Review: Indigenous Culture and Religion before and since the Conquest

Reviewed Work(s): Legends of the Plumed Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God by Neil
Baldwin; The Myth of Quetzalcoatl by Enrique Florescano and Lysa Hochroth; Time and
Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos by Kay Almere Read; Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ:
Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru by Carolyn Dean; Indigenous South Americans of
the Past and Present: An Ecological Perspective by David J. Wilson; Native Traditions in
the Postconquest World by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins; Indian Slavery, Labor,
Evangelization, and Captivity in the Americas: An Annotated Bibliography by Russell M.
Magnaghi
Review by: Anna L. Peterson
Source: Latin American Research Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2001), pp. 237-254
Published by: The Latin American Studies Association
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 INDIGENOUS CULTURE AND RELIGION

BEFORE AND SINCE THE CONQUEST

Anna L. Peterson
University of Florida

LEGENDS OF THE PLUMED SERPENT: BIOGRAPHY OF A MEXICAN

GOD. By Neil Baldwin. (New York: Public Affairs, 1998. Pp. 205. $37.50
cloth.)
THE MYTH OF QUETZALCOATL. By Enrique Florescano, translated by
Lysa Hochroth. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Pp. 287. $45.00 cloth.)
TIME AND SACRIFICE IN THE AZTEC COSMOS. By Kay Almere Read.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. 308. $39.95 cloth.)
INKA BODIES AND THE BODY OF CHRIST: CORPUS CHRISTI IN
COLONIAL CUZCO, PERU. By Carolyn Dean. (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1999. Pp. 288. $59.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)
INDIGENOUS SOUTH AMERICANS OF THE PAST AND PRESENT: AN
ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE. By David J. Wilson. (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view, 1999. Pp. 480. $60.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.)
NATIVE TRADITIONS IN THE POSTCONQUEST WORLD. Edited by
Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins. (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton
Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1998. Pp. 480. $30.00 cloth.)
INDIAN SLAVERY, LABOR, EVANGELIZATION, AND CAPTIVITY IN THE
AMERICAS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY. By Russell M. Magnaghi.
(Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1998. Pp. 559. $110.00 cloth.)

Myth and Culture in Mesoamerica

Quetzalcoatl seems to embody the syncretic nature of pre-Columbian

and post-Columbian Amerindian cultures. The plumed serpent encompasses
a variety of Mesoamerican indigenous traditions and European elements in
a constantly shifting composite that has served at different times and places
as a symbol of identity for various native groups, creoles, and mestizos. Draw-
ing on this multivalence, Neil Baldwin uses Quetzalcoatl as the center of his
exploration of Mexican culture and history in Legends of the Plumed Serpent:
Biography of a Mexican God. The book, as Baldwin readily admits, emerged
from a traveler's fascination rather than from lengthy training in Mesoamer-
ican myth. After deciding to write about Mexico, Baldwin sought "a char-

Latin American Research Review volume 36 number 2 ? 2001 237

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Latin American Research Review

acteristic of Mexican life or even an archetype within the culture that I might
be able to capture, that would have the staying power to become the center
of my book" (p. 6). Eventually he settled on Quetzalcoatl, "the only symbol
with so much staying power that it can be found permeating nearly every
formative culture of Mexico" (p. 10).
Baldwin's discussion of precolonial Quetzalcoatl legends is gener-
ally competent, although specialists will note a few dubious claims, such as
his description of human sacrifice as "penance" (p. 34) and his insistence on
"the Aztecs' absolute conviction" that Cortes represented the return of Quet-
zalcoatl (p. 53). A larger problem emerges from his use of the plumed ser-
pent as a metasymbol that sets the pattern for all that follows. Identifying
Quetzalcoatl as the primary archetype of Mesoamerican culture diminishes
the significance of other myths and symbols. It also means collapsing dif-
ferent elements, including other feathered serpents, into a unified image of
Quetzalcoatl and perhaps seeing Quetzalcoatl in too many different times
and places. The other risk is perceiving too much in Quetzalcoatl itself. No
single image can capture a whole culture, and Baldwin may ask Quetzal-
coatl to bear too much weight.
This weakness in Legends of the Plumed Serpent becomes especially
apparent when Baldwin arrives at the conquest. The main problem is the
increasing stretch required to accomplish both his goals: writing a biogra-
phy of Quetzalcoatl and also constructing a thumbnail sketch of Mexican
cultural history. The effort to unite these two projects through the use of
Quetzalcoatl as a defining archetype, already tenuous in the preconquest era,
becomes increasingly problematic for the colonial period.Throughout his
discussion of the Spanish arrival, Christian missions, and other political and
cultural processes during colonization, Baldwin strives to keep Quetzalcoatl
front and center, as for example "the primary touchstone" for debates over
creole identity (p. 124). But he often fails to find a direct relevance for his title
character, and entire chapters go by with few or no references to the plumed
serpent, particularly during the revolutionary and independence periods. Some
of the connections Baldwin makes are thin to the point of breaking, such as
his citation of Octavio Paz's identification of Francisco Zapata and other
Mexican nationalist heroes as "only translations of Quetzalcoatl ... in fact,
unconscious translations" (p. 143). To be fair, it is not clear who is stretching
more here, Paz or Baldwin.
Baldwin encounters twentieth-century interpreters with evident
relief. He contends that Mexicans like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente
Orozco and foreigners such as D. H. Lawrence shared his view of Quetzal-
coatl as a uniquely potent metaphor for Mexican culture. (Yet for other in-
terpreters, such as Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, Quetzalcoatl embod-
ies subjugated indigenous and mestizo America.) Despite a few gaps and
weaknesses in his treatment of earlier periods, Baldwin generally succeeds,
as Tony Hillerman's jacket blurb contends, in "collect[ing] what the archae-

