Gabriela Ramos makes a compelling case that death was at the center of the spiritual encounter between Andeans and Spaniards in colonial Peru. When the two groups interacted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she persuasively argues, their concerns frequently involved what a proper funeral should look like and how the living should think about deceased ancestors. Ramos's claim about the rapidity of Christianization, however, is not as well substantiated.
In her introduction, Ramos stakes out historiographical territory in opposition to some of the best-known works on religion in colonial Peru. Unlike Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991) and Kenneth Mills, Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), which rely heavily on records of Spanish attempts to extirpate “idolatry” and “superstition” from the Andes, Ramos's work is based on a close reading of nearly five hundred wills written by indigenous residents of Lima and Cuzco. The result is a perspective that differs from that found in MacCormack and Mills in its emphasis on the speed of conversion to Christianity. Ramos does not want to “dismiss the weight of the violence that permeated the conquest and colonization process” (7), but at the same time she insists that only “several decades” after the military conquest, “the spread of Catholicism in the Andes was wide and effective” and had “deeply permeated the lives of the indigenous population and transformed them completely” (1).
To make her case, Ramos first looks at death practices in pre-Hispanic Peru. Indigenous deathways were marked by a great deal of variety, but an expanding Incan Empire “intervened in the cemeteries, burial places, and sacred spaces of their enemies and allies” (33), just as the Spanish would do starting in 1532. The Incas were especially interested in the geographic expansion of their cult of ancestors, which focused on the mummified remains of leaders. Ramos then turns to several chapters on Spanish efforts to Christianize native mortuary practices in the decades following conquest. Violence was a crucial component of this campaign. As Ramos puts it, “a language gradually developed in which the body was the main vehicle of communication” (36). This was the case in the 1533 execution of the Inca leader Atahualpa and in the punishments meted out by later conquistadors, which frequently featured spectacles of burning native Andeans to death. When the wars of conquest were finally over, the Spanish began to try to Christianize the Indians. One of their methods was to explain Christian concepts, particularly those relating to death and the afterlife, in terms the locals could understand by being “linked to existing Andean beliefs” (85). This was a particularly effective technique, Ramos argues, with the Catholic idea of purgatory.
Chapters 5 and 6 constitute the heart of the book, based as they are on the author's database of hundreds of wills found in the Peruvian Archivo General de la Nación and the Archivo Departamental de Cuzco. Ramos's efforts with these intractable sources are impressive. She is able to bring to life numerous obscure indigenous Andeans whose voices have been otherwise lost to history. Ramos tells us about a humble vendor from Lima named Elvira who, after her death in 1572, was buried in the cathedral “in an anaco (indigenous woman's outfit) that served as her burial shroud” (146). We learn of Isabel Tocto of Cuzco, who in 1600 warned her three granddaughters that if they led an “evil life” and committed “offenses against God” they would be stripped of their inheritance (180). These and other stories represent praiseworthy acts of historical recovery.
It remains an open question, however, whether these wills are representative of the full complexity of Andean religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The problem goes beyond the fact that Ramos's heroic archival work uncovered the wills of only a small percentage of the indigenous population of Lima and Cuzco (she found, for example, 225 wills from Cuzco from 1559 to 1670; because more than 10,000 Indians lived in the city at any one moment, tens of thousands must have lived there over the course of the century) (128). More importantly, wills, with their formulaic prose and official compositional oversight, are hardly the best place to find the persistence of pre-Hispanic Andean attitudes toward death. True, Ramos persuasively argues that bequests of Andean items such as llamas and freeze-dried potatoes helped “inscribe Andean ideas and practices within a Catholic framework” (209). This is apparent in the 1586 will of Magdalena Caruayaco, which states, “I have three pairs of gourds for drinking and four pairs for eating to go toward the masses for my soul” (209). But by ignoring the records of Spanish attempts to extirpate “idolatry,” Ramos overlooks the abundant evidence that Andean religion maintained more pre-Hispanic practices than she allows. In Ramos's conclusion, she maintains that the “transformation of practices and ideas regarding death in the Andes came about in a surprisingly brief period and on a very large scale” (214). From the perspective of indigenous wills this is undoubtedly true. But from a broader perspective the assertion is less convincing. It is hard to square Ramos's argument with the dozens of individuals described in Mills's Idolatry and Its Enemies who creatively blended Christian and pre-Hispanic practices, such as those who took communion annually and continued to worship local mountain huacas (deities).
Even if Ramos's assertions about the thoroughness of Christianization in the Andes are not entirely convincing, her deep research in previously underused sources offers abundant evidence of the importance of death in the encounter between Christians and indigenous people.
