1) Vilcabamba was both a space of crisis and one of deviation, and its inhabitants, especially its leaders, were represented as apostates, that is, renegades who rejected Christianity and Spanish rule, "standing away" from the imposition of colonial power. (2) As Jose Rabasa convincingly argues, apostasy is a unique category of being "without history," for apostates reject their forced incorporation into universal history that Christian baptism and conversion signal (172) and are written into history as "an attribute imposed from without" (177) and that functions rhetorically so as to incorporate the so-called apostates into (Western, universal) history. One of the characteristics of this imposition is a "bundling" of tropes of heterodox practices and identity markers in the representation of apostates so that they become figured in history (and more specifically, in the texts I read here) asa combination of renegade, idolater, sexual deviant, diseased, nonwhite, nonEuropean, polluted, stained, and so forth. (3) In short, this bundling produced abject subjects and was figured on the body and space of the colonized and those who resisted colonization, in this case, the rebellious Incas of Vilcabamba. At first seemingly cooperating with and then later rejecting Spanish colonial subjugation and returning to their ancestral practices, they were characterized as apostates by Spanish missionary-chroniclers and historians. Cristobal de Molina and Cristobal de Albornoz, missionaries and early extirpators of idolatry, described Vilcabamba as the new center of Inca religious resurgence and attempted to tie a localized millennialist movement known as Taki Onqoy to the Inca priests of Vilcabamba. Seventeenth-century Augustinian missionary and historian Antonio de la Calancha also represented Vilcabamba as a space of not just military resistance but also Inca apostasy. In his accounts of the martyrdom of one of his Augustinian brothers, Friar Diego de Ortiz, Calancha elaborates from his baroque perspective how the neo-Inca refuge was a "university of idolatry" led by Titu Cusi Yupanqui and Tupac Amaru. These writers, by appealing to apostasy as the main charge against the Andeans in both Taki Onqoy and Vilcabamba, and by extension the Inca leader Titu Cusi Yupanqui, simplify what I perceive to be a more complex colonial subjectivity. Titu Cusi Yupanqui, the alleged apostate, is known to us today precisely because he wrote himself into history by producing the Instruccion del Inga Don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupangui para el muy ilustre Senor el Licenciado Lope Garcia de Castro (1570), a testimonial-like narrative that defends his father Manco Capac's actions in rebelling against the Spaniards, denounces the Spanish treatment of the Incas in the conquest and postconquest, and negotiates a future relationship with the Crown. Titu Cusi Yupanqui declares himself a Christian, is baptized, and participates in various Christian ceremonies and Spanish cultural practices, yet his words and deeds recorded in the Instruccion represent "heresies" in relationship to Christian orthodoxy and reveal his so-called apostasy, that is, his return to and continuance of Andean religious and cultural practices the extirpators denounced. Titu Cusi Yupanqui crisscrosses the boundaries constructed by the binaries established by discourses of orthodoxy and apostasy. As I explain below, the Andean concepts of tinkuy and chaupi inform how Tuti Cusi Yupanqui elaborates the body and space so central to Andean religious practice in his Instruccion. I will show how the Inca's version of history challenges the "bundling" of bodily and spatial tropes found in those hegemonic narratives that sought to reduce him to apostate. …

“In examining indigenous discourses from the Andes, Horswell seeks to recuperate forms of mestizo consciousness. According to Horswell, we may trace hybridity as heresy in relationship to the orthodoxies of both cultures. Beyond blood contamination, he traces a fear of pollution of ideas and cultures—that is, there is a felt sense of heresy not only with respect to Catholic orthodoxy but also with respect to Andean forms of life. In this article Horswell is particularly interested in issues of body and space in the representation of Vilcamba, which Spanish chroniclers described as the new center of Inca resurgence; the related indigenous movement known as Taqui Onqoy; and Titu Cusi's Instrucción del Inga Don Diego de Castro Titu Cusi Yupangui para el muy ilustre Señor el Licenciado Lope Garcia de Castro (1570). Translated as the "dancing sickness," Taki Onqoy disseminated the belief that Andean huacas, which according to seventeenth-century Spanish authorities designated sacred spaces and gods that were worshiped in those places, were finally rebelling against the foreign Christian deity by seizing and possessing the bodies of Andeans. Horswell's article is not just about these acts of apostasy, but also about native epistemologies that can be imported into our analytical and critical discourses. He is particularly interested in examining the third spaces articulated by the Andean cultural concepts tinku, yanantin, and chaupi. Horswell transports these third terms into reading practices that allow us to understand colonial Indians and ladinos practicing an in-between positioning. As such, his article is at once a study of apostasy in colonial texts and a proposal for developing new reading practices.” (From introduction of the special issue)