Carolyn Dean

Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America

In the mid seventeenth century, Doña Isabel Uypa Cuca, a woman of a noble Inka lineage, lived in and created a culturally and biologically hybrid household in the city of Cuzco, Peru. She married a man of Spanish descent and they gave birth to two daughters. She wore clothing of Spanish bayeta, Chinese silk, Andean cotton and alpaca fiber; the material was cut and tailored according to both European and Andean fashion. Her belongings were stored in locked wooden cedar chests as well as Inka urpus (pottery vessels). The walls of her home juxtaposed the images of Christian saints with the likenesses of preHispanic Inka emperors. Yet in her own accounts of her possessions there appears no suggestion that her particular heterogeneity was in any way remarkable to either her or her contemporaries. Rather it is we who recognize, name, and remark on hybridity here. Because cultures are collective, they are inherently heterogeneous. Millennia of travel and trade have insured that mixing and interaction is the norm; examples of truly isolated societies are rare in the extreme. Yet in every society certain mixtures become naturalized over time, losing their visibility and potency as mixtures, while others continue to be marked as such. The latter apparently disclose signs of their disparate origins; they stand out from the norm and seem to require acknowledgement, if not also explanation. They also require naming. Recently the term “hybrid” has been used. Although some scholars have resisted applying the words “hybrid” and “hybridity” to cultural forms, many others have adopted them as a way of acknowledging the mixed descendancy of certain objects and practices. It is the selectivity currently exercised in the discourse of hybridity that prompts this essay. Beyond this, we find that in present academic discourse the word “hybrid” and its cognates evoke quite particular—especially political—connotations. This paper thus addresses the implications of choosing, or not choosing, to recognize and name hybridity in visual and material culture. In approaching the subject this way, we seek to examine the politics of recognition (and, perhaps, mis-recognition) rather than determine the value or appropriateness of applying the term “hybridity” to distinct cultural manifestations. Since the Iberian cultures now glossed as “Spain” were expansionist, scholars who have studied colonial societies in Spanish America have confronted the

Copied Carts: Spanish Prints and Colonial Peruvian Paintings

Prints of processional carts from a Spanish festival book (1663) served as prototypes for the carts featured in a series of canvases, painted around 1674–80, depicting the Corpus Christi procession in Cuzco, Peru. The canvases in which the carts appear relate to five of colonial Cuzcos indigenous parishes and were probably commissioned and executed by native Andeans. By incorporating forms from a Spanish source in the painted record of a local event, Andeans confounded the documentary mode of reportage. The resulting pictorial contradictions underscore the complexities of cultural confluence.

The Inka Married the Earth: Integrated Outcrops and the Making of Place

According to a story told in the Andes today, the ancient Inka (Inca) married Mother Earth and produced human offspring. Rock outcrops that were integrated by Inka builders into masonry structures can be understood as traces of that union. By providing petrous foundations for Inka walls, the Mother Earth herself appears to have readily consented to, if not actually joined in, Inka building activity. As a place of union between Inka and earth, the integrated rock outcrop thus constituted a powerful sign of belonging, as well as an imperialist claim to the possession and assimilation of new territories.

