Blogs

Inti Raymi; ritual vs. theater

I’m going to use this blog post as a sort of exercise – or practice round – for my position paper. In Indigenous Mestizos, De La Cadena pulls a quote from a guy named Turner (I forgot his first name and I don’t have the page number, but this is a blog post so I […]

Death in the Andes: The Perspectives of the Stories We Tell

As I wanted to have some reading done for this course before my trip, I initially read Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa in early May. Of course, back then, I was trying to navigate the reading with very little context. I did not know what Sendero referred to, and for whatever reason […]

Blog Post #10: The (weaponized) Politics of Race and Culture

“ ‘Refined’ (refinado) was the adjective used to refer to someone considered culto, having culture. Diametrically opposed to ignorance, and yet more significant, to coarseness and immorality, having culture implied being erudite, having delicate manners, and behaving according to the principles prescribed by the Catholic religion” When reading De la Cadena’s text, Indigenous Mestizos: The […]

XII. Macchu Picchu

There is a light in the valley: bodies gather from the horrible dark and find a couple, many-feathered and bright weaving a tapestry of song into the dead reality of night. There is a man at the door in a mask with golden eyes: better to burn the sacred gift than to let him redivine […]

Reading Blog 7

A not so Sacred Valley of the Dolls

The ‘Noble Savage’ and We the Indians

Reading Blog 10

The In and Out of Inti Raymi

¨If the imagined Inkas are imagined as once-living, active individuals, then agency cannot be so easily denied their descendants, even those now called campesinos¨ (Dean 216) in Inka Bodies Dean argues that the presentation of Inti Raymi as increasingly “accurate”, as opposed to catering to the preconceptions of international tourists, advances the fight for campesino […]