Pastoral Quechua explores the story of how the Spanish priests and missionaries of the Catholic church in post-conquest Peru systematically attempted to “incarnate” Christianity in Quechua, a large family of languages and dialects spoken by the dense Andes populations once united under the Inca empire. By codifying (and imposing) a single written standard, based on a variety of Quechua spoken in the former Inca capital of Cuzco, and through their translations of devotional, catechetical, and liturgical texts for everyday use in parishes, the missionary translators were on the front lines of Spanish colonialism in the Andes.
The Christian pastoral texts in Quechua are important witnesses to colonial interactions and power relations. Durston examines the broad historical contexts of Christian writing in Quechua; the role that Andean religious images and motifs were given by the Spanish translators in creating a syncretic Christian-Andean iconography of God, Christ, and Mary; the colonial linguistic ideologies and policies in play; and the mechanisms of control of the subjugated population that can be found in the performance practices of Christian liturgy, the organization of the texts, and even in certain aspects of grammar.
Alan Durston is assistant professor of history at York University, Toronto, Canada.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Transcription, Translation, and Citation Norms xii Map xiv Introduction 1 Background 25 History Diversity and Experimentation-1550s and 1560s 53 Reform and Standardization-1570s and 1580s 76 The Questione della Lingua and the Politics of Vernacular Competence (1570s-1640s) 105 The Heyday of Pastoral Quechua (1590s-1640s) 137 Texts Pastoral Quechua Linguistics 181 Text, Genre, and Poetics 221 God, Christ, and Mary in the Andes 246 Performance and Contextualization 271 Conclusion 303 Glossary 316 Notes 319 Pastoral Quechua Works 357 Bibliography 359 Index 381
