Modern Intellectual History, 10, 2 (2013), pp.

399–414 
C Cambridge University Press 2013
doi:10.1017/S1479244313000073

disjunctive circles: modern

intellectual culture in cuzco
and the journeys of incan
antiquities, c.1877–1921∗
stefanie gänger
Department of History, University of Konstanz
E-mail: [email protected]

This essay explores the journeys of Andean pre-Columbian antiquities across the
Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century along the veins of
intellectual networks, between Andean communities and European, North American
and Creole collectors and museums. Centred on the studies and collection of José Lucas
Caparó Muñı́z, the essay focuses on the Creole and European practice of lifting pre-
Columbian objects preserved or “still” in use in Andean communities out of their context
and taking them to European and Creole private and public collections. Intellectual
history has long paid scant attention to the many voices that its authors silenced,
disfigured and suppressed. By looking at the journeys of Andean artefacts—at their
owners, their brokers and their losers—this erssay traces the systemic hierarchies and
the chasms of an expanding modern intellectual culture.

a black stone table without feet

During the 1870s, José Lucas Caparó Muñiz (1845–1921) began to form one of
Cuzco’s most significant collections of “Incan antiquities”. Several of the artefacts
in his collection Caparó did not excavate, but took them, purchased or exchanged
them, from the villages in the surroundings of Cuzco, in Peru’s southern Andes.
One of the artefacts in his collection was, as he explained in the catalogue entry,
a black stone table without feet. It was not unearthed from a huaca, because it has been in
constant use among the Indians from the village of Sangarará (province of Acomayo), who

∗
I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Gabriela Ramos for commenting on previous
drafts of this paper and for suggesting some of its main ideas to me. I have presented an
earlier version of this paper at the Global Civil Society Conference held at the University
of Cambridge in October 2009. In July 2011 I presented a draft version of this article at the
Freie Universität in Berlin and have profited from the comments of Barbara Göbel and
Paula López Caballero. I would especially like to thank José Guevara Gil for granting me
access to José Lucas Caparó Muñiz’s correspondence and manuscripts.

399
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 400 stefanie gänger

currently play phiscay on it, with a stone dice. Sir Federico Cuba has given it to me, taking
some precautions, because the Indians idolater on it, they play games of chance for money
or chicha, a fermented corn brew . . . It is very likely that before they play, they worship the
gods of their ancestors, accompanying it with mysteriously pronounced words, a custom
that has remained intact in the remote provinces, where the light of civilization has not
yet arrived.1

Scholars have argued for some time now that objects have the capacity to
communicate complex histories,2 and that “we have to follow the things
themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their
trajectories”.3 This essay follows the “black stone table without feet” as it went
from being a gaming table in a village, to being the pride of Caparó’s cabinet of
antiquities, to being—so it will seem from the comments of observers—sold later
to a collection abroad, in Europe or North America. Like many other supposedly
pre-Columbian artefacts, the black stone table travelled along the veins of
an expanding market in antiquities, of personal connections and of scholarly
networks, across the Americas and the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century.
Even though pishca players, Cuzco antiquaries like Caparó and north Atlantic
buyers were all entangled in the same transatlantic circuits that made the table
travel, their intellectual participation in the space that materialized in between
was uneven. While some voices that accompanied the journey remained unheard,
the ones that were heard were assigned peculiar modes and degrees of audibility.
By looking at the journey of Caparó’s black stone table—from Sangarará to the
museum—this paper traces the systemic hierarchies and the chasms of a global
modern intellectual culture: it scrutinizes both the ideas that circulated in and
through its geography, and those that were left behind on the journey.

objects in transit: a global republic of letters

and the circulation of incan antiquities
Caparó’s museum, where the stone table had found a momentary resting
place by 1878, was but one of numerous private collections in the city of Cuzco.
Virtually every member of the local elite in the former capital of the Incan
Empire owned a collection or at least some scattered Incan artefacts, openly

1
José Lucas Caparó Muñı́z, “Colección de antigüedades peruanas”, El Comercio, 15, 17 and
18 May 1878.
2
Natalia Majluf, “Working from Objects: Andean Studies, Museums, and Research”, Res 52
(2007), 65–72, 65.
3
Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, in Appadurai,
ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 5.

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 disjunctive circles 401

on display in their private mansions.4 Caparó established his own collection of

Incan antiquities as a museum in his Cuzco mansion, where it occupied various
rooms. Its visitors gathered around precious stone utensils, gold and silver pins,
earrings and figurines, painted ceramic vessels, wooden queros, colourful woven
tunics and mummified human bodies. The collection grew continuously, and
by 1919, two years before Caparó’s death, it contained more than two thousand
pieces.5 Cuzco gentlemen—Caparó, himself a landowner, lawyer and deputy,6
among them—organized archaeological expeditions into the Andes, to examine
ruins and to bring back artefacts for their collections.7 Incan antiquities were
given as presents to one another among friends or family; they were exchanged
among the city’s antiquaries; and they were also, and had been ever since the
conquest, subject to a local and, following the mid-nineteenth century, an
expanding transatlantic market,8 where they could be sold and purchased.9
Caparó’s catalogue documents how the antiquary excavated some pieces, how
he received some as gifts from relations and acquaintances—among them the
black stone table from his acquaintance Federico Cuba10 —how he acquired
collections “formed by a variety of individuals”,11 and how he bartered pieces

