week4—the necessity and fluidity [of fault lines] in Andean Self-Understandings; un/making through Reciprocity—
reading blog #7 – Irene Silverblatt’s Modern Inqusitions
“The puzzle I want to explore is the following: how some Andeans, after about one century of Spanish rule, began to see themselves (somewhat) as Inca descendants and as “Indians”; or, in other words, how Andeans, who had primarily identified themselves as members of ayllus, began, in addition, to conceive of themselves in the terms of political order imposed by their Spanish colonizers.” (190)
A reminder–mostly for myself–of what an ayllu is:
“Ayllu were self-sustaining social units that would educate their own children and farm or trade for all the food they ate, except in cases of disaster such as El Niño years when they relied on the Inca storehouse system. Each ayllu owned a parcel of land, and the members had reciprocal obligations to each other.” (Wikipedia)
This reading has helped me to begin to put together the pieces of a question I had but had no idea how to frame or even verbalize. We have had many discussions about Indigeneity, colonialism, and the tensions that lie between, but perhaps, what we have been discussing but wholly missing was the idea of Andean identity—of which Indigeneity plays an unmistakable role.
After our guest speaker, I asked Cecilia Sueiro about the feelings or ‘general consensus’ towards Incans from Peruvians. I knew it was probably a stupid and unanswerable question, but I felt the urge to ask and I didn’t know how else to say it. She answered shortly: “there is no general consensus”. (She, of course, said more on it later, but this was the gist).
More and more, I refer myself back to the idea of tinkuy, which was mentioned in Carolyn Dean’s Inka Bodies. Tinkuy is defined as a kind of mediation between two opposing forces; Andean and European, Indigeneity and foreignness, past and present, pagan and Christian, masculinity and femininity (Dean 4). Personally, I understood tinkuy in relation to adaption, hybridity, and syncretism. Though, now that Andean reciprocity I believe my understanding of these concepts and identities has expanded ten-fold.
The idea that Andeans more wholly adopted the Incan identity in face of Spanish colonization was something that felt paradoxically true and oddly problematic to me. I can see now that if this statement is taken solely, that’s where the problem lies. Indeed, Andean self-understanding is something complex, intricate, fragile yet robust, adaptive, meditatively opposing, and somewhat rigid but at the same time, fluid within those bounds of rigidity. But perhaps, most of all, Andean self-understanding is contradictory.
Silverblatt framed this taking on of Incan identity as the product of tension of Spanish systemic imposition. As “Andean Indianness was a product of Spanish colonialism, yet its meanings were bound to the experiences of a century before” (190). Though, Andean identity (in the first excerpt) was mainly tied to the ayllus. In this way, I think there is a paradoxical kind of layering of identities that all amalgamate into the ‘current Andean self-understanding’.
Perhaps, the sense of ‘Indianness’ or Indigeneity is both made and unmade through all of these factors—Incan strategies of imperialism (generosity, affect[ion], particularist state-making, agrarian communism); Spanish colonization (imposing universal ways of living, feudalism, order under lettered/legal standards); and community membership and affects of the ayllus. In other words, the ethos of the past (Incas) became all the more present in the face of a Spanish imposed future—this tension is what then sparked the significance of Indianism/Indigeneity in Andean self-understandings. Andean reciprocity then expands to that of self-understanding in the midst of Incan and Spanish imperialism, colonization, and hegemonies.
One thing I would perhaps like to add to this is the idea of Andean cosmovision and cosmoliving. I am not quite sure what this means yet, or it how it fits into the conversation… but I am sure it has a place here.