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Abstract
Julio C. Tello, a Peruvian archaeologist, ascertained that the valuable environmental knowledge gained by Peru's pre-Hispanic civilisations equally had contemporary significance for a modernising and industrialising nation. This article explores how his findings on Peru's pre-Hispanic civilisations informed his understanding of their environmental relations, resource use and, furthermore, how he identified himself with some of the national discourses prevalent during the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis particularly links with arguments concerning Peruvian national identity and the importance of clean water supplies and biodiversity. Tello's field notes that comprised his book, Arqueología de Cajamarca: Expedición al Marañon – 1937, being the northern region of the Marañon River basin, is the principal narrative informing this discussion. The focus is on Tello's uncovering of antique water channels – acequias and an aqueduct, leading him towards an alternative environmental conclusion that was multi-functional. His field notes are explored as “travel writing” for their exciting heterogeneous capabilities for socio-environmental commentary. As Tello's writings contributed towards processes of decolonisation in Peru, understood as a challenge to the dominance of Eurocentrism, this discussion engages with the notion of “coloniality of power” – a concept developed by social theorists such as Aníbal Quijano and Walter D. Mignolo as to how Peruvian culture and history have been mainly defined by colonial, imperial and global processes.
Acknowledgement
Many thanks to Matthew Brown, Alberto Loza Nehmad (Tello's archivist at UNMSM, Lima, Peru), two anonymous peer-reviewers, Sandra Nava, Ximena and Paco Maurial, Sociedad Geográfica de Lima and Tim Youngs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
† Words specific to Peru and Latin America are given in italics. Fuller explanations of their significance may be found in the notes. All translations from the Spanish are my own unless otherwise stated. Readers wishing to check these against the originals are invited to contact me.
1. Luis E. Valcárcel (1891–1987), a professor at San Marcos University, Lima, wrote extensively on Indigeneity, made ethnographic investigations and was generally considered to be the movement's most prolific writer. In an article for Amauta (Citation1929), he clarified the segregation occurring at national level: “About Peruvian-ness … as there are various Americas, there are indeed two Perus; Indian Peru and modern Peru” (Citation1929, 100–101). Implied in Valcárcel's thinking was sentiment fused with socio-economic restructuring, also apparent in his work, Perú: patria antigua. He was seeking answers to what the experiences of being ‘Peruvian’ signified; how a pluralist society should incorporate history and equally embrace the challenges of modernity, thus sharing ideological aspects with Tello.
2. Peru's pre-Hispanic era had been an exciting focus for archaeologists, beginning in 1863 with E. George Squier (1821–1888), and others such as Guillermo Reiss, Alfonso Stuebel and Max Uhle. Peruvian historian, Mariana Mould de Pease, confirmed how Squier's travels and documenting of archaeological sites were the first modern attempt to understand more about the pre-Hispanic past (Citation1997). Uhle devised the first solid theories on the origin and development of the pre-Hispanic civilisations, pointing out that not all ruins are Incan (Buse Citation1980). Tello was developing some of these earlier observations.
3. Indigenismo: a movement concerned with the rethinking and evaluation of Indigenous cultures with political and ideological theories, involving artists, academics and government policy-making. The movement emerged during the 1920s and 1930s, instigated by intellectuals of mostly socialist belief structures. In Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui was a leading Marxist and cosmopolitan proponent dedicated to land reforms, labour, cultural integration and civil rights. Rebecca Earle writes: “Indigenismo is a general term used to describe a movement that developed in a number of Spanish American countries from the second decade of the twentieth century. Martin Stabb has defined it as a sympathetic awareness of the Indian.” Indigenismo was characterised by a concern with the well-being of contemporary indigenous peoples, often expressed as a “desire to elevate Indians from their lowly position so that they might enjoy the benefits available to other citizens” (Earle Citation2007, 185). Indigenista: a person belonging to a pro-Indian artistic movement and typical of the Cusco and Lima intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s.
4. His opinion was supported by explorer-scientists of the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima.
5. For example, Andean scholar, Hernan Amat Olazabal, writes:
Julio C. Tello is without doubt one of the great paradigms of our history. Not only deserving of the title “Father of Peruvian Archaeology”, he was the first champion of those who sought and continue to seek a national identity that is nourished from millennia of Andean traditions. (Citation1997, 5)
6. Quijano's definition is apt here:
Eurocentrism is […] the name of a perspective of knowledge whose systematic formation began in Western Europe before the middle of the seventeenth century, although some of its roots are […] much older. In the following centuries this perspective was made globally hegemonic, travelling the same course as the dominion of the European bourgeois class. (Quijano Citation2008, 197)
7. By the 1920s, the aspects of coloniality that controlled and maintained Western subjectivity and knowledge underwent decolonisation processes within Peruvian intellectual circles. Throughout the twentieth century these efforts achieved wide-reaching reforms across Peruvian society. Decolonisation was fully embraced through archaeology by Tello and his efforts in reforming education. It should be noted that the politics of knowledge being discussed here, in short epistemology and its control, define some of the dominant features of coloniality in its capacity to influence all aspects of Peruvian history, culture and life since conquest. As a theory, coloniality has been developed extensively by scholars Aníbal Quijano and Walter D. Mignolo, who were also building from Mariátegui's earlier concepts on the social relations and structure of power. During the 1920s, many Indigenista intellectuals had already rejected the relevance of the knowledge being taught within Peruvian universities. The efforts of Mariátegui (himself self-taught) toward a comprehensive critique of Peruvian history and society were a counter-narrative against the pro North-American extreme empiricism taught within the social sciences in Peruvian universities. These institutions founded their social sciences on the impulses of North American models, producing selective readings that maintained their colonial residues and regenerations of knowledge. For more on Tello's education and travels in the West, see Tello (Citation2009).
