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  • Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
  • Eligia Calderón Trejo
Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Heidi V. Scott, xiii +256 pp. Maps, glossary, bibliog., and index. Paper $35.00. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, Indiana. 2009 (ISBN-13: 978-0-268-04131-1).

This relatively short book concerns colonial experiences of landscapes of Peru. Though its title mentions territorial contestation and mapping neither of those processes forms any significant part of the text which is also marred by the quite unhelpful use of post-modernist concepts such as corporeality and embodied practices; the actual persons involved in the four case study chapters were no more or less than explorers, administrators and Indians, and in fact very little evidence, other than infrequent desultory remarks, provide evidence of their physical being in the colonial documentation. Their actions speak loud enough without the veneer of discursive theoretic constructs. [End Page 220]

Chapter two, for example, argues that the arriving Spanish acted as individuals whose actions were influenced by both the environmental context as well as by the aboriginal inhabitants—hardly a novel interpretation. Details are presented of the physical hardships suffered by the invaders, many via their narrative records of service (relaciones de servicio). Their impressions of what they perceived as the harsh environment is well captured in the text but it is clear exaggeration appears to have been the rule. The benefits accruing to the Spanish from their alliance with the Wanka of the Huancayo valley is a pattern that was to be replicated in many other regions, thus aiding the conquest and relieving the new invaders of many hardships. But anyone who has traversed the many fragments of the so-called "royal highway of the Incas" that still exist in Andean America can measure the accuracy of Cieza de León's praise of its utility in enabling the Spanish to avoid the "harshness of the land". Equally problematic is the notion that Spanish authors of the sixteenth century wrote for a specific readership in Europe: in fact we have very little knowledge of who actually read any of the treatises that are here interpreted.

The third chapter provides an analysis of the handful of relaciones geográficas (reports based on a questionnaire) that were returned to the imperial authorities from Peru in the 1570s and '80s. From earlier studies of the 166 such reports on Mexico little new information is provided in the Peruvian reports. There is the usual tension demonstrated between Spanish and indigenous information provided, as well as the unfortunate dearth of Peruvian maps (the exception is Dávila Briceño's of 1586 but unfortunately the copy provided as fig. 8 is out of focus and thus illegible). The argument that many of the provincial authorities did not reply to the request for information since they could not describe their regions is difficult to support given the fact that non-response means just that: no information. We simply do not know even if the questionnaires arrived at the non-responding authorities. Concealment of information is evident, as is the differential treatment of urban as opposed to rural districts.

More successful is the author's analysis of mobility of population in the Huarochirí region, principally based on details of competition for parishioners of two priests. Travel times between the relevant parish centers (new reducciones) and their flocks became good measure of the obstacles of distance. Other means of assessing the cultural impacts of landscape elements are also examined—the trials of those attempting to cleanse the idolatrous beliefs of the Indians, the mythic topography of the pre-Hispanic past, and the unsuccessful brief attempts at missionary activities of the Jesuits. Interesting is the author's claim that landscape fixity was operationalized more by the feet of those who traversed the region, than those who described it textually or cartographically. The only problem with that notion is that the documentary evidence is very fragmentary and ethnically biased given the lack of aboriginal descriptions.

The last section of the book describes two instances of the Amazonian frontier relationships to the Andean highlands. In the early seventeenth century...

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