Cissy's 2024 Peru Global Seminar Blog

In Royal Commentaries, Garcilosa opens with a transcription of the oral retellings he grew up with of the origins of the Inca Kings. He writes that before the Incas came, the people lived “without tilling or sowing the soil”. Then, the first Inca prince and princess taught the people to “till the soil, and grow plants and crops, and breed flocks, and use the fruits of the earth like rational beings and not like beasts.” During our visit to the Pisaq ruins today, the tour guide said the Incas brought “civilized society” to the peoples of these mountains through the introduction of agriculture. It wasn’t very clear, but I think he explained that before the Incas, the people gathered wild foods.

I think it’s interesting that in both these narratives, the implementation of organized agriculture is a defining factor for what makes a society “civilized”. I think about this in relation to “Canada”, where European agriculture was very much weaponized by the government as a tool of assimilation. Perhaps you’ve heard of the forest food gardens of the Coast Salish and Ts’msyen peoples along the northwest Pacific coast. For the longest time, academics believed these forests were untouched and that these peoples were solely hunter-gatherers before they were introduced to European agriculture, because they failed to recognize that ways of actively cultivating food existed outside of our narrow idea of what agriculture entails. People were actually harvesting from very carefully managed gardens designed to be in-tune with the surrounding forest. The dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands was justified by the claim that they were not using their lands to their full potential; that their lands weren’t productive enough. The idea was that a claim to land was only legitimate if you intended to cultivate it in the way the Europeans did. This destroyed Indigenous food systems, both physically and through the severance of lineages of intergenerational knowledge transfer, and severely disrupted Indigenous diets.

So, I wonder about pre-Incan systems of agriculture. Were the people really just gatherers? Maybe agriculture wouldn’t even be the right word for their way of growing food. How do we define agriculture? Is any human system of working with plants in a way that benefits them an “agricultural” system? In my classes where we’ve discussed Indigenous food systems in “Canada”, we don’t (or we very rarely) use “agricultural” to describe Indigenous systems of growing food because in this context, the colonial connotations outweigh it’s usefulness as a descriptive term. In this case, the sign or the representation (our knee-jerk image of what agriculture looks like) is too far off from the reality to be of use.

But even if a people were solely hunters and gatherers, does that make them less “civilized”? Or less deserving of respect? Since we’ve really been on a let’s define things streak recently, how would we define civilization? And under that definition, is it an ideal that we should or must strive towards?

Edit: Changed my question and title according to Jon’s comment.

I know this is an arts course so we’re supposed to analyze the texts or whatever, but this is my blog so I can do what I want. Here’s a rundown of the trees mentioned in Arguedas’ The Old Man and The Journeys. Stay tuned for a rundown of other flora, and also fauna, in my next reading blogs. The names in bold are the names used in the book.

(All images are public domain. Also the formatting is kind of messed up but I can’t figure out how to fix it. Thanks for understanding).

Cedrón (Aloysia citrodora)

• Quechua: sitrun
• English: lemon verbena
• 2-3 m tall perennial shrub, rough leaves emit lemon scent when rubbed
• used to add lemon flavour to many foods (main ingredient of Inka Cola), used in traditional medicine

Pepper Trees (Schinus molle)

• Quechua: mulli
• Spanish: anacahuita
• up to 15 m tall evergreen tree, produces bright pink fruits
• many traditional uses, I’ll just list a few briefly here
• pink peppercorn (seasoning), treat wounds and infections (antibacterial and antiseptic properties), leaves used for cleansing and blessing, leaves used for textile dyeing, Incas used oil from leaves in mummification practices, Wari empire used the fruit in chicha

K’enwa (Chenopodium quinoa)

• English: quinoa
• Spanish: quinua
• (it’s the same pronunciation in all 3 languages, just different spelling)
• low (1-2 m tall) “tree” with red bark (generally not considered a tree, but its stem is woody and Arguedas refers to it as such)
• grows on valley floor and in some ravines
• first domesticated in the Peruvian Andes from wild or weed populations (non-cultivated varieties still exist alongside cultivated)
• able to thrive even in saline, nutrient-poor, and drought-stressed soils!
• the “History” section of the Wikipedia page on quinoa is very interesting if you want to know more

