It has just struck me that it is now less than a fortnight before I will be in Peru, to take a group of twenty UBC undergraduates (accompanied, fortunately, by a very reliable Teaching Assistant) for six weeks of study and exploration in Lima, Cusco, Pisac, Ollantaytambo, and Machu Picchu.

I am asking the students to write a regular travel blog, on which they will reflect on their experiences and observations while they are there (alongside a reading blog, in which they comment on a respond to the texts we will be reading and discussing). And so I thought, pour encourager les autres, that I would do the same.

At present I am still caught up in logistics–just yesterday I heard from our hotel in Cusco, for instance, that there has apparently been a misunderstanding about how many rooms we need; I am very much hoping this gets resolved today! But the sudden realization of how close the trip is may perhaps, paradoxically, help me stand back and think again about what I hope we achieve.

The theme of the course (because it is also a regular, six-credit university course) is “Making and Unmaking Indigeneity in the Andes.” Its basic premise, I suppose, is that we cannot (and should not) take Indigeneity for granted. Indigeneity is a product of history–and of course, specifically colonial and postcolonial history–if only for the fact that, prior to colonization, there was no such category as “Indigeneity.”

There were of course Inkas (and Chankas and Ashánika, and so on; elsewhere, Maya and Mexica etc.), but there were no Indigenous people. Indigeneity is a result or construction of colonialism. Indeed, the term “Indigenous” (in English) is first attested to by the OED in 1632, and it is in 1646 that we have the first occurrence of what we would consider its modern meaning, in a reference (by Thomas Browne) to “indigenous or proper natives of America.”

So we will read and think about how Indigeneity has been made–and at various points, also un-made–in the Andes from the seventeenth century (with Guaman Poma) to a present that we will, partially at least, see around us in Peru itself.

Inevitably, we will be tourists–and I hope that the students have a good time, and do not get sick or break legs and the like–but we will also be studying tourism, thinking about a history of outsiders’ gazes or Occidentalism, reflecting on our own participation, and even complicity, in making and unmaking Indigeneity. There is a lot to learn, and not only for the students. I am very much looking forward to the trip, although I am also a little nervous. . . if mostly in a good way. As I have told the students: we need to expect the unexpected and prepare for our plans to be derailed. That will be part of the learning.