Abstracts

quechua penn

 


Friday, February 10th

 

Session 1: Epistemologies of Decolonization

Indigenous Research in the Andes: Decolonial Potentials and Academic Justice
Luis Gabriel Sanchez Rose (SUNY Albany)

The emergence of interdisciplinary Andean Studies and Latin American Studies brings into the academy many philosophical and historical concepts held by indigenous people in the Andes.  It is critical that as we proceed in weaving more of indigenous epistemology and ontology into our research, we must remain critical and sensitive to the pitfalls of essentializing, fetishizing, or appropriating these knowledges into the colonial institution of the academy.  Recent debates on decoloniality from Latin American intellectuals provide some useful theoretical and methodological tools for researchers to avoid the above mentioned dangers of the academy.  Several concepts in decolonial theory promote alternative ways of considering indigenous language, social relations, and historical accounts that can transform the way Andean Studies scholars conduct research and theorize about the experiences of/with indigenous people. In this paper I will explain how decolonial theory can facilitate an inclusion of indigenous philosophy and history into research that also works to further social justice and a re-presentation of the Andean context.  I will draw from many of the commonly cited names in decolonial theory including Quijano, Mignolo, Walsh, Cusicanqui, and Dussel to propose distinct concepts and frameworks for scholars to use in their own research on the Andes.  Concepts and frameworks that can be harnessed for a decolonization of knowledge production by the (re)assertion of indigenous knowledges in social justice research.


Making Visible the Present/Seeing What’s Already There:
Amuyt’aña y Luraña en dos prácticas recientes de Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Caroline Shipley (Ohio State)

Reconociendo la importancia de componer un abordaje teórico sobre una región al incluir las propias teorizaciones y prácticas que están siendo desarrolladas dentro de la misma región, yo propongo una revisión detenida y precisa de dos prácticas saliendo del trabajo más reciente de Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui a la hora de realizar esta tarea.  Mientras que su discusión, elaboración y práctica de la llamada “Sociología de la imagen” ha recibido considerable atención de la crítica, todavía falta mucho para ver una mayor utilización de esta gran herramienta conceptual que nos ofrece para poder mejor pensar y practicar nuestras investigaciones contemporáneas.  Mucho menos estudiado es su utilización y apropiación crítica y efervescente de unas palabras e ideas aymaras desde las cuales ella teoriza y desarrolla su propio pensamiento y quehacer diario.  En esta ponencia, voy a brevemente explicar estas dos prácticas a través de una contextualización dentro de un performance especifico de María Galindo de Mujeres Creando, y comentar en la recepción de estas dos prácticas de Silvia por la crítica.  Terminaré destacando las posibles ventajas que puedan venir al intentar realizar nuestro trabajo intelectual sobre y hacia unos estudios andinos cuando está fuertemente alimentado con estas dos prácticas contemporáneas sumamente matizadas.  


Cosmopolitismo, Cosmopolítica y crítica decolonial en el siglo XX
Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar (Ohio State)

La crítica decolonial ha demostrado la vigencia de las colonialidades del saber, ser, poder, género y de la naturaleza en las culturas y sociedades latinoamericanas. En esta charla se examinará cómo estas colonialidades han modulado la producción artística y cultural peruana contemporánea. Desde una aproximación decolonial, revisaremos las propuestas cosmopolitas y cosmopolíticas de Gamaliel Churata, José María Arguedas y Macedonio Villafan Broncano.

 

Session 2A: Time as Narrative

New Voices, New Narrative spaces:  Fighting Injustice with Fantasy
Kimberly E Contag (Minnesota State U–Mankato)

Contrary to the exploration of the truncated human lives that we find in in early 20th-century Ecuadorian literature, contemporary writers explore fantasy to champion a space for animism and the spirit world.  Steeped in realism inherited from early 20th century writing, contemporary authors employ fantasy to unveil an experience that extracts the essence of social and historical issues through its distorted lens and adds a new creative space. In this space an inanimate object with a consciousness of its own could observe the Ecuadorian experience more completely and narrate more effectively the suffering, the beauty, and the tragedy of the Ecuadorian experience than any one particular human voice (e.g., Peky Andino’s Medea llama por cobrar or Iván Egüez’s  El poder de Gran Señor). Human experience could be developed in the secret territory of the spirit life (Jorge Dávila Andrade’s “El dominio escondido” or Acerca de los ángeles. Historias para volar). Relying on the traditional indigenous belief that all living things have a soul and maintain their individuality no matter what their physical state (animism), even Ecuadorian science fiction communed with the Andean ánima to thwart the threat of extinction (Santiago Páez, Profundo en la Galaxia). These new voices propose a vivid, deep, and beautiful counter state to the fractured lives of fictional Ecuadorian experience. In this fictional space, the unseen natural spirit prevails, delights, and provides hope in stark contrast to the punishing injustices and ice-cold realism of human experience and a natural world without a soul. 


Hacking Digital Universalism – Technological Futures and Rethinking Networked Time from the Andes
Anita Say Chan (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Dominant framings of “the digital” continue to project it as not just extending the promise global interconnection, but accelerating contemporary paths towards a future of productivity modeled by innovation centers of the high-tech world. This paper examines the temporally-oriented, chronopolitical underpinnings that mobilize digitality’s global spread, and the varied alternative imaginaries around digital culture and the tempos of global connection that emerge outside the given centers of techno-culture. By attending to the diverse experiments in digital culture that emerge from rural and urban citizen-founded innovation spaces in Peru, including Andean hack lab networks, this paper explores the distinct temporalities and rhythms of engagement as central to the development of new memory archive practices. By necessarily engaging local histories of knowledge work around nature, technology, and information objects, the paper explores how knowledge and memory practices around the digital in Peru might demonstrate means to contend with the forms of monologic expression that have dominated global digital discourse and innovation logics, while opening up possibilities for uncovering distinct collective futures in dialogue with multiple local pasts.