4
Note, for instance, the Frenchman Castelnau’s descriptions of the ancient artefacts Cuzco
families kept in their homes. Francis de Castelnau, Expédition dans les parties centrales de
l’Amérique du Sud, de Rio de Janeiro a Lima, et de Lima au Para; exécutée par ordre du
gouvernement français pendant les années 1843 à 1847 (Paris, 1851), 244.
5
For the 1878 catalogue see Caparó Muñı́z, “Colección de antigüedades peruanas”. For
the 1919 catalogue, registering 2,096 pieces, see J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, “Catálogo de las
antigüedades incanas que constituyen el Museo Caparó Muñı́z”, Colección Manuscritos de
José Lucás Caparó Muñı́z (Cuzco, 1919).
6
Caparó served as district mayor, director of welfare, dean of the College of Lawyers, and—
being a member of the Civil Party (Partido Civil))—as deputy for Canas between 1897
and 1902. César Itier, El teatro quechua en el Cuzco (Lima, 2000), 24; José Guevara Gil, “La
contribución de José Lucas Caparó Muñı́z a la formación del Museo Arqueológico de la
Universidad del Cuzco”, Boletı́n del Instituto Riva-Agüero (1997), 167–226.
7
See Caparó’s report on the expedition to the Huatta Fort: J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, “El Fuerte
de Huatta”, Boletı́n del Centro Cientı́fico 4 (1901), 32–41.
8
For the emerging market in Andean antiquities, and the role of forgery in it see Karen O.
Bruhns and Nancy L. Kelker, Faking the Ancient Andes (Walnut Creek, 2009).
9
Tristan D. López, “Antigüedades jentı́licas”, El Ferrocarril (1872).
10
Caparó’s niece, for instance, Concepción Saldı́var de Palomino, supplied Caparó with
artefacts. J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, Museo de Antigüedades peruanas precolombinas pertenecientes
al D.D. José Lucas Caparó Muñı́z quien las colectó con afan incesante de 15 años, en
muchos pueblos del departamento, haciendo personalmente varias escavaciones de las huakas
(tumbas), (Cuzco, 1891), 13.
11
Guevara Gil, “La contribución de José Lucas Caparó Muñı́z”, 172, 183.

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 402 stefanie gänger

with another collector, Emilio Montes.12 A vivid intellectual sphere developed

around and drove the pieces’ circulation. Some of the antiquaries authored
learned treatises on Incan artefacts, history or Quechua language. Caparó himself
purportedly worked at night on his studies, in the few hours he could spare from
his public duties.13 Cuzqueños founded clubs where the area’s pre-Columbian
antiquities were exhibited and discussed.14 Gatherings were restricted to, and
remade, a local elite; even the public associations devoted to archaeological
study that emerged following the 1860s would retain the air of private elite
gatherings.15 Cuzco’s antiquaries—the city’s landowners, judges, politicians and
businessmen—gathered where the “light of civilization” had already arrived: in
the salons, to pass around artefacts like the black stone table that were brought
into the highland city, and to discuss their meaning.
The former capital of the Inca Empire not only was a geographical location, it
also had long been a concept; by the late 1800s, Cuzco had become a living museum
of a bygone Incan past, a “reservoir” of the remnants of pre-Columbian times.16
Travellers and antiquaries from Europe and the United States passed through
the highland city in growing numbers following Independence, attracted by
Cuzco’s close association with Incan history and its peculiar materiality, the visible
presence of Incan structures. Local antiquities parlours like Caparó’s provided
forums of encounter for Cuzqueños and their visitors who had come to marvel at
and, in many cases, to acquire Incan antiquities. Caparó published only very few
of his studies in newspapers or journals, but he read out his manuscripts about
Quechua linguistics and Incan archaeology in his museum to interested visitors,

12
Montes formed a collection of pre-Columbian pieces from the Cuzco area between the
1860s and the 1910s. Brian S. Bauer, Avances en arqueologı́a andina (Cuzco, 1992), 114, 130.
13
See Guevara Gil, “La contribución de José Lucas Caparó Muñı́z”, 170–71; J. L. Caparó
Muñı́z, “Khipu pre-colombiano”, Colección Manuscritos de José Lucás Caparó Muñı́z.
Estudios especiales de José Lucas Caparó Muñı́z sobre el khipus, geroglı́ficos, emblemas, fijos
i mudables, i avisos volantes pre-colombianos (Paruro, 1903), 3–4.
14
One of the first post-Independence “clubs” devoted to the study of Incan antiquities in
Cuzco was founded in 1825, and met regularly in “Jeraldino’s pharmacy”. See Variedades,
11 May 1825.
15
For an example see the account of a meeting of the Peruvian Archaeological Society, based
in Cuzco: Manuel González de la Rosa, “Sociedad Arqueológica Peruana”, El Nacional,
5 Dec. 1868.
16
For a discussion of the increasing “musealization” of Incan culture and Cuzco over the
nineteenth century see Natalia Majluf, “De la rebelión al museo: genealogı́as y retratos
de los incas, 1781–1900”, in Natalia Majluf, Thomas Cummins, Luis Eduardo Wuffarden,
Gabriela Ramos Cárdenas and Elena Phipps, eds., Los incas, reyes del Perú (Lima, 2005),
253–317.

