Space-Time Perspectives on Early Colonial Moquegua

1. Moquegua

3 DOI: 10.5876/9781607322764:c01 1 Moquegua A Landscape Perspective An anthropology whose objects are no longer conceived as automatically and naturally anchored in space will need to pay particular attention to the way spaces and places are made, imagined, contested, and enforced. —Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (1997a: 47) Moquegua—more specifically, the valley of the Río Osmore and its tributary streams—has a long history of contacts with, and colonization by, expansionist states.Colonization begins at least as early as the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era, with settlers from hundreds of kilometers distant: Wari to the north and Tiwanaku to the southeast. Later, in the late fifteenth century, the Inkas from Cusco, midway between these earlier centers, made their presence felt in Moquegua. Finally, in the sixteenth century, the Osmore drainage came to be occupied by an alien culture—the rapacious, emergent-capitalist, rabidly evangelical Spaniards. Subsequent centuries of growing settlement left an indelible imprint on the landscape, particularly with respect to agricultural production as evidenced by small plots on valley flatland demarcated by walls, trees, irrigation canals, and roads.Today, the Panamerican Highway streaks along the east side of the river course before veering southeast and disappearing into the barren hills. The growing city of Moquegua and its urban services dominate the upper mid-valley, whereas to the south the landscape is rural, its built environment consisting of the adobe ruins of Colonial and later wine haciendas dotting the margins. MOQUEGUA 4 All these waves of colonists, despite having different traditions and speaking different languages, shared similar economies—agro-pastoral, with metallurgy and vast trading networks—and valued similar resources. They all contributed to the layers of imbricated places and meanings in the landscape of today’s Moquegua. How did they “learn the new landscape” (Rockman and Steele 2003) of the southwestern region? How were landscape, space, and place variably defined, bounded, named, and otherwise cognitively structured by the participants in these emplaced interactions? My interest is in both “contact” and “colonialism” (see Silliman 2005), especially in one aspect of the power relations and negotiations inherent in the latter: How was the Osmore valley “re-spatialized,” particularly with the entry of the Spaniards and subsequent entanglements with Catholicism, capitalist market forces, and nascent globalization ? The area’s multi-ethnicity and multivocality are of special interest, given evidence of considerable ethno-linguistic diversity. Spatiality and Spatialization: landScape, Space, and place Spaces, both built and “natural,” are constitutive of social actions and relations , while at the same time those actions and relations structure and order spaces (Keith and Pile 1993a). My interest is in the various spatialities and spatializations constructed in the Andean environment of Moquegua as they can be accessed through archaeological and documentary evidence. Spatiality refers to the perceived qualities or conditions that define socially produced spaces and their functions.These qualities and conditions order a landscape and its places. Dictionary definitions of the term spatiality do not begin to approach the nuances of its meanings in anthropology and geography, which emphasize both social and physical spaces and individuals’and groups’interactions with them.Social groups create unique definitions of space,its use,and its meaning based on their values, economic activities, myths, and histories. Spatialities exist at multiple levels or scales, and because they may be variably perceived and defined, they are almost invariably contested (Keith and Pile 1993b: 26). Spatialization refers to how—the recursive processes by which—such structuring spatialities are created and recreated (see Martin and Ringham 2006: 190). These processes include defining, naming, bounding, and cognitively ordering spaces,not all of which are detectable archaeologically.Similarly,geographers might analyze the creation and use of space on the basis of processes of their appropriation, environment, exploitation, and management). In the topographically diverse Andes region, spaces are not only horizontally defined, but MOQUEGUA 5 their vertical dimensions are also significant structuring elements, both physically and cognitively. A landscape1 is generally considered a particular segment of a holistically perceived/construed/experienced environment as shaped by both natural and cultural processes (see, e.g., Naveh and Lieberman 1993: 3–5). A landscape may be considered a “cognitive or symbolic ordering of space” (Ingold 1993: 152) or, more epigrammatically, a “network of places” (Chapman 2008: 188), a “layered artifact” (Dunning et al. 1999: 650), or an “additive amalgam” (Fisher and Feinman 2005: 64) that is “simultaneously place, process, and...