A study of the Amautas and their role in forming ideological conceptions of education in their time and implications today

• In Event: Indigenous education in Latin America

Abstract

The study of the Andean culture is still present and is a major challenge for many researchers. Even with advances in archeology and anthropology in this area, the topic of this research where there has been little or nothing contemplated in scientific circles either in America or in Europe. This study aims to analyze the role and ideological conceptions of education disseminated by Amautas (Andean wise men) among the native populations of Peru around the sixteenth century, and their effect on the current traditional communities in the same region. Here we tried to analyze from investigating the chroniclers and reports of European travelers in America, with memory and narratives about the past, between the current traditional Andean populations and trying to develop an understanding of the role played by “Amautas”, with their ideological conceptions, as well as what still survives today in these societies, such as ideology, principles and pedagogies, since at one point these “Amautas” worked in the service of the State.
This study is based on reading and analysis of works written in the sixteenth century by European chroniclers who arrived in the territory of the Inca, not only in Peru but also in today's Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, the Brazilian Amazonia and northern Argentina during this time. These writers were from different backgrounds such as religious, historians, naturalists, scientists, politicians, wealthy colonists, autodidacts and settlers in new lands and even children of Europeans born in the colonies, but educated in Europe, and yet some way they felt heirs to all of this Andean culture in its own way. They recorded their conceptions of this new world by means of reports and manuscripts. Thus in their writings they described Andean cultural customs and practices from the perspective of their own cultures and compared and commented on what comes in the parameters of their own experience.
About “Amautas” the chronicler Fernando de Montesinos in his book, Memorias antiguas historiales y políticas del Perú, Madrid, Impr. M. Ginesta, 1882, on page 24: "Said that Amautas, knew all about the happenings of these times by ancient traditions which were passed down from generation to generation. When this prince reigned the letters of these learned men illustrated all that had happened before and they called them Amautas, educators who taught to read and write and their most prominent science was “astrology."
The resistance of the last Inca stronghold fell in 1572, as the Chronicler Franciscan Diego de Córdoba Salinas mentioned in his book in the sixteenth century, " Crónica Francisca de las provincias del Perú", Washington, DC Academy of American Franciscan History, 1957 Page. 41 "The Inca with his royal blood, together with men and women went to the wild mountains of the Andes to a place called Vilcabamba, where he lived in exile until his death and loneliness." For now we can only imagine how much it extended the work of the Amautas later rulers. This also challenges the reader to consider the legacy they could have left behind in the colonial society of that time. So we may affirm this for the first time, that the "conquest" was not consummated in 1532, when the Spanish arrived, and neither of them in the final encounter with the Inca Atahualpa in Cajamarca and his subsequent imprisonment, but that this resistance in the region of Vilcabamba prolonged the action of these Andean masters and who knows how long this influence has been reaching us up to the present day.
Through the examples mentioned above, we prepared an analysis of the writings of the chroniclers. These materials were investigated with oral histories that reflected the ancestral memory of current populations in this region. The field research will allow us to approach the times (past and present), for which the indigenous communities, due to their relative geographical isolation, but mainly by the strength of their cultural traditions, still retains a traditional religious community organization and practices that led the Inca society of the past, as is in the case of the Keros Ampay Community of (Cuzco, Peru).

Authors

• Irwin Andres Susanibar Chavez, non

• Ana Lidia Pantoja, non