 

Session 2B: Intercultural Pedagogy and Indigenous Languages

“Youth , language and othering in the Quechua classroom”
Frances Kvietok (University of Pennsylvania)

In this presentation, I draw on ongoing ethnographic and participatory fieldwork carried out in Cusco, Peru to explore how youth make use of their language practices to negotiate identities as speakers and learners of Quechua. I am interested in analyzing the use of language practices which are linked to (and youth link to) stereotypical images of Quechua speakerhood, which circulate in contemporary Andean society and in youth’s Quechua language classrooms. In this paper I offer a preliminary analysis of instances of 1) motoseo and 2) stylized pronunciation of Quechua consonants, drawing on classroom fieldnotes and audio recordings as well as on interviews with youth. In doing so, I seek to understand how youth draw on different linguistic resources to position themselves and others in different ways across interactional contexts. The purpose of this analysis is to offer a youth-centric perspective to consider how otherness and discrimination is reproduced and made sense of in contexts of Indigenous language education and of Indigenous language shift to Spanish, as well as to use this analysis as a point of departure for crafting anti-discriminatory Indigenous language education pedagogies.

 

Making Indigenous languages relevant: the instruction of Quechua in universities
Américo Mendoza-Mori (University of Pennsylvania)

 

 

Session 3A: Andean Identity in Tension and Transition

Economía y sentimiento: las tensiones capitalistas en Aves sin Nido
Mercedes Victoria Mayna Medrano (UPenn)

Mi objetivo será estudiar la novela Aves sin Nido (1889) de la peruana Clorinda Matto bajo los parámetros del “desarrollo desigual”. Este marco teórico propone que el capitalismo, como sistema mundial, no se ha reproducido de la misma manera en América Latina que en otras partes del mundo. En otras palabras, la acumulación del capital en un espacio y tiempo determinados siempre creará restos de otras épocas o espacios. Por lo tanto, diversas temporalidades pueden coexistir. Para el caso de la literatura, este desarrollo desigual también tiene consecuencias que pueden ser observables en la forma estética de un texto.

Las preguntas que guiarán mi trabajo serán las siguientes: ¿Existe una tensión en la convivencia de elementos precapitalistas y capitalistas en la novela Aves sin Nido? ¿Son estas tensiones-efectos de un cambio social que se expresa económica y socialmente a través de la llegada del capitalismo imperial británico a una parte de los Andes peruanos? ¿Cómo afectan estas tensiones a la retórica y la forma de la novela? ¿Cómo se expresa esta tensión en los personajes? Mi propuesta es leer Aves sin Nido como un texto lleno de tensiones propias del cambio social y económico que se está produciendo en el Perú después de su derrota en la Guerra del Pacífico. Todo esto está enmarcado en las tensiones propias de la instalación del capitalismo imperial británico en el Perú durante el siglo XIX. En este contexto analizamos la mirada que tienen los intelectuales como Clorinda Matto sobre cómo el Perú debería enfrentar estos procesos económicos y sociales.

 

Lo propio americano. Lo andino en la Revista Americana de Buenos Aires (1929-1939)
Jose Carlos Salinas (Washington University, Saint Louis)

“La Revista Americana de Buenos Aires” (1929-1941) fue un proyecto editorial internacionalista poco conocido que planteó una plataforma para pensar la identidad y el debate de lo “americano” por medio de la colaboración de intelectuales y colaboradores de distintos países. Su director, Victoriano Lillo Catalán, refugiado catalán de la guerra civil y que además luchó por Francia en la primera guerra mundial; fue el responsable de un proyecto que editó poco más de doscientos números en once años de existencia.

Enmarcado en un proyecto mayor sobre la circulación e influencia de la cultura andina en la Argentina de comienzos del Siglo XX, el presente trabajo pretende abordar los modos cómo la Revista Americana articuló redes intelectuales con escritores y colaboradores de Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia. Analizando la inclusión de temas y debates de las naciones andinas en la Revista y reconstruyendo los puntos de contacto material entre Lillo Catalán y sus colaboradores, pretendo demostrar que la Revista representó el mayor registro de presencia de cultura andina en Argentina hasta entonces y además, fue innovadora en el modo de articular la problemática de la cultura andina, desde el ámbito de una cultura regional.


Pensar la ‘nación indiana’: sujeto y comunidad en la escritura de los
memoriales indígenas del siglo XVIII
Jose Eduardo Cornelio (Ursinus College)

En el presente trabajo propongo pensar en una genealogía del sujeto andino, para lo cual exploro un momento específico en el proceso de la historia andina: el siglo XVIII colonial en el virreinato peruano, el que estuvo caracterizado por una serie de intervenciones letradas por parte de un grupo de nobles e intelectuales indígenas que buscaban crear puentes de diálogo político con el poder imperial. En ese sentido, exploro las trayectorias en la constitución de esa subjetividad política necesaria para la articulación de una serie de demandas que buscaban llamar la atención del monarca español, de modo tal que se pudieran generar cambios concretos en el espacio social en favor de la nobleza y la población indígena en general. Esta idea de comunidad, no obstante, en la que nobles e indios del común conforman un solo cuerpo, no surge como algo dado, sino que es parte de un proceso que se va constituyendo de modo progresivo en la escritura de los memoriales indígenas. Trazar esa trayectoria es precisamente el propósito de este trabajo.


