LAST 315 will trace the construction and reconstruction, negotiation and reinvention, production and consumption of Indigeneity in the Andes, with a focus on Peru and the “Sacred Valley” between Cusco and Machu Picchu, from precolonial times to the present.
We will read and discuss key texts written by and about Peru’s Indigenous people. These range from early seventeenth-century accounts of Inca civilization and the Spanish conquest, written from an Indigenous point of view, to novels and testimonies associated with twentieth-century indigenismo, to contemporary scholarly accounts of insurgency, politics, culture, and tourism in the Andes.
After orientation in Lima, and some time in Cusco to see the Corpus Christi festival, our base will be Pisac, originally established as a colonial reducción, twenty miles from the former Inca capital. From here, we will investigate the local ecosystem and cultural networks, from nearby Indigenous communities and their land management practices to markets, handicraft production, and the booming tourism industry in the towns lining the Sacred Valley.
Periodically, we will undertake field trips further afield, such as to the former Inca citadel, Machu Picchu, the so-called “lost city of the Incas” allegedly “discovered” by U.S. historian Hiram Bingham in 1911, and now Peru’s most emblematic tourist destination.
The program’s climax will be attendance at Cusco’s most important festival, Inti Raymi or the “festival of the sun,” which has been held at the nearby ruins of Sacsayhuamán since its reinvention by indigenista intellectuals in the 1940s.
Such inventions and reinventions will be the object of study and reflection over the course of our month in highland Peru, as we consider the various incarnations of Indigeneity over time, whose persistent legacies will be apparent in our everyday encounters and travels through the region.
Instructor:
Jon Beasley-Murray, jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca.
If you are having problems of any sort, get in touch before they have the chance to get out of control. I want you to do well in this course just as much as you do.
