{"id":65,"date":"2024-06-04T10:23:03","date_gmt":"2024-06-04T17:23:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/?p=65"},"modified":"2024-06-04T10:24:21","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T17:24:21","slug":"week3-cain-without-abel-adaptation-for-the-andes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/2024\/06\/04\/week3-cain-without-abel-adaptation-for-the-andes\/","title":{"rendered":"week3\u2014Cain the City-Founder; Adaptation for the Andes\u2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

week3\u2014Cain the City-Founder; Adaptation for the Andes\u2014<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

reading blog #4 \u2013 Guaman Poma\u2019s \u201cThe First New Chronicle and Good Government\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Saints and sainthood really confuses me. I think these past few texts have really been challenging me on what I thought I knew about Christianity and religion. I previously thought I knew a lot, given that I\u2019ve gone to church my entire life, my mom is a Children\u2019s Ministry Pastor, and my brother just graduated with a master\u2019s in Christian Arts, but as I go along further, I\u2019m realizing I don\u2019t know all that much. To me, the worship and praise of saints\u2014especially during Corpus Christi\u2014was kind of contradictory to the belief, specifically in terms of the rules against worshipping idols. <\/span><\/p>\n

Guaman Poma\u2019s middle-stance writing on the historical account of Inca peoples and Spaniard conquest plays on so many contradictory parallels. I can\u2019t quite put my finger on what exactly feels off to me, perhaps it is the whole of it. <\/span><\/p>\n

The first thing that really struck me was Part 1 (The Ages of the World: The First Generation of the World), where Poma very clearly subscribes to the (European) interpretation of black people being descendants of Cain. With Poma being Quechua, this was not something I expected to be reading about. Perhaps, it makes sense\u2026 given that Poma is nobility and this text is addressed to the king, but it still shocked me. Cain being the ancestor of Black people is especially problematic because Cain is attributed as being the brother rejected by God and being the first murderer on earth\u2014this belief then fueled the justification of slavery of Black people by Europeans. Sometimes, I really don\u2019t understand where Poma is writing from, because in the footnotes after this mention, it says that \u201celsewhere, he writes sensitively about the harsh lives of enslaved black men and women\u201d (15). <\/span><\/p>\n

The mention of Cain is also interesting to me because of the colonial context in which this text exists. In the Bible, Cain is cursed by God with being forever transient, but in revenge, Cain built the first city without the presence of God, east of Eden in the land of Nod. So, even though the European interpretation of Cain is an association with Black people, the Europeans at this time are the ones \u2018building cities\u2019, and according to Poma, they are doing so without the presence of God or just behaviour. It\u2019s fascinating to see these layers of contradictions pile on one another, and to see the justifications (or lack thereof) that subsequently follow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, Poma uses King James Version, which I personally do not like at all, but given the historical time I will let it slide.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think the thing that helped me to understand this depiction of faith and Spanish conquest in the Andes was Dean\u2019s description of adaptation of religious figures into Andean context. (I.e., Pan as a pastoral and shepherd figure, Apollo as the Sun and the Incan weight of the Sun\u2019s divine presence\u2026). In this way, Poma\u2019s adaptation of Biblical origins onto Andean environment\/context started to click for me. It absolutely does not make sense until it just does. (This is not a very coherent sentence, but it\u2019s making sense to me in this moment, so I am leaving it as is).<\/span><\/p>\n

My question for you all then is this: did you notice any other forms of adaptation in Poma\u2019s writing? Did you notice any contradictions that stood out to you?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

week3\u2014Cain the City-Founder; Adaptation for the Andes\u2014 reading blog #4 \u2013 Guaman Poma\u2019s \u201cThe First New Chronicle and Good Government\u201d Saints and sainthood really confuses me. I think these past few texts have really been challenging me on what I thought I knew about Christianity and religion. I previously thought I knew a lot, given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75568,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,46,44,43],"tags":[50,49,48,47],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guaman-poma","category-reading-blog","category-the-first-new-chronicle-and-good-government","category-week3","tag-cain","tag-first-new-chronicle","tag-guaman-poma","tag-reading-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions\/67"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lastjasmine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}