Alan Durston

Notes on the Authorship of the Huarochirí Manuscript

The anonymous Huarochirı́ Manuscript is a unique source on colonial Andean culture and the only colonial Quechua text of clear indigenous authorship which runs over more than a few pages. Written in the first decade of the seventeenth century, it is a book-length (96-page) account of the religious lore of the Huarochirı́ province of the central Peruvian highlands which alternates between narratives of the deeds of the local deities (huacas) in a mythical past and ‘ethnographic’ descriptions of ritual practices, many of which were still being observed at the time of writing. There is only one known copy, and it is held at the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid in Manuscript 3169, a volume that also contains other texts of great importance for the study of Andean religion. Since the German edition of 1939, the Huarochirı́ Manuscript (HM) has been translated into Latin, Spanish, French, Polish, Dutch, and English (see Salomon 1991, 28 29). It has been considered required reading for Andeanists for decades*Frank Salomon and George Urioste refer to it as a ‘testament’ of Andean culture in the sub-title of their 1991 English edition. Nonetheless, the question of the HM’s authorship has generated remarkably little discussion. Recent commentators have tended to approach it as a collective work in which a number of people were involved during different stages of redaction, so the question appears somewhat moot. This essay attempts to throw new light on the problem by re-examining the evidence on the composition process and by analyzing similarities between the HM and a 1608 Quechua petition written in Sunicancha, Huarochirı́ by the Indian nobleman (curaca) and scribe Cristóbal Choquecasa. Choquecasa has been identified as someone who had a major role in the genesis of the HM by Antonio Acosta, Willem Adelaar, and Frank Salomon (Acosta 1987, 597; Adelaar 1997, 136; Salomon 1991, 26, 34). However, only the recently deceased John H. Rowe went as far as suggesting that the HM was actually written by Choquecasa. Rowe based this opinion on the similarity in handwriting between the HM and the

APUNTES PARA UNA HISTORIA DE LOS HIMNOS QUECHUAS DEL CUSCO

La interpretacion de himnos en quechua es una de las mas arraigadas expresiones del cristianismo andino. Este articulo intenta una primera aproximacion a los textos de los himnos quechuas que se cantan actualmente en la ciudad del Cusco en cuanto a sus origenes historicos, y propone una cronologia de la evolucion del genero del siglo XVI al XX. Se sugiere que la mayoria de los himnos vigentes corresponden a un tipo que se desarrollo hacia fines del periodo Colonial y que no aparece con claridad en el registro escrito hasta mediados del siglo XIX.

The Lettered Mountain: A Peruvian Village's Way with Writing . By Frank Salomon and Mercedes Niño-Murcia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 392.

The Lettered Mountain explores the “way with writing” of the people of Tupicocha, a village located about 100 km (a full day’s bus ride) east of Lima, in the storied highland province of Huarochirı́. Its title is a homage to Ángel Rama’s hugely influential The Lettered City, which argued that hierarchical practices of alphabetic writing shaped the colonial origins of Latin American societies. A number of recent books have built on Rama’s emphasis on writing as a constitutive social practice while challenging his assumptions that it was restricted to Hispanic bastions (the lettered cities) and that it operated in a vacuum. This The Lettered Mountain also does, but it is unique in a number of respects.

94.95 cloth;

behaviour than promote it among the lower orders. The various crises at the end of the colonial era gave the plebeian sector further opportunities to make its size and beliefs felt, according to Johnson. At the time of the British invasions, many were recruited and volunteered to challenge the invaders. Roused by their military success, they focused their ire on the incompetent viceroy, pressuring the authorities to replace him with the commander who had defeated and expelled the British. That recruitment was part of a militarization of society which paved the way for the eventual call for autonomous rule in May 1810, following news of the cataclysmic events in Spain. But were the workers as central to these later events as Johnson suggests? As in his chapter on the French conspiracy, they seem to play a subsidiary role, leaving intact the traditional explanation of the events according to which the elites manipulated both politics and the lower orders to achieve their ends. In particular, it was the new military commanders who seemed dominant, a point made by the local Spanish naval commander in writing to his government in June 1810 on the basis of information from his contacts in Buenos Aires. The May Revolution, he wrote, ‘has been more a military confusion than a movement of the people’. But Johnson’s point that the plebes constituted a large component of the forces that these men commanded indicates a certain form of influence. Thus, workers and artisans had become a group to be considered, if only to be kept in their customary subsidiary role, a role that Johnson quite clearly shows was not as subsidiary as the elites may have wished. And the mystery? The epilogue of the book describes a mutiny in December 1811 involving a militia unit that had a significant plebeian component. Its suppression and the execution of its ringleaders end the book, apparently marking the failure of plebeian influence and the consequent dominance of the military elements. Johnson writes that ten of the leaders were executed on 11 December, but then provides a list of eleven names. It leaves one wondering: who is the odd man out?

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Allies at Odds examines the conflictive relationship between the priests of Indian parishes in colonial Peru and their indigenous assistants, with an emphasis on how the latter negotiated the legal system and mediated ecclesiastical policies. The book deals primarily with the archdiocese of Lima, making excellent use of die court records held at die Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, particularly the causas de capitulos in which parishioners sued their priests. In addition to their key role in determining how Christianity was actually practiced in the Andes, parish assistants were the main cadre within a broader class of indios ladinos, Spanish-speaking and often literate Indians who mediated between what the authorities imagined as two separate republics. Literate Indians were generally die product of parish schooling, and many had acted at one point or another as assistants to priests. Also, it is in the ecclesiastical archives diat we most often find their writings, and the Spanish legal literacy of Indians is a central theme of the book.