Geographies of Indigeneity: Space, Race, and Power in the Andes (1880-1930), reframes the intellectual construction of indigeneity as the structural principle informing the postcolonial nation in the Andes. My main claim is that Andean scientific elites defined indigeneity as an ethnicity attached to a territory, privileging only Inca-centric lineages and the southern highlands region. In this work, I develop a critique of these exclusions, and I shed light on alternative genealogies and notions of indigeneity that have been marginalized by metropolitan- and nation-sponsored definitions and debates. Thus I contribute a peripheral geographical and ethnic dimension of indigeneity that interrogates a hegemonic cultural history and reformulates conceptions of racialized subalternity and indigenous representation as they have been articulated in Indigenous studies and ethnic studies scholarship. My project combines scholarship from Indigenous studies, cultural studies, and anthropology in order to formulate the analytical category ‘geographies of indigeneity.’ My writing investigates colonial projects as biopolitical technologies for the control of bodies and territories, arguing that state and capitalist optics associated indigeneity with territory. These biopolitical projects aimed for three main objectives: the placement and displacement of indigenous bodies, the control of Indigenous productive and reproductive labor, and the silencing of native political agendas. But more importantly, geographies of indigeneity brings into view the indigenous conceptions of land, territoriality, and conviviality with nature. As proof, I analyze textual, visual, and oral documents by Quechua, Kañaris, and Muchik authors that demonstrate notions of territory, temporality and self-representation that consistently confronted western definitions. Throughout the three chapters of Geographies of Indigeneity, I claim that the discursive construction of indigeneity necessarily implied the territorialization of race. Each chapter inspects such territorialization under three analytical categories: intellectual elitism, gender, and political territoriality. The first chapter, “Intellectual Elites and the Territory for Indigeneity,” analyzes the early works of members of the literary group Norte such as César Vallejo, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, and José Eulogio Garrido; the ‘discovery’ of a Mochica pre-Columbian civilization through the works of Peruvian archaeologist Rafael Larco Hoyle; and the ethnographic photographs and portraits of indigenous elites produced by German scientist Hans Heinrich Brüning between 1885 and 1920. This set of works allows me to argue that regional elites formulated notions of indigeneity attached to a northern Andean territory of coastal deserts and their adjacent cordillera in order to forge a place within Latin American debates about race. I claim that these conceptions of a northern Andes indigeneity –usually disregarded by a scholarship on Andean indigeneity during the 20th-century– questioned the supposed pan-Andeanism of the ideas developed in the southern Andes. The second chapter, “A Body that Re-appears: Reflections on Indigeneity and Gender,” inspects the journalistic, scientific and literary works discussing the case of Benigna Huamán, an indigenous woman burned alive in 1888 after she was accused of being a witch in the highland village of Bambamarca. Here, I argue that constructing notions of indigeneity as an intellectual project was a racial and a gendered endeavor with economic consequences, as criollo elites saw the indigenous race as essentially ‘unmasculine’ and ‘lazy.’ The chapter emphasizes that indigenous women were thought of as a threat for the Andean republic, as their labor (re)produced non-western knowledges and was seen as non-productive for the capitalist economy. The third chapter, “Political Indigeneity and the Racial Geographies of the Nation-State,” inspects literature and historical records about the so-called ‘bandits’ in the Andes, and argues that they were leaders of indigenous political movements who challenged the political organization of the national territory. I show how Andean intellectuals were interested in de-indigenizing indigenous political actors who rose up against the Andean republic. These indigenous ‘rebels’ challenged positivist conceptions that assumed a territorial inertia of indigenous peoples, and proved networks of circulation of knowledge and goods that politically and scientifically questioned the very basis of the nation.

Creator

• Maradiegue, Walther

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-tk0k-yq93

Subject

• Native American studies
• Literature
• Latin American studies

Language

• es

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15293
• etdadmin_upload_765080

Keyword

• Indigeneity
• Andean studies
• Indigenous studies
• Latin American studies
• Cultural studies
• 19th century

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright