In the 1970s, Fernando Fuenzalida published a series of startling ethnographic essays based on his fieldwork in the 1960s. The Quechua ‘oral bible’, as Fuenzalida called his elicitations, expressed not Christianity superimposed on Andean local cults (‘idols behind altars’) but a religiosity unknown under either rubric. It abounded in drastic yet systematic reconceptualisations of Christian themes through Andean postulates. For example, highlanders had remodelled the apparently pre-Columbian notion of pachakuti – ‘turn of epoch’ – around a heterodox Franciscan legacy of the twelfth century, Joachim of Fiore's millennarian notion of a Third Age. The ‘oral bible’ remembered a primordial age of cannibal immortals, still present in the form of prehispanic mummies. It foretold an epoch in which monsters born out of mining pollution would end this world. An Andean remnant of humanity would begin the new epoch, with bodies like hummingbirds. Mind-blowing was the word for it. Since the 1950s, Catholic missionaries like Jacques Monast had found themselves caught up in heterodox popular creations amounting to an unknown religion. In the wake of Vatican II, theologians like Rodolfo Kusch for a time felt free to take it as grounds for contemplating a distinctively Andean kind of Christianity.
Peter Gose holds that historiography and ethnography did not meet the challenge of finding out when or where such innovations came from; in fact, these disciplines did not even perceive a challenge. From the indigenismo that beguiled structuralist and Geertzian anthropology of 1980s, up to current notions of ‘strategic essentialism’, many who wrote about Andean popular religion have anachronistically equated modern ethnographic findings with seeming prehispanic precedents. Others, engrossed in ‘post-colonial’ meditations, detect colonial hallucination in the very idea of an Andean tradition. The result, alleges Gose, is that prevailing notions of Andean religion are almost as ahistorical and isolating as those entertained by ‘extirpators of idolatry’ 400 years ago. For Gose, what Fuenzalida beheld is a religion as historical as any other, and a historically researchable one too. ‘Only through the formation of a colonial interculture’, notably the religious interculture developed in Andean communities, ‘could relations of indirect rule and tributary extraction emerge’ in the first place (p. 33). Invaders as Ancestors is a history of that interculture on its sacred side.
When twentieth-century southern highlanders sacrificed to sacred mountains, they often spoke of the deities inside mountains as wealthy white males. Many Quechua terms about such worship – pagapu, armada and derecho, for example, all meaning ‘offering to a mountain lord’ – are etymologically Spanish. This kind of thing, Gose writes, ‘seems to embarrass many modern commentators’ (p. 298). However, he continues, ‘no racially essentialized notion of “identity” underwrites mountain spirits’ appearance as white political authorities. A different dynamic is at work: Andean highlanders invoke the image of these white political authorities only to subject them to their own forms of sociality, and thereby ideally remake them into a power that is no longer alien' (pp. 298–9).
This way of facing power arose not through bending the knee to colonial power, Gose proposes, but rather through extending into the colonial situation a common emplotment from prehispanic mytho-history. Many legends through which Andean societies explain their own makeup have as central episodes the incorporation of a powerful superhuman being from outside the tellers' own realms. Once taken within, he (for the pattern often includes masculinity) becomes an ancestor. Society is thus genealogically built up on the inside-outside dyad, and the dyad in turn becomes the conceptual means to incorporate gods such as Dios, Jesus and the saints. Foreignness, then, meant something quite different in the Andean habit of mind from what it meant to Spaniards in the age of ‘purity of blood’.
The main body of the book is thickly muscled, with study of little-known archival manuscripts as well as cases from the well-known archives of the ‘extirpators’. Gose argues that the unknown religion that Fuenzalida found grew through several successive processes. Among them were the spatial reorganisation of sacred places in the course of forced resettlement, struggles over whether ancestors should repose in churches, and the linkages between ancestor cult and colonial political authority. Those who work with those sources will enjoy Gose's skilful distillation of the issues behind the tangled lines of testimony.
For Gose, the greatest single misstep of scholars in explaining vernacular belief has been an ahistorical habit of conflating the modern cult of mountains with prehispanic religion. He holds that mountain worship is a recent innovation. The decisive shift from deified ancestors to deified mountains is linked to the decomposition of curaca authority during the interval between the failed Túpac Amaru rebellion (1781) and the onset of Peruvian independence (1825). Curacas, whose mummified lineages had once formed the axis of social organisation, were demoted to parasitic functionaries. Mountains arose as gods without lineages, and therefore without the hierarchical implications of genealogy. This argument about a vernacular religious side to the emerging rural republic and indigenous citizenship adds a welcome new dimension to the debate about this pregnant moment. Gose's argument for a sharp break may prove overly abrupt, however. After all, as early as 1645, Francisco de Ávila, who knew mountain cults as thoroughly as any outsider, wrote that villagers worshipped snow-capped peaks ‘because that is where their water comes from’. Ancestral connections are not necessarily the crucial nexus – and how do archaeological finds of Inca mountaintop sacrifices fit in?
Debatable issues aside, Gose's second monograph marks a handsome success in what one might call ‘big ethnohistory’. Ethnohistory until recently was taught as an optional supplement to imperial historiography. Ethnohistory books characteristically focused on sampling small local corpuses. Today ethnohistory increasingly attacks problems that are wide and deep, and this work is an accomplished example of how it is done. Insofar as Gose shows Andean cults to have sustained colonial relationships in general, rather than just the inner hierarchies of villages, he has brought the history of vernacular sacred culture a long distance from the periphery toward the core of New World historiography.