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 disjunctive circles 403

both locals and foreigners.17 Travellers effortlessly entered forums of antiquarian

learning and collection in Cuzco, because both parties—the visitors and their
hosts alike—met on the grounds of a European-style, bourgeois sociability, of
shared aesthetic and intellectual affinities. Cuzco collectors self-identified in
their majority as Creoles, a ruling elite whose sovereignty rested not only on
identifying with indigenous America, as the justification for their independence
from Spain, but also on being of Hispanic, and hence European, descent and thus
capable of self-rule in the face of Europe’s imperial powers.18 Cuzqueños had
family and friendship ties with Europe, they read and engaged with European
literature and science,19 and the pre-Columbian artefacts in Cuzco collections
stood amidst colonial furniture and next to imported French pianos.20 Cuzco
antiquaries and their visitors partook in the same cosmopolitan Republic of
Letters: they shared a language, a culture and codes of civility with the European
and North American elites that travelled and transformed the globe in the late
nineteenth century. To Cuzco collectors and their counterparts in North America
and across the Atlantic, European classicism had rendered Incan antiquities
“aesthetically recognizable” at first;21 it had suggested the Incas’ monumental
structures, fine statuettes and exact drawings, in their similarities with Roman
and Greek vessels, as legitimate objects of study, collection and exhibition to
both.22 North Atlantic and Peruvian collectors and students of antiquities not only

17
J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, “Carta a D. Jorge Polar, Ministro de Justicia, Paruro, 3 de Junio”,
Colección Manuscritos de José Lucás Caparó Muñı́z. Libro borrador de cartas, artı́culos
necrológicos, histórico-arqueológicos (1905). For comments by Caparó’s visitors and
disciples see J. Tamayo Herrera, Historia del indigenismo cuzqueño, siglos XVI–XX (Lima,
1980) 137, 167.
18
The work of David Brading has opened up research on Creole discourses about the pre-
Columbian past in showing how Spaniards born in the New World created an American
identity through an engagement with America’s pre-Columbian past as the historical
foundations of their countries. David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy,
Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867 (Cambridge, 1991). See also Bernard Lavallé,
Las promesas ambiguas: Ensayos sobre el criollismo en los Andes (Lima, 1993).
19
David Cahill, “Curas and Social Conflict in the Doctrinas of Cuzco, 1780–1814”, Journal
of Latin American Studies 16 (1984), 241–76, refers to a wide range of European writers
available to Cuzqueños already during the eighteenth century.
20
For a vivid impression of Cuzco elite family homes see Paul Marcoy, A Journey across
South America from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean (London, 1873), 262.
21
For a general discussion of the “aesthetic recognition” of American art see George Kubler,
Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art (New Haven and London, 1991). The Roman
Empire had had a profound influence on the Spanish understanding of the Incan Empire
from the sixteenth century. Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas,
Spain, and Peru (Princeton and Oxford, 2007).
22
Cuzco collectors persistently interlinked their praise of the antiquities’ purity, simple
elegance and exact dimensions with references to their similarity to classical art. See,

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 404 stefanie gänger

shared an aesthetic perception, they also shared a methodology. Even though the
distinctions between antiquarianism—the combination of textual and material
evidence and typological classification on a descriptive basis—and archaeology—
commonly associated with an emphasis on excavations, the distinguishing of
layers of the soil through stratigraphy and an analysis of the find context—
had crystallized by the end of the century, Caparó, his Peruvian counterparts
and their north Atlantic correspondents alike resorted to an as yet varied set
of practices: study collections on both sides of the Atlantic combined objects
purchased from travellers or locals with objects that had been excavated by the
scholars themselves.23 An interconnected intellectual sphere emerged between
Cuzqueños, North Americans and Europeans, through a shared intellectual and
scholarly language, through conversations and friendly encounters in Cuzco
parlours, and around the objects on display.
Along with the transfer of knowledge and ideas, material culture changed
hands through the salons. In the absence of an appropriate state policy to
hinder export,24 numerous pre-Columbian antiquities left Peru through the
presence of foreign visitors. Ana Marı́a Centeno, whose city mansion doubled—
like Caparó’s—as a museum of antiquities and a parlour in Cuzco, was “kind
enough”, as the US diplomat Ephraim George Squier observed, to bestow
antiquities from her collection as gifts upon visitors.25 Upon Centeno’s death
in 1876 her collection was widely renowned in the period’s museums through
the reports of those European and North American travellers who had enjoyed
her hospitality.26 Following her death Centeno’s heirs sold the collection to the

for instance, catalogue entry 302, Emilio Montes, Catálogo del Museo de Antigüedades
peruanas e inkaikas de la propiedad del Dr. D. Emilio Montes y de Aldasábal Vasquez de
Velasco (Cuzco, 1892).
23
For reflections on the transition from antiquarianism to archaeology see Alain Schnapp,
“Between Antiquarians and Archaeologists: Continuities and Ruptures”, in Tim Murray
and Christopher Evans, eds., Histories of Archaeology: A Reader in the History of Archaeoloy
(Oxford, 2008), 392–405. On the Peruvian context see chaps. 1 and 3 in Stefanie Gänger,
“The Collecting and Study of pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, c. 1830s–1910s”,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2011.
24
It was only following legislation in 1892 and 1911 that control of the export of antiquities
was practically enforced in Peru. On protective legislation in Latin America see Rebecca
Earle, “Monumentos y museos: la nacionalización del pasado precolombino durante el
siglo XIX”, in Beatriz Gónzalez-Stephan and Jens Andermann, eds., Galerı́as del Progreso:
Museos, exposiciones y cultura visual en América Latina (Rosario, 2006), 27–64.
25
Ephraim George Squier, Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas
(London, 1877), 458.
26
For Squier’s visit and account see ibid. The German traveller Brühl also commented
on Centeno’s museum, in a passage that bears close resemblance to Squier’s account of
his visit. Gustav Brühl, Die Culturvölker Alt-Americas, 8 vols. (Cincinnati, 1875–87), 126.

