ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Geographical knowledge and the more-than-human lived landscapes of Huarochirí, late-16th-century Peru

• In Event: Andean Sciences Untranslated

English Abstract

This proposal explores the more-than-human dimension of geographical narratives produced in colonial Peru. Through an analysis of the Descripción y Relación de la Provincia de Yauyos Toda (1586), its accompanying map, and the Huarochirí manuscript (an early-17th-century compilation of creation myths), it addresses the connections between European and Indigenous perceptions of the landscape, assessing the role of non-human entities in the description of nature.

Written by Diego Dávila Briceño, the Descripción was one of Spanish America’s Relaciones Geográficas. Scholars like Portuondo (2009) and Mikecz (2025) have underscored both the Indigenous agencies in the production of the Relaciones Geográficas and the scientific conventions of cosmography and natural history present therein. Yet Dávila Briceño’s Descripción includes geographic features that suggest that, despite transformations by the colonial order, creation myths in which mountains, animals, and rivers were considered proper actors still played a part in the lived experience of the landscape.

Building on this, this proposal discusses the role of the non-human world in the production of knowledge about itself: firstly, by focusing on Dávila Briceño’s description of the Pariacaca mountain (a waka that is also central character in Huarochirí’s mytho-history), and by comparing the portrayal of animals in Dávila Briceño’s Descripción to the Huarochirí manuscript. This demonstrates the overlap of Western and Indigenous epistemologies rooted in distinct definitions of humanity and non-humanity, ultimately revealing how non-Western perspectives (and their non-human agents) “intruded” on the production of scientific knowledge in colonial contexts.

Author

• Bruno Stori, Pennsylvania State University