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

ologists have learned and [making] it accessible for us amateurs." Special-

ists on Mesoamerica will not find Legends of the Plumed Serpent particularly
innovative, but it makes a better than usual coffee-table volume-oversized,
lavishly illustrated, and beautifully produced-one that can introduce tour-
ists and armchair travelers to Mexican history and culture and perhaps
inspire them to further study.
Both the strengths and the weaknesses of Baldwin's book become
evident in comparing it with Enrique Florescano's The Myth of Quetzalcoatl,
a more scholarly book with much less appeal for nonspecialists despite Lysa
Hochroth's clear and readable translation. Florescano does not ask Quetzal-
coatl to bear as great a symbolic burden as does Baldwin, and Florescano's
occasional tendency to essentialize Quetzalcoatl or Mesoamerican culture
is usually balanced by attention to the great diversity of traditions and im-
ages of Quetzalcoatl. These traditions, he argues, began spreading through-
out Mesoamerica with the decline of the great cities of Teotihuacan and Tula.
Even cultures far from Nahua (Aztec-Mexica) centers possessed images of
and myths about the plumed serpent.' Quetzalcoatl's two main incarna-
tions are as a Toltec culture hero and, in later Nahua and Mixtec myths, as
"the divine messiah who brings to the earthly world the benefits of civiliza-
tion" (p. 37). The first version, Quetzalcoatl as "god, priest, and cultural hero
of Tula," is frequently confused with the presumed historical figure known
as Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, who "performed feats as a warrior, gov-
erned Tula at the height of its splendor, lost the throne, and finally abandoned
his kingdom, fleeing east with some of his followers" (p. 37).
The diversity of images of Quetzalcoatl is matched in The Myth of
Quetzalcoatl by a plethora of interpretations. According to Florescano, some
scholars "see in the accounts about Quetzalcoatl a constellation of myths
without any relation to true historical occurrences," while a larger group
believes that the myths document "the historical experience of a royal per-
sonage who founded the kingdom of Tula, introduced important religious
reforms, and created a civilized political community that was a model of
government influencing many different areas of Mesoamerica" (p. 59). Flores-
cano aims at a different approach, according to which the figure of Quet-
zalcoatl "was forged over a prolonged period of time and under the influ-
ence of distinct cultural traditions." Florescano asserts that the complex
mythology about Quetzalcoatl brings together originally distinct traditions
about the Plumed Serpent, Venus and the Divine Twins, the creator and wind
god Ehecatl, and the historical figure Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl.
Amidst these different strands, Florescano perceives "a basic unity in

1. Nahua refers to "all related Nahuatl-speaking peoples who inhabited Central Mexico in
the post-Classic period (1200-1521 C.E.) just preceding Spanish rule" (Read, p. 4; see also
Baldwin, p. xi). Nahuatl designates the language spoken in Tenochtitlan and surrounding
areas, which had become by the conquest a lingua franca in a large part of Mesoamerica.

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Latin American Research Review

the mythical thought" of different Mesoamerican cultures: "Long ago, these

peoples invented a canon to explain their origins and conserve and trans-
mit their memory. This model integrated the original foundation of the cos-
mos with the birth of the sun, which breathed life and order to the different
parts of the created world, and, finally, with the origin and development of
the ethnic groups that founded memorable cities and nations" (p. 111). Flores-
cano also finds this mythical paradigm in the Mayan text Popol Vuh, which
he discusses at length (pp. 91-110). Like Quetzalcoatl, the hero twins in the
Popol Vuh are "cultural heroes who fulfill the role of transmitting the basic
necessities to humanity" and who concretize a divine-human agreement ac-
cording to which "creation is an act of the gods, and the mission of humans
on earth is to conserve the basic principles of this divine creation and honor
the founding gods through sacrifice" (p. 110).
Existing cultural symbols and myths were both appropriated and
transformed as invading groups conquered ancient Mesoamerican cultures,
beginning in the seventh century. In the ongoing process of political domi-
nation and cultural syncretism, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl became the found-
ing leader of Nahua society, a symbol of royal power and blood sacrifice.
The power of this symbolism reflects the fact, Florescano argues, that even
when historical events transform existing myths and symbols like the plumed
serpent, these long-standing cultural icons do not disappear. As the Mexica
conquered other peoples politically, they also incorporated these peoples'
gods, thus bringing together various strands of the Quetzalcoatl myth in
order to legitimize their own project of empire-building (p. 167). Although
Florescano does not make the point explicit in The Myth of Quetzalcoatl, this
process of domination and cultural syncretism parallels the aftermath of the
Spanish-Christian conquest beginning in the sixteenth century.
Florescano draws on his interpretation of Quetzalcoatl to elaborate
a general theory of myth. He argues that indigenous Mesoamerican narra-
tives link the beginnings of agriculture to "the origin of the cosmos, the birth
of human beings, and the beginning of civilized life." This leads him to con-
clude that "the basic mythical theme is also the symbolic expression of the
most important agricultural process" (p. 193), not only in Mesoamerica but
in other agricultural cultures as well. In his last chapter, Florescano discusses
Quetzalcoatl as a parallel to mythological figures from Europe and else-
where, united as "Children of the Mother Goddess." In most versions, the
Mother Goddess is separated from her lover (or brother or son), who dies
in the summer and is buried deep in the earth. But thanks to the determined
efforts of the wife or mother, he is reborn in the spring (p. 203). When re-
vived, the hero brings food to the surface of the earth, making possible human
life and civilization (credit goes not to the Mother Goddess but to her hus-
band or son.) Various agricultural myths repeat this pattern in order to "rat-
ify the customs supporting the life of peoples, conserving the memory of
their traditions, and acquiring for them prestige and authority" (p. 239). These

