The Gender(ed) Revolution: Female Priests and the Mary Magdalenas of the 16th Century Taki Onqoy Movement (Ayacucho, Peru)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Interpretations of past identities have until recently often been considered in dichotomous binaries, in which individuals are either male or female, peasant or elite, ritual specialist or commoner. With the application of queer theory to archaeological analyses over the past decade, these "normative" understandings have been challenged, and scholars have recognized the fluidity and entanglement of identity. In the 1560s revitalization movement known as Taki Onqoy (quechua: "dancing sickness"), women were the majority of participants, making up nearly two-thirds of all named takiongos. Contrary to classical interpretations of men as the agentive actors in times of exaggerated cultural change, these female takiongos danced, preached, and intentionally took the names of Mary Magdalena and other Catholic saints in order to shift between participants and spiritual leaders and promote religious revitalization. In this paper, I suggest that women played an integral role in challenging Catholic evangelization through their group participation in Taki Onqoy. Specifically, by taking on identities of female Catholic saints, women were able to both affirm the power of the Catholic Church, while simultaneously subverting this power through leading indigenous rituals and instructing followers to return to their pre-Hispanic worship practices and beliefs.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Future Is Fluid...and So Was the Past: Challenging the 'Normative' in Archaeological Interpretations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24213