The Trouble with (the Term) Art

Much of what is today called art was not made as art. This is the case not only with regard to early European artifacts and monuments, but also with regard to objects made outside the West in places where the concept of art traditionally has not been recognized. Not infrequently (although less frequently than in the past), many of the objects from outside the West that were not made as art are grouped together and called “primitive art.” This is so despite the fact that art historians and anthropologists, among others, have been fussing about the term “primitive art” and its synonyms since the middle of the twentieth century.1 In 1957. Adrian Gerbrands was one of the first to offer a thorough discussion of what he called “the problem of the name.”2 Yet his proposed substitute term—non-European art—was also criticized by those in the field. Suggested alternatives—exotic art; traditional art; the art of pre-industrial people; folk or popular art; tribal art; ethnic or ethno-art; ethnographical art; ethnological art; native art; indigenous art; pre-urban art; the art of precivilized people; non-Western art; the indigenous arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas—have all been proposed and critiqued.3 Despite decades of discussion, little has been resolved, as was seen in the array of commentary provoked in 1984 by William Rubins “Primitivism” exhibition and its companion catalogue.4 What interests me in all of this is the fact that discussion, from the 1950s to the present, invariably focuses on the adjective—primitive, exotic, or what have you—rather than the noun, “art.” This is the case even when the author acknowledges that “art” is also a difficult term without proper definition and agreed-upon usage.5 Thus, it may be time to focus specifically on the term “art” as currently used by scholars writing about the many and varied autochthonous visual cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Such a discussion matters not only to those studying long-ago or faraway places; it concerns all those who employ the term, for what art is seems to be at the very heart of the issue.

Reviewing Representation: The Subject-object in Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Inka Visual Culture

This essay explores the ontological perspective embedded in current scholarship, particularly the ways it interprets and categorizes unfamiliar things of indigenous American origin. I review the notion of representation, a term ubiquitous in art historical writing (and in other disciplines as well) and one that is generally considered descriptive rather than evaluative, but which tacitly converts indigenous things into not just art, but more fundamentally into signifiers. Because this conversion alters the very things it is deployed to understand and explain, insisting on a substitutive relationship between materials and ideas, rather than recognizing a necessary indivisibility, it actually participates in an on-going conquest—a conquest of perception.

Beyond prescription: notarial doodles and other marks

E.H. Gombrich (1909–2001) is one of a very few art historians to contemplate doodles on official records of the preand early modern periods. In an essay entitled ‘Pleasures of Boredom’, he argued that such doodles reflected scribal ennui; while the text was necessary and serious business, the superfluous images were but playful expressions. In his discussion Gombrich focused on the numerous examples of scribal doodling richly illustrated by the Italian painter, poet and philosopher Giuseppe Zevola in a book based on the historical archives of the Banco di Napoli. Gombrich’s suppositions were not specific to these Neapolitan bank records, however. Rather, he drew his conclusions more broadly to suggest that scribbling pictures in official (textual) records everywhere is a sign of tedium on the job. Gombrich’s hypothesis is here reconsidered by focusing on doodling, as well as other kinds of markings, found in the notarial records of the Archivo Regional in Cuzco, Peru, between the years 1630 and 1810. While no doubt some marks were indeed sketched in response to tedium in the workplace, they served a variety of other functions as well: they filled empty spaces in the notarial books preventing the misuse of blank pages; they were a means for copyists to refine their craft; they exhibited skilled quill-work and so drew attention to otherwise anonymous copyists; and they expressed rivalry within the competitive world of notarial workers. The hierarchical binary of text and image, tacitly accepted and advanced by Gombrich, ignores the degree to which calligraphy purposefully encompasses both categories. To the copyist-doodlers penwork — whether text, image or a combination of the two — was penwork and so spoke to the pensman’s capabilities, as well as his position within the workshop and his aspirations. What’s more, within the realm of notarial record-keeping, the opposition of text and image was not so meaningful as the juxtaposition of prescribed and non-prescribed marking. The latter constituted a discursive space where contributors to official documents could make ‘off the record’ comments to one another. Although this study responds to notarial documents in just one of the provinces of colonial Spanish America, as with Gombrich’s work, the observations made and conclusions drawn herein are intended to have broader implications. This study also invites those familiar with notarial records elsewhere to contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of markings beyond the official text. What constitutes the subject of study — what Gombrich characterized as a doodle — is our first concern. The common definition of the verb ‘to doodle’, which is ‘to draw or scribble idly’, unfortunately anticipates the motive for the mark, and so implies that notarial images and other markings are the unimportant fruits of time not usefully occupied. Since the 1 – Giuseppe Zevola, Piaceri de noia: quattro secoli di scarabocchi nell’Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli (Milan: Leonardo, 1991). Gombrich’s essay originally appeared as the introduction to Zevola’s volume (pp. 7–17). It was reprinted as ‘Pleasures of Boredom: Four Centuries of Doodles’, The Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999), pp. 212–25. 2 – This study was based on the examination of over one hundred notarial markings from midto late colonial Cuzco (1630–1810), with the majority coming from the period between 1650 and 1730, from the Archivo Regional del Cusco (ARC). Although there were many types of notaries operating in colonial Spanish America, here I am focusing on the notaries public (escribanos públicos) who worked for those individuals or groups who sought out state-sanctioned notaries and could pay for their services.

