Staging Lo Andino: the Scissors Dance, Spectacle, and Indigenous Citizenship in the New Peru
Staging lo Andino: the Scissors Dance, Spectacle, and Indigenous Citizenship in the New Peru DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Jason Alton Bush, MA Graduate Program in Theatre The Ohio State University 2011 Dissertation Committee: Lesley Ferris, Co-Advisor Katherine Borland, Co-Advisor Ana Puga Copyright by Jason Bush 2011 Abstract “Staging Lo Andino: Danza de las Tijeras, Spectacle, and Indigenous Citizenship in the New Peru,” draws on more than sixteen months of fieldwork in Peru, financed by Ohio State‟s competitive Presidential Fellowship for dissertation research and writing. I investigate a historical ethnography of the Peruvian scissors dance, an acrobatic indigenous ritual dance historically associated with the stigma of indigeneity, poverty, and devil worship. After the interventions of Peruvian public intellectual José María Arguedas (1911-1969), the scissors dance became an emblem of indigenous Andean identity and valued as cultural patrimony of the nation. Once repudiated by dominant elites because it embodied the survival of indigenous spiritual practices, the scissors dance is now a celebrated emblem of Peru‟s cultural diversity and the perseverance of Andean traditions in the modern world. I examine the complex processes whereby anthropologists, cultural entrepreneurs, cosmopolitan artists, and indigenous performers themselves have staged the scissors dance as a symbolic resource in the construction of the emergent imaginary of a “New Peru.” I use the term “New Peru” to designate a flexible repertoire of utopian images and discourses designed to imagine the belated overcoming of colonial structures of power and the formation of a modern nation with foundations in the Pre-Columbian past.
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