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BEYOND THE LETTERED CITY

Duke University Press

Contents

ABOUT THE SERIES.............................................................................ixLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS........................................................................xiACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................xvIntroduction.................................................................................11. Imagining Colonial Culture................................................................272. Genre/Gender/Género: "Que no es uno ni otro, ni está claro".....................533. The Indigenous Lettered City..............................................................1134. Genres in Action..........................................................................1535. The King's Quillca and the Rituality of Literacy..........................................1916. Reorienting the Colonial Body: Space and the Imposition of Literacy.......................219Conclusion...................................................................................251GLOSSARY.....................................................................................259NOTES........................................................................................263REFERENCES CITED.............................................................................317INDEX........................................................................................353

Chapter One

Andean peoples appropriated European representational forms within a colonial context that was more than a mere backdrop to their actions: it came to be an integral component of their worldview. The transculturating nature of colonial indigenous life problematizes the neat distinctions we have traditionally made between native and European worlds in our historical treatments of Latin America. Here are colonial indigenous figures, such as Don Diego de Torres, who defy radically polarized interpretations. Don Diego exemplifies the mestizo of noble native rank, living in a world in which such appellations were not necessarily intrinsic to individuals, but were highly contingent, given that movement across ethnic categories was fluid in this period, mediated by class distinctions and by gender (Kuznesof 1995; Schwartz 1995). Don Diego's intimate participation in the "lettered city" and in the world of Christian notions of morality and history (Adorno 1986) were part of the privileges accorded to the nobility. However, the ethnic and political basis of his claim to noble status came from the fact that he served as cacique of Turmequé and traced his chiefly privilege through his maternal line. These ambiguities and contradictions belie the stereotype of a hermetically sealed and unchanging colonial indigenous sphere. How are we to make sense of such a multifaceted individual who moved within a social space in which cultural codes and practices were disputed and contested by native people and Europeans alike? How can we contextualize Don Diego's cultural discourse within a colonial system that was not characterized by primordial and discrete cultural categories, but where ethnic classifications were explicitly recognized as operating simultaneously as tools for domination, as modes of accommodation, and as vehicles of resistance? To what extent can we capture the ethos of a world in which, like our own, people lived radically multicultural realities that at the time were not noted as at all remarkable or "hybrid" (Dean and Leibsohn 2003)?

Studies of the colonial Andes have, until recently, tended to classify cultural groups into two isolated "republics," following the model of the administrative division of the Spanish colonial world into the two republics of the Spaniards and the indios, without paying attention to the intricate connections and interfaces bridged by celebrated individuals such as Don Diego de Torres, as well as less well- known folk such as the testators Juana Sanguino and Don Andrés, the cacique of Machetá. It is only in the past decade that scholars have begun to publish texts which reject the analytical utility of this Spanish juridical arrangement, focusing instead on the emergence of a colonial culture in which the two republics were not so much closed worlds, as they were critical scenarios within which representations and, ultimately, power, were wielded by colonial administrators and indigenous agents alike. In this view, the two republics are not so much an analytical model, as a hinge for interpreting systems of inequality within which indigenous subjects strove to consolidate newly structured native communities.

A good example of this perspective is the work of the art historian Carolyn Dean (1999), who argues—in her study of a seventeenth-century series of paintings of Corpus Christi processions in Cuzco—that these depictions of colonial hereditary lords in Incaic regalia represent not so much a resurgence of Inca iconography providing ethnographic evidence on pre-Columbian lifeways, as they proclaim the triumph of Spanish Christianity and embody indigenous alterity through costume. Corpus thus served as a stage for the Christian profanation of Incaic cosmology and, on a secular level, functioned as an arena in which Andean symbols could be deployed to consolidate an indigenous power structure under the guidance of the Crown. For Dean, the seemingly Incaic components of colonial culture cannot be taken at face value, but must be reevaluated within the colonial administrative and religious system. Thus, Dean suggests, colonial culture is best comprehended as a complex process of "relexification," in which Andean syntax was used to frame European utterances (1999, 127, 168).

Colonial Culture and Mestizaje

Under such circumstances, it becomes difficult to separate the threads of colonial culture into discrete culturally marked bundles. The weave can be better appreciated as a series of "entangled objects" (Thomas 1991), in which the voices of numerous cultural actors from different historical periods are inextricably intertwined. Instead of visualizing the process of cultural contestation as the confrontation of two opposite poles, we hope, after Serge Gruzinski (1999, 213), to look at it as a "series of modulations" that unfold over time, as much among Europeans as among native Andeans, both of whom belonged to heterogeneous social constellations marked by a multitude of cultural, racial, occupational, and gender identities that could be altered by administrative petition. As Laura Lewis (2003) so elegantly demonstrates in her study of the negotiation of caste in colonial Mexico, the interaction of Spaniards, indios, Africans, mulattos, and mestizos involved the cross- fertilization of discourses and practices, ranging from European law to indigenous witchcraft and African ritual. Cultural forms moved in all directions, mediated by the colonial status hierarchy and the European legal framework that bolstered it. However, members of subordinated castes were not without recourse to their own sources of power over those hailing from the dominant categories; they countered colonial power with ritual practices that drew upon all of the cultural traditions, but focused on the potency of indigenous witchcraft. Indeed, systems of power and of representation were entangled...