Scorned Subjects in Colonial Objects

Abstract Focusing on colonial Spanish America, we explore scorned subjects—indigenous things that were identified as vital, sentient subjects by the people who made and used them but reclassified as “objects” by European friars, priests and settlers. Attending to key examples of scorned subjects in central Mexico and the Andes, we consider how European ontology and epistemology, manifested in the actions of colonial-era missionaries and persisting in present scholarship, shade our interpretations of sacred indigenous things. Of particular concern is how perceptions of the indigenous sacred shifted under changing colonial conditions. Our research suggests that rather than stubbornly requiring traditional pre-Hispanic materials to provide a physical presence, the indigenous sacred was often more supple than colonial authorities supposed. The implications of this arrangement, we find, open new questions about the relationships among materiality, colonial history and the indigenous sacred in the Americas.

Fame of Thrones: Seats, Sights, and Sanctity among the Inka

Abstract The Inka of Andean South America regarded as sacred those seats reserved for the divine head of state. The most famous of such seats was known to the Inka as the Sapaqurinka; today it is more commonly known as the Throne of the Inka. It was hewn from a rock outcrop located atop a promontory overlooking the Inka’s capital city of Cuzco. Attending closely to its specific parts, as well as to its overall aspect, location, and medium, this paper elucidates the principles evoked when the Inka ruler sat on stone, saw what was there to be seen, and assumed the role of divine overseer. The petrous materiality of the Throne, its fixed location, and the ways in which it was carved, combined to enable the deific leader of the Inka state to become simultaneously a living ruler and an extension of the sacred landscape. By sitting, the Inka ruler not only inhabited a sacred topography, but merged with it, his body composed of vital but impermanent flesh and also – in deliberate complementarity – petrous fixity and permanence.

Inka Ruins and the Discourse of Mystery

Many Inka sites in western South America were abandoned in the early sixteenth century following the Spanish invasion and colonisation of the Andes. Their ruins provide a starting point from which to consider the discourse of mystery commonly enshrouding ruins today. Despite the fact that the ruination of Inka sites was witnessed and documented, and despite decades of work by scholars to understand Inka technological and cultural practices and belief systems, questions continue to be asked that, in fact, have long been answered. Yet many visitors prefer imaginative speculation and unverifiable postulations over reasoned hypotheses, and so actively work to prolong, rather than solve, the mystery of ruins. Focusing on the Inka site of Saqsaywamán, the author seeks to understand how the discourse of mystery itself, born out of the process of Spanish colonisation, still exerts a powerful influence over visitors to Inka ruins today.

Savage breast/salvaged breast: Allegory, colonization, and wet-nursing in Peru, 1532–1825

In a remarkable late eighteenth-century Peruvian painting, America is allegorized as a richly dressed, voluptuous female suckling two youths. This chapter considers the exposed breast of the more typical savage allegorical America, and how both its visibility and availability represented the conquest of American land and people. Such considerations enable one to read the singular breastfeeding America of the painting, couched in allegory, for Peruvian independence from Spain. Further, the chapter shows how this America figure derives from the Virgo Lactans , the traditional European image of Mary breastfeeding Jesus, and how that derivation influences the reading of the allegory. Finally, the chapter reflects on the predicament of real Indian women who were employed as wet nurses for Spanish infants in colonial Peru. Keywords: colonial Peru; Peruvian painting; Savage breast; wet nursing