review of Fabulas y mitos de los incas and El retorno de has huacas

LATIN AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURES JOURNAL A Review of American Indian Texts and Studies

Guest Editor: Monica Barnes

Vol. 7,No.2

Pennsylvania State University

Fall 1991

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"Andi woman"? Translating peccado nefando as "heinous sex act" doesn't convey that homosexual sodomy was generally meant by this phrase. This book requires several close readings. Interesting and controversial points of view often remain implicit, perhaps because the author has succeeded in absorbing Quechua modes of thought. While studying audio tapes with a friend Harrison asked: "OK, but what did she sing right before she mentions that monkey with yellow-colored hands?" I know how to say the words in Quichua and they flow freely, but what I've said cannot be literally translated. Directions-right before or right after-only have value my system of written notation. For Sisa, songs are not verse lines, rhyme, stanzas centered on a white page. For her, a song is an emotional response voiced in a wide range of musical tones.

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Harrison seems to believe that lineality and unidirectionality, the idea that speech can only move forward in time and that a sequence of utterances a, b, c cannot be perceived in any other order, are artifacts of writing, not universal characteristics of speech, as Hockett has argued. This position deserves to be e:i.'Plored at length. Occasionally there are straight historical mistakes. For example, in spite of Harrison's assertions, domestic dogs existed in the Andes before the Spanish conquest and Cieza de Leon was not an eyewitness to the capture and execution of Atahualpa. Harrison's book is about song, the marriage of words and music. This volume, however, does not present even a single line of musical notation, although the author does have an intriguing collection of audio tapes, and her lectures demonstrate that she bas paid close attention to rhythm, stress, and intonation. This reviewer's criticisms should not be taken as an indication of an overall negative opinion. On the contrary, they are signs of her full engagement with Harrison's unfailingly intelligent, well-written, well-illustrated, and scholarly text. Monica Barnes

Cornell University

Crist6bal de Molina and Crist6bal de Albornoz. Fabulas y mitos de los incas. Edited by Henrique Urbano and Pierre Duviols. Cr6nicas de America Series, number 48. Madrid: historia 16, 1989. 200 pages, footnotes. Paperback. Luis Millones, et al. El Retomo de las Huacas: Estudios y documentos del siglo XVI. Lima: Fuentes e Investigaciones para la Historia del Peru Series, num-

ber 8 and Biblioteca Peruana de Psicoanalisis Series, number 2, Instituto de

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Estudios Peruanos and Sociedad Peruana de Psicoanalisis, 1990. 452 pages, indexes, bibliography, footnotes, 4 maps, 2 figures from Guaman Poma de Ayala. Paperback. "If the ancestors of the people called Indians bad known writing in earlier times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now." So begins the "Huarochiri Manuscript," according to the translation of George L. Urioste (Rijos de Pariya Qaga: La tradicion oral de Waro Chiri [Mitologfa, ritual y costumbres]. Foreign and Comparative Studies Program, Latin American Series, No. 6, Vol. 1. Syracuse, New York: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1983:1.) Not having written records, the Incas and their predecessors might at least have had foreign historians intellectually equipped to understand them. Instead, it was their misfortune--and ours--that their cultures were recorded by Europeans, whether ill-disposed, or well-intended, who were determined to change them. Apart from "the testimony of the spade," and a very small number of documents penned by Indians already strongly influenced by Iberia and the Catholic religion, all we know of pre-Hispanic Peru comes from very imperfect accounts written by Spaniards. We regret the shortcomings of our sources as we use all of our skill, imagination, and critical faculties to make the most of them. It is a real help to have several very important, and exasperating, reports on indigenous Peruvian religion available in new critical editions.

By the 1560s it was manifest that Spanish priests had failed to convert all Indians into orthodox Roman Catholics. In Peru's central highlands, the Taki Onqoy movement arose in response to disastrous epidemics, the stresses of conquest and colonization, and forcible interrup_tion of indigenous practices. The Taki Onqo~wliiletbe Christian God bad made Spain, Spaniards, and :Eth-opean foods and goods, the huacas, the native deities, had made the Andes and the people and things there. Local huacas, who had been starved and defeated by the Spanish forces, were regrouping under the great huacas of Pachacamac and Titicaca, to drive the Iberians back into the ocean from which they had apparently come. To bring about this desired reversal, Indian adherents were forbidden to enter Spanish houses or churches, to wear Spanish clothing, or to eat Spanish food, and were to avoid all contact with Spanish people. It was believed that adherence to these prohibitions, combined with rites including dancing, would restore good health and an adequate food supply. The Taki Onqoy was not a revival of pristine pre-Hispanic religion, but a response to Christian evangelism mediated by indigenous theology. As in the case with so many Christian heresies of the Old World, our information on the Taki Onqoy comes from its opponents. There are three primary authors, the extirpador de idolatrlas, Crist6bal de Albornoz; the Cusco priest, Crist6bal de Molina; and the native chronicler, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. The latter claimed he had been Albornoz's assistant. The accounts of Albornoz and of Guaman Poma were rediscovered in this century. The writings of Albornoz and Molina have, up to the appearance of the books under