8. For a complete bibliographical list of Tello's publications, see Tello (Citation2007, 52–59).
9. The total surface area of Peru's Montaña and lowland forests seems to fluctuate between sources – the lowest figure I found was 65%, the highest 72%. This figure obviously is diminishing fast as statistics by the “Instituto de Investigación de la Amazonia Peruana” (IIAP), 2006, show that “at least 10,000,000 hectares of forestlands have been deforested by Andean migrations, clearing of forest by fire, indiscriminate felling of trees, narcotics and other causes” (Ortiz Citation2006, Per – 41). This study was provoked by diminishing rainfall levels causing droughts across Amazonia.
10. Nevados: high snow-covered peaks and often associated with Indigenous deities – Apus – and pantheism.
11. Museo de Antropologia, Lima: Plaza Bolivar, Pueblo Libre. Of further interest, “On the 4th of December 1913, Tello founded the first museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with the support of President Billinghurst” (Tello Citation2007, 68).
12. Aside from Peru, the other countries were/are: Bolivia, Guatemala, Mexico and Ecuador.
13. During earlier periods of Peru's history since Independence, many travellers portrayed Indigenous people as “hung over”. Mark Thurner, for example, writes: “the most worthy object of ethnological study […] was the archaeological ruin […] No link between the Inka past and the Indian present was discernible: Indians had been cut off from their history […] by the Spanish conquest” (Citation1997, 12). Indigenismo, with a steady following in the late 1910s, was to challenge this assumed antiquarianism.
14. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana is the original title in Spanish. Mariátegui was greatly inspired by the rise of the independent press in Peru and was to launch his own socio-political magazine, Amauta. This Quechua word is never fully clarified, yet written everywhere. All texts refer to its meaning of “wise men”; men of learning from the Inca dynasty. Overall, I believe, as gleaned from travel narratives and texts, that Amautas were people dedicated to learning, to the art of using one's mind to maximum benefit for the rest of society. This process might have included debating, reflection, counselling, pilgrimages, personal suffering, official representation (ambassadors), knowledge of Quipus systems and official reporting and accountability, to name a few duties of an Amauta. Quipus: Inca system of recording events by use of strings, lengths, colours and knots; perhaps used to mark the importance of historic moments, or stock-taking and accounting records and all leading toward good government of the Inca kingdom. Very little is known today about this system of recording and its true scope.
15. Of the “Indian Problem”, Earle refers to: “the belief held by the elites of the nineteenth-century that a large indigenous population weakened the state and impeded the development of national identity” (Earle Citation2007, 163).
16. Ayllu is an Indigenous communistic social-economic unit whose founding principles were concerned with the sharing of the means of production, distribution and allocation. It is also employed to describe forms of adherence to kinship groups; Inca in origin.
The ayllu comprised all people who were related, by marriage or consanguineously. Since preconquest settlements were generally small hamlets, the term ayllu could refer to the entire community. In a broader sense, the ayllu could be a separate cultural and linguistic group. (Cook and Cook Citation2007, 19)
17. See my book-in-progress, Peru: an environmental history of travel writing on the Andes and Amazon, which includes chapters on the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, focusing specifically on Peruvian women writers engaged in ecology and who use travel writing as resistance literature to globalisation.
18. For example, the Sociedad Geográfica de Lima debated a wide range of narratives, including early chronicles, with a view toward further investigations and establishing favourable circumstances specific to Peru and Peru's geography. Mould de Pease also writes, “The work of travellers in Peru […] is an inexhaustible source of ideas to hypothesise our national space in a realist manner” (Citation1997, 21).
19. Original text, “La primera Tarjeta Postal apareció el 28 de noviembre de 1907, y fue captada a lomo de bestia por el artista Martín Chambi”. The date printed was certainly a typing error. It was 1917 not 1907 when Chambi arrived in Cusco as well as being the 50th year (calculation based upon the article appearing in 1967). Other newspaper articles support this date.
20. Huaca/Waka is a feature of a landscape – a mound, a man-made pyramid, may be cut stone – believed to have had religious significance such as the “Huaca de la luna” pertaining to the Moche culture. Tello wrote the following as to the significance of wakas:
the monuments and cemeteries were, fo the Indians, wakas, or sacred relics, the places where their gods or the spirit of their ancestors dwelled […] Waka is, therefore, for him, an intangible and invulnerable place, a taboo. No conscientious native dares, even today, to profane his wakas. Wakas are all the ancient monuments of Peru. (Tello Citation2009, 92)
21. The “Conference of the Parties” (COP-20) – as part of the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (UNFCCC) – meeting in Lima, Peru (December 2014), has successfully drafted considerable last-minute agreements over global warming: a five-page text agreed on 14 December 2014 is known as the “Lima Call for Climate Action”. This Climate Summit has also taken place during tense confrontations over quality and access rights to water between local agriculturalists and huge industrialised projects around Ica, Peru.