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

parallels lead Florescano to conclude that "faced with the common mystery
of death and the periodic resurrection of life in nature, human beings from
different regions and cultures produce similar symbols" (p. 6).
This quest for mythical parallels can misread or ignore elements that
do not accord with preselected archetypes. Florescano follows a track set by
Mircea Eliade and other historians of religion, who have created overarching
theories of myth and symbol based on parallels among key images, as ex-
emplified by Florescano's "mother goddess."This approach to myth and reli-
gion, at least in Eliade's version, sets ordinary or "profane" history in stark
opposition to the eternal and unchanging sacred. In Time and Sacrifice in the
Aztec Cosmos, Kay Read argues that this vision of history as the opposite of
the sacred grossly misinterprets Mexica culture. For the Mexica, the changes,
destructions, and creations of history were the source of life itself.
Read begins by describing two images on a plaque from fifteenth-
century Tenochtitlan: the ritual binding of fifty-two reeds and a fire drill
sparking a sacrificial fire. Although the plaque provides little information
for nonspecialists, Read proposes that it illuminates "a somewhat messy and
highly complex system of interlocking images, interrelated significations,
and polyvalent metaphors. These metaphors founded Mexica conceptions
of time and sacrifice, a system which to many may seem more terrifying
than beautiful" (pp. 1-2). Finding Mexica culture a little of both, Read draws
on a wide variety of oral, written, and especially visual sources to describe
a complex yet coherent and distinctive worldview. The images on the plaque
crystallize two fundamental themes pervading Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec
Cosmos. First, the reeds symbolize the ceremony of the "Binding of the Years,"
a ritual occurring at the end of a fifty-two-year solar cycle. On the plaque,
the reeds underline the centrality of temporal transformation in the Mexica
worldview. The Mexica believed that all things moved with the powers of
life and thus all things constantly changed. The second image of the fire
drill igniting a sacrificial flame points to the centrality of sacrificial trans-
formation, the need shared by gods, humans, and other beings to eat other
entities in order not to die before their time.
It is especially difficult to understand this worldview today because
the Spanish conquerors systematically sought to eliminate written, oral, visual,
and ritual dimensions of indigenous Mesoamerican worldviews. Due to the
intense Spanish interference in postconquest indigenous texts, Read argues,
the best primary resources for pre-Colombian religions are plaques and other
archaeological remains, which were least touched by the Spanish (p. 17).
Yet Read does not entirely ignore written and oral traditions. For example,
she discusses in some detail the story of the Birth of the Fifth Sun, which
portrays the creation of the cosmos not as an ex nihilo act over in a few mo-
ments but rather as "the result of a sequence of concrete, destructive events
in which one thing changes to create another, each new thing heir to the
previous" (p. 58).

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Latin American Research Review

This vision of change raises the issue of human sacrifice. Read stresses
in Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos that the various forms of Mexica sac-
rifice were rooted in a realistic vision of biological life: "No organism can
exist without eating, none will exist forever, and when an organism dies, its
remains rot and change into that which nourishes other organisms. Destruc-
tion does indeed create, even now" (p. 59). In Mexica culture, the practice
of sacrifice reflected a desire to order and partially control the processes of
death and change in order to preserve the processes of birth and life. As
Read explains, "Because death gave life, the Mexica moral community was
predicated on creating appropriate life-giving destructions" (p. 182). These
creative destructions took various forms, including the best-known but var-
ied ritual of human sacrifice as well as more frequent offerings such as cakes,
nonhuman animals, and especially limited ritual bleeding of oneself or an-
other (pp. 128-29). Thus the "sacrificial logic" of Mexica culture was rooted
not only in spectacular rare ceremonies but in everyday practices, images,
and conceptions. In Read's view, Mexica sacrificial realities rested in an im-
manent daily order so mundane and so intimate that members of Mexica
society learned from childhood on that sacrificial transformation was true
and necessary. The inculcation of this worldview instilled a practice of "non-
reflection on those realities" (p. 178), meaning that no one questioned the
practice of sacrifice or the philosophical legitimation of it.
This conclusion may be the only significant point on which Read's
argument could be more nuanced. In her effort to show how sacrificial logic
pervaded all aspects of Mexica culture, she links consensus to unanimity.
But the fact that an idea or practice is inculcated from childhood on and is
widely accepted need not preclude cultural reflection or criticism of that prac-
tice. This point is especially evident in recent scholarship on the limits of
Christian missionizing in the colonial era. No culture achieves unanimity,
even about relatively trivial practices, and therefore why would the Mexica
be able to maintain unanimity about human sacrifice? Readers do not have
to believe that every single member of Mexica society felt the same about
sacrifice to be persuaded that sacrificial logic was embedded in everyday
life. Read's overstatement probably stems from the need to counter the com-
mon claim that only massive coercion could explain the institution of human
sacrifice. She argues persuasively that while some coercion probably oc-
curred, coercion alone cannot explain why individuals took part in sacrifi-
cial rituals. Some participants were willing, based on their embeddedness
in and commitment to the sacrificial logic of Mexica culture (p. 188).
This logic shaped not only ritual but also conceptions of time and
history. The Mexica believed that history was continuous, that everything
in the universe changed constantly. There was no way to prevent the passage
of time, to avoid change, to find a realm beyond history. For the Mexica,
Read contends, history was not opposed to the sacred. Rather, history was
all there was, and consequently the profane "equaled" the sacred (p. 157).