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 disjunctive circles 405

Ethnological Museum in Berlin, an institution that had long been competing

for its acquisition.27 Commercial interests drove the pieces’ transfer across the
Atlantic, but the forums of an interconnected intellectual sphere, of friendship
and intimacy, mediated the possibility of the transfer of specimens at first. Among
the many objects that left Peru through Cuzco’s parlours was probably also
Caparó’s black stone table. Following the entry on the table, the second piece
described in Caparó’s 1878 catalogue was “a stone dice of whitish-brown colour”
belonging to the same game, pishca, or, as Caparó spells it, phiscay. As in the
case of the stone table, Caparó commented that the brownish dice had “not
been unearthed, because of its constant use among the Indians”, and that Señor
Bartolomé Ceballos, “a foremost inhabitant [habitante principal] of Sangarará”
had given him the dice.28 In the last of the three catalogues Caparó published
during his lifetime, immediately before he sold the remainder of his collection
to the local university in 1919, the dice still appears, and Caparó mentions that
the game used to be played on a black stone table, but the table itself is no longer
recorded in the catalogue.29 By the end of his life, Caparó was in financial trouble,
and began to sell, bit by bit, antiquities from his collection to the foreign travellers
who visited his antiquities parlour.30 Even though it cannot be ascertained with
certainty, it is likely that the black stone table ended up in a private collection
or a museum abroad. Caparó, like Centeno, stood in dialogue with European
and American scientific communities: through their parlours, they drew disperse
localities together and opened up both a material and an intellectual give-and-
take. The black stone table, one of Cuzco’s many antiquities that made their

Francis de Castelnau published a widely read travelogue, in which he refer’s to Centeno’s

museum, but by the name of her husband, Romainville. Francis de Castelnau, Expédition
dans les parties centrales de l’Amérique du Sud, 244.
27
For the correspondence between the Ethnological Museum in Berlin and Centeno’s heirs
in relation to the transaction see Adolfo Romainville, “Carta a Adolf Bastian, Lima, 24
de Septiembre”, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Ethnologisches Museum: Sammlung Centeno
Pars I b. Litt. A. (1887); A. Romainville, “Carta a Adolf Bastian, Cuzco, 1 de Marzo”,
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Ethnologisches Museum. Sammlung Centeno Pars I b. Litt. A.
(1887).
28
The stone table is described in catalogue entry number one, the dice in number two. J. L.
Caparó Muñı́z, “Colección de antigüedades peruanas”.
29
Caparó Muñı́z, “Catálogo de las antigüedades incanas”. Caparó’s collection is still at the
basis of what is today Cuzco’s Museo Inka. Albert Giesecke, “Los primeros años del Museo
Arqueológico de la Universidad del Cuzco, hoy Instituto Arqueológico del Cuzco”, Revista
del Instituto y Museo Arqueológico de la Universidad Nacional del Cuzco 12 (1948), 36–44.
30
Max Uhle, director of the National Museum in Lima, lamented that Caparó was selling
out the collection bit by bit. Max Uhle, “Carta al Presidente del Instituto Histórico, Lima,
1 de Mayo”, Archivo del Museo Nacional de Arqueologı́a, Antropologı́a e Historia. Colgante
2000–6 (1907).

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 406 stefanie gänger

journey across the Atlantic and the Americas during the late nineteenth century,
gives us a glimpse of how intellectual and material networks intersected and how
they were, at times, identical.

intimate strangers: brokers in modern intellectual

geography
In one of his manuscripts, Caparó related how for over thirty years he had
observed the ceremonies of the “Indians” in the highlands of Cuzco:

We have seen by the light of the cconucuy (nightly fireplaces) numerous groups with their
khuñas (napkins), which contained, wrapped up, their inccaichos (amulets and conopas),
their khipus, their Illas and their protective stones. We have witnessed the ceremonial
spilling of chicha to the Apus (genies), to the Anquis (mediators) and afterwards to the
Sun, the Moon, the Stars, the huakas (gods), that is to say, the hills and the roads in
the woods . . . and they say they are similar to wild beasts, humans and animals . . .
We have heard them sing the tuyallay, the huanccasccar and the harahui, with mournful
and monotonous tones . . . weeping at their current disgrace, compared to their ancient
greatness. We saw all of this, an age of fantastic shadows . . . the objects through the prism
of what lies beyond the grave . . .31

