Habsburg Peru: Images, Imagination, and Memory (review)

Early modern imaginings of Peru—geographical and historical—that explained and challenged both the European international order and the hierarchies of Andean society are the subjects of the two essays that comprise this volume. Peter Bradley's "Peru in English: The Early History of the English Fascination with Peru" details the many mentions and discussions of Peru in histories, travel accounts, and geographies published in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The histories were overwhelmingly translations of Spanish texts, which reflected the diverse and often conflicting views in the Spanish literature: insofar as Peru loomed in the historical imagination of the English, it was as the site of Spanish brutality, Indian barbarism, or Inca civility. But the English also produced a substantial literature that imagined contemporary Peru, above all through accounts of voyages. While precious metals greatly informed that imagining, Bradley points out that most description was limited to coastal areas, and he exposes an English view of Spanish South America that paid great attention to Chile and its rich soil, that was impressed with its coastal ports, and that peopled the continent with potential allies—Indian or creole—against the Spanish yoke.

David Cahill's "The Inca and Inca Symbolism in Popular Festive Culture: The Religious Processions of Seventeenth-Century Cuzco" examines an altogether different sort of "Peruvian imagining"—that of the Inca past in colonial Cuzco, the former seat of the empire—and skillfully explores the political uses of this historical imaginary. Certainly after the Túpac Amaru rebellion of the early 1780s the role of the "Inca" in Andean political thought and symbolism drew a concerted attack from officials asa threat to Spanish rule; and Cahill makes clear the continuing attraction of Inca symbolism for Andean Spaniards attempting either to assert their own standing in, or to bring the downfall of, the colonial order. The focus of his inter-related essays, however, is Cuzco's colonial Inca nobility, whose local prominence and privilege were embodied by an Inca cabildo and protected by patents of nobility conferred by Charles I in the sixteenth century. Cahill emphasizes the importance of the performance of "Inca-ness" to that nobility, above all in the processions at the heart of Cuzco's civic life. His analysis of two celebrations elucidates the extent of pre-conquest Inca ritual iconography in these Catholic observances, and offers provocative hypotheses about how the calendar and structure of Inca religion determined the colonial Incas' public Catholic practice. In the larger context of this book, the most striking aspect of the processions is the competition for status and authority among the complex and variegated indigenous nobility of late 17th-century Cuzco, competition that was largely played out through the remembering and redefining of "Inca" ancestry. In that, the political nature of these performances of Inca-ness emerges clearly, albeit not the meaning: as Cahill notes, "the political meaning and ramifications of ritual involvement and Inca symbolism . . . may only be guessed at" (p. 147). Whether, as the bishop of Cuzco feared after the Túpac Amaru rebellion, Inca symbolism was inherently anti-Spanish and anti-colonial; or whether the public prominence of Inca nobles in the city's ceremonial life suggests Inca acceptance of Spanish rule in exchange for the relative privilege of elite subjection, is unclear, as it presumably was at the time. Indeed, the ambiguity of Inca imagery constituted part of its symbolic power in colonial Cuzco.

While Cahill gamely observes that Cuzco's creole elite was influenced by the 18th-century European celebration of the Incas—and the ghost of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega clearly haunts both the English and the Cusqueña imagining of the Peruvian past—the principal weakness of the work is the failure of the two halves to engage one another directly. Nonetheless, these essays will be of...