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

Mexica culture sought to give "order to the inevitable fact of transforma-

tion and [allow] people to comprehend it, to enter into it, and even to con-
trol it a bit" (p. 95). This goal drove the complex calendrical calculations of
Mexica and other Mesoamerican cultures. The continual flow of history makes
human existence ultimately insignificant, but historical conjunctions offered
a chance to make human life significant (p. 120). Sacrifice was crucial to
efforts to order and direct the flow of history and its transformations.
In Time and Sacrifice in the Aztec Cosmos, strange and frightening im-
ages of bloodthirsty Aztecs give way to a coherent society in which certain
forms of violence made perfect theological and ethical sense. This argu-
ment does not imply that Read approves of sacrifice: "Understanding dif-
ferent and diverse orientations to world 'normalities' does not necessarily
make them all equally right everywhere. We need not view human sacrifice
as acceptable human behavior in our own culture to be able to understand
how it might be both acceptable and normal in another" (p. 31). Further, the
Mexica condemned certain kinds of violence. Theirs was not a lawless or
amoral society (p. 168). The particular types of violence that the Mexica ac-
cepted and rejected might shed light on our own culture. As Read observes,
"Our initial horror at the practice of human sacrifice may even help if un-
derstanding its normality in the Mexica world causes us to question the vio-
lence in our own and to ponder how that violence came to be either con-
doned or considered a normal and familiar part of experience" (p. 32).

Indigenous Americans as Agents and Adapters

Read highlights the value of visual resources in achieving a fuller

understanding of native cultures in the Americas. In Inka Bodies and the Body
of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru, art historian Carolyn Dean
also makes heavy use of visual art and artifacts as tools for "reading culture."
Dean focuses on the festival of Corpus Christi in an effort to understand the
various ways that native Andeans, particularly Inka elites, constructed new
selves in the colonial setting. She describes the Andeans as active agents
("subject but not abject") who managed despite the limitations they faced
to challenge and alter Hispanic culture through a variety of means, includ-
ing Christian rituals such as Corpus Christi. This approach situates Dean
squarely amidst growing scholarly interest among Latin Americanists and
others in uncovering the complexities, ambiguities, and conflicts in colonial
histories, which earlier accounts often portrayed as relatively smooth and
uncontested processes of conquest and assimilation.
Dean chose to focus on the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi, which
celebrates the body of Christ transubstantiated in the eucharistic host, be-
cause of its "semiophagous character," meaning that "it was a feast that dined
on signs of difference, gaining sustenance for its triumph from the Andean
subaltern" (p. 1). Without denying the power of Spanish Catholics and the

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Latin American Research Review

losses and suffering of their Andean subjects, Dean explores the ways in
which indigenous persons employed Corpus Christi to criticize, defy, or rein-
terpret the culture of the colonizers. For example, she describes colonialists'
fear that Andeans "were secretly worshiping wak'as (sacred places and things)
on Corpus Christi" (p. 52). Although the Spanish tried to crush such "idol-
atrous practices," they always fell short in "their ability to understand and
to control the thoughts and faith of the colonized." This failure posed a sig-
nificant problem for the colonizers: "while behavior could be observed, its
meaning was opaque. Intentions and beliefs-hearts and minds-were be-
yond evaluation" (p. 52). Precisely because intentionality is so often hidden
or ambiguous in religious rituals and practices, religion has been a primary
site of indigenous and anti-colonial resistance. An unfortunate gap in Dean's
analysis is a failure to reflect both on the distinctively religious nature of the
colonial institution of Corpus Christi and on the distinctive character of reli-
gious resistance to colonization and postcolonial domination more generally.
Despite this lack, Dean shows effectively that the Spaniards' desire
to convert Andeans to Christianity inevitably opened up possibilities for re-
sistance. Any triumph the colonizers achieved was ambivalent, and their
efforts to proclaim victories over indigenous ideas and practices were often
premature or overly optimistic. Suspecting as much, Spanish authorities tried
to gloss over the threat of indigenous noncompliance in various ways. For
example, Dean notes, the Spanish "chose to understand (and consequently
dismiss) the discontent of the colonized as the irrational misbehavior of
drunken Indians" (p. 58). This interpretation missed the potential for vio-
lence and outright resistance that lurked in "battle dances" (p. 60).
The ambiguity of Corpus Christi derived more from the way that it
embodied indigenous resistance to Spanish domination, however. The feast
also contained possibilities for Inka elites to legitimize their own relatively
privileged social positions. As Dean emphasizes, colonial Andean society
was far from homogeneous, and "the simple binaries produced by the col-
onizer failed to contain the heterogeneity of Cuzquefio society" (p. 177).
Despite Spanish attempts to blur ethnic distinctions, "Colonial-period An-
deans did not see the world as composed of indios in opposition to espafioles."
Inka nobles continued to understand themselves as such and used Corpus
Christi to reinforce their elite position relative to other Andeans. In a "stud-
ied hybridity" (p. 122), Inka elites drew on Spanish and indigenous traditions,
as evident in their costumes for the Corpus Christi festival, in efforts "to
fashion their own bodies as empowered sites of cultural confluence" (p. 123).
Their vestments combined Hispanic and Andean aspects in ways that man-
aged simultaneously to accommodate European notions about elite adorn-
ment, to reemphasize the nobility of the Inka past, and to differentiate be-
tween European and Andean culture in order to position the caciques as
privileged mediators. To describe the distinctive identity that Andean elites

