Burial Plots: Finding Theatre in the Thanatology of Colonial North Coast Peru.

Summary

Spain's invasion of the Andes initiated a social drama unprecedented in the experience of the Andean natives. Spanish and Spanish-conscripted native chroniclers wrote extensively about Inca pageantry, spectacle, and ritual, and hastily attributed pagan belief to performances they witnessed or heard about. With equal haste, the Spanish appropriated performance as means of introducing and enforcing Christianity. In this paper, I treat performance as the central feature of Andean Colonial transition. Performance may be considered an ephemeral social feature but fortunately, in mortuary performances (dealing with death and treatment of the body); there are many theatrical elements that survive in mortuary contexts (e.g., staging, setting, costumes, make-up, props, and choreography). Archaeology, history, and ethnographic observation together illustrate that performance has alternately established, celebrated, or subverted Andean power relations during hundreds of years. Mortuary performances are especially excellent commentaries about the religious climate of Colonial Peru. I argue that the Colonial Spanish saw performance as evidence of belief and employed performance in the effort to transform pagan belief to Christian belief. Ultimately, communities, religion, and performance itself were transformed; integrated and reintegrated into dynamic personal and public expressions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21854