Session 3B:  
Andean Contemporary Poetic Praxis and Ideological Formations in the Southern Cone

La poesía peruana de vanguardia en la revista Amauta (1926-1931) de José Carlos Mariátegui
Róger Santiváñez, Ph.D. (Temple)

Como es sabido el primer nombre que tuvo la notable y fundamental revista Amauta –cuando era sólo un proyecto- fue Vanguardia; desde esta perspectiva es fácil comprender el decidido apoyo que nuestro gran ideólogo –introductor del pensamiento marxista en el Perú- José Carlos Mariátegui le diera a los movimientos y al arte de vanguardia. En efecto, una revisión exhaustiva de la poesía vanguardista publicada en Amauta nos presenta un amplio panorama que podríamos clasificar de la siguiente manera: 1) Alta vanguardia. Aquí incluimos a los más talentosos poetas peruanos de la tendencia: César Vallejo, Oquendo de Amat, Xavier Abril, Martín Adán, César Moro, Westphalen, los hermanos Peña Barrenechea y Alberto Hidalgo. 2) Vanguardia indigenista y nativista. En este campo estaría –por un lado- el Grupo Orkopata de Puno: Gamaliel Churata, Alejandro Peralta, Emilio Armaza, Emilio Vasquez y Luis de Rodrigo.  Y por otro, los nativistas: Alberto Guillén, José Varallanos, Guillermo Mercado, Nicanor de la Fuente, Juan José Lora, Bustamante y Ballivián, Mario Chabes y Nazario Chávez Aliaga. 3) Vanguardia del grupo de la revista de nombre cambiante ‘Hangar-Timonel-Rascacielos-Timonel’: Magda Portal, Serafín Delmar, Julián Petrovick. Y otros vanguardistas de Lima: Blanca Luz Brun, Armando Bazán. 4) Vanguardia politizada: Esteban Pavletich, César Miró y Ricardo Martínez de la Torre. Esta ponencia realizará un estudio de las principales características de cada uno de estos modos de expresión poética, focalizado en la específica literariedad de los textos publicados –concretamente- en Amauta y –de este modo-  prefigurar el concepto mariateguiano de ‘poesía de vanguardia’ en el contexto peruano y latinoamericano de su época.


Más allá de fronteras: lenguaje e identidad en
i tu de Cecilia Vicuña
Silvia Goldman, Ph.D. (DePaul)

El libro de poemas i tu (2004) de la poeta y performer chilena Cecilia Vicuña nos interpela y nos habla en varias lenguas –español, inglés, quechua, latín y griego. Las palabras se juntan y dispersan, montan y desmontan, a la vez que van diciendo y reconociendo su propia alteridad mientras migran de una lengua a la otra. De este modo, i tu funda un habla “entre lenguas” capaz de traspasar fronteras territoriales, culturales y lingüísticas. Se trata de un “habla-alba”, como sostiene la voz poética, que va hacia las raíces comunes de varias lenguas para construir un proyecto de futuro basado en la redefinición continua de una identidad plurilingüe y pluricultural. En este trabajo se rastrearán los modos y los caminos en que Vicuña va forjando este sitio geográfico y poético particular que es el i tu,  primero cuestionando nuestras apreciaciones a priori de lo que es lo americano, y luego haciéndonos transitar por las distintas geografías de un texto movedizo donde no solamente el lector, sino también las palabras experimentan sus propios viajes y transformaciones. De este modo, y haciéndose eco del término “traveling poetry” de Jahan Ramazani, la poética de i tu constituye en sí misma una forma de viaje donde las palabras mutan, los sonidos se pierden y se resignifican, y donde las lenguas cuestionan sus lógicas organizadoras para poder interactuar, hermanarse, constituyéndose en cuerpos móviles, horizontales e inclusivos donde se redefinen nociones como las de “frontera” y “extranjero.”


Hacia una ética de la representación: arquitectura de la imagen en la producción poética y las artes visuales.
Sarli E. Mercado (UW Madison)

Imaginar experiencias que lindan con lo inefable es quizás una de las tareas primordiales para muchos escritores y artistas plásticos contemporáneos en general, y en particular, para muchos artistas latinoamericanos cuya experiencia vital ha sido marcada por el abuso de los derechos humanos y el trauma colectivo bajo órdenes de Estado. Como parte de un proyecto más extenso sobre la conceptualización de la memoria/posmemoria vinculada a la violencia política —en la poesía, las artes visuales o a partir de las diversas intervenciones urbanas que redefinen el espacio público de la actual metrópolis moderna hispanoamericana—, este trabajo se centra en la obra de artistas en su mayoría peruanos, cuyas propuestas contribuyen a estas reflexiones desde la experiencia andina. Entre ellos se encuentran los poetas Patricia Alba, Domingo de Ramos, Roger Santibáñez, Carlos Villacorta, Victoria Guerrero o Carlos Aguilar Agüero como los fotoperiodistas Rodrigo Abd (Argentina) y Miguel Mejía Castro (Perú) [estos últimos dos participantes de la exposición temporal “Desaparecidos”, en El Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (LUM)]. Esta es una reflexión que apunta, entre otras, a preguntas como: ¿qué relación hay, o no, entre la imagen poética, la pictórica y la fotográfica de este tipo de representaciones? ¿Cómo y qué efecto tiene expresar a través de lo visual y lo verbal experiencias que resisten la representación?  Y finalmente, ¿es posible hablar de una estética que conduzca a una ética de la representación de este tipo de creatividad artística?