Lúcumo (Pouteria lucuma)

• Quechua: lluku uma (Spanish almost definitely came from the Quechuan)
• English: none, just the Spanish
• grows around houses of small haciendas
• tall trees (up to 20 m) with straight trunks and high, leafy crowns
• gray-ish brown, fissured bark which produces a milky white exudate
• fruit eaten raw (very sweet!); also used in juice, milkshakes, and ice cream (apparently the most popular ice cream flavour and most popular fresh fruit in Peru???)
• puree is used in a special kind of dulce de leche called manjar de lúcuma!

The following are known as “clean-wooded trees”, which Arguedas explains are trees where the branches and leaves may be trimmed frequently. I’m not quite sure what that means.

Lambras (Alnus acuminata)

• Spanish: aliso andino
• English: Andean alder
• up to 25 m tall with a straight trunk, many yellowish lenticels, produces catkins
• used in traditional medicine to treat acute inflammation

Willow (Salix humboldtiana)

• Quechua: sawsi/wayaw
• Spanish: sauce criollo
• grows along watercourses, evergreen OR deciduous depending on climate, grows up to 25 m tall, narrow triangular/columnar shape
• Quechua-speaking communities recognized the thick clump of roots that help stabilize the soil and prevent the river from destroying crop fields and stone walls

Eucalyptus (mainly Eucalyptus globulus)

• Quechua: kalitsu
• Spanish: eucalipto
• introduced to Andes from Australia in the early 20th century (yes, fairly recently!), has since become an important cash crop
• introduced by priests to the hills that had become barren as European development had destroyed native Andean tree populations
• fast growing and adaptable; able to survive the harsh Andean climate
• has since developed a number of local uses: medicine, construction, cooking
• very deep-rooting and dries up groundwater, other species unable to grow around them

Capuli (Prunus serotina)

• Spanish: cerezo criollo
• English: black cherry
• tall, leafy trees with luminous trunks that line town walls
• Arguedas says they are the only fruit trees in the valley
• long branches allow for dense undergrowth that houses toads
• cultivated long before European contact, fruit was an important food

Tara (Tara spinosa)

• Commonly called tara in English and Spanish too
• English: Peruvian carob
• Spanish: guarango
• 2-5 m tall, yellow to orange flowers
• resistant to most pathogens and pests, tolerates dry climates and poor soils (i.e., with lots of sand and rocks)
• traditionally made into an infusion to treat inflamed tonsils, fever, cold, and stomachache
• now used as a source of tannins in automotive and furniture leathers, made into gum to be used as a thickening agent and stabilizer in foods

Broomwood (Spartium junceum)

• Quechua: I couldn’t find one
• Spanish: retama de olor
• low, long belts (2-4 m tall) growing just beyond the shores of rivers
• fragrant yellow flowers in May and June
• Fun fact! Broomwood primarily photosynthesizes using its green shoots, so its leaves serve little use! This is a water-conserving strategy that allows it to thrive in dry climates.
• native to Mediterranean, introduced and often invasive in Peru
• has since become important in Quechuan and Aymaran ethnobotany, believed to protect against evil
• nitrogen fixing! (essentially takes nitrogen from the air and puts it into the soil)

Unfortunately, I had to omit myrtle and puna trees because I couldn’t figure out what plants these terms were referring to.

I’ll be looking out for these trees for the rest of our time in Cuzco!

I started reading Deep Rivers instead of what we’re supposed to be reading for tomorrow because it’s making me nervous that we have to read two entire books by Friday. So far I am… confused but enjoying myself!

In the first story, The Old Man, Arguedas tells the story of a boy who visits Cuzco for the first time with his father, who is from here. They arrive in Cuzco at night and leave early the next morning. They are visiting so the father can exact some sort of revenge on the Old Man, whom he is related to and previously worked for, but whom he hates.

