Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (review)

Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru. By CAROLYN DEAN. Latin American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Photographs. Plates. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xi, 288 pp. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95.

Art historian Carolyn Dean's Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ breathes life into Cuzco's mid-colonial years through a multiperspectival investigation of Corpus Christi, the Catholic feast in honor of the body of Christ as transubstantiated in the consecrated Host. Writing for an academic and cross-disciplinary readership, Dean studies the ways in which different historical actors understood their own and others' participation in the public performances of the festival, and how their understandings were being created and developed within pictorial and textual representations of these performances.

Dean emphasizes that while the annual festival in the former Inka capital became a potent expression of Spanish Christian triumph and native Andean subjugation, it was almost never only that. Corpus was a performance in which Indians embodied a range of deliberate and inadvertent roles, from the tightly scripted through the wildly ambivalent to the largely independent and even subversive. It was not as if colonial Indians did not process and impersonate Inkas in other Andean places. But the participation of a sizeable elite descended from the prehispanic rulers made Cuzco unique and symbolically charged.

The members of this nobility were simultaneously Inkas attaching themselves to a glorious imperial past and Hispanicized civic potentates whose influence was in and of the seventeenth century. Dean argues that the visual and textual traces by which we can better understand these culturally "composite" figures reflect more than their enfeeblement as effortful peacock-descendants of a vanquished ruling caste; she is intrigued by them as agile, "mediative" actors within a colonial city. The Spanish authorities, on whom Dean also tries to keep an eye, seem ultimately to be caught in a contradiction which rivals the fix of any preceding Inka cacique, that of having invited to their feast the very performers and performance they must increasingly suspect as antithetical to their ends.

Dean's principal contributions are her substantial efforts to peer within and behind a remarkable series of 16 canvases (from an original group which appears to have been 18), probably painted by at least two native Andean artists between 1674 and 1680. Here, Dean's careful eye for visual detail and paradox is married to an impressively wide reading. The canvases are rich in urban and festive detail, and purport to depict parts of an actual procession of Corpus Christi. Dean's investigations show the paintings to have been achieving a good deal more in their seventeenth-century context. The works were also the imaginings of contemporary patrons, from a striving bishop to a pious native grandmother, all of whom saw in the paintings opportunities "to create and advance their own visions of themselves and their roles in the festive life of Cuzco" (p. 81).

Dean's research confirms that the series once hung in the parish church of Santa Ana, a sector of the city dominated by resettled Cañari and Chachapoya, peoples whose own hybridity was founded on assisting the Spaniards from the early days of the conquest. This knowledge of the canvases' environs guarantees that a few of the questions raised in and by this fluent book hover from beginning to end. What, if anything, did the parishioners see in the paintings which adorned the walls of their church? With which figures would these viewers have identified? And in precisely what sense? If they looked at all, the parishioners of Santa Ana could hardly have missed the Inka caciques' paraded assertions of prehispanic authority and colonial importance. But Dean's neat extra stroke is to look also beyond their colorful parade. Her exploration of the final canvas in the series (see chapter 8) brings this...