1970-2000: De la hegemonía de lo conversacional a la diversidad de registros poéticos
Carlos Villacorta Gonzales (University of Maine)

A finales de los 60, con la publicación de la antología Los nuevos (1967) se consolidó en la poesía peruana joven el registro conversacional como la línea más apreciada, que marcó una suerte de refundación en nuestra lírica contemporánea. En las décadas de los 70 y los 80, siguió siendo indiscutible la hegemonía de este registro así como su radicalización presente en grupos como Hora Zero y el Movimiento Kloaka. Al mismo tiempo, otras posibilidades estéticas, desarrolladas paralelamente, fueron vistas con cierta desconfianza y calificadas con frecuencia como “pasatistas” o evasivas, en comparación con el diálogo más atento a las dinámicas político-sociales de lo conversacional. Antonio Cornejo Polar propuso que la poesía conversacional es un nuevo discurso de representación múltiple y polifónico de la diversa sociedad “recogiendo lo que es común y negándose a elevarlo a la condición de símbolo o emblema de categorías mayores.” En los noventa, en un contexto más proclive a la multiplicidad, en correlación con la difusión de las estéticas y el pensamiento posmoderno y en diálogo con los avatares del escenario nacional, lo conversacional todavía se puede reconocer en la nueva generación de poetas. Sin embargo, su preocupación ya no es, principalmente, la de los nuevos sujetos nacionales. En la última década del siglo XX, se puede reconocer una apertura hacia la diversidad de posturas y registros poéticos. Esta ponencia revisará las tensiones estéticas e ideológicas entre el registro poético conversacional hegemónico en las primeras décadas de los setentas hasta final del siglo XX.

 

Panel Session 4  (Invited Panel I)

Andean and Amazonian “Ecologies of Knowledge and Meaning” as Pedagogical and Programmatic Model
Michelle Wibbelsman (Ohio State)

What are the best approaches for awakening and deepening students’ appreciation for the expressive and aesthetic sensibilities of the Andes and Amazonia? What are the possibilities for pedagogy and programming that are compatible with participatory and oral traditions? In what ways can these enable us to get beyond teaching about culture in the classroom, and instead, engage with indigenous knowledge systems?  

In this paper I discuss two new initiatives that support Quechua Language and Andean and Amazonian Studies at The Ohio State University that emphasize an applied and immediate engagement with Andean expression and aesthetics using elements of performance pedagogy and material culture as methods that are compatible with participatory and oral traditions, and fresh perspectives on pedagogy and programming informed by indigenous knowledge and practice systems. They are the Andean Music Ensemble, launched in Fall of 2014 as an interdepartmental collaboration between the School of Music and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Andean and Amazonian Cultural Artifact Collection. Modeled on Andean and Amazonian notions of “ecologies of knowledge and meaning” that suggest interrelation, interconnected and interdependent processes, and nested systems of epistemology, these initiatives are embedded in a broader “Integrated Learning Environment for the Study of Andean and Amazonian Languages and Cultures” that attempts to engage with the methods and think from Andean and Amazonian epistemological frameworks and theoretical perspectives.


Andean Studies from the Periphery: Researching Andina Women, Resilience, and Education in Ticapampa, Peru
Laura Valdiviezo (UMass-Amherst)

In this testimonial approach to study Andean women, I aim at understanding the meanings and cultural practices of four generations of women of both, Andean and Spanish descent, who lived in the central Andes in Peru. Experiences of servitude, war, and environmental violence, marked their lives and those of later generations who lived and visited elders in their chacra, where children were cared for and deeply loved, but where learning Quechua was forbidden to them. Theirs was a life in the periphery, where cultural practices responded to daily material scarcity but they were abundant with mixed language practices and knowledge about survival that preceded any formal education. This testimonial work collects the stories of some of the women who both lived and visited the chacra. The women in this study include the ones who came from the nearby town of Huaráz to visit their Awichita and their daughter, Abuelita; the heads of a small household in Ticapampa. I hope the insights of this presentation contribute to our understanding of Andean Studies as a field as well as its borders, where the lives of those who were, in this case, at the periphery deepen our ways of knowing and theorizing in this field.

 

Saturday, February 11th

 

Session 5A: Indigenous Community Politics and Insurgency

Andean space, indigeneity and the state. The Puno Tambopata Project 1956-1966.
Cayetana Adrianzen (NYU)

For Andean elites and intellectuals, the mountains have often been thought of as a limiting factor, a literal barrier for development in their nations. In Peru, over the last century or so, there has also been an undisputed link between Andean mountains and indigenous people -denoted by the word “serrano”. In consequence, and perhaps because of it, the Peruvian state and its mostly coastal elites have made their central goal to “modify”, “improve”, “civilize” and transform the indigenous groups and the space they inhabit. My paper will seek to problematize the -supposedly- natural relationship between Andean space and indigenous people. In doing so, it will look particularly at the role that the state sponsored programs have had in delimiting that region and making it a “indigenous space”. As a case study of sorts, I will focus on the Puno Tambopata Project (1956-1966). Sponsored by the International Labor Organization the project sought to “organize” migration from the “overpopulated” areas in Puno to colonize areas of the Tambopata low-land region. Although small, it generated not only quite a bit of attention from the press and was hailed, as the ultimate – and complementary – solution to the uniquely “Andean problem.”


