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5 CONVERGENCES IN THE PLACES OF EARLY EVANGELIZATION As we saw in the previous chapter, by 1532 the communities and landscape of the Colca Valley were undergoing significant transformations under Inka rule. Ethnic identities and boundaries had hardened, and political hierarchies morefluidunderautonomousrulehadbeenamplifiedandformalizedto produce a few key points of articulation between imperial administration and Yanquecollaguas, Laricollaguas, and Cabanaconde. Agricultural and pastoral systemswereexpanding,withanaccompanyingregimentationofproduction logistics. But day-to-day community life was not radically altered, as the great majority of the same hamlets, villages, and towns continued to be occupied. These institutional and physical structures constituted the interfaces through which the peoples of the Colca Valley engaged the Spanish and provided a structure for Spanish colonial administration. The traditional narrative of the Pizarro-led Spanish invasion of the Andes has been recounted and debated extensively and need not be recited here. Moreover, to recall the discussion of the introductory chapter, dwelling on that narrative risks reifying a sense of historical termination or fatefulness that is at odds with the experiences of the people living in rural places in the highlands like the Colca Valley in the early years following the invasion. “Conquest” was itself a founding mytho-historical framing of the invasion— from the earliest accounts—in the service of the contractual, political, and ideological ends of Pizarro, the Crown, and the church (Seed 1991, 1992). Since at least the Late Intermediate period—and as we saw locally in the previous chapter—the peoples of the ethnic polities of the central Andes had developed their own strategies and frameworks for incorporating invaders: by treating them as ancestors (see also Gose 2008). So it is all too easy to anachronistically ascribe moods and motivations that likely were not prevalent in the lived experiences of Andean communities in the early years of Spanish colonization. Convergences in the Places of Early Evangelization 159 Besides, for vast swaths of the population, the first sustained Spanish presence in Andean community life came not in the form of an armed conquistador bearing sword and harquebus, but in the curious apparition of a sandalshod , tonsured mendicant friar bearing Bible and cross. Even as epidemics often preceded their presence, it was often the clergy who were the first Spaniards to live in a sustained manner among rural indigenous communities, both in Peru and elsewhere in the Americas. They conceived of their project as an ideological extension of conquest—that is, as a spiritual conquest over forces of demonic deception (MacCormack 1991; Ricard 1966)—but in practice ,thepastoralworkofevangelizationnecessitatedaconcertedengagement with a vast diversity of indigenous religiosities in the Americas (Durston 2007; Estenssoro 2003; Lara 1998; MacCormack 1985). With church institutions weak and the pastoral corps tiny, the early mission field in the Andes was more improvisational and experimental than in the period following the reducción and Third Lima Council (Estenssoro 2003). But as critical as early evangelical encounters are for understanding the lived experiences of Andean communities during the initial transition from Inka to Spanish colonial rule, precious little is known about them. The ecclesiastical documentary record of the first evangelization—defined by Estenssoro as the 50-year span from the invasion to the promulgation of the first major church reforms of the Third Lima Council (1583)—is dominated by high-level prescriptive texts, which are more illuminating of what church authorities thought they were doing than how initial evangelization was carried out in the field, let alone indigenous responses to it (for an excellent overview of the ecclesiastical documentation that does exist, see Durston 2007). Even less is known about the spatial and material contexts of early evangelization . This is especially regrettable because, as discussed below, the Spanish themselves conceived of the transformation of the built environment and the habits of body and mind that they thought would flow from it as central to turning native Andeans into Christians. This chapter explores these spatial and material dimensions of the first evangelization through analysis of the built environment and material culture of early mendicant doctrinas in the Colca Valley. The valley was one of the earliest sites of Franciscan evangelization in the Peruvian highlands. A small group of friars first reached the valley in the 1540s, and by the 1560s they had established a series of small, rustic chapels in existing hamlets and villages, which were subsequently abandoned with the establishment of the Toledanreduccionesintheearly1570s(Cook2002;Wernke2007a).Thewellpreserved architectural and archaeological remains present in these sites today provide ideal contexts for understanding how material media were both [3.149.230.44] Project...

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