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review, only been available in hard-to-find and imperfect editions. Both the Urbano/Duviols publication of Molina's "Relacion de las Fabulas de los Incas," and Albornoz's "Instrucci6n para descubrir todas las Guacas del Piru ..." and the new Millones' volume of Albornoz's "Informaciones de Servicios" have made essential primary material available in excellent scholarly formats. It makes abundant sense to group Molina's "Relacion" with Albornoz's "Instruccion ..." Molina's short account is a vital source, not only for the Taki Onqoy, but for Inca religion in general. Here we have one of the most important versions of the Inca origin myth, one in which Manco Capac and his wife survive a Great Flood. We have the story of the two Viracochas, the sons or servants of the Creator. In his introduction, Urbano gives us his analysis of this unique myth. We also have mythical accounts of the origins of the Caiiari and the Cuyos-Ancasmarca peoples, stories which also have the Great Flood as an important event. There is a description of the various kinds of Inca priests, and a detailed ritual calendar which includes an important cycle of Quechua prayers to the Creator. Although, as Urbano points out, Molina may have altered these texts slightly, so that they would seem to prefigure invocations to the deity he recognized as the One True God, they nevertheless are in the corpus of early Quechua literature and give us a rare example of colonial Quechua-to-Spanish translation. Although many priests were good linguists, they were generally more interested in rendering European religious works, such as the catechism approved by the Council of Trent, into Indian languages. In addition to his outline of the major beliefs of the Taki Onqoy, Molina describes the Capacocha (Qhapaq Ucha), an important rite of human sacrifice.

Henrique Urbano is one of the few Andeanists who reads widely in theology and history, as well as in anthropology, and he seems comfortable dealing with sources in at least four European languages, as well as in Quechua. Readers of Revista Andina, the indispensable journal he edits, know that Urbano is of an argumentative turn of mind. He is at his most stimulating when he explores the Christian influences upon apparently pristine sources. The "Instruccion ... " of Albornoz is a general description of Inca religion with a few brief glimpses of how local practices may have been linked with the Inca state cult. For instance, as a sign of good faith after the conquest of Soras, Lucanas, Angararas, and Jauja, the Inca and a local curaca each pulled a wing off a living falcon, preserving the wings as a sacred trust. Albornoz realized that if clerics were to be effective in eradicating native religious practices, they had to understand them, at least superficially, and recognize them. Albornoz is fairly explicit in defining various types of Inca huacas, the small objects, shrines, and features of the landscape which were infused with sacred power. These descriptions will help readers comprehend other colonial Andean texts. For example, there are many mentions in the Huarochiri manuscript of huacas, and willkas, and a careful study of that work does not make the difference clear. Albornoz explains that willkas are a type of huaca. Willka is a sacred tree whose fruit is a powerful medicine (in the sense that word sometimes has among North American Indians) used to purge and cure. It is also a hallucinogen and

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Albornoz may have been thinking of the altered perceptions wil/ka can induce when he wrote that it was used to invoke the devil. Albornoz provides a list of the huacas found in many parts of Peru. As when reading Cieza de Le6n, and so many other earlier chroniclers, one longs for more details. Albornoz's writings are particularly maddening, because he frequently states that he left fuller descriptions in the archive of the Cusco cathedral, or in the "libros de fabrica" of local churches. These descriptions have not been located in our century.

Pierre Duviols, who also wrote a solid introduction as well as notes for his -/?a:t~ portion of Fabulas y mitos ... , has had the chance to correct some errors whic~ appeared in his 1967 publication of the "lnstrucci6n" in the Journal de la Societe des Americ~nistes and certainly, ~th fewer transcription and ~esetting mis(_ takes, the sixteenth-century Spamsh seems a good deal less fornudable.~ ~ Even greater improvements have been made to the transcription of the "infonnaciones" of Albornoz. These are self-serving accounts which Albornoz compiled in 1569, 1570, 1577, and 1584, as well as a few shorter documents which accompanied the 1584 report, and a 1602 letter to the king of Spain. The bulk of Albornoz's writing was first published by Luis Millones in 1971 in a low-budget edition of very limited distribution (Las infonnaciones de Crist6bal de Albornoz. Cuernavaca: Centro Intercultural de Documentaci6n). El Retomo de las Huacas is a welcome replacement and should now be considered the definitive volume. A new paleographic version by Pedro Guibovich Perez corrects many of the mistakes which understandably, but unfortunately, occur in the 1971 edition. The Taki Onqoy accounts contain a good deal of repetitious testimony, and are not light reading. However, clear layout and indexes oftoponyms, personal names, and huacas make them as easy to use as possible. Essays by Millones, Guibovich, Rafael V ar6n Gabai, and Sara Castro-Klaren greatly elucidate very difficult texts. Guibovich provides a biography of Albornoz which is necessarily short, given the limitations of the supporting documentation. With his solid contribution, Var6n puts the Taki Onqoy into its cultural and historical context. Castro-Klaren's essay is an interesting semiotic comparison of the world of the Taki Onqoy and the cosmos of the scissors dancer in Jose Marfa Arguedas's story "La Agonfa de Rasu Niti." She also argues persuasively, as Millones and his students have for some time, that the Taki Onqoy was as much a rejection of the solar cult imposed by the Inca state as it was a negation of Catholic evangelism. An essay by Lemlij, Millones, Pendola, Rostworowski and Hernandez analyses the psychological dimensions of the Taki Onqoy movement in the light of Freudian theory. Peru does provide excellent opportunities to expand psychology beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and the United States through interpretating the mental states of people far removed from twentieth century western thought. However, the short psychoanalytic essay on ·the Taki Onqoy is disappointing, not in the least because the movement is examined exclusively from the point view of a male subject, although many