All Politics is Local: Decentralization and Government Performance across Bolivian Municipalities, 2003-2013
Mariana Giusti-Rodríguez (Cornell)

Why do some communities receive greater levels of government services than others? It is often assumed that the failure of poor countries to provide basic government services stems from either a shortage of fiscal resources or a failure to allocate those resources towards the public good. Bolivia is the poorest economy in South America. Yet an examination of subnational variation in budget execution across the Bolivian municipalities between 2003 and 2013 reveals that fiscal constraints are not always the fundamental obstacle to citizen welfare. While all municipal governments face obstacles to complying with central government finance rules and fiscal policies, some municipalities are still systematically more successful than others in executing the annual budget. What explains this variation? Controlling for a variety of alternative explanations, including the wealth of the community, levels of ethno-linguistic fractionalization, and the strength of civil society, a structured comparative analysis of 4 most-similar municipalities reveals that the condition of unified or divided local government shapes the capacity of local governments to execute their budgets. The results of a regression discontinuity model of 337 Bolivian municipalities before and after the 2010 municipal elections confirm the finding that community development is highly contingent on the level of governmental fractionalization at the municipal level. These findings contribute to our understanding of the conditions under which political decentralization improves development outcomes, with implications for theories of variation in local governance across the Global South.

La mujer no es apolitical e indiferente
Leah Cargin (Minnesota State University-Mankato)

The current scholarship on the members of Sendero Luminoso focuses unilaterally on men. The few scholars who include women in their studies only mention statistical analyses, or they frame them as passive victims succumbing to the seductions of the terrorist organization. It is critical that the scholarship expand in quantity, but also in complexity. Sendero was not a feminist utopia, but I contend that they did provide women with alternative opportunities to the machista society in Peru. In its inception university educated women actively chose to join Sendero. They were not coerced, but many scholars argue that as the organization entered the countryside and began to mobilize the rural populations, they used the impoverishment of the Andean people to introduce and enchant them with the idealism of Sendero. Poverty had led the Andean people to desperation. This narrowed their options for opportunity and Sendero provided a chance to escape their realities. The rural women were drawn into Sendero by the promise of a changed life. Current scholarship implies that women were forced or tricked into joining Sendero, but I argue that they were not misled and that many women chose to join to obtain a sense of agency. In order to understand the role that women played in Sendero I have analyzed their motivations to join. This paper will add to the scholarship on Peruvian women, demonstrate their decisions to join Sendero, and argue their relationship within the organization was complex.

 

Session 5B: Hybrid Voices

Pensar en quechua y escribir en español, letras indígenas en la el Perú Colonial
Ana María Ferreira (University of Indianapolis)

La colonización española en el continente americano supuso entre muchos otros efectos, la imposición del español como la lengua oficial.  Para la población nativa, este hecho significó de algunas maneras una transformación en la forma como era percibido y representado el mundo, también en como eran contadas las historias y en general alteró el sistema simbólico americano.  Al mismo tiempo, se puede pensar que el español -como la lengua de los ‘nuevos’ sistemas judiciales y de gobierno-, ayudó aun más a excluir a los indígenas de la participación política y del poder en general.

Con esto en mente, quisiera presentar en la conferencia, una ponencia sobre la relación entre el español y el quechua en textos escritos por indígenas en la temprana Colonia en el Virreinato del Perú.  Desde hace algunos años he estado trabajando le escritura de Titu Cusi Yupanqui y quisiera en esta oportunidad analizar su obra, junto a la de otro autores como Guamán Poma de Ayala y Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti.  

Mi lectura busca entender la relación entre el español y el quechua en la escritura de estos tres autores.  Me pregunto al analizar la relación entre el quechua y el español en sus textos, qué consecuencias políticas y simbólicas tiene el uso del español como lengua principal de sus textos.  Al mismo tiempo busco comprender la importancia y significado del uso de algunas palabras en quechua.  El objetivo de esta ponencia es proponer preguntas e hipótesis sobre la relación entre el quechua y el español en estos tres autores indígenas durante la Colonia.


Quechua lyric and national consciousness in Arguedas’
Todas las sangres
Scotland Long (UPenn)

The question that I will attempt to answer in this paper is why José María Arguedas included such an impressive amount of Quechua lyrics and poems in his novel Todas las Sangres. The narrative, which depicts the social reality of capitalism’s arrival in Peru, contains within itself a sort of Quechua cancionero or songbook. What is the function of these Quechua lyrics within the novel’s vision of modernization for the country? What is the potential role of this artistic production not only in Arguedas’ literary work, but within the new cultural hybridity that the ethnographer, poet, and novelist envisioned? In the West, the novel is viewed as the modern successor of the epic. However, as a mythologist and scholar of Quechua song, did Arguedas think otherwise, finding a role for the epic/mythic/oral within the new Peru? I argue that the hybridity of Quechua verse and Spanish prose in the novel helps the reader appreciate the multiple temporalities and social and cultural practices that constitute the new Peruvian nation.  

