Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-09T09:13:30.849Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

8 - Exploring Incan Identity

from Part II - The Inca and Inca Symbolism in Popular Festive Culture: The Religious Processions of Seventeenth-Century Cuzco

Get access

Summary

The Spanish conquest implied the capture of the Andean imaginario by the new overlords, an open-ended and variegated process still in train today. This capture is not merely an appropriation, however, but rather a continuing dialectic which is sometimes uneven, sometimes reciprocal. Multiple processes of acculturation have generated various degrees of hybridity, sometimes resulting in a true synthesis. This process reaches beyond mutual borrowings, appropriations and impositions; it is often creative, so much so that the resultant hybridities sometimes border on the fantastic, such that were they fiction, they would easily fit under the rubric of ‘magical realism’. And these outcomes either represent or at least involve the creation of new imaginarios – perhaps as good a definition of syncretism as any – which in turn evolve in new directions. In such encounters, Europeans gazed calmly from without, mulling over the stream of reports of the fabulous that impinged upon their consciousness, while the Andean Other scrambled furiously to construct an identity that would be acceptable to their new masters, and which might preserve some vestige of the erstwhile fealty accorded the former Incan elite by their native Andean subjects. It was a tall order to sell the notion of a post-colonial Incan aristocratic caste to conquerers and conquered alike, both of whom, it may be surmised, held this anachronistic nobility in some contempt, for different reasons but in roughly equal measure.

Memories are cheap, but all that the surviving Incas had to sell was their past. They were imagining a community, but it was a past community. The success with which they drew on this memory and cobbled it to borrowings from the newly hegemonic culture would determine their place, their survival, within the new Spanish order. Their future was a ‘future past’. Save for a scattering of nobles who had materially assisted the conquest, either before or after the fall of the city of Cuzco, their claim to noble status was based principally on lineage and kinship. Claims based on Incaic lineage were on the whole paltry and insufficient in Spanish eyes, for all that kinship and inheritance were themselves pillars of Spanish society and thus colonialism. Indeed, these qualities were at the heart of occidental notions of the aristocratic.

Type
Chapter
Information
Habsburg Peru
Images, Imagination and Memory
, pp. 87 - 96
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×