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women participated. This is clear in the statement "Desde tiempos inmemoriales la sal, el aji y el acceso a la mujer estaban prohibidos en visperas de acontecimientos importantes." Most people who buy El Retomo will probably do so because they already understand its scholarly importance. However, at least a few will be attracted by its cover. Beautiful burnt orange tones evoke both Peru's desert coast, and the dry season of the sierra. Yutaka Yoshii's crisp photo of the face of a mummy bundle invites us to enter another time, another place, another world of thought. Both of the books under review have allowed mature scholars to return to, reflect upon, and, in some cases, correct, their earlier work. Consequently, we have quality and richness seldom achieved in first publications. However, ifDuviols and Millones had not taken the risk, some twenty years ago, of making primary sources available, even if in imperfect editions, our present understanding of colonial processes would have been considerably diminished. Monica Barnes

Come// University

Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth. Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1989. xii, 242 pages. 15 illustrations, appendix, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. Cloth

$40.00s. When the Spanish missionaries were in close contact with the Nahuas of Mexico they entered into a moral dialogue with these Indians. The friars intended to transform the Nahuas into a model Christian society, but these natives resisted Hispanic cultural indoctrination both actively and passively. Louise Burkhart, shows how the Nahuas did not simply add European traits to their indigenous culture, but reinterpreted those traits to make them consistent with their preexisting cultural models. At the same time, the author observes how the Nahuas reinterpreted their own culture and their past on the basis of their new experiences. The Spanish priests wanted to change the Indian's religion, but they did not transform it the way they hoped. The Catholic friars did not totally succeed because they attempted to introduce into Nahua ideology Christian moral precepts, such as the concept of sin, that were totally alien to the native culture. The priests learned the Nahuatl language and taught Christian beliefs in Nahuatl terms. They had to learn how to persuade the Indians using a rhetorical style different from the Spanish one. Burkhart shows the importance of rhetorical speech for the Nahuas and how the priests tried to use such forms of speech in their preaching. Christian rhetoric adopted Nahua metaphors and modes of religious expression. The priests used pictures to teach Catholic doctrine and staged religious

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dramas acted out by Indians in Nahuatl, plays which were consistent with the native tradition of deity impersonation. The author analyzes how the Christian morality rested upon the concept of sin and friars equated it with the Nahuatl verb that meant "to damage," and was used to refer to moral corruption. For the Nahuas, damage was a violation of structure and continuity which affected not only the individual but the entire universe. The concept, nat/ocalli, or damage, has, according to Burkhart, a range of meanings alien to Christianity. She believes that its semantic field overlaps with the idea of sin but is not synonymous with it. The concept of sin leads her to a discussion of guilt and shame and the differences between these ideas in Hispanic and Nahuatl cultures. The author analyzes other dualities: good and evil, order and chaos. For the Nahuas, the basic cosmic conflict was between order and chaos, while the Christians emphasized the conflict of good and evil. For the Indians, disharmony was as necessary as harmony. They believed that creative and chaotic forces were dependent upon each other to function. In Mesoamerican thought, opposites complement each other and chaos was a necessary source of life, of creative struggle. The Nahuas did not have the same concept of evil as the Christians. The Spanish priests ended up expressing the Catholic oppositions of good and evil in terms of order/disorder to make such ideas meaningful to the Nahuas. Burkhart also observes how the indigenous concept of deity was accepted by the priests and how these friars tried to incorporate it into the understanding of Trinity. The native gods, however, included a group deities of disorder such as the sorcerer Tezcatlipoca. The complete Nahuatl idea of deity could not fit into concepts of the moral order of the Catholic missionaries, and the friars were forced to adjust to native modes of thought. In other chapters, the author studies how orientation in space and time was important to the Nahuas. The friars used symbols of centrality when discussing Christian sacred beings in order to appeal to Indian minds. The devil was relegated to a peripheral position to indicate that he was a morally negative supernatural being. The periphery was considered dangerous and evil by Mesoamericans. Another Nahua concept, pollution, was used by the Spanish priests to teach moral values to the natives. The friars associated goodness with the idea of purity and immorality with pollution, an idea consistent with Nahua thought. The Indians accepted baptism and confession as purification rites because they operated within a Nahua frame of reference. There were areas of conflict between Christian and native customs. The priests tried to impose chastity and temperance on the Indians, but they did not succeed. The traditional value system of the Nahuas accepted the use of drinking during festivals, but the concept of virginity was unknown to them. It was common for unwed couples to join in free unions. For the natives, marriage was mainly an important rite of passage and purification.