 

Session 6A: Hispanidad and its Echoes

“Orfeo con su voz mudada”: ecos andinos en la práctica de la Academia Antártica
Víctor Sierra Matute (UPenn)

La creación de las primeras academias literarias del Virreinato del Perú, a finales del siglo XVI, supone una de las muchas imposiciones estructurales que Occidente practicó durante la ocupación colonial americana. Aliadas de la cultura elitista, estas academias se autoproclamaron como fundadoras de un canon literario. Este “nuevo estilo”, a la vez que reclama una diferencia, replica las ideologías de un discurso dominador que silencia aquellas voces disidentes —las nativas— que no se ajustan a sus postulados políticos y estéticos. Sin embargo, una lectura atenta del corpus textual producido en el seno de dichas academias revela que la oralidad andina tuvo una sutil pero profunda influencia sobre ellas. En esta comunicación analizaré la actividad literaria de la Academia Antártica. Trabajaré con los volúmenes poéticos de la Miscelánea austral y el Parnaso antártico para mostrar que el rasgo diferenciador de este grupo de escritores es, precisamente, la importancia que otorgan a la dimensión acústica y vocal. La temprana andinización del castellano, explicada por lingüistas como Cerrón-Palomino, es más que un aspecto estético: el contacto que mantiene con el quechua y el aimara no solo se produce a nivel lingüístico, sino también ideológico. La voz como “ontología radical” es un elemento que permite a estos intelectuales, en palabras de Mabel Moraña, “reivindicar a la Colonia como locus productor de cultura capaz de desafiar los fundamentos mismos del exclusivismo europeo”.


(Des)apropiación y topología en las reescrituras coloniales contemporáneas de Colombia y Perú
Juan Carlos Rozo (University of Houston)

En esta presentación analizo las formas en que algunos autores en Colombia y Perú han reescrito la Conquista y la colonización del Nuevo Mundo valiéndose de numerosas estrategias discursivas que trascienden los límites de la novela histórica y la metaficción historiográfica. Entre dichas estrategias discursivas me interesa ahondar en dos: Primero, la (des)apropiación del documento histórico (crónicas, relaciones, etc.) en favor de lo que Cristina Rivera Garza ha denominado como “estética citacionista”, es decir, la desarticulación del Cronista, o el yo Autor —y Autoridad—, en favor de una escritura en comunidad, que permite el protagonismo del discurso en sí mismo y no de quien lo enuncia. Dicha (des)apropiación es patente en dos obras del escritor peruano Fernando Iwasaki: la colección de cuentos Inquisiciones peruanas (1994) y la novela Neguijón (2005).

Una segunda estrategia discursiva es la narración topológica, entendida como la contemplación y construcción de un espacio, por un observador que lo hace desde el interior “subjetivo”, y no desde un afuera “objetivo” como sería el caso de la cartografía y la historiografía oficial. Dicho discurso tipológico es patente en la trilogía de la conquista del colombiano William Ospina: Ursúa (2005), El país de la canela (2008), La serpiente sin ojos (2012), novelas en las que un narrador marginal (re)narra las expediciones de Orellana, Pizarro y Ursúa.

Con este análisis demostraré algunas estrategias de reescritura y reevaluación de la Conquista y Colonia en algunos autores andinos contemporáneos.  

 

Post-Colonial Colonials: Spanish Migrants to 21st Century Lima
Diego Arispe-Bazán (University of Pennsylvania)

A new wave of Spanish arrivals in Peru has seen a dramatic growth in the last 3 years, a population of labor migrants seeking employment after the 2008 crisis. These immigrants enter the highly stratified Peruvian society with a different, high level of colonial social capital. This project will investigate local anxieties about race and class in relation to the ideological and historical contexts that have informed Hispano-Peruvian relations over time. To explore this question, this project specifically seeks to investigate how seemingly banal encounters reinforce larger processes of subject formation and social encounter, and serve as avenues through which ideologies of exclusion and inclusion in post- colonial settings are both asserted and transformed. The project thus links macro-political forces with everyday encounters and potentially identify moments and tempos within the process of coloniality.

Session 6B: Performing Devotion in the Andes

Revolutionary Gospel in Teatro de los Andes and La Compañia de Teatro de Albuquerque
Eduardo Luís Campos Lima (Universidade de São Paulo)

This work presents a brief comparison between La muerte de Jesús Mamani, a play produced by Bolivian theatre group Teatro de los Andes, and the play La pasión de Jesús Chávez, created by La Compañia de Teatro de Albuquerque, from New Mexico. Both works are part of the Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano (New Latin American Theatre), developed all over Latin America and related to Chicano theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. The Nuevo Teatro combined Modernist forms and procedures with traditional artistic expressions. Campesino and indigenous performance played a vital role in this process. From a political point of view, the ideas of Liberation Theology were an important source of critical thinking. In Bolivia, one of the sprouts of the Nuevo Teatro is the group Teatro de los Andes, created in 1992 in Sucre. The conjunction of European Modernist experimentalism with Bolivian forms and contents was a remarkable aspect of their work since the beginning. In Jesús Mamani, the story of Jesus Christ is recounted in the Andean context, with an indigenous character who is killed due to his ideas – in a reference to Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Jesús Mamani is part of a long tradition of narrating the Gospel in a revolutionary form. In Albuquerque, as well, La Compañia staged in 1982 the story of a peasant revolt organized by Jesús Chávez, a political and spiritual leader.

 

Troubling the Pentecostal pursuit of “modernity” in Cusco, Peru

Emilie Egger (Yale)

