Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
78. How might we talk about Indigeneity and Catholicism in the Andes?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Sierra L. Lawson [+]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sierra L. Lawson is a doctoral student in the Religion and Culture track in the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sierra’s current work examines competing transatlantic discourses on maternal health within visual and textual archives. She is specifically interested in the devotional labor of “Morisca” women in the Ebro region and women in early Andean colonies as mutually influenced by and influencing imperial grammars for classifying ‘religion.’ In studying rhetorics of devotion she has previously focused on communities who describe themselves as Marian—and, specifically, Guadalupan—devotees.
Description
This chapter reflects on the history of Catholicism and Indigenous practices in the Andes. Looking to modern day festivals like Corpus Christi as well as early colonial figures such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, this chapter gives an account of the complexities of thinking about religion in the pan-Andean region and highlights the interaction between Spanish Catholicism and elements of pre-contact Inca culture in Tawantinsuyu (the Inca empire) such as conceptions of time and division of space.