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

constructed for themselves in colonial culture, Dean prefer

ite. Unlike terms such as syncretic, mestizo, hybrid, or pa
concept of a composite describes a process of cultural combination and change
and also speaks to "an order and an organization that prioritize its parts and
give meaning to the whole within cultural and historical bounds" (p. 169).
As a composite, Corpus Christi contains diverse elements that did not ab-
sorb or erase each other.
In and through colonial institutions such as Corpus Christi, Dean
emphasizes, Inka elites also succeeded "in equating Peru's indigenous past
with the hikaic past, aided as they were by the Spanish will or need to homog-
enize the colonized" (p. 180). Inka domination made it more difficult for
other Andean ethnic groups to gain power and relative autonomy within
colonial society. Early in the conquest, Spaniards used non-Inka groups as
allies in their effort to dominate the Andean region, but once colonial rule
was established, non-Inkans lost status largely due to the Inkas' skillful ap-
propriation of new institutions and practices such as Corpus Christi. Dean
finds evidence of Inka success in the twentieth-century revival of the Inti
Raymi festival, a June solstice celebration associated with Corpus Christi,
which took place around the same time of year. For colonial Spaniards,
"Identifying Inti Raymi-or, for that matter, any Inka celebration-in Corpus
Christi constituted a performative metaphor for the triumph of Christianity
over native religion, and of Christians over 'pagan' Andeans" (p. 32). The
modern revival of the Inti Raymi festival, however, interprets the ceremony
in very different terms. Early-twentieth-century Peruvian intellectuals and
indigenistas viewed Inti Raymi as a symbol not of Spanish triumph but of
Inka resistance because the indigenous feast "'survived' beneath the sti-
fling mantle of Corpus Christi" (p. 203).
Dean's discussion of the way the revived Inti Raymi festival follows
but does not replace Corpus Christi (as the colonial Corpus Christi attempted
to do with Inti Raymi) points to the way that precolonial, colonial, and mod-
ern elements coexist in Peru today, complementing and contradicting each
other (p. 214). In the midst of this complexity, Dean explains, Peruvians con-
tinue to construct distinctive identities and to imagine different possible
futures, just as colonial Andeans did. "Subalterns," then or now, are not
simply shaped by the tools of the dominant culture. They use those tools
themselves, in creative although inevitably limited ways (p. 166). These theo-
retical discussions make Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ a valuable contri-
bution to colonial Latin America history but also to cultural studies and
other fields concerned with the dynamics of resistance and domination.
Happily, Dean manages to make this contribution while mostly avoiding
the tendencies common to subaltern and postcolonial studies to overinterpret
historical data in light of contemporary theoretical frameworks and to em-
ploy jargon-ridden and obscure language. At her best, Dean challenges main-

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Latin American Research Review

stream historians and contributes to the diversity and analytic strength of

alternative approaches to colonial Latin America and to colonial, postcolo-
nial, and subaltern studies more broadly.
Dean's work falls squarely within the "relatively new and dynamic
turn in research on colonial Latin America" that Elizabeth Hill Boone de-
scribes in the introduction to Native Traditions in the Postconquest World (p. 5).
This approach takes "the perspective of the native peoples as they moved
within and responded to the cultural and intellectual climate of the post-
conquest period" and focuses on indigenous culture and everyday activi-
ties rather than "large-scale, formal, colonial institutions" (p. 6). This per-
spective is what unites the diverse contributions to the collection edited by
Boone and Tom Cummins. Native Traditions in the Postconquest World explores
the emergence of colonial social, political, economic, and cultural forms in
Aztec Mexico and Inka Peru, two regions where "the indigenous/Spanish
interface" was most concentrated (p. 3). Like Dean and Read, contributors
to the volume take visual texts seriously, and many chapters are heavily
illustrated.
Two essays following the introduction provide an overview of the
mutual interactions between colonizer and colonized, laying the ground-
work for subsequent discussions of more specific aspects of Aztec and Inka
culture. In "The Many Faces of Medieval Colonization," historian Angeliki
Laiou takes "a backward glance" at medieval Europe, arguing that "the de-
velopments of the sixteenth century are in many ways dependent upon in-
stitutions and ideologies that were deeply ingrained in the practices and
minds of the colonizers" (p. 13). The most important of these institutions
and ideologies were economic and religious. The Crusades, in particular,
shaped European Christian attitudes toward "foreign people" more gener-
ally by establishing an image of "the Other" as intrinsically evil and thus in
need of either conversion or elimination (p. 15). The emergence of this model,
a major factor in the colonization of Latin America, underlines Laiou's claim
that while economic factors were important, the cultures and ideologies of
conquering and conquered groups often proved definitive in shaping colo-
nial experiences. In contrast to Laiou's emphasis on the diversity of colonial
experiences, James Lockhart, in "Three Experiences of Culture Contact: Nahua,
Maya, and Quechua," finds that "cultural developments in the postcontact
period are much the same wherever we look" (p. 48). This conviction that
scholars can identify universal variables in experiences of colonization sets
Lockhart apart from Laiou and most other contributors.
The heterogeneity of indigenous society, a theme central to Dean's
Inka Bodies, also comes to the fore in the Boone and Cummins volume. In
"Litigation over the Rights of 'Natural Lords' in Early Colonial Courts in
the Andes," John Murra describes conflicts surrounding the role of Inka
elites in Cuzco. Internal divisions were based not only on socioeconomic
status but also on gender, as Irene Silverblatt underlines in "Family Values