The Cuzco described by Arguedas is dirty and disappointing, full of shadows and drunkards who urinate in the middle of the street. The tone of the story is dark and foreboding, and after reading it last night, I wasn’t sure what to expect. This morning, as we broke through the clouds and Cuzco came into view, I couldn’t help but think Arguedas was so wrong. Was he though? We’ve only been here for a day and I have yet to stray far beyond the four corners of the Plaza de Armas. Is Arguedas’ representation of Cuzco more “real” than what I have experienced so far? By the end of our stay, and as we get more adventurous, will we glimpse the “reality” that Arguedas described?

In the story, it is implied that the boy’s father has been away from Cuzco for a long time, so the Cuzco in his stories is very different from what the boy is experiencing. The boy mourns a Cuzco that he will never see and in response, the father says, “It’s Cuzco… That’s what it does to the sons of those who have left.” In contrast, the cedrón tree growing in the middle of the courtyard in the “driest, hardest earth” is forced to witness the decay of the city, reflected in the tree’s slow death as its bark is peeled off. The boy claims that despite the destitution around it, the cedrón must be the unhappiest creature of all in that courtyard. The boy says perhaps the colonizers “poisoned the earth of the city with their breath”, and that is why the cedrón is so small and scraggly. The fragrance of the cedrón tree is a source of comfort to the boy, and it pains him to see the tree suffer.

Cedrón is used in Indigenous traditional medicine in the Andes. Cedrón is also the main ingredient of Inca Kola, a drink created by a British immigrant to Peru and now owned by Coca-Cola. Inca Kola is a patriotic symbol for Peruvians and is hence a tool in the state’s nation-building project. The cedrón tree was brought to Europe in the 17th century and has since become a popular ornamental plant, in addition to its popularity as a flavouring agent. Perhaps the physical decay of the cedrón in The Old Man is analogous to this decay of sacredness as the trees and their products become increasingly commodified. What does it mean to be sacred?

I’m going to be looking out for cedrón trees around Cuzco!

If you’re going to respond to one of my blog posts, please don’t let it be this one thanks. This one is a mess.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of maps as ideological frameworks, and of the interplay between reality and representation.

“Thus, a sign contains two ideas – one of the thing represented, and the other, of the thing doing the representing.” (Rama, 1996, p. 7)

In an intro to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class I took last term, we learned that all maps are projections. There is physically no way to display a sphere on a flat surface without distorting it. You are forced to make choices between what you believe is most important to accurately represent. For example, as you may already know, the most common Mercator projection severely distorts the size of countries so that those in the north are disproportionately large. However, the Mercator is one of (if not the best) projection for correctly displaying country shapes and, by extension, directions (this is why Google Maps uses the Mercator projection). Indeed, it was initially developed specifically for sea navigation. Maps are interpretations and, therefore, they can tell you a lot about who made the map.

As Rama states, maps are often idealized representations – how a certain person wants the world to look. They are something to strive for and thus, they can be an assertion of power. I’m thinking specifically about that map that the Chinese government released a few months (?) ago showing what they consider the South China Sea, AKA their exclusive territorial fishing waters. If I remember correctly, the boundary looked arbitrarily drawn and infringed on many other countries’ territorial waters. In the real world, China has indeed been more aggressively asserting its presence in that area by bullying fishermen from other countries. Sorry, this isn’t a great summary, I recommend looking it up.

When Rama calls these written accounts “signs”, it confused me at first. What is the definition of a sign? From my interpretation, it seems to be any recorded interpretation of the world. I thought immediately of street signs, then protest signs. Though signs have been used to impose a colonial idea of hierarchy onto the planned cities, I think they can then be used to resist and dismantle that worldview. Art, and other forms of signs, are important to resistance movements because they are a medium to imagine alternative futures, which can then be made a reality. I think signs can be a tool of collective worldbuilding.

Also, I’m simply astounded that the city of Concepcion in the south of Chile was founded only 30 years after the founding of Panama City. By being bases for conquering forces and relay stations for information, these cities were very literally and physically contributing to colonization beyond their role as disseminators of colonial ideas and ideals. I think even the development of agriculture around the cities was meant to both provide the physical means to sustain the colonizing effort, and to impose European agrarian ideals on the land and the peoples of the land.

I don’t have a good question for this post. Did you see any maps of Lima before you arrived and how did that impact your expectations for the city?