Caparó often laid emphasis on his intimacy with Andean customs or ceremonies,
and on his observations of peoples’ uses of Incan material culture, reminiscent
to him of Incan times. He also recorded meticulously his conversations with
“Indians” in his archaeological expedition reports, documenting how he sought
to elicit from them what he believed they “still” knew about the meaning of
ancient forts or pre-Columbian pottery, what they had heard about it from
“their ancestors”.32 The idea that “they” were the same people, “in their current
disgrace” as much as in “their ancient greatness”, the suspicion that they “still”
knew, that they were connected with that past through their usage of the same
conopas, inccaichos and khipus he associated with Incan rule, pervaded Caparó’s
writings and his collecting practices, as it did with those of many of his Cuzco
contemporaries. Scholars have long argued that Creoles perceived a rupture

31
J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, “Khipu pre-colombiano”.
32
See Caparó’s transcription of an interview with Mariano Huamán, an Indian guide, J. L.
Caparó Muñı́z, “El Fuerte de Huatta”. On the stereotype of the “inscrutable Indian” see
chap. 8 of N. Majluf, “The Creation of the Image of the Indian in 19th-Century Peru:
The Paintings of Francisco Laso (1823–1869)”, unpublished PhD dissertation, University
of Texas, 1996. Miruna Achim has pointed to the conviction among eighteenth-century
Mexican naturalists that the Indians treasured knowledge of pre-Columbian medicinal
cures. M. Achim, Lagartijas medicinales: Remedios americanos y debates cientı́ficos en la
Ilustración (Mexico, 2008), 118–19.

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 disjunctive circles 407

between pre-Hispanic Incan glories and Indians’ miserable, abject present.33

Peruvian writings of the late nineteenth century suggest, however, that ideas
about continuity also underlay their authors’ thinking: even though Indians
were unaware of their history, even though their connection with that past
was distorted, through their cultural practices and “continued” use of material
culture they were “still” intrinsically connected with the pre-Columbian past.
To Caparó, the Indians were ultimately the same as their “ancestors”: they were
relics of the past in the present, “fantastic shadows” from “beyond the grave”.34
Caparó’s interviews with “Indian informers”, his words about how he “had seen”,
“witnessed” and “heard” people worship, or weep, or sing, are part of a peculiar
kind of rhetoric rather common among southern Andean intellectuals: a claim
to intimacy and proximity with indigeneity.
Even though Cuzco antiquaries, like Caparó, and north Atlantic buyers were
all entangled in the same transatlantic networks of intellectual and material
exchange, the antiquities’ journeys uncover how each of its partakers was allotted
a peculiar position. By the end of the nineteenth century, north Atlantic museums
were considered to be the world’s “centres of calculation”, maintaining cycles
of accumulation that allowed them to draw together, compare and synthesize
material culture into new meanings. In one of Europe’s or North America’s
large collecting museums, as well as in Lima’s National Museum, an artefact like
the “black stone table without feet” would not cease to change in meaning—
museums are not the final resting place of artefacts, the place they go when their
lives in the “real” world are over: a museum in Oxford or Berlin, as historians
of collecting have long argued, is as emergent, as constantly being brought into
being through the actions of people, as is Caparó’s cabinet or village social life.35
And yet, the table would have been subject to new practices of ordering and
objectifying, moving into and through a variety of different intellectual scales
in these “centres”: juxtaposed with Chinese pottery and Egyptian mummies, it
would stand for one of mankind’s many variations, or, in its relative complexity,
indicate evolutionary progress, or, alternatively, add to the range of exotic artefacts
testifying to the successful imperialist expansion of late nineteenth-century nation

33
Rebecca Earle, among other historians, has come to the conclusion that “while the
pre-Hispanic past began slowly to be incorporated into the national heritage alongside
the colonial period, contemporary indigenous peoples were declared to have lost their
connection to that past”. Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making
in Spanish America, 1810–1930 (Durham, NC and London, 2007), 20.
34
I make this argument at length in chap. 3 of Gänger, “The Collecting and Study of pre-
Columbian Antiquities”.
35
For this idea see Chris Gosden and Frances Larson, Knowing Things: Exploring the
Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (Oxford, 2007).

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 408 stefanie gänger

states.36 Historians have long recognized that manuscripts, natural specimens

and, as in this case, non-European material culture were considered to gain
epistemological value as they travelled towards the “centres”.37 Little attention
has hitherto been paid to the fact that the distance covered by the object in
transfer was also thought to lead to the loss of detail, context and information,
to change and distort the pieces’ meaning, as in a game of “Chinese whispers”.38
In fact, however, European and American scholars alike shared a sense that
the objects not only gained, but that they also lost, epistemological value, as
they travelled away from the Andes and were situated in relation to another
world of objects. Historians have long overlooked the important role played by
Peruvian antiquaries in transatlantic archaeological networks around 1900. The
considerable international demand, traceable in the correspondence of Europe’s
and North America’s scholars, museums and societies, was premised upon a
peculiar kind of expertise attributed to Peruvian antiquaries: their presumed
intimacy with indigeneity, and their capacity to mediate it. In their dialogue
with museums abroad, Cuzco collectors supplied first-hand observations, pre-
Columbian artefacts and Andean “legends” or the voices of “Indian informers”—
for scientists in Europe or North America.39 In Cuzqueños’ access to Andean
material culture, in their dominion of indigenous languages and in their
observations of the inhabitants of the Andes themselves, they were seen to be
in possession of knowledge and resources that constituted a privilege, naturally
amiss in Europe, the US or distant coastal Lima. Whereas European scientists were

