Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532-1670

Introduction

Introduction This book studies how the conversion of the Andean populations to Catholicism was achieved from a particular perspective: changes in attitudes toward death. Specifically, it investigates how and why the members of a society modify their attitudes toward the sacred to the point of changing not only their ideas and beliefs about, for example, the origin and operation of the world but the way in which they relate to their peers or what arrangements they make for the remains of their dead. The people of the Andes in the sixteenth century had no choice in their conversion to Christianity. Through different routes, men and women of all classes were compelled to receive baptism and to fulfill a series of requirements implied therein, some of which are topics of this book. Several decades later, the spread of Catholicism in the Andes was wide and effective and, despite opinions to the contrary from some observers and scholars, it had deeply permeated the lives of the indigenous population and transformed them completely. Consequently, this is also an investigation into how the conditions were established that made possible a change of this scope: the terrain , the main actors, the methods and instruments employed by missionaries and colonizers, and the reactions and strategies of the men and women who were the target of this assault. The problem of religious conversion in the context of colonialism forms the general frame within which this study is inscribed. The work of other scholars who have explored this vast field, placing different emphases on themes, space, chronology, and point of view, is thus expanded. The use of the term “conversion” has been and still is the object of disagreement among historians and anthropologists,| 1 and it has generated an extensive secondary literature that I shall not summarize here.1 I would, nonetheless, like to clarify several points. In speaking of conversion, I refer to a multiple, prolonged, and nonlinear process that involves an effort to adopt and adapt ideas and practices centered on the sphere of the sacred. These multiple transformations are motivated and accompanied by changes in the living conditions of their agents. In the context of colonialism, the difference between religious traditions and customs that came into contact with one other and the unequal power relationships of those who took part in the process should not necessarily lead us to imagine a scenario divided into two clearly opposing camps, each neatly defined and homogeneous. In comparison to other times and places, the distinguishing characteristic of religious conversion in the context of Spanish colonialism was its unavoidability. In most of the New World territories occupied by the Spaniards, cooperation between Church and state in the evangelizing mission was also a distinctive feature.2 In the Andes in particular, the conquest and the establishment of political and social order had a specifically Catholic orientation. It could not have been otherwise, because the prevailing culture and legal order in Spain were informed by that same source. Moreover, the missionary and colonization process in the Andes was affected by the political, religious, and cultural reforms of the mid-sixteenth-century Council of Trent.3 In Mexico in the years immediately following the conquest, the mendicant orders were able to put into practice missionary ideas and methods of the period prior to the Catholic reform, with a considerable degree of autonomy, utopianism , original evangelizing materials, and decentralized printing presses established early on. For a while, the religious orders operated to a large extent free from state oversight and a centralized ecclesiastical structure.4 The later date of the conquest in the Andes and, above all, the period of wars and enormous political instability that followed it resulted in evangelization headed by a Church eager to stake out a clearly institutional role. At the foundation of the Andean colonial project, the ecclesiastical and political authorities were for the most part bound by the dictates of Trent. This is clear not only in doctrinal issues or in the evangelizing role that fell to the secular clergy 2 | death and conversion in the andes and to the Society of Jesus but also in such crucial and lasting factors as linguistic policy, control of the printing presses, and the planning of urban centers, crucial spaces from which Christianity was spread. Cooperation and symbiosis between the evangelization and the colonial project were fundamental to the Andes. For these reasons, studying...