Consistent with patterns across Latin America, the Pentecostal evangelical population in Southern Peru continues to grow. With their increasing numbers, Pentecostals in Cusco have sought to form a religious and political identity independent of the hybrid culture of Andean-Catholicism that has pervaded the region since colonial contact; moreover, since the late-twentieth century, a vaguely “Andean” cultural identity has been appropriated by both Cusco residents and outsiders to commercial ends. The proliferation of Pentecostalism in the religious landscape of Cusco positions Pentecostals against the commercialization and politicization of indigenous culture while simultaneously orienting them toward a Western political identity.
Yet an examination of Pentecostal religious practices in Cusco disrupts what has come to be seen as an entrenched binary of Protestant-Catholic identities. This paper examines how contemporary Assemblies of God churches in Cusco city and province reject Andean-Catholic practices such as magic, liturgy, and traditional forms of community and social organization, while embracing idiosyncratic versions of such rituals. Specifically, Pentecostal abstention from alcohol and coca leaves and what they perceive to be the pagan practices of many of their Catholic neighbors often masks other forms of mysticism as expressed through Pentecostal practices such as glossolalia, prophecy, and healing rituals. Moreover, the search for an “authentic” Christianity not mediated by the Roman Catholic Church or “indigenous” pagan ideology exists alongside a continuity of United States missionary activity through collaborations with American churches for financial support of church social programs.
More broadly, this paper speculates regarding the future of religious studies in Latin America, especially how religious identity relates to political power (both locally and broadly) through the lens of the complex relationship of Andean-Catholics and evangelical Protestants in Southern Peru, which blurs lines between binaries of modernity and tradition, Western and indigenous, and mystical and authentic.


The Legal and Ethnic Power of Nuestra Señora, the ‘Mother of the Indians´:  Andeans’ Translating Possession in the Colonial Pueblos de Indios.
Alcira Dueñas (Ohio State-Newark)

This presentation provides a new explication of Spanish empire construction as a bottom-up formative process, challenging the conventional top-down history of imperial law and legal practice. I consider the indigenous translation of the Spanish legal tenet of “possession” as an entry point to understanding the locality and ethnic history of the Spanish legal empire. I suggest that indigenous understandings of possession generated a local re-inscription of imperial space as Andeans infused rituals of land possession with unique meaning when confronted with the loss of what came to be their homeland. Andeans understood well the notion and ritualistic nature of the Spanish legal tenets and rendered it with unique visual, performative, and symbolic expression. In confronting the impending loss of livelihood and homeland, indigenous women led their men in deploying and mobilizing religious imagery, sabotaging official land surveys, and raising their voices in Quechua to stop the advance of colonial private landownership over indigenous lands. I analyze original legal writings that colonial caciques produced in the midst of land disputes, which reveal them as unique cultural translators and bring to light the role of indigenous women and men in subverting Spanish-sanctioned rituals of ownership in colonial Ecuador. I, therefore, see Andean Studies benefitting from a localized perspective that acknowledges contemporary Andean understandings of justice as rooted in local knowledge, political rendering of religion, and the generative power of imminent cultural and social demise.


“Religious crossdressing: The figure of the imilla in Paucartambo”
Enzo E. Vasquez Toral (Princeton)

The presence of crossdressing in Peruvian traditional dances is usually masked by satire and comedy artifacts. However, this performative practice is paradoxically present in the context of religious festivities. The Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen de Paucartambo showcases several dances that tell the story of this town; among those, the Qhaphaq Qolla dance is one of the most iconic. Aside from several Qolla characters, Qhaphaq Qolla includes a man dressed as a woman, popularly known as the imilla. The figure of the imilla is a distinctive form of crossdressing for two main reasons: it is present in a dance that is only performed by men; and the imilla is said to represent a religious deity such as the Virgen del Carmen herself. The mix of the religious and the queer poses questions to the very elements of this dance and of its place in religious traditional dances in the Peruvian Andean region. This papers proposes to look at the figure of the imilla beyond the syncretic elements of the festivity and the dance she is part of. In doing so, I propose to understand the cross-dressed body of the imilla as challenging immediate gender roles in this festivity, which in turn challenges the very concept of tradition. By reading the imilla through multiple perspectives, I seek to place this “festive crossdressing” as constituting a theoretical view of its own to understand the queer in Andean folkloric tradition. To facilitate this analysis, this paper includes fieldwork research done in the 2016 Fiesta de la Virgen del Carmen de Paucartambo.

 

Session 7 (Invited Panel II): Thinking Andean Studies Through Bolivian History

Framing and Disseminating the Indian Law and Toribio Miranda’s Jaqi Nationalism
Waskar Ari (University of Nebraska)

Toribio Miranda played a crucial role in the indigenous struggle against the “colonial” dimension of the Bolivian state and the haciendas during the first half of the twentieth century. My research shows the role of this Uru activist in the network  of Apoderados in the 1920s and delves into the emergence of the indigenous network of  “Alcaldes Mayores Particulares” (AMP) and their discourse of Indian Law. I explore the making of an indigenous activist and analyze the strategies that Miranda used in the era before the1952 revolution. I evaluate the historical context that produced the figure of Toribio Miranda and review his political discourse, which was based on Uru and Aymara ideas. I also discuss the importance of Andean religion in constructing the idea of a multi-ethnic Qullasuyo. From 1920 to 1940, Miranda traveled extensively between the communities and ayllus of Oruro and northern Posotí and the valleys of Chuquisaca and Cochabamba to organize indigenous people, with a special emphasis on hacienda peons. Miranda elaborated a discourse based on the oral tradition of the Urus and his own version of the laws of Indies. In doing this, Miranda showed a strong devotion to the Mother Earth (Pachamama) and to the other deities of the Andean world. He was among the first to emphasize Indian education and eventually organized autonomous indigenous schools. His successive wives (or t’allas) played important roles in his activism, building up joint leadership and supporting his ideas about multi-ethnicity. Toribio Miranda, an Uru Indian, was a leading figure in the long historical trajectory that created the current estado plurinacional de Bolivia


Bolivia Revisited: Reflections on scholarship in the post-structuralist era
Brooke Larson (Stony Brook)

This paper will re-engage my LARR 1988 state-of-the-field essay, which appraised the historical and anthropological work on Bolivia that North American researchers had produced over the 1970s and 1980s. A synopsis of that early reflective essay will be my point of departure for looking at post-structuralist and culturalist developments in Bolivian historiography after c. 1990.