36
For overviews of Europe’s and North America’s ethnographic collections see, for Germany,
H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial
Germany (Chapel Hill, 2002). For the United States see David Jenkins, “Object Lessons and
Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology”,
Comparative Studies in Society and History (1994), 242–70. On British collecting in India
see Bernard S. Cohn, “The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities and Art
in Nineteenth-Century India”, in Barbara Stoler Miller, ed., The Powers of Art: Patronage
in Indian Culture (Delhi, 1992), 301–29.
37
Bruno Latour’s concept of the “centre of calculation” refers to a metropolitan centre
that possesses the power to maintain a cycle of accumulation through a wide network
of individuals and institutions. See B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists
and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, 1987). For an application of the concept to
the Indian intellectual context see Savithri Preetha Nair, “Native Collecting and Natural
Knowledge (1798–1832): Raja Serfoji II of Tanjore as a ‘Centre of Calculation’”, Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society 15 (2005), 279–302.
38
Historians of science have pointed out how plants or things often moved easily from the
Americas or Africa into Europe, but how the knowledge of their many uses and meanings
did not necessarily follow the same path. Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger,
Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, 2008).
39
I examine this in Gänger, “The Collecting and Study of pre-Columbian Antiquities”.

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 disjunctive circles 409

advantaged in their access to technology, material culture for global comparison

or a range of publications, Caparó and his contemporaries saw themselves and
were seen as scholars privileged in their access to the “local”—a category that
appears to have emerged in scholarship precisely in conjunction with Europe’s
and America’s global cycles of intellectual accumulation. In his manuscripts,
Caparó condescendingly disparaged what he called “writings from a bird’s-eye
view”, studies carried out by foreign researchers and Lima authors who came
only for a short while to the Cuzco area, who took Incan antiquities to distant
museums where the isolated pieces would be “mysteries without a key”. Foreign
or Lima-based studies of Incan antiquities were “generous attempts”, and yet they
were bound to fail because these scholars lacked “a comprehensive knowledge”
of Andean languages and customs and of the ancient structures. According to
Caparó, “archaeological and linguistic . . . studies about the Peru of the Incas
could not be useful if they were not undertaken in Cuzco, by a Cuzqueño”.40 His
studies, Caparó was certain, would “surprise” the intellectual world abroad.41
Historians of Iberian science have long observed how eighteenth-century
Creole naturalists emphasized their experience of, and proximity to, American
nature and to Amerindian groups: they saw themselves as translators into
the enlightened sciences of the indigenous languages they understood or the
medicinal practices they observed among the Indians. Denouncing European
scholars’ failure to meaningfully include American materials or to fully
understand American culture and nature, Creole intellectuals’ discourse of
proximity, their “localism”, was a way of reaffirming their particular kind of
belonging to and the significance of their role in global networks of knowledge
production, transmission and exchange.42 Caparó’s words about how he had

40
J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, “Apuntes y tradiciones que se pueden utilizar para la historia del
Imperio de los Incas”, Colección Manuscritos de José Lucás Caparó Muñı́z (Cuzco, 1887).
41
J. L. Caparó Muñı́z, “Carta a Dr. Santiago Geraldo, Paruro 6 de Noviembre”, Colección
Manuscritos de José Lucás Caparó Muñı́z: Libro borrador de cartas, artı́culos necrológicos,
histórico-arqueológicos (Paruro, 1904).
42
Miruna Achim shows how Mexican Creole naturalists’ collaboration with “Indian
informers” and their role as mediators and translators was a way of reaffirming their
belonging to transatlantic scientific networks. Achim, Lagartijas medicinales, 118–19.
Marcos Cueto has discussed Andean naturalists’ belief in the failure of European scientific
works to include American materials. Marcos Cueto, “Natural History, High-Altitude
Physiology and Evolutionary Ideas in Peru”, in Thomas Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper
and Rosaura Ruiz, eds., The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish
America and Brazil (Dordrech, 1999), 83–94. Natalia Majluf has made a similar point
for the visual arts, in arguing that the marginalization of mid-nineteenth-century Latin
American cosmopolitans has been effected primarily through the discourse of cultural
authenticity. See N. Majluf, “‘Ce n’est pas le Pérou’, or the Failure of Authenticity: Marginal
Cosmopolitans at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855”, Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), 868–93.

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 410 stefanie gänger

“seen” and “heard” struck a very particular chord: they elucidate the peculiar
position as brokers that Cuzco antiquaries held in the intellectual geography that
materialized around the antiquities’ journeys.

