Carey Senior Faculty Fellow 2002-03
Sabine MacCormack (Classics/History)
University of Michigan
History and Social Thought in Early Colonial Peru
The project began as an investigation of the historiography of the
early colonial Andean world and expanded into a broader investigation
about how the Inca empire, its institutions and methods of governance,
were remembered during the first century or so after the Spanish
invasion in 1532, and how and why this memory changed. This is a
question about different forms of knowledge, and ways in which they
were preserved. Conquest amounted to a vast reorganization both
of Inca and Andean historical memory, and of administrative, religious
and legal procedures. Things were remembered, but selectively and
for new purposes. To run the viceroyalty of Peru, Spaniards needed
some knowledge of the recent Inca past and of Inca administration.
They also needed an understanding of Andean religion and religious
history to devise a missionary strategy, this being a central task
of government, since the primary claim to Spanish sovereignty in
the Americas was a religious one, the evangelization of indigenous
populations. Andean people participated in these reasons for knowing
the past, even if only because they were the ones who provided the
information. But the crux of historical explanation for Andean people
was their own defeat, the survival of those of them who did survive
in a new polity, and their changed religious identity as Christians—for
by the end of the 16th century, the majority were Christians.
In one sense, Christianity in early colonial Peru was an instrument
of conquest, and of making the results of conquest permanent. But
Christianity was a two-edged sword, because its ethical messages
of fraternal love, of assisting the poor and needy, and of the equality
of all human beings in the sight of God, amounted to a powerful
array of criticisms by Andean people of their Spanish and creole
rulers. Theological arguments thus veiled conflicts between indigenous
and Spanish political authorities. These tensions which constituted
the nitty-gritty of everyday governance and of political and religious
life in colonial Peru remain unresolved to this day, and resound
by their absence in the historical works written about Peru during
the 16th and 17th centuries. Written history and history as lived
by people day by day thus diverge widely, but the gap can be bridged
by recourse to archival documents that recount histories of groups
and individuals that found no room in the genres of historical writing
that were transplanted from Spain and Europe to the Americas. If
we look at the interface between historical memory and social thought
as communicated in historical writings in the traditional sense
and in archival records, it turns out to be untrue (at least in
the Andes) that there are “people without history,” and
that history is no more than the story of the victors. Also, however
much the evangelization of Andean people was to some degree accomplished
under duress, Christianity provided much of the means that enabled
Andean people to make themselves heard as participants in their
own right—not as effectively as we might wish, but heard nonetheless.
Why does it matter? Because here, despite all the violence, the
oppression, the heartbreak for the reader who reads about this past,
there is a demonstration that force majeure is not the only game
in town.
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