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Acknowledgement
Drafts of this essay were presented in the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, and in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Northwestern University. I thank in particular Hermann Herlinghaus, Tom Rogers, Jorge Coronado and Marisol de la Cadena for their insightful comments.
Notes
1 For the Inca case, see Seed, Citation1991 and Lamana, Citation2008: 27–64; for the Aztec case, see Todorov, Citation1984: 51–124. The French and British, who also gave writing a prominent place in their narratives of their colonial encounters, re-wrote key Spanish colonial encounters to craft their imperial grammars of difference. These re-writings echo Amerindian responses to the specifically Spanish renditions of the same events, but also expose the limits common to all Western imperial thinking (Lamana, Citation2007).
2 ‘Fetishism’ has a long and at times controversial academic history (see Taussig, Citation1983; Ellen, Citation1988; Apter and Pietz 1993; Pietz, Citation1999; Masuzawa, Citation2000). I intend to make no intervention in the debates about its precise meaning, genealogy or scientific rigour, and to state no claim about its historical pertinence (the question of anachronism); I use it strategically, as means to an end.
3 I am indebted to Taussig's (1993: 45–7) study of the role of yielding in shamanism.
4 The facts that Oviedo calls Badajoz the cacique's master (amo), that there were other Spanish settlements and that the cacique follows his orders indicate that there was an encomienda regime at work. Gonzalo de Badajoz, one the founders of the city of Panama (1519), received an encomienda in that same year, which in 1522 was enlarged to include a Cueva cacique. He died in 1530 (Mena García, Citation1996: 59, 75, 87).
5 Consider, in contrast, the massacre that followed the Inca Atahualpa's miss-handling of the bible during the Inca–Spanish contact scene. I thank Jorge Coronado for having brought the contrast with Cajamarca to my attention.
6 ‘Occidentalism’, after Coronil, Citation1996.
7 The Peruvian council made the point several times. Sermon seven states that images in churches are not honoured ‘because of what they are in themselves, that they are made of wood or metal or paint, but because of what they represent, which is in heaven’ (Catecismo… Citation1991: 652). (See also the 1584 Doctrina cristiana y catecismo… 1991: 483.)
8 I use ‘magician’ as short cut for the many different kinds of lay experts on the supernatural; as Geertz (Citation1975) points out, the label ‘magic’, and its use, has to be object of a critical study.
9 For the role of the scientific claim of objectivity in the visual register, and flashes of non-Western awareness of and uses of it, see Tobing Rony, Citation1996.
10 I quote Koster's guide's words using my translation of the original in Portuguese (which Koster provides in two footnotes), not Koster's own translation of it. I thank Tom Rogers for having brought the passage to my attention in the first place and for having helped me do the alternative translation, and Frank Safford for having pushed me to think why exactly the example was relevant to my argument.