chinese whispers: breaches of silence in the

circulation of incan antiquities
Caparó associated the pishca game with pre-Columbian times: the fact that
he placed the black stone table and the whitish-brown dice in his “collection of
Incan antiquities”, and that he emphasized how both “had not been unearthed”,
suggested that they should have been: that it was underneath the ground, and to
an archaeological past, that both belonged. Caparó thus implied not only that
Indians had failed to evolve towards modernity on the line of progress, but also
that in their lives and practices the past had survived. Caparó’s remarks on the
phisca game reflect, on the one hand, long-standing Creole cultural tropes about
indigeneity; on the other hand, however, they also give us a glimpse of a factual
reality that has occupied scholars for decades.
The pishca game Caparó refers to can indeed be traced back to Incan rule.
Andeanists at present concur that a game called pichca came in use all over
the Andes as a consequence of Incan expansion in these territories.43 There is
evidence from the early colonial chroniclers and from archaeological finds that the
game was, in the Cuzco area and beyond, associated with the ceremonial consul-
tation of huacas as oracles, with foresight and divination. The game is recorded
as being played in a number of different contexts: Bernabé Cobo relates that
Incan rulers played what was called pichca against local leaders in the dependent
territories, as a symbolic element in the taking of power, and the native chronicler
Guama Poma de Ayala mentions that the game was played in connection with
the harvest.44 Caparó’s assertion that he was witnessing an ancient custom “that
has remained intact in the remote provinces” is one we find in the writings of
numerous Andeanists, up to the present. There is evidence from various parts of
the territories that belonged to the Inca Empire—the Argentine province of San
Luis, the province of Azuay in Ecuador, and from Anta, in Cuzco, among others—
that a game now called pishca or pisqay was played during the twentieth century.
According to Caparó, pishca was a “game of chance” for money or chicha, but he
conjectured that it was “possible” that people also “idolatered” when they played

43
Santiago Ordóñez Carpio, “El juego del huayru o pishca: Una aproximación a la
reestructuración del cambio y la muerte en los Andes”, unpublished MA dissertation,
FLACSO Ecuador/CBC Colegio Andino, 2004.
44
Margarita Gentile, “La pichca: oráculo y juego de fortuna (su persistencia en el espacio y
tiempo andinos)”, Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’Études Andines 27 (1998), 75–131.

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 disjunctive circles 411

it, and worshipped the gods of their ancestors. In fact, from recent scholarship on
pishca, it seems that in the Cuzco area during the mid-twentieth century, people
played for money in the context of funerary rites, to win prayers for the deceased.
Observers have suggested that the role of the game in mortuary rites might still
be that of an oracle at present, and that the medium consulted is the deceased,
in transit between life and death during the five days following his passing.45
The pishca table was not the only object Cuzco antiquaries took out of
“constant use”. Throughout the period, collectors took or purchased objects
from “Indians” who, so the collectors believed, had kept the pieces “since the
times of the empire”, and had “continued” to use them for practical, ceremonial
or religious purposes. Antiquaries’ writings illustrate that, while some of the
“Indians” who owned artefacts willingly participated in a circuit of exchange and
commoditization, others clung to these pieces as meaningful things embodying
personal memories or as objects of utility and ceremonial artefacts and deterred
those who attempted to collect them. Federico Cuba supplied Caparó with several
artefacts “that had not been unearthed”: a “pot of very fine stone, greenish . . .
with the faces of wildcats sculpted on it”, “still” used in rituals commemorating the
accorasis (Incan princes) among the Indians, or stone mortars that “continued
to be in use” because they were “so practical”.46 There is evidence, as in the
case of pishca, that cloth, vessels and utensils that observers and owners alike
associated with pre-Columbian times were kept, revered, reproduced or put
to new uses in the Andes. The objects Caparó mentions in his description of
the ceremony he had observed—khipus, illas and conopas—have been described
by archaeologists of the pre-Columbian period, by colonial historians and by
anthropologists working on the twentieth-century Andes. Conopas are small
carved stone figurines representing llamas or alpacas kept among the belongings
of Andean herders, and illas are carved figures or natural pebbles that evoke
animals, houses or crop plants, found on the hillside as gifts to the mountain
deities, the apus. Both types of miniature are used in Andean rituals as offerings.
Caparó’s reference to the huacas as “gods, that is to say, the hills and the roads in
the woods”, reveals the antiquary’s awareness of the animate power of the material
world in both the pre-Columbian and the modern Andes.47 Their practicality
might have played a part in why pieces held to be Incan were used in the Andes
around 1900, as in the case of the mortar, and so might village and family
traditions. The khipus that Caparó refers to—bundles of knotted strings—are
associated with Incan culture, and there is evidence that they served Andeans

45
Ibid.
46
See catalogue entries one and five. Caparó Muñı́z, “Colección de antigüedades peruanas”.
47
Bill Sillar, “The Social Agency of Things? Animism and Materiality in the Andes”,
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19 (2009), 367–77.

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 412 stefanie gänger

during the nineteenth century as a mnemonic tool to keep track of information.48

As in the case of the “greenish pot”, some uses of pre-Columbian material culture
appear to have represented genuine attempts at preserving or creating a relation
with the Inca past.49 Yet we can only conjecture as to the meaning of the greenish
pot, the khipu, the mortar, or, indeed, the black stone table: for the life the pieces
had led before they entered Caparó’s collection was left behind on the journey.
The antiquarian and archaeological practice of lifting pre-Columbian objects
out of their context and taking them to private and public collections not only
produced “circulation”; it also produced a rupture. Caparó and his European
and North American visitors conversed on the joint premise that the table was an
Incan antiquity, an object of antiquarian scrutiny and collection, that it should
have been unearthed. In this matter at least, neither Caparó nor his visitors shared
common ground for communication with those who, over that same table, wept
over the death of their beloved, or “worshipped the gods of their ancestors”, or
sought to tell what the future would bring, with the people for whom the table
was not an antiquity, but a part of their present. The incommensurability of
forms of knowledge, the impossibility of translation in the peculiar instant of
loss around the stone table’s journey, is representative of many such instances
in the history of ethnography and archaeology. Scholars have examined other
parts of the globe for how Western collecting and museum practices made sacred,
inalienable objects into scientific data and alienable commodities, stripping them
of meanings, of their auditory, tactile, or olfactory intricacies, and reducing them
to visual signs to be decoded.50 Ceremonial objects, insignia of status, useful tools,
or indeed a gaming table, were reconfigured into “antiquities” or etnografica,
transformed into objects on display, divesting them of their usefulness, meaning
and memories. Caparó did not tell why people “idolatered” on that black table,
what their “mysteriously pronounced words” were, and what the “gods of their
ancestors” meant to them: he deliberately invoked a sense of mystery, rather than
providing a “key” to unravel it, painting a dark world of the past where “the light of

