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 (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999) 288 pp. $54.95 cloth $18.95 paper

This book examines the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi as it was celebrated in Cuzco, Peru, during the colonial period. Dean argues that given its significance as a celebration of Christianity's triumph over heresy, Corpus Christi had a special importance in Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca state. Rather than uniting old and new Christians around the celebration of the Eucharist, colonial Corpus Christi in Cuzco was an occasion for creating and emphasizing social and ethnic differences, thus reinforcing the very act of colonization. Andean people, particularly their elites, built their colonial identities through their participation in the processions that colonial authorities staged to celebrate Corpus Christi and other public festivals.

Dean started the research that culminated in this book by studying a series of late seventeenth-century paintings of the Cuzco Corpus Christi procession. Although the exact identity of their authors is unknown, it is widely accepted that they were Cuzqueor Indian painters. Dean argues that these paintings are interpretations and re-creations of colonial Cuzco's social, cultural, and ethnic complexity rather than exact depictions of different scenes of these religious celebrations. The development of this argument led her to examine the history of the Corpus Christi celebration in Cuzco since its introduction a few decades after the Spanish conquest of Peru.

The first part of the book is devoted to this historical revision. In the following chapters, Dean offers a careful examination of the canvases. She discusses both the context in which the paintings were commissioned as well as the characters and scenes represented. Dean concedes special attention to the Indian noblemen who paraded in these processions dressed in outfits that reflected colonial interpretations of what Incas should look like. Given her argument that Andean colonial elites constructed their identities in these public performances, Dean discusses the nuances of this process through a variety of aspects, from the negotiation of their problematic status within the colonial order to the costumes and adornments created to represent themselves in the canvases and, presumably, in the processions. The examination of colonial Inca representations, objects, and symbols takes the author to a discussion of how the Inca elite imagined and reconstructed its past, and the significance that this political and intellectual exercise had on their relations not only with Spaniards but also with Indians belonging to other ethnic groups.

Research on the Corpus Christi paintings led the author toward an inquiry of identity construction in a colonial context and, even further, to its transformations within the national period. Hence, the book covers a time period that goes from the second half of the sixteenth century to the present. Dean makes use of a variety of resources to deal with this vast, intricate topic: archival research and historical analysis, art history, anthropological literature, postmodernist theory, and postcolonial discourse theory. The result is an ambitious book with a number of interesting ideas about the making of Peru's colonial native elite. The author's important documentary findings contribute to knowledge of Cuzco's colonial cultural life.

The author's methodology is problematic, Dean appears to downplay the importance of times, places, and changes within Peru's colonial period: Arguments centered on early colonial aspects are backed with mid- or late colonial documentary evidence (100,110, 111), and events taking place in the Lima diocese are used to explicate those taking place in Cuzco (47). Her choice of chronicler--for example, Murúa or Calancha, rather than Cieza or Betanzos--to document pre-Hispanic Inca dress or describe the dynamics of ethnic diversity in Cuzco under Inca rule is curious.

Gabriela Ramos
University of Pennsylvania

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