Indecent Living: Indigenous Women and the Politics of Representation in Early Colonial Peru
The main period of consolidation and reform of the early Peruvian colony—the 1560s through the 1580s—also marked the beginning of the invention of the economic and social character of the colony in the Spanish empire. This new role was constructed and normalized in part via a reimagination of the pre-Hispanic past, of which the colony could be seen as both an outgrowth and a corrective. Within the context of the contemporary political and economic crises in which colonial Viceroys and other functionaries found themselves during these decades—crises of  nancial realization, demographic collapse, civil rebellions and indigenous uprisings—the authors of of cial political narratives envisioned an ef cient state that would have legitimacy among both colonizers and colonized. The narratives and reports that grew out of this legitimating project developed a narrow, Cuscocentric vision as they emphasized pre-Hispanic institutions that indicated the preferred direction of the colonial state, including the Inca legal system and rules for political succession. One of the most interesting institutions thus held up for admiration and consideration was the acllahuasi , a Quechua word used by these Spaniards to refer to what was probably an array of social institutions involving groups of con ned women called acllas or mamaconas. The changing and narrowing representations of the acllas—as a harem, as productive and tradeable commodities, as “vestal virgins” or beatas, and  nally as idealized wives of the state—indicated the shifting agendas of the authors and patrons of these narratives towards a discourse that celebrated centralization, hierarchy and separation between classes and ethnic groups. While the historical narratives that emerged during and from this political debate were not necessarily instrumentalist , I argue here that the construction of this discursive terrain was a by-product that had its own effects upon, at least, our knowledge of colonial Peru. My argument is organized around some key texts written during this central period of constitution of the political economy of colonial Peru, and demonstrates how the development of a more centralized vision of the colony by its administrators and elites contributed to the construction and acceptance of a historical narrative, the terms of which were commonly deployed by those in power as well as their critics. I begin with the chronicles of conquest, written within a few years of contact by the conquistadores themselves. These reveal the spontaneous and indetermi-
Colour by Numbers: Racial and Ethnic Categories in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1532–1824
The distinction between ethnic and racial categories in social analysis is finely drawn, and rarely clear. In the case of Latin American societies, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are sometimes synonymous, and far more often deployed as if they were. Researchers are familiar with the ways in which processes of deracination, acculturation and miscegenation iron out the cultural edges that demarcate social groups, one from another; perhaps the classic example is the gradual loss of indigenous characteristics attendant upon native American migration to cities. Yet, even in the complete absence of rural-to-urban migration, such processes have been at work moulding present-day indigenous communities, which once recognised numerous ethnic distinctions within ‘Indian’ society, distinctions that were progressively diluted – though not wholly extinguished – during some three centuries of colonial rule. To draw attention to the protean nature of ethnicity in Latin American societies, however, is not to say that researchers are necessarily unaware of the problem, but rather that they often follow research agendas that may be inconvenienced by attention to such nuances. Thus, for example, a number of broad-brush racial cum ethnic classifications provided the basis for the fiscal demands of Crown and Church alike during the colonial period, and as such provide the essential pillars for much of the quantitative fiscal and demographic database that we possess.
Curas and Social Conflict in the Doctrinas of Cuzco, 1780–1814
Historians concerned to evaluate the turbulent political history of southern Peru in the late colonial period have, in the main, sought their answers in the voluminous correspondence generated in the wake of the several rebellions, seditions and sundry protests and riots which so scarred the epoch. Several historians have recently explored the wider structural context of such unrest, and we even have a socio-racial analysis of the leading cadres of the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780. Beyond the political and economic or commercial context within which such political conflict took place, however, we still lack an analysis of social stratification in southern Peru which embraces both the divisive and cohesive facets of inter-class relations, with all that the imply fo the potential formation of political alliances in the region. Moreover, apart from the immediate conflicts which precipitated the two major uprisings of 1780 and 1814, little is known of the nature of social relations at local level during the interregnum of some three decades which separated those two revolts, or indeed before 1780.