Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650

Abstract

Pastoral Quechua is many books in one. It is a history of the institutions that fathered pastoral Quechua (secular clergy, mendicants, and Jesuits); of the ideology that justified its creation, Inca Christianity; and of the language, its texts, and its use. The topics include pre-evangelization in the Andes attributed to St. Thomas, St. Bartholomew, or the Devil; Quechua translators and writers; mestizos’ presence in the Catholic Church; the Quechua “cartillas” since Juan de Betanzos’s translations; genres and their poetics; the creation and evolution of an official corpus of Quechua pastoral texts; changing attitudes toward inclusion of Andean religious vocabulary and Andean customs in Christian practice; the use of the texts in everyday Quechua liturgy; interaction between the texts and their social, spatial, and temporal contexts; the properties and evolution of the religious vocabulary used; the grammatical characteristics of pastoral Quechua; attitudes to other Quechua languages; institutional use of the language to teach and preach Christianity in Quechua, Spanish, or Latin; and teaching pastoral Quechua.This is the first so ample a book on pastoral Quechua. Previous investigations were case studies based on a text or a historical event but they did not bring together all the aspects of the language and its literature. Durston’s book explains how pastoral Quechua developed and why it never became a universal written standard for nonpastoral uses. Some of the analyses are little masterpieces of research. The author discovered who had translated “Doctrina Cristiana,” prepared and published by order of the Third Lima Council in 1583. His analysis of Oré’s hymns and its intertexts is a marvel. His study of the ways in which Christian writers substituted Andean tropes and images for European ones is another masterpiece of analysis.Some of the author’s affirmations seem doubtful. When writing on pastoral Quechua, he does not use any model of Andean religion, yet it was Andean religion which was confronted by Christian teachings in pastoral Quechua and thus influenced pastoral Quechua texts and language. The only exceptions to this are his considerations of how the Inca religious vocabulary was used by pastoral Quechua authors and how the Inca grammar was corrected to express Christian truths.He believes what the authorities tell him, if they come from the second half of the twentieth century. Thus he calls Inca prayers written down by Cristobal de Molina in Cuzco in about 1575 “pseudo-Inca,” without considering their contents. At the same time he treats the vocabulary of “pseudo-Inca” texts as an example of Inca religious tradition. Thus he considers only separate words or paintings, but not the text that contains the words or describes the images. He quotes Juan Pérez Bocanegra’s use of Inca religious terminology in reference to the Pope, archangels (as Capac Cozco San Miguel), and God, titled Huanacauri, but he does not try to understand the meanings of such words. Unfortunately, studies of Quechua sociolects in the sixteenth century do not exist. So the author should have left some of his ideas for a later volume and a more profound study.Some statements sound absurd: “On several occasions Pérez Bocanegra replaced mucha – ‘to adore’ with hupa . . . This term appears to be a Puquina loan word . . . . Its use brings to mind Cerrón-Palomino’s hypothesis that the Incas had originally been Puquina speakers. The fact that Pérez Bocanegra used it in some fairly strategic contexts (it is the first word in his Marian hymn) indicates that it carried a certain ritual prestige because of its Puquina origin” (p. 218). How could Pérez Bocanegra know that a word used in Southern Quechua about 1630 was of Puquina origin? How could the everyday Quechua speakers know that it was a prestigious word because of its origin? Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino does not affirm that the Incas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries spoke or knew Puquina. Deductions based on presence or absence of a word in colonial or modern vocabulary are frequently false, as is the case of rana, “buy or sell,” attributed by Durston to coastal Quechua exclusively but also present in Diego González Holguin’s 1608 Vocabulario (part 2, p. 220 [original p. 222]), which supposedly describes Cuzco Quechua of the late sixteenth century.The book is solidly based on all accessible colonial Quechua texts and on the literature that surrounds them. The author uses terminology and methods of historical investigation, linguistics, literary theory, and art studies, sometimes esoterically. Everyone interested in the history of Quechua, Christianity in the Andes, and language planning should read it.