‘Viracocha vs. Dios’ Andean Thought and Cultural Change in Colonial Bolivia

• In Event: Colonial Indigenous Intellectuals: Writing, Voices, and Networks

Abstract

The missionary enterprise in the Andes came to rely heavily on the labor of parish priests, or curas doctrineros, and Andean assistants whose Spanish literacy skills and command of native Andean languages allowed them to reach out to the larger constituencies of the multiethnic faithful. By focusing on his own writings, this presentation focuses on the discourses and surrounding circumstances of Juan de Cuevas Herrera an Andean religious man from the Charcas Province in the mid-seventeenth century. I analyze his elaboration of Christianity through interpretation of Inca foundational myths. Juan de Cuevas Herrera, an itinerant cura doctrinero in several rural parishes of the Charcas province, was part and parcel of a largely inaudible choir of Andean voices from the carriers of the evangelization project in the rural ground. Cuevas became an active pastoral writer who attempted to redefine the terms of the ecclesiastic discourse and policies in the midst of the extirpating assault of the Catholic Church in mid-colonial Andean America. This essay identifies the conditions of Cuevas Herrera’s textual production: the doctrinal environment of the time; the collision between the Andean and European worlds as the colonial missionizing project advanced, once the Spanish conquest was completed. In the hands of Juan de Cuevas Herrera, the extirpation efforts of the Lima Archbishopric to eradicate the knowledge and the ceremonial culture of shamans, curacas, and Indian ritual specialists triggered a unique intellectual response: the reformulation of the historical narrative of the conquest and its redefinition of god and some Inca mythical heroes such as Viracocha. In rewriting this foundational chapter of colonial history in America, Juan de Cuevas Herrera struggled to reposition Viracocha, the Inca demiurge, as the true god. Is is through his own pastoral critique to colonial Christianity that we can see Andeans’ intellectual agency in the midst of the Spanish extirpatory effort to impose Christianity in the Andes.

Author

• Alcira Dueñas, Ohio State University