Claudia Brosseder. The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru.

Abstract

Huaca was a colonial Hispano-Quechua word for indigenous sacred places or ancestors who engaged with humans in reciprocal sustenance. Much of what we know about them comes from seventeenth-century ecclesiastical trials of their devotees. Claudia Brosseder is the author of a 2004 monograph on the Wittenberg Lutheran reformer Caspar Peucer and his association with Philipp Melanchthon. As an erudite student of the Protestant Reformation she sees in Andean huaca cults elements of protest against Counter-Reformation Catholicism, but not in the form of nativism; rather she focuses on “the people called Indians” as partially autonomous actors within Christendom. The period runs from Peru's first “extirpation-of-idolatry campaigns” (p. 2) in 1609 to the fading of repressive campaigns by the middle eighteenth century. In taking up “the evolution of Andean rituals and their symbolic makeup during colonial times” (p. 2), Brosseder enters a densely worked field. Since Pierre Duviols's pioneering and still-indispensable 1971 treatise, La lutte contre les religions autochtones dans le Pérou colonial: “L'extirpation de l'idôlatrie,” entre 1532 et 1660, a good dozen other books have treated interaction between the Andean huaca tradition and the post-Tridentine Church. Two of the best in a strong field share Brosseder's emphasis on the clergy's internal debates about native heterodoxy. Sabine MacCormack in 1991 treated Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru under the rubric of deep intellectual history, reaching back as far as patristic views about paganism, while Juan Carlos Estenssoro in 2003 focalized a post-Tridentine time when churchmen competed for office by extirpating indigenous forms that had themselves resulted from earlier attempts at Christianization (Del paganismo a la santidad: La incorporación de los indios del Perú al catolicismo, 1532–1750).