48
On the post-conquest evolution of the khipu, see Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus
and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village (Durham, NC and London, 2004), Carol Mackey,
“The Continuing Khipu Traditions”, in Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, eds., Narrative
Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu (Austin, 2002), 320–47.
49
See, for instance, Thomas Cummins, “Let Me See! Reading Is for Them: Colonial Andean
Images and Objects ‘como es costumbre tener los caciques Señores’”, in Elizabeth Hill
Boone and Thomas Cummins, eds., Native Traditions in the Postconquest World: A
Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks 2nd through 4th October 1992 (Washington, DC, 1992),
91–148.
50
On how Western collecting and museum practices made sacred, inalienable objects into
museums objects, see Cohn, “The Transformation of Objects into Artifacts, Antiquities
and Art”, Annette Weiner, “Inalienable Wealth”, American Ethnologist 12 (1985), 223–30.

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 disjunctive circles 413

civilization had not yet arrived”.51 Caparó’s words reflect a discourse of intimacy,
not genuine inquisitiveness; they embody a narrative of familiarity, not real
acquaintance, with the world he described; in sum, they mirror the position as a
“broker”, an intermediary, that Caparó had assumed in a transatlantic intellectual
community. Caparó brought together his own world and that of his European
contacts, but he divided, at the same time, that shared sphere from the phisca
players in Sangarará.
Whereas Caparó’s barters with don Federico Cuba, the conversations in
Caparó’s parlour, and the transactions with European and North American
buyers reveal an interconnected intellectual sphere, and whereas we know how
elite belonging was reified as people gathered around that black stone table
in Caparó’s antiquities parlour and how a transatlantic intellectual community
instituted its order on that table’s back, the meaning that revolved around the
table in Sangará was left behind on the journey. The table’s journey reveals not
only an interconnected intellectual world in which people spoke to each other
across borders and continents, but also a disjunction, in revealing the ways in
which some did not speak, and were not spoken to. Meanings crossed oceans if
they travelled along the veins of a shared intellectual language and within the
conventions of bourgeois sociability, but they hesitated to cross a distance as
short as that between two people facing each other when there was no shared
language and no shared sphere to hand them on.

histories of interconnectedness
The language of “liquidity” so prevalent in research about globalization today
invokes an image of unimpeded, all-encompassing movement—of agentless
“flows”, universal mobility and effortless “circulation”.52 But the world is no even
medium of transmission. Whereas the transactions between a Cuzco antiquary,
a North American diplomat and a museum in Berlin reveal how systemic
hierarchies were translated into peculiar scholarly roles in the modern intellectual
geography that moved ideas back and forth, the table’s journey between the
players and the cabinet reveals a moment of encounter that led to the loss,
rather than the transfer, of ideas and knowledge. The circuits that moved Andean
antiquities reveal the material interconnectedness of different parts of the world
in the late nineteenth century but they also reveal how intellectual exchange along
those same veins was not fluid, how it was subject to inequalities, restrictive and
contingent. Histories of interconnectedness may well be episodic or disjunctive.

51
Caparó Muñı́z, “Colección de antigüedades peruanas”.
52
For one recent critical discussion of the “mobility bias” in global history see Stuart
Alexander Rockefeller, “Flow”, Current Anthropology 52/4 (2011), 557–78.

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 414 stefanie gänger

Rather than being prevented from thinking about interconnectedness by the

existence of breaches, inequity and discrimination, these disjunctions must be
seen as intrinsic and constituent elements in these journeys and their analysis.
The formulation and movement of ideas neither is a disembodied enterprise
nor does it consist only of those that appear “emblazoned on the title pages of
European texts”: it consists invariably also of the many voices that it silenced,
disfigured and suppressed.53
The ideas that were transmitted in peculiar modes and those that stayed
behind, when Andean antiquities were taken out of one context and moved
into another, remind us that in processes of global circulation there were always
also ideas that would not circulate, that were inwardly directed, fragmenting,
excluded from or reluctant about movement. There were always ideas that were
not communicated and not shared, and that were particular to their time and
place, and again others that had little to do with the wider world. Lumps
and gaps, divergence and disparity marked the trajectories of material culture
and the ideas attached to it through the Andes and across the Atlantic; they were
disjunctive circles, rugged paths full of meaningful silences.

53
Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago
and London, 2008). A number of historians have put forth similar claims. For a useful
synthesis see Sujit Sivasundaram, “Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and
Theory”, Isis 101 (2010), 146–58.

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