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

in Seventeenth-Century Peru." She attempts "to make sense of family val-

ues by placing them in the broader arena of colonialism's cultural charge:
the task of refashioning the humanity of colonized women and men" (p. 63).
Silverblatt argues that "contests over the definition of humanness were at
the heart of the colonial endeavor," and central to these contests were ar-
guments about the family and individual roles within it. Silverblatt focuses
on the Christian family and the Spanish "ethics of honor" as anchors for the
kind of society that colonizers, without full success but at great cost, sought
to impose on Andeans.
Another common theme in Native Traditions is what Boone terms "the
fundamentality of texts" (p. 9). Texts, broadly understood, served not only
the colonizers but also the colonized as tools for constructing and main-
taining their distinctive identities. In "Let Me See! Reading Is for Them:
Colonial Andean Images and Objects 'como es costumbre tener los caciques
Seniores,"' Tom Cummins examines objects and images that served as por-
tadas or entrances to colonial culture. Andeans continued indigenous rep-
resentational practices while adapting and adopting some European images
and values, in texts that included Guaman Poma's Nueva coro'nica y buen
gobierno, colonial coats of arms, textiles, and pottery. Boone's contribution
entitled "Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Postconquest Mexico"
continues the focus on syncretic or hybrid colonial images and texts. She
compares pre- and postconquest Nahua manuscript painting, highlighting
areas of continuity as well as the emergence of new genres and themes.
Boone emphasizes the force of indigenous agency but also the fact that
Spanish tolerance made possible some of the continuity in native paintings.
Another type of document important to both colonizers and colonized were
Nahuatl tftulos primordiales, indigenous-language municipal histories de-
scribing communities' territorial boundaries and landholdings. As Stephanie
Wood points out in "The Social vs. Legal Context of Nahuatl Tftulos," they
served native leaders in their efforts for individual power and collective sur-
vival and today offer "testimony ... to the process of identity and power
negotiation in the colonial context" (p. 228).
A dominant theme of Native Traditions as a whole is the complex and
ambiguous ways that both conquerors and natives drew on diverse tradi-
tions to construct distinctive identities in the colonial setting. This theme
comes forth in Susan Gillespie's "The Aztec Triple Alliance: A Postconquest
Tradition," which explores the theory that the three cities of Tenochtitlan,
Texcoco, and Tlacopan, not a single government, ruled the precolonial Aztec
Empire. She argues that while the formal "triple alliance" portrayed by some
scholars probably did not exist, the notion of a triadic organization has foun-
dations in native historical traditions. In short, the triple alliance is not so
much a postconquest invention as a transformation of an earlier tradition.
Although the conquest disrupted indigenous culture, postconquest tradi-
tions retained important aspects of earlier traditions and forms. Frank

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Latin American Research Review

Salomon makes a parallel argument in "Collquiri's Dam: The Colonial Re-

Voicing of an Appeal to the Archaic." He is interested in the ways that An-
dean people "worked to renew the fund of memory about precolonial times"
(p. 265). The work of recollection was and is performed, he argues, by dif-
ferent groups and in different "theaters." Salomon contrasts two theaters
from the early seventeenth century to the present: struggles over irrigation
and efforts to defend water rights through litigation. In both cases, contem-
porary conflicts are framed in terms of myths, rituals, and practices from
colonial and precolonial times.
Salomon hints at but does not make explicit the central role of reli-
gion in colonial encounters. This theme comes to the fore in "Time, Space,
and Ritual Action: The Inka and Christian Calendars in Early Colonial Peru,"
by Sabine MacCormack. Focusing on Guaman Poma, MacCormack shows
how Spanish colonization disrupted and tried to replace the Inka religious
calendar and the ritual practices it ordered. Nonetheless, many Inka and
Andean rituals persisted into the colonial period, albeit with new meanings
(p. 318). Similar themes emerge in succeeding essays. Maria Rostworowski
argues in "Pachacamac and El Senior de los Milagros" that the indigenous
god Pachacamac is connected to the cult of El Senior de los Milagros, which
developed in colonial Lima and persists in Peru and among Peruvian-
Americans to this day. Pachacamac represents "an instance of the transfor-
mation of a pre-existing native religious center and its ritual practices into
a Christian cultic practice directed toward a sacred image produced in the
New World rather than toward an image brought from Europe" (p. 345).
In other words, Pachacamac constitutes a prime example of syncretism, the
coming together of indigenous and European forms to produce novel
ideas and practices, in this case the transformation of the Andean deity
Pachacamac into the Christ of Pachacamilla and, after a miracle, eventu-
ally into El Sefior de los Milagros. Rostworowski emphasizes the agency
of indigenous and African Peruvians in this blending process. Both colo-
nized and colonizers have contributed to the ultimate syncretic result.
Pachacamac continued to change form and meaning throughout the colo-
nial period, as have other New World syncretic images, such as the Virgins
of Guadalupe and Copacabana (and Quetzalcoatl). Rostworowski points
out that with these syncretic figures, the triumph of Christianity was es-
tablished over the pre-Hispanic deities, but "the ancient gods did not lose
their hold on the people" (p. 356). Religious syncretism thus represents a
prime example of the persistence of indigenous forms and the agency of
native people despite the power relations of colonialism.
Louise Burkhart's contribution to Native Traditions, "Pious Perfor-
mances: Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico,"
explores "how the general praxis orientation of Nahua religion informed
the Nahuas' ways of becoming and being Christian as well as informing the

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

ways in which their Christianity was described and interpreted by the friars
who presided over their religious life" (p. 362). Burkhart emphasizes the
syncretic nature of the faith adopted by the Nahuas, who did not become
Christian "in anything like the sense implied by conventional understand-
ings of religious conversion." What they did was "represent themselves as
Christians, whatever they understood Christianity to be." Further, "by selec-
tively responding to the devotional options presented them by the friars,
[the Nahuas] exerted considerable control over the creation of their church"
(p. 362). Like the black and indigenous Peruvians who created the cult of
the Christ of Pachacamilla, Nahua Christians brought indigenous elements
to bear on the emerging New World Christianity. These indigenous aspects
enabled the friars to continue defining Nahua Christians as "them" in con-
trast to the European "us." But these aspects also helped the Nahua to ar-
ticulate their own distinctive identity and to exert considerable control over
their religious and cultural practices, sometimes including active resistance
to clerical intervention (p. 375). Burkhart concludes, "Through their pious
words and pious performances, the Nahuas actively represented them-
selves as Christians while retaining many of the moods, movements, and
media that had constituted their traditional religiosity" (p. 378).
Language, like religion, was a tool of both dominator and dominated.
In "A Nation Surrounded," Bruce Mannheim observes that the Europeans
were not the first to build an empire in the Americas. The Inkas, like the
Aztecs, dominated a wide variety of ethnic groups. Yet unlike the Spaniards,
the Inkas did not try to impose linguistic and religious uniformity on their
subjects. Their empire was "a mosaic in which speakers of distinct and often
unrelated languages lived cheek to jowl" (p. 384). Only after the Spanish
conquest was Quechua standardized and, along with Aymara, made into
the dominant language of indigenous Andeans. Colonization reduced but
did not eliminate indigenous heterogeneity, and Andean cultural forms,
especially textiles, continue to show the incompleteness of "blending" be-
tween European and native cultures but also among different indigenous
groups.
Frances Karttunen's "Indigenous Writing as a Vehicle of Postconquest
Continuity and Change in Mesoamerica" reiterates several major themes of
Native Traditions as a whole. She examines the ways that both colonizers and
colonized used colonial institutions, especially writing, as their own devices,
albeit in circumstances that were painfully constrained for the colonized.
Karttunen concentrates on the persistence of some pre-Columbian themes
and forms of native writing into the colonial and postcolonial periods. Like
other cultural forms, native writing in the postcontact era sometimes broke
With the preexisting indigenous culture but also continued and sometimes
even enhanced native traditions and forms, in and through a "covert folk
tradition" threading through the "overt professional tradition" (p. 434). Kart-

