Popular Religion and Appropriation: The Example of Corpus Christi in Eighteenth-Century Cuzco

Abstract

Historical studies of Andean popular religion have largely been confined to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the main exegeses of the early chronicles and the rich materials on “extirpation of idolatry.” The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remain largely terra incognita, while information on twentieth-century popular religion has come primarily from ethnographic field studies. More recently, historians and anthropologists have begun to explore the religious or messianic dimension of the great uprisings of 1780–1783 in the southern Andean sierra, taking their cue from a 1955 essay by John Rowe on a purported “Inca nationalism.” Yet between early-colonial historiography and twentieth-century ethnography, one encounters a virtual silence of two centuries. This hiatus is largely explained by the lack of printed sources for the period and the consequent need to sieve scarce data from archives. Also pertinent is the fact that by the end of the seventeenth century, the tide of early-modern missionary zeal had ebbed. That waning of interest in extirpatory endeavors by church and state alike coincided with a diminution of witch-hunts in Europe generally and a decline in the influence and fervor of the Inquisition in Spain specifically.