I will focus on shifting research agendas in three areas: a) the  shift in the “locus of [scholarly] enunciation” from el Norte to Bolivia;  b) the eclipse of longue durée Andean ethnohistory by dynamic studies of indigenous movements in particular moments in history; and c) the new subaltern politics of knowledge and voice, testimonio and memory, that have reshaped the contours of Bolivian history and anthropology in recent times. (I exclude the recent explosion of studies in, and on, Bolivia, since the rise of Evo Morales — a topic for another panel.)
If time, I conclude with a few thoughts on  the field of “Andean Studies” of yesteryear and of today.

 

Session 8 (Invited Panel III)

 

Indigenous movements in the eye of the hurricane
Marc Becker (Truman State University)

Sociologist Andrés Guerrero famously has examined how nineteen-century liberal legislation in Ecuador created a “ventriloquist’s voice” that mediated Indigenous expressions of resistance to exclusionary governing structures. An oft repeated assumption is that in political struggles Indigenous voices disappear, and what we are left with are the actions of intermediaries who purportedly spoke out in defense of subaltern rights but in reality only desired to advance their own political, social, and economic interests. In essence, this perspective alleges that these intermediaries added another layer of exploitation to an already marginalized and silenced population. Careful studies, however, reveal that Indigenous activists did advance their own agendas, both alone as well as in collaboration with sympathetic urban allies. Recovering subaltern voices, however, is complicated by a lack of written archival documentation that typically forms the basis for a scholarly examination of the past. Often this lack of documentation is not so much the fault of local organic intellectuals, but rather the racist attitudes of a dominant class who did not find their thoughts and actions worthy of preservation. During the 1940s, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents conducted intelligence-gathering efforts against urban leftists in Latin America, but failed to do so on rural communities, thereby providing one stunning example of the historiographic consequences of such an omission. Despite the United States security apparatus’ stated concern for subversive movements in Ecuador, they missed what could be construed as some of the most significant political organizing efforts. The FBI failed to submit substantive reports on Indigenous movements, even as the Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios (FEI, Ecuadorian Federation of Indians) mobilized rural communities against historically exclusionary and repressive structures. The United States intelligence apparatus never placed much importance on gaining a strong understanding of rural organizing efforts, or attempting to counter the potential threat that they might represent. The absence of scrutiny of this Indigenous federation reveals as much about the narrow assumptions and nature of United States intelligence gathering endeavors as does a study of where they chose to focus their surveillance efforts. This essay examines the gap between the perception of both domestic and international surveillance operations and the realities of rural mobilizations.

‘Cuánto me costó aceptar a Santiago como una huaca’: The Andean Politics of the Gods Choosing Us
Oswaldo Hugo Benavides (Fordham University)

As Bolivian scholar, Silivia Rivera Cusincanqui, points out, it is hard work to accept the Spanish icon, Santiago as a local Andean Huaca. He is too white, says Silvia Rivera, too bearded and too violent to seem to fit into the Andean pantheon. But fit he does as myriads of Andean communities venerate Santiago as a patron saint. So how does one understand this Andean way of seeing the world? What really is Andean Cosmology? The Andean understanding of history and place, histories and sacred spaces? Ultimately, I use this particular example to help us to think about the plausibility of Andean produced theory; that is, is it possible to produce theory in the Andes, from the Andes, for the Andes? An authentically generated Andean theory as opposed to having the Andes being the constant consumer of European and North American theories that traverse the “old new” ways of the colonial and neocolonial circuit.

Hopes for Equality and the Political Mobilization of Castas in the Late Colonial Peru
Mónica Ricketts (Temple University)

 

KEYNOTE:

Foundational Violences: Silences, memory, and fratricide in Peru’s historiographical narratives, 1781-2017
Cecilia Méndez (UCSB)

Like other American countries after independence,  Peru was engulfed in civil wars throughout the nineteenth century. But the memories of these wars did not shape national political identities in twentieth-century Peru as they did  in, say, twentieth-century Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, or the  United States. Rather, the memories of Peru’s nineteenth century civil wars have been overshadowed by  those of  the War of the Pacific that Peru lost to Chile (1879-1883), and the uprising lead by Túpac Amaru II in 1780-181.

 

Despite having occurred four decades before the establishment of Peru’s national state, the Túpac Amaru rebellion can be studied as a civil war by virtue of its lingering effects in the country’s memory.  But insofar as it was, for the most part, a repressed  memory, it was not integrated into an open, explicitly political discourse at the national level, at least until the 1960s.  My presentation analyzes the silencing and  memories of the Túpac Amaru rebellion and subsequent –mostly indigenous– rebellions (1780-1815)  as they manifested themselves in popular and  historiographical narratives from shortly after they occurred. It postulates that the erasure of these uprisings from the earliest  foundational historiographical  narratives of the nation cannot be interpreted as forgetfulness but  rather as an uneasiness toward their violent character. Yet, it was not violence per se that unsettled the dominant historiography, as much its remembrance in “ethnic” terms. Put it other words: the rebellion of Túpac Amaru  was not silenced because it was violent but because it evoked, in mostly Creole writers, the idea of  Indians exerting violence.

My ultimate goal is to decipher a seeming paradox; to wit, how the very country that produced both the major anti-Spanish colonial insurgency in Spanish America prior to the wars of independence, and the bloodiest Marxists guerrilla in the 20th century, crafted one of the most conservative –“insurgency averse” – historical narratives of national foundation in the continent.

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