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Latin American Research Review

tunen emphasizes, however, that scholars should not identify "the folk tra-
dition" as an unchanging remnant of archaic indigenous culture. Both overt
and covert forms changed continually through the colonial and postcolonial
periods. This change continues today in current Maya and Nahua writing
and performance, which Karttunen discusses briefly.
Contributors to Native Traditions in the Postconquest World repeatedly
emphasize the creativity and persistence of native peoples in the colonial
period, their capacity to use and transform European traditions while pre-
serving their own. Tom Cummins highlights these issues in his "Synthetic
Comments" at the end of the volume, but he also describes the conquest as
"a catastrophe," "the beginning of the violent end" of indigenous cultures
in the Americas (p. 450). This point is important because as the pendulum
of scholarly work on the indigenous Americas swings away from visions of
passive natives waiting to be discovered and toward affirmation of native
resilience and resistance, the danger exists that the capacity of the colonized
to retain some degree of agency might overshadow their overwhelming
losses. In reflecting on native agency, Cummins points out that many con-
tributors emphasize the centrality of texts, including visual images and rit-
uals, as means for preserving and interpreting indigenous traditions. Colo-
nizers attempt to substitute and replace their forms for indigenous ones, but
this effort is never complete, as the Christ of Pachacamilla, the festival of
Corpus Christi, and numerous other examples make clear. This incomplete-
ness extends to contemporary scholarly efforts to understand the postcon-
quest world. Cummins cites the "growing variety of approaches and aims
in Latin American colonial studies" that make the field both richer and more
controversial as it develops (p. 459). In the end, this variety is necessary to
understand the complexity and ambiguities of the post-Columbian world,
for "there cannot be an essentialist or master text that governs the study of
colonial Latin America as a universal explanatory model" (p. 453).
Or can there? David Wilson believes that a single model can explicate
not only colonial but also precolonial and postcolonial indigenous cultures.
In Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present: An Ecological Perspective,
Wilson begins to construct a "grand unifying theory for anthropology" (p. xv).
He also expresses an empirical aim: to provide "an updated, continentwide
treatment of indigenous South American cultures that includes consistent
reference to the sociocultural and archaeological information we now have
at hand for the groups that have inhabited the different geographic areas of
the continent" (p. 7). Combining several different models, Wilson proposes
a "systems-hierarchical evolutionary paradigm" as the most capable of in-
terpreting and ordering vast amounts of information, in contrast to the frag-
mentation and specialization of much current ethnography.
Wilson draws especially on the work of Julian Steward, coauthor of
Native Peoples of South America (1959), the last wide-ranging handbook of
contemporary as well as ancient South American native cultures. Wilson aims

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

to update Steward's work with contemporary ethnographic information as

well as a revised theoretical approach, building on ecological anthropology
and the work of Marvin Harris. Wilson rejects Harris's single-variable model,
however, in favor of looking "at all the component variables of the system,
forgetting none and invoking all" to explain why a culture is the way it is
(p. 217). Wilson also argues that the different variables are related in a "cir-
cular way," so that mental "superstructure" and material infrastructure mu-
tually shape each other, in contrast to Harris's one-way model (pp. 430-31).
Wilson's efforts to nuance ecological anthropology may not satisfy
the many anthropologists who suspect any materialist explanation of re-
ductive determinism or the even larger number who reject all grand unify-
ing theories. Students and teachers who do not reject his assumptions out
of hand, however, will find that Wilson provides a great deal of information
about historical, environmental, cultural, and material aspects of diverse cul-
tures past and present. Early chapters offer overviews of various South
American environments and the relations between subsistence and socio-
cultural development, along with information about ecological zones, crops,
and historical developments. Subsequent chapters are organized by type of
society (or level of "sociopolitical integration") and region, beginning with
past and present "band societies" and ending with states.
A guiding theme in Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present
is that "relatively limited and noncomplex material cultures" are often "any-
thing but limited and noncomplex when it comes to the less tangible but
equally critical behavioral and ideological features of their adaptations"
(p. 147). Wilson links this view to his emphasis on adaptation: all features
of a culture represent ecological and evolutionary adaptations, in different
senses, to particular ecological and geographic conditions. Ecological con-
ditions lead groups to develop forms of material culture that correspond
with the productive potential of their particular habitat. For example, Wilson
cites Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff's work on the Desana as one of the best ex-
amples of a traditional society with an "adaptive system"that explicitly rec-
ognizes "the limitations, or constraints, on human population numbers" and
articulates an "ecologically driven ideology" that is an intimate part of every-
day life (p. 231). Desana cosmology works to ensure that "energy is main-
tained and returned to the local environment by keeping population num-
bers strictly confined to sustainable numbers over the longer term" (p. 240).
This example reinforces Wilson's arguments that sociopolitical levels can-
not "evolve" to levels of integration "higher" than the local ecosystem will
support and that complex cosmologies, ideologies, and moral codes can de-
velop alongside relatively simple modes of production and organization.
In his discussion of indigenous states, Wilson puts his theoretical para-
digm to work by attempting to explain why the highest level of sociopoliti-
cal complexity developed in the central Andes and nowhere else in South
America. He critiques several other efforts to answer this question for failing

