Evangelicals and New Agers in the Last Inka Ayllu. A Quechua community’s conflicts over indigeneity

• In Event: Identidades en movimiento: Diasporas y Migración Indígena y Afrodecendiente. I

Abstract

This paper explores a conflictive scenario in the Quechua speaking community of Hapu (Cuzco, Peru). Hapu is one of the Q’ero communities celebrated as the hallmark of indigenous authenticity – usually referred to as the Last Inka Ayllu – in urban Cuzco and in New Age circles abroad. Due to this fame there are expectations among some Hapu people to obtain benefits by getting involved in the New Age tourist circuits flourishing in the city of Cuzco and that are starting to reach Hapu. They are aware that their practices of food-offerings to the mountains and lands attract the interest of New Agers and take pride in them. At the same time, other community members have converted to Evangelicalism and condemn precisely these very same practices associating them to idolatry and the devil. Both groups criticize each other and construct, in different ways, claims of moral superiority which become articulated with different aspects of the dominant ideologies of racial-ethnic hierarchy. In the process, both groups are reshaping their relationship with their practices and constructing novel forms of indigeneity.

Author

• Guillermo Salas Carreño, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú