Ben's Peru Blog

AHHHHH eegads, I have fumbled yet again, woe is me. I AM A BLOG POST SHORT AND DID NOT REALIZE (perhaps two blog posts, I am not a numbers guy, never have been, never claimed to be), anyway let’s cut to the blog post, enough dilly dallying, tom foolery and other such silly acts of idling. The quote I would like to focus on for this final blog post is from “How Difficult It Is To Be God” by Carlos Iván Degregori: “To this deception, which goes back to the…read more

Still catching up on me blogs argggh (thats my pirate voice), The quote from Indigenous Mestizos I would like to focus on for this blog is “Last but not least, Arguedas was particularly worried about the female vendors’ appearance and their vestido de castilla, the typical mestiza dress, made of hand-woven wool. As the ‘favorite nesting material for bugs and filth [inmundicias] of all sorts, and as a permanent carrier of bacteria’ it should be covered by white, body-length aprons. The white fabric would facilitate the supervision of mestiza cleanliness.”…read more

When we were discussing Andean Lives together as a class, I remember someone, can’t remember who, saying that the people who’s lives are detailed in andean lives had essentially adopted a stoic philosophy. I found this to be a fascinating take, I was thinking a similar thing when I was initially reading the text but as I have thought about it more, I feel that this is not quite accurate.  The logic behind this person making this argument was essentially that, despite the miserable experiences these individuals had to endure,…read more

Inspired by but not stolen from Niki and Ana’s idea for a joint blog post (double length for fairness). Come Read Mine and Orla’s Joint experience blog. Link is here

While I overall thought Machu Picchu unforgettable and an amazing experience, I think much less fondly of the town of Aguas Calientes. While it absolutely does have its charms and areas of genuine beauty. I found the main strip to be a painfully overstimulating tourist hellscape, a la Niagara Falls, Las Vegas etc. I found the main strip to be so over the top in this sense that it almost seemed like a parody of itself, I was half expecting to see a Machu Picchu-themed Hooters at some point. I…read more

In the Neruda reading this week, Machu Picchu represents not only physical grandeur and spectacle but also spiritual resiliance and cultural memory. For Neruda, Machu Picchu embodies the enduring spirit of the Inca civilization despite centuries of colonization and it’s aftermath. I found the following excerpt to be especially intriguing….    “Rise up in birth with me, my brother. Give me your hand out of the deep zone of your wide-spread sorrow. You will not return from the bedrock depths. You will not return from subterranean time. It will not…read more

  Our trip to Amaru was, according to Jon, the most important and culturally significant day of the trip. I feel like in retrospect, this claim was dubious, but that is neither here or nor there. At the beginning of this course back in Lima, Jon told us that we may come out of this course knowing less about indigeneity in the Andes than we knew going into it. I’m gonna be real, I had noooo idea what this was supposed to mean, no idea at all, not an inkling….read more

When I was reading “Deep Rivers”, I found the following quote, where the protagonist Ernesto observes the behaviour of the birds being shot at by the local townsfolk, to be a really apt metaphor for cultural survival, and existential assertion of identity amidst cultural loss. “Why didn’t the flock scatter? Why didn’t they take off at the sound of the explosions, when they saw the wounded falling all about them? Instead they stayed in the branches, screeching, clambering, hopping from one tree to another”   I see the birds’ refusal…read more

While reading Mariátegui’s “The Problem of the Indian: A New Approach”, I couldn’t help but make connections to Frantz Fanon. Though to be fair I think about Frantz Fanon a lot. While they were writing in quite different contexts, they are both fundamentally concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples and the dismantling systems of exploitation while also confronting the underlying socio-economic and psychological forces that sustain oppression. For Mariátegui, the root cause of Indigenous oppression lies firmly in the inequitable distribution of land and the entrenched power of the…read more

Yesterday we went on a full-day journey from Pisac, to Chinchero, to Moray, to the Maras salt mines. This journey was far longer than any of us expected, I suspect it was far longer than our drivers expected as well, bless their souls (rest assured they were tipped well). I went into this whole thing blind, in the sense that I did not look into any of these sites in any real detail. I more or less learned what each site was when I arrived. Moray was the most fascinating…read more