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The Jesuit and the Incas

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The Jesuit and the Incas 03_Reviews.qxd 7/10/05 12:18 PM Page 453 The Jesuit and the Incas. The 1597 he returned to Peru and secretly wrote Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera, S.J. what is probably our most important Sabine Hyland, Ann Arbor: The University source on colonial Andean culture, the of Michigan Press, 2003, 269 pp. Primer nueva coronica y buen gobierno—its official author, the revered Felipe Guaman Alan Durston Poma de Ayala, serving as a mere front who University of Notre Dame sold his name for a cart and a horse. While Blas Valera (1544–1597) was a prominent the Naples documents initially caused member of the first generation of Jesuit quite a stir, several leading Andeanists con- missionaries in Peru and, crucially for the sider them modern forgeries, and there is story told by Sabine Hyland, a mestizo. widespread agreement that their contents, Until recently he was known primarily as at the very least, cannot be taken at face the author of the Historia Occidentalis,a value (see Guibovich Pérez 2003 for a recent lost history of the Incas in Latin that was discussion). extensively quoted by Garcilaso de la Vega The Jesuit and the Incas seeks to resolve in his Comentarios reales de los Incas the various mysteries surrounding Blas (1609).Valera was most valued by his supe- Valera, especially the motives for his riors for his knowledge of Andean lan- fall from grace and the fantastic claims guages, and was involved in the translation made about him in the Naples documents. of the official catechisms of the Third Lima Hyland argues that the latter are in fact Council (1582–83) into Quechua and Ay- 17th century texts authored by a disgrun- mara. In 1583, however, he fell out of favor tled Jesuit, but that they weave together for reasons that were too delicate to express Valera’s real story with a series of fictions in the Jesuit correspondence and so serious and forgeries. Valera’s mysterious crimes that he was imprisoned for three years by were indeed his attachment to his maternal his own order. He was eventually sent to people, his radical condemnation of the Spain, where he died in 1597. Spanish conquest, and his belief that the Blas Valera remained an obscure figure Incas had independently understood the until the 1990s, when a group of Italian re- key Christian truths. In his efforts to searchers gradually unveiled a corpus of complete the Christianization of native rather spectacular Jesuit documents Andeans from within their own culture, owned by a private collector in Naples, in- Valera developed a new quipu system for cluding one allegedly penned by Valera recording verbal texts in Quechua through himself long after his reported death. They a syllabic code—this was the true origin of state that Valera was secretly condemned the phonetic quipus described in the by his order for his radical pro-Inca beliefs, Naples documents (ch. 6). His pro-Inca especially his heretical conviction that Inca position became so radical as to border on religion was compatible with Christianity. heresy, and his superiors decided to cover Valera is also said to have preserved a secret up the problem by imprisoning him and Inca writing system involving a type of claiming that he was being tried by the In- quipu (or khipu, a record made from knot- quisition for fornication (ch. 8). Hyland ted strings) that could fully record verbal argues, however, that Valera’s death in 1597 texts—a sample quipu was included in the was real—he did not return to Peru and documents. After faking his own death in cannot be considered the true author of Book Reviews 453 03_Reviews.qxd 7/10/05 12:18 PM Page 454 Guaman Poma’s chronicle. These and exaggeration to say that most of the impor- other claims contained in the Naples doc- tant and novel claims that Hyland makes uments, together with the text apparently about Valera in these eight chapters— written by Valera himself in the early 17th including his creation of a phonetic quipu century, were concocted by a fellow Jesuit system—are either highly speculative or sympathetic to Valera’s cause (ch. ten). entirely unfounded with respect to the The book is a laudable attempt to recon- sources cited. struct the life of an important but shadowy In particular, Hyland’s argument that player in the early Christianization process. Valera was punished by the Jesuit order for It bears directly on one of the key issues that his radical nativism is both implausible has been emerging in the literature: the and unsubstantiated. None of the beliefs depth of the conflicts that developed within concerning the proximity between Inca re- the Church concerning the relation between ligion and Christianity that Hyland attrib- Andean culture and Christianity (see utes to Valera were heretical. They were Estenssoro 2003 and MacCormack 1991). It certainly contrary to the prevailing doc- is also significant for its treatment of the trines and policies of the time, but it seems Naples documents as “true lies” (partially unlikely that they would have been dealt falsified 17th-century texts rather than mod- with so drastically and with such secrecy. ern forgeries) and its attempt to work The only documentary evidence pro- through their implications, when the pre- vided to the effect that his trespasses were vailing tendency so far has been to deny of a doctrinal rather than a moral—sexual them any historical interest. In this respect, nature is a single, ambiguous and decon- it provides an interesting explanation for textualized Inquisition document (tran- the surprising phonetic quipus of the scribed in Appendix B) that does not bear Naples documents: Hyland explains them the weight of Hyland’s conclusions. Fur- as a Jesuit invention which may nonethe- thermore, it is not at all clear from histori- less have had precedents among the pre- cal texts other than the Naples documents conquest quipu systems. These perspectives that Valera actually held Inca religion in are especially timely considering the recent such high esteem. Hyland’s key source in boom in quipu studies (e.g., Quilter & this respect—the anonymous Relación de Urton 2002). The Jesuit and the Incas also las costumbres antiguas de los naturales del has considerable potential for attracting at- Pirú—cannot be attributed to Valera with tention from broader audiences because of any certainty (I would suggest that the its engaging style and readability. evidence is largely negative). Unfortunately, Hyland’s portrait of For all the interest the book holds for Valera is not supported by sources other students of the early colonial Andes, it is than the Naples documents, which by her compromised by its unacknowledged re- own account contain numerous fabrica- liance on a single, very questionable source. tions. The first eight chapters of the book Hyland’s Valera,who is essentially the Valera were allegedly written with no recourse at of the Naples documents minus his post- all to them, so that in Chapters 9 and 10 she 1597 exploits, is simply not visible in the re- was able to approach them critically and maining sources. As Hyland herself puts it, distinguish the important truths and half- the Naples documents “present a very real truths they contain. However, it is not an mystery” (227). The fact that she was not 454 Journal of Latin American Anthropology 03_Reviews.qxd 7/10/05 12:18 PM Page 455 able to find a more convincing documen- tary trail to support her interpretation does not bode well for its eventual acceptance. But The Jesuit and the Incas, precisely be- cause of its controversial content, will no doubt have the positive effect of stimulating further research on these problems and the broader issues that surround them. References Cited Estenssoro Fuchs, Juan Carlos 2003 Del paganismo a la santidad. La incorporación de los indios del Perú al catolicismo, 1532–1750. Lima: Instituto Francés de Es- tudios Andinos & Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Guibovich Pérez, Pedro 2003 Las polémicas en torno a Guaman Poma de Ayala. Colo- nial Latin American Review 12(1):99–103. MacCormack, Sabine 1991 Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colo- nial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Quilter, Jeffrey and Gary Urton, eds. 2002 Narrative Threads: Account- ing and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin: University of Texas Press. Book Reviews 455.
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