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\"In Search of the Inca examines how people in the Andean region have invoked the Incas to question and rethink colonialism and injustice, from the time of the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century until the late twentieth century. It stresses the recurrence of the \"Andean utopia,\" that is, the idealization of the precolonial past as an era of harmony, justice, and prosperity and the foundation for political and social agendas for the future. In this award-winning work, Alberto Flores Galindo highlights how different groups imagined the pre-Hispanic world as a model for a new society. These included those conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth century but also rebels in the colonial and modern era and a heterogeneous group of intellectuals and dissenters. This sweeping and accessible history of the Andes over the last five hundred years offers important reflections on and grounds for comparison of memory, utopianism, and resistance\"-- Provided by publisher.

La Gran Revuelta de 1780 a 1783, un momento crucial en la historia andina, es reexaminada bajo una nueva luz en este apasionante ensayo histórico de Carlos Guillermo Páramo, que encuentra en esta rebelión el profundo significado de la noción de «vuelta» o kuti, vital para las comunidades indocampesinas andinas. Al abordar una teoría política del terror, ausente hasta ahora en los discursos de la teoría social, Páramo profundiza en las fuerzas culturales que impulsaron el alzamiento y la violencia de la población indígena andina. Presenta el concepto de wak'a, un término rico en significados y esencial para las sociedades andinas. Y, para esta tarea, profundiza en dos personajes claves: Túpac Amaru y Túpac Katari, que son presentados como manifestaciones de las wak'as; hombres que encarnaron nociones complejas de destrucción y renovación del mundo dentro de una cosmovisión llena de matices. Wakas y temblores es un viaje profundo al corazón de las creencias andinas, una obra que nos reta a ver más allá de la historia convencional y a entender la riqueza cultural que subyace a las revueltas de los pueblos originarios. Una lectura esencial, a caballo entre la historia y la antropología, para aquellos interesados en desentrañar los misterios y las fuerzas que han moldeado la historia política de los Andes.

The objective of this research is to conduct a spatial analysis of the functional Andean worldview of the Ankasmarka Archaeological Site, located in Calca, Peru. The preservation of cultural heritage in Latin America faces significant challenges that threaten the integrity of key sites such as Ankasmarka. Despite its historical relevance, this site lacks available open access information and data, collected in accessible reports, which hinders the attraction of attention and funding necessary for its conservation. Furthermore, urbanization and uncontrolled tourism negatively impact both cultural traditions and the connection of local communities with their past. The methodology employed is based on a systematic review of primary information, supplemented by excavation reports and official sources. Specialized software such as AutoCAD Architecture and Revit were used to carry out the topographic and architectural survey of the site, enabling the precise and rigorous interpretation of the data. This article focuses on the spatial and functional description of the site, with the aim of paving the way for future research in specific areas such as formal and structural analysis, as well as social and political dynamics. The results reveal a complex organizational structure at Ankasmarka, with enclosures designated for various functions, particularly storage and agricultural activities. The site is divided into three sectors: Sector A, which includes housing, storage areas, and tombs; and Sector B and C, with the highest concentration of housing and agricultural zones with storage areas, respectively. The findings underscore the interrelationship between agriculture, funerary practices, and architecture, highlighting the importance of Ankasmarka in the lives of its ancient inhabitants and the need for continued future research.

Using the intriguing stories and words of a Quechua-speaking woman named Luisa Cadena from the Pastaza Province of Ecuador, Janis B. Nuckolls reveals a complex language system in which ideophony, dialogue, and perspective are all at the core of cultural and grammatical communications among Amazonian Quechua speakers.This book is a fascinating look at ideophones-words that communicate succinctly through imitative sound qualities. They are at the core of Quechua speakers' discourse-both linguistic and cultural-because they allow agency and reaction to substances and entities as well as beings. Nuckolls shows that Luisa Cadena's utterances give every individual, major or minor, a voice in her narrative. Sometimes as subtle as a barely felt movement or unintelligible sound, the language supports an amazingly wide variety of voices.Cadena's narratives and commentaries on everyday events reveal that sound imitation through ideophones, representations of dialogues between humans and nonhumans, and grammatical distinctions between a speaking self and an other are all part of a language system that allows for the possibility of shared affects, intentions, moral values, and meaningful, communicative interactions between humans and nonhumans.

The name of \"Peru\" and the entities and beings it names first appeared \"in an abyss of history\" on \"the edge of the world\" in the early 1500s. In this essay I ask that hermeneutical truths or meanings the strange event that made the name of Peru both famous and historical holds for-and withholds from-any understanding of the meaning of colonial history. By way of a reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's rendering, in Los Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) of \"the origin and principle of the name of Peru,\" I suggest that Peru's name is itself an inaugural event that marks the founding void or abyss of colonial and postcolonial history, which is to say, of modern global history. This événemential void is not unoccupied, however. It is inhabited by another founding, mythopoetic figure of history: \"the barbarian\" whose speech is registered in the historian's text.

