Los Incas en la colonia

The book under review is a posthumous collection of articles by the Peruvian ethnohistorian Franklin Pease (1939–1999). The essays were published, largely in the 1980s and 1990s, in journals and edited volumes in Peru, Spain, and elsewhere, many of which are now hard to find. Focused on indigenous ethnohistory in colonial Peru, the collection includes classic and highly influential essays along with more ephemeral pieces, illustrating the arc of an extraordinary career.Franklin Pease was among the foremost Peruvian public intellectuals of his generation. He traveled widely, researching in foreign archives and teaching at universities in Chile, Mexico, Spain, France, England, and the United States. At various moments he served as director of Peru's National Museum of History and of the country's National Library, as well as a member of the Comisión Consultiva del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. He also served as dean of the Faculty of Letters at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and directed its publishing branch. He was the founding editor of the journal Histórica, which quickly came to be the country's most prestigious journal of history and which he edited until his death.Pease's main research areas, throughout his more than 300 books and articles, were three: the history of the Inca empire, the textual study of colonial historical chronicles, and the ethnohistory of indigenous Andeans under colonial rule. While his studies of the Incas have been largely superseded, his work on the chronicles remains influential. This volume is the first to collect his writings on colonial ethnohistory. In spite of its title, the book's focus is not limited to the ethnic Inca class but encompasses how Peru's indigenous elites (Inca and non-Inca) adapted to Castilian rule. One of Pease's most influential books was his 1992 monograph Curacas, reciprocidad y riqueza, on the ways that Andean ethnic lords maintained aspects of traditional political culture while finding opportunities to profit from their role as middlemen between indigenous commoners and the colonial state; Los Incas en la colonia includes an important article published in Spain's Revista de Indias that sketched out Pease's most important ideas on this theme.Not surprisingly for a prolific author such as Pease, there is overlap among the essays' subjects and a certain amount of repetition. Alongside original research, the book also includes historiographical surveys and reflective essays, such as “Nuestra imagen histórica quinientos años después,” written for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage. A few of the essays are little more than brief sketches, such as a six-page article from a 1990 collection on the use of khipus in early colonial administration — an example of Pease's tendency to open up topics for junior scholars to develop. (In this case, Pease's suggestive treatment was developed by younger scholars such as Carmen Beatriz Loza in Bolivia and Galen Brokaw in the United States.)Reading the volume from start to finish will be useful mainly for those interested in Pease's career in the intellectual history of his time. The book illuminates the intellectual ferment in Peru in the second half of the twentieth century, when the history and the contemporary reality of the country's indigenous population went from being a minor subject for academics to one of the most prominent and exciting subjects of national intellectual inquiry. Pease, a man of the academic establishment par excellence, was among the first to make indigenous history the focus of his research; he collaborated with Peruvian and foreign contemporaries, from María Rostworowski to John Murra, to create the new field of Andean ethnohistory. Not coincidentally, this was also the first time in Peruvian history when large numbers of indigenous people were themselves able to enter the halls of academia. In the book's final essay, “Cuatro décadas de etnohistoria andina” (published the year before his death), he recalled teaching a class in Peruvian history in the 1970s to adult students in Lima who were indigenous migrants from the highlands — something that earlier generations of Lima university professors might have had difficulty imagining. While lecturing, Pease felt suddenly uncomfortable with the word indio and substituted hombre andino; at the end of the lecture, a student told him, “thank you for not calling us indios . . . we are Incas” (p. 408). This collection traces the agenda of Pease and his fellow ethnohistorians in constructing a usable past, which would situate the sweep of indigenous history within the Peruvian reality of their own time

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Ethnohistory · Ethnology · Humanities · Indigenous · History · Latin American history and culture