22. One hundred years after Hiram Bingham removed artefacts from Machu Picchu, Cusco to Yale University, USA, a court ruling ordered many of the items to be returned to the Republic of Peru. White & Case LLP, Republic of Peru (Plaintiff) V. Yale University (Defendant), United States District Court, District of Connecticut, Case 3:09-cv-01332-AWT, 2009. My thanks to Owen C. Pell and Philip Hurst.
23. This is particularly developed by Quijano (Citation2008) and his “Coloniality of Power” theories.
24. This position was also shared by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda upon visiting Machu Picchu and, famously, the two Argentine friends, Alberto Granado and Ernesto Guevara. Later they all came to identify with a common space and continental mestizo race.
25. Professor Antonio Raimondi (1824–1890) was born in Italy but highly regarded as a patriotic Peruvian by many. He settled, married, had a family and died in Peru after 40 years of national service and travel, having narrowly missed Machu Picchu. He dedicated himself to the natural sciences and to teaching them at the University of San Marcos. His influence, findings, written and cartographic work were invaluable sources to those following in his footsteps and engaged in exploration and scientific investigation, such as Manuel Antonio Mesones Muro (1862–1930). In the Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society of London, he was referred to as “our Peruvian Honorary Corresponding Member” (See Raimondi Citation1866–Citation1867, 102).
26. Friar Uriarte wrote that the “name given to the Montaña region of Peru geographically represents the eastern slopes of the eastern Cordilleras stretching to the Ecuadorian, Colombian, Brazilian and Bolivian borders – borders that demarcate Peru's own geo-political borders. The Montaña region begins at 1500 m altitude on these eastern slopes and features innumerable ravines and gullies. Most of the region does not exceed 300 m in altitude” (Uriarte and Buenaventura Citation1938, 14–15, my translation).
27. Acequias/azequias are sophisticated water, irrigation channels, often constructed of stone and dating from pre-Hispanic times.
28. Some anthropologists and environmentalists have fairly recently adopted arguments that react against the assumption that certain cultures are more natural and connected to Nature than others, claiming this notion should be dropped as it is fuelling established prejudices and is damaging overall. Kay Milton (Citation1996) takes this line, for example, while O.F. Cook (Citation1916) hypothesised that the later Inca culture had caused stresses upon the environment through deforestation, even to the point that glaciers had retreated as a result. Chronicle entries like those of Cieza de León also described what amounts to a Paradise; himself being filled with wonder at how rich the area was in biodiversity and tree coverage and how man lived in harmony with the environment. Such a premise was indeed what Tello was also seeking to establish.
29. In his book, An Environmental History of Latin America, Miller (Citation2007) makes it very apparent how different environmental relations and attitudes toward Nature between the Indigenous and Europeans were as, for example, Tenochtitlán on Lake Texcoco (Mexico city today) was rapidly converted from a beautiful and extensive city surrounded by clean waters, aqueducts, dikes, wildlife and causeways to a problematic, contaminated and toxic swamp after the conquest.
30. With the passing of law number 10,356 on 24 June 1944, as Cusco celebrated a thousand years of history and the winter solstice arrived, this day was decreed as the official “Day of the Indian”, the “Day of Tahuantinsuyo”.
31. José de Echave is head of Lima-based NGO, Cooper-Acción, examining collective rights and extractive industries.
32. This figure is given by the “Autoridad Nacional del Agua” (ANA)/National Water Authority and cited by Echave (December 2010–January 2011, 5).
33. The National Institute of Natural Resources (INRENA). INRENA has a limited capacity to protect Peru's sensitive and valuable environments. Andrea Sabelli writes: “INRENA is the governing body that oversees the forestry sector and is responsible for enforcing the Ley Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre (Forest and Wildlife Law, Law No. 27308, 2000) […] However, because INRENA suffers from a lack of human and financial resources they are unable to adequately enforce the policy and as a result a significant amount of illegal logging is occurring in the country” (Sabelli Citation2011, 115).
34. Brack's deforestation figures and environmental knowledge of the Sierra might well have been partly informed by geographers such as Stuart White whose research on peasant agricultural practices concludes that the Andes once were forested by a continuous tree cover up to approximately 4000 m in altitude (see White Citation1986).
35. The Quenal tree (Polylepis) is an obvious example, establishing itself as high as 4200 m.
36. Conversation with Walter H. Wust and myself in Lima on 20 April 2010. Wust (b. 1967) has published extensively on Peru's flora and fauna and his books, guides and encyclopaedias total more than 320 titles. He has coordinated 50 scientific expeditions and made documentaries with National Geographic, the BBC and Discovery.
37. Consider also Arturo Escobar's stance on “alternative developments” and “alternatives to development” (Citation1992).