The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu is usually interpreted as a “royal estate” of the Inca ruler Pachacuti. This idea is challenged here by a critical reappraisal of existing sources and a re-analysis of existing evidence. It is shown that such evidence actually point at a quite different interpretation suggested, on one hand, by several clues coming from the urban layout (the interior arrangement of the town, the ancient access ways, the position with respect to the landscape and the cycles of the celestial bodies in Inca times), and, on the other hand, by a comparison with known information about the Inca pilgrimage center on the Island of the Sun of Lake Titicaca. Altogether, these clues lead us to propose that Machu Picchu was intentionally planned and built as a pilgrimage center connected with the Inca “cosmovision”.

During the era in which the Spanish first encountered public religious practices that they perceived to be idolatrous in the Americas, the study of Hermetic and Platonic texts in Europe was reactivating interest in the power of images and idols, and in the agency of demons. In the Americas, Spanish newcomers encountered idolatry, the cult of deities present to their worshippers in material objects of various kinds, as part of daily religious practice. The resulting battle over idols and the beliefs surrounding them is in one sense only an outcrop of debates over idols and demons in the ancient Mediterranean and in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Yet while ancient beliefs about idols were reiterated in Peru, arguments shifted in this new context. At question is whether these arguments achieved anything beyond imposing European ideas and cognitive models on the Andean world?

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de Oña presents himself as a new Virgil, the viceroyalty’s official poet.The War of Arauco is historically tied to La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, published in three parts: 1569, 1578, and 1589. The epic protagonist, however, is conspicuous in his absence. The glories of battle are transferred to the collective hero, both Hispanic and Mapuche, associating García Hurtado de Mendoza’s military feats with that of a “mozo capitán acelerado” [hasty youthful captain] (III.37.70.2). In this dissertation I analyze how the Angoline bard composes the answer to this historiographical elision. Nineteen cantos span the patron’s military career in the Americas throughout half a century: the second campaign in Arauco (1557–1561); the tax revolts and pacification of Quito (1592–1593); and the incursion of the English corsair, Richard Hawkins, into the Pacific South Sea (1594). If La Araucana features the first conquest of Chile (1536–1556) and part of the second, the poetic voice in Arauco domado actualizes the plotline with events contemporary with its composition of 1594–1596.After my analysis, I am able to conclude that the criollo subject’s experience informs the representation of the patron and the Mapuche characters but differs from Peninsular intellectuals like Lope de Vega with the insistence on an evangelic-diplomatic solution to the Araucanian conflict. García Hurtado de Mendoza represents the miles christianus, a paradigm of humanist virtues—nobility, mannerisms, the interests in arms and letters, and also religious devotion. If we understand Arauco domado as a specula principum [princely mirror], we note that pacifying Arauco with a Christian paladin benefits both the empire and frontier settlements in economic and religious terms. The American landscape—closer to the Mediterranean’s flora and fauna than the Antarctic reality—determined the behavior of Mapuche characters, which contrasts with the protagonist’s exemplarity. Far from being ornatus, the scenery in Arauco domado changes according to the criollo desires for pacification and mercantile benefits. The unvanquished Valley of Elicura— locus amoenus—is the ideal setting for love, fertility, and Greco-Roman philosophy. The coast of Concepción, in contrast, is a field piled with bodies dismembered by artillery—the locus eremus . Lastly, the reception of Arauco domado in Spain evidences anxieties over dispossession by the English Empire under Elizabeth I. Lope de Vega’s La Dragontea (1598) and Arauco Domado (1599, performed in 1625) adapt Oña’s poem to enhance García Hurtado de Mendoza’s public image. The poet’s urgency to pacify the Arauco region and benefit from its resources is reduced to the exoticism of Chilean subject matter in works by Lope de Vega.

In the context of the globalizing New Age movement and of the \"turismo mistico\" (mystical tourism) industry emanating from Peru, white and mestizo New Age practitioners and tourists fashion ideologies emphasizing the spiritual energy which supposedly resides in Quechua bodies, even as they freely appropriate Quechua cosmology and ritual for a hybridized New Age Andean spirituality. This case shows how racialized structural inequalities are expressed and experienced by tourists and New Age movement leaders through particular, essentialist representations of the body and through a common repertoire of emotional responses to inequality, commodification, and privilege. The paper provides an ethnographic account of how racialization may be perpetuated, negotiated, and resisted through religious systems, particularly through the work of constructing ideologies and experiences of the body and of emotional subjectivity.

Shipowners' seemingly slow adoption of marine compound engines is often attributed to not appreciating the new technology's superior economy. This article argues that this slow adoption needs to be understood alongside the challenges faced by engine builders in persuading skeptical shipowners and practical engineers that their designs were trustworthy. It explores the rich cultural contexts within which Glasgow master engineer John Elder and his associates rendered their marine compound engines credible for Liverpool's Pacific Steam Navigation Company, the first line to deploy the new engine. Elder operated within a culture whose hallmarks were useful work, economy, and the power of direct witnessing. The article also explores the role of William McNaught, an independent consultant with a strong track record as both a practical engineer and the inventor of a steam-engine indicator. His indicator, deployed to evaluate the performance of Elder's compound engines, stood at the center of the controversy over their economy.