Rethinking Landscape and Colonialism in the Context of Early Spanish Peru

Abstract

Efforts to work towards the rematerialisation of landscape have recently been augmented by concerns for corporeal, nonrepresentational dimensions of landscape experience as well as for nonhuman agency. Increasingly, landscape is conceptualised as a never-finished product of processes and practices that are both material and symbolic. Although such trends are reflected to some extent in work on landscape in colonial contexts, in this paper I contend that a closer engagement with these new directions may offer a useful means of breathing new life into colonial landscapes that, in some scholarly work, appear to have little existence beyond European representations that were made of them. Arguing for a conception of colonial landscape as process, I suggest that there is a need not only for recognising the material and corporeal dimensions of European experiences of colonial landscapes but also for attending to the ways in which those landscapes were brought into being and given meaning through the frequently mundane and locally focused activities of everyday life. Following a brief review of recent work on colonial landscapes, these suggestions are explored in the context of Spanish encounters with landscape in early colonial Peru. Initially focusing on accounts produced between the eve of conquest and the mid-16th century, the analysis then shifts to a legal battle that was fought in the early 17th century between two priests who occupied neighbouring parishes in the highland province of Huarochirí.