Conversation on Educated morality in Marisol de la Cadena’s book Indigenous Mestizos
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“By taking action, by participating, by carrying out the people’s justice, the Andamarcans would become conscious of their own power. This was a destiny they could not avoid. They were no longer victims; they were beginning to be liberators.” This powerful quote from Page 71 of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Death in the Andes encapsulates one […]
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In “The Years We Lived in Danger,” the first chapter of How Difficult it is to be God, Carlos Iván Degregori demonstrates how two groups in conflict with one another can each be wrong at the same time. Degregori states that: “During 1980–82, Shining Path expanded vertiginously in the rural zones of Ayacucho. In response, […]
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While I overall thought Machu Picchu unforgettable and an amazing experience, I think much less fondly of the town of Aguas Calientes. While it absolutely does have its charms and areas of genuine beauty. I found the main strip to be a painfully overstimulating tourist hellscape, a la Niagara Falls, Las Vegas etc. I found the main strip to be so over the top in this sense that it almost seemed like a parody of itself, I was half expecting to see a Machu Picchu-themed Hooters at some point. I…read more
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“ Like other invented traditions, this production implied a conscious process of using the past to create a public ritual for political ends” (Cadena 157). The Inti Raymi ( Festival of the Sun) is one of the most significant cultural events in Peru, and is rooted in the ancient traditions of the Inca civilization. While […]
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Waiting for the train from Aguas Calientes to Ollantaytambo, I asked Daniel how to see and write in terms of affect. Of course it’s important to talk about ideology. But I think I think too much in categories and broad concepts and don’t pay enough attention to how bodies move and are affected by other […]
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“Literate Indians like Miguel Quispe, whose demands were rational, were considered racial/cultural transvestites, ex-Indians who maintained the markers of their previous identity (like indigenous clothes) to manipulate actual (irrational) Indians.” (de la Cadena, p. 308) In this passage, de la Cadena is describing how elite cuzquefios of the 1920s defined Indigeneity as necessarily illiterate and […]
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A passage that stood out to me in Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919-1991 by de la Cadena is the last passage of the book which reads: “The hegemonic acceptance of the “legitimate” hierarchies produced by education accommodates the relationship between the dominant and subordinate forms of discrimination. This hegemony of educational hierarchies makes dominant culturalist racism not only possible but apparently unquestionable and thus all the more formidable” (pg. 330). This book discusses how there was a shift from using race as a form of discrimination to forming social hierarchies based on intelligence and intellectual achievement. Education was said to have a “corrective power” and supposedly cancels the original inferiority of “Indians” or Indigenous groups.
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