Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism in the Andes

Abstract

Invaders as Ancestors is a substantial, ambitious work that plots the transformation of preconquest (and pre-Inca) Andean ancestor worship into the mountain spirit worship that has characterized Andean religion over the past two or more centuries. With the daring and originality that he has brought to the study of preconquest society, Peter Gose explains this transformation as the result of ongoing responses to colonial challenges that themselves changed over the course of two centuries. In the process, he elucidates the politico-cosmological world of indigenous societies as they experienced Spanish conquest and colonial rule. In a sense, this work stands in counterpoint to the superb intellectual history of the past three decades that has explored the impact of the conquest on Spanish and European thought: here the topic is the impact of the conquest and the centuries of ensuing colonial rule on Andean cosmology and belief. Focusing on Andean mortuary practices and the ancestors cults that stood at the heart of precon-quest society, Gose offers a compelling model of how these manifestations of indigenous cosmology co-opted and coexisted with Spanish customs and rule in the first century of the viceroyalty. However, he argues, the seventeenth-century extirpation campaigns and the widespread crises of the eighteenth century rendered maintenance of ancestor cults impossible and produced a reorientation of religious practice toward a veneration of mountain spirits.This book operates on several scholarly levels with varying degrees of success. Gose offers sophisticated and detailed discussion of how the Spanish and the conquest were absorbed into an Andean worldview that had a long tradition of negotiating conquest through narratives of kinship. This work is essential for understanding how the hierarchical relations of colonial rule were constructed at the very heart of the societies of the república de indios. Grounding his argument and analysis in contemporary texts and archival sources (particularly of the Lima archbishopric), Gose makes a compelling case for using incorporation, rather than rejection, as the model for Andean responses to Spanish demands. Ultimately, though, coexistence and incorporation proved insufficient for the maintenance of ancestor cults, as the disruptive forces of the colonial economy and colonial law and the open assaults of the extirpation campaigns of the seventeenth century provoked a collapse of the kin-based ayllu and of the elite authority on which ancestor veneration depended. Here Gose relies on a set narrative from Andean social history: his descriptions of the decline of the ayllu as anything but a tributary, administrative association and of the universal crisis of kuraka legitimacy in the eighteenth century will strike many colonial historians as overly broad and simplistic. The later sections of the work also tend to reduce the Andes to a single space, sacrificing attention to regional variations in social and economic structure, history, and cultural practice to the larger narrative of religious and cosmological change.Gose engages in great detail with numerous significant but narrow debates in colonial Andean history — most importantly those of the sixteenth century on the origins of attributions of the deifying term viracocha to Spanish invaders, and on the scope and significance of the anticolonial Taqi Onqoy movement of the 1560s. The detail of his interventions and the tone and certainty with which the author presents his conclusions are sure to excite debate, although in places the discussion neglects recent, important works. (The absence of Catherine Julien’s work from the discussion is particularly unfortunate.) The book makes further contributions to the scholarship on colonial Andean culture through thoughtful and detailed engagements in the academic debate surrounding the extirpation campaigns and the genealogy of the mountain spirits and their place in Andean religion generally.Gose marshals this study toward a critique of the simplistic “resistance” model of colonial Andean social history with its implicit essentialization of indigenous culture, arguing that such analysis — still dominant (although by no means hegemonic) in the academic study of colonial Andean history and anthropology — denies the Andean strategies of “mediation, inclusion and assimilation” that have so characterized Andean societies and enabled their reproduction over five centuries. In a valuable corrective, Gose emphasizes Andean religious beliefs and practices as vital and dynamic in their response to Spanish rule and Catholic evangelization. Far less successful are the work’s claims of sweeping theoretical significance in colonial and postcolonial studies. The introduction offers a broad challenge to the postcolonial critique put forward by Edward Said, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others in the 1980s, without paying attention either to the elaboration and refining of theorizations of colonial power relations over the past two decades, or to their formulation in response to Enlightenment and modern European colonial regimes and their residues rather than to the colonial empire of a corporatist, absolutist early modern state.