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Latin American Research Review

to emphasize the links among sociopolitical organization, means of subsis-

tence or production, and ecological factors. Wilson argues in contrast, "No
state, however large and complex it may be, is freed of a concern about the
environment and the subsistence system that support it" (p. 428). He points
out that even the mighty Inkas suffered anxiety about rainfall and expressed
this worry in a variety of mythic and artistic representations.
After applying his theory to a wide range of past and present indige-
nous societies, Wilson's last chapter moves "Toward a Scientific Paradigm
in South Americanist Studies." Wilson indeed hopes for a "science" of in-
digenous cultures, in which hypotheses are elaborated, tested, and revised
in relation to available data. He argues that this approach, which he applies
to "all of the societies that traditionally have been the focus of anthropo-
logical research," can transcend dichotomies such as material versus men-
tal cultures or internal versus external causes. It can also take into account
"higher-order variables" such as religion and symbols, which other cultural
ecologists ignore (pp. 434-35), and thus avoid the materialist pitfall of de-
moting "mental culture" to an epiphenomenal footnote. Culturalists, how-
ever, may be inclined to categorize Wilson as only slightly subtler than Harris.
The suspicion that Wilson advocates a reductive approach to culture may
be heightened by his discussion of adaptation in ecological and evolution-
ary terms. But Wilson applies evolution only in general terms, in relation to
"the sex drive and its effect on population." He argues mainly that humans
are biologically inclined to reproduce and that cultural factors such as ide-
ology develop in order to restrain the damaging effects of overpopulation.
Thus Wilson is not much of a genetic determinist, but he may still be
too materialist for many scholars. For those who are not unalterably opposed
to grand unifying theories in general or materialist ones in particular, Indige-
nous South Americans of the Past and Present is both readable and teachable.
It is well organized, often engagingly written, and includes a helpful glos-
sary of terms as well as many illustrations and tables and an extensive
bibliography.

An Annotated Bibliography

Another recent volume includes no theory but makes a substantial

contribution to pluralism in the study of indigenous culture and religion in
the Americas. Russell Magnaghi's annotated bibliography, Indian Slavery,
Labor, Evangelization, and Captivity in the Americas, encompasses 557 pages
of small type consisting of 5 pages of introduction followed by 3,639 entries
for books and articles, most described in one or two sentences. It also contains
detailed subject and author indices. Most sources are in English or Spanish,
with others in Portuguese, Italian, and French.The unifying theme is "the
variety of ways in which the Indians of the Americas have been dominated

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 REVIEW ESSAYS

since their first encounters with the Europeans after 1492" (p. 1). The forms
of domination included the most obvious, such as slavery, the encomienda,
and capture in war as well as somewhat more subtle practices such as trade,
missions, and diplomacy. Magnaghi also covers forms of resistance to these
different institutions, including recent pan-indigenous movements as well
as earlier events such as slave uprisings.
The bibliography is mostly organized by period and country or region
(for the Andes, the Caribbean, and subregions within the United States).
There are also relatively short sections for general sources, the European
origins of colonization, and "theory and legal aspects." While a significant
proportion of the listings are for the United States and Canada, Latin Amer-
icanists will discover much of value. Perhaps even more important, they
will not have to struggle to find it. The sections are logically organized and
clearly marked. This reference work will be helpful for both specialists and
undergraduates seeking a few quick references. Some of the longer sections,
such as that on the colonial Caribbean covering over 20 pages and nearly 150
entries, might have benefited from more specific subheadings.
The annotations are short and to the point, for example, "a study of
the mita in the mining center of Potosi" (p. 116). Magnaghi does not repeat
material in the title of a book or article but uses the annotations to fill in de-
tails that are not obvious. Thus he sometimes indicates that a work only
"mentions" a topic such as Indian captivity or the slave trade, providing
help for scholars sifting through the potentially overwhelming lists. Some-
times the descriptions are invaluable, as when the title gives little or no in-
formation, or when a document is rare and accessible to most scholars only
through interlibrary loans, for which they need all the bibliographic infor-
mation in advance. Because space precludes listing more than brief and
nonevaluative descriptions and an occasional insightful or important, users
of the bibliography will have to do a lot of preliminary reading to deter-
mine the quality and relevance of a given item. The volume will be very
helpful, however, for locating sources not in an individual user's library
stacks and pointing out references hidden in broader or apparently unre-
lated topics. Given the growing scholarly interest in indigenous traditions,
colonial domination, and diverse forms of resistance, the bibliography will
be invaluable to specialists and students in a range of fields.
The books reviewed here reflect the broad range of themes and theo-
ries that preoccupy contemporary scholars of indigenous cultures in the
Americas. They vary in focus-from the solitary figure of Quetzalcoatl to
all native South Americans-and also in approach, where the most striking
difference is found between Wilson's book on the one hand and Dean's and
the Boone and Cummins volume on the other. Even the books that propose
encompassing theories, as Wilson's does, face inevitable limits-and even
those that acknowledge their limits embody clear arguments for particular

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Latin American Research Review

ways of interpreting culture and history. The differences among the books
do not make any of them necessarily less helpful. The moral of the different
stories might ultimately be the value of methodological and theoretical plural-
ism in trying to piece together the diverse, complex, and never transparent
experiences of indigenous cultures in America.

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