In Ideology and utopia (1936), the sociologist Karl Mannheim regarded the breakup of the medieval Church as the historical condition of the emergence of a new professional class, the intelligentsia, which served the emerging political structures of early modern Europe. That class, of which Juan Luis Vives and Peter Ramus were among the most influential members, was to a great extent encompassed by thinkers that have come to be known as Renaissance humanists, whose principal intellectual impact was to replace the philosophically orientated logical arts of late medieval scholasticism with literary arts dominated by rhetoric. Both Vives and Ramus played a major role in this transformation. To use Peter Sharratt's phrase, their goal was to reorganize the encyclopaedia of the arts. Their lingering appeal to Aristotle on a host of matters notwithstanding, both considered themselves to be engaged in an advance guard intellectual reformation of great proportions that to some extent depended on an assault against Aristotle, the authority of the academic and intellectual establishment of the late Middle Ages – an Aristotle understood in the particular way he was institutionalized by scholastic thinkers. This contest of ideas took place within academic institutions; the stakes were intellectual influence on the newly emerging social and political formations.

Juan Luis Vives's own early education was firmly within this scholastic mould. As he became exposed to humanistic attitudes, he reacted strongly against the dominion of logic over language, an early indication that language teaching and language theory were to become the centre of gravity of his thought.

The publication of an emended Greek text of the New Testament with a parallel Latin translation in 1516 established Erasmus as the premier evangelical humanist. The Complutensian Polyglot Bible was the first such printed, although it was not published until 1520 for lack of a licence. It was an unprincipled edition by competent philologists but religious conservatives, who subordinated their linguistic skills to ecclesiastical orthodoxy and the Vulgate version. Erasmus's edition secured the approval of Pope Leo X, the prestige of Johann Froben's press, and the applause of learned readers. Lorenzo Valla had inaugurated philological scholarship with corrections to the Vulgate edition. Erasmus surpassed all predecessors in Greek textual criticism, establishing the text that would dominate New Testament studies until the nineteenth century. He would issue four revisions. Scripture was to be correct, Erasmus insisted in a methodological preface, for ‘the theologian derives his name from divine oracles, not from human opinions’.

Countering the speculative and controversial scholasticism that prevailed, Erasmus would provide knowledge of the original sources of theology as his principal purpose. As he outlined his method, by collating variants of the Greek New Testament he produced what he considered the definitive text. Although he consulted manuscripts broadly, he relied consistently only on several, unwittingly not the best available, but only determined so in modern research. Erasmus advanced beyond dependence on New Testament manuscripts, however, by appropriating patristic citations as sources of Scripture. Methodically he identified confused homonyms, corrupt assimilations, and intentional changes. Erasmus invented the principle of the harder reading, and explored inference and even conjecture in reconstructing the text.

The seventeenth century sees widespread consideration of the theory and practice of fiction. During this period, prefaces to novels become the location not just of praise but of more extended analysis, and novels themselves begin to incorporate reflection on their own workings. Similarly, a body of critical writing takes shape, manifested in different forms: reviews of individual texts, satirical commentaries or theoretical essays on the genre as a whole. This critical activity, though, is largely centred on France. In England, writers like Dorothy Osborne may reflect in letters on French heroic romance, but there is very little independent analysis or theorizing. Discussion about the novel is almost invariably second-hand, as is seen in the large number of translations and adaptations of French texts.

A current of hostility to novels and novelists is apparent throughout the century. Some, like Pierre Nicole, condemn fiction out of hand, branding the novelist a brazen murderer [empoisonneur public]. In rather less vituperative manner, Langlois gives expression to many widely voiced criticisms of imaginative literature, and on more than one occasion Jean-Pierre Camus and Charles Sorel attack writers of fiction both past and present. Novels are dismissed on the grounds that they consist largely of time-wasting fantasy [resveries], or, conversely, that they are morally corrupting, appealing through their tales of amorous adventure to man's physical nature. Langlois likens the novel reader to Narcissus, lured by illusion into empty, dangerous imaginings, and Sorel's Berger extravagant (1628) follows the tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote, mocking a hero whose confusion of fiction and reality is the sign of madness.

Born in Noyon, France in 1509, John Calvin left his homeland due to religious persecution exercised by Francis I on Evangelical and Reformed believers at the time of the Affaire des placards (1534). Marguerite de Navarre, sister of Francis I and a devout Evangelical with close connections to Jacques Lefévre d'Etaples, Guillaume Briçonnet, and the Cercle de Meaux, was a friend of and patron to many Calvinists, among them the poet Clément Marot who provided the first Protestant translation of the Psalms into French (1543), and Calvin himself. Calvin was influenced by, and in turn influenced, French Evangelicals. By 1541, the date of the publication of his Institution de la religion chrestienne, Calvin had established himself in Geneva and had begun his attempt to reconfigure Geneva as a Protestant anti-Rome.

Calvinist literature develops in Switzerland and France. It can be said to be a godfather to later Puritan literature in Scotland and England, notably in John Bunyan's Grace abounding to the chief of sinners (1666), with its depiction of the sinful self as literary creator or in the Calvinist pessimism of Jacobean tragedy. Calvinist literature also demonstrates some affliations with Evangelical literary production, most notably Bonaventure des Périers's Cymbalum mundi (1537), an allegorical satire on religious persecution, some of the religious-flavoured tales of Marguerite de Navarre's L'Heptaméron, and the religious satire found in Rabelais's Quart livre (1548).

Calvinist literature is primarily informed by theology. It is grounded in a paradox. The Calvinist injunction was to ignore the self so that the self would not hinder the focus on God. However, the Calvinist tradition of individual spiritual examination of conscience (in contrast to the mediated system of priestly confession in Catholicism) gave rise to an intense anxiety about the self, and a constant surveillance of it. That ultimately resulted in literary expression of that self’s concerns and world-view. Increasingly, the Calvinist confessional perspective informed the content of the written work.

The effective southern border of Spanish control emerged early in the sixteenth century with the creations of a series of small scattered postas (forts) linking the early colonial settlements of Buenos Aires, San Luis, Mendoza, Santiago, and Concepción. This frontier changed very little in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. The relative autonomy of native societies south of this frontier was assured over the centuries in part because apart from small outposts that served the needs of passing ships, like Puerto Deseado (Carmen de Patagones) on the Atlantic coast and Valdivia and Chiloe on the Pacific coast, the Spanish presence in the Southern Cone was minimal after 1600 until the nineteenth century. Most of the Spanish activities and resources were oriented to the north to support the mining industry. However, the initial negotiations over this frontier between Spanish conquistadors and the native people they encountered in the early colonial period resulted in reorganization and adaptations among Indian societies that allowed them to maintain political sovereignty well into the late 1800s. That native peoples numbering at least between 100,000 to 300,000 individuals were able to resist conquest and colonization for nearly four centuries deserves our attention when considering the history of South America.

We are accustomed to imagining the political boundaries of the Spanish empire in the southern cone of South America as following the north–south axis of the Andes, extending to the tip of Tierra del Fuego. We can see this north–south orientation projected in the historical mapping of colonial and national political boundaries as they were increasingly subdivided and defined over the centuries. By the twentieth century this political process ultimately resulted in the (still disputed) establishment of the national border of over 2,000 miles dividing the countries of Chile and Argentina.

The first task inherent in understanding interethnic reorganization and readaptation at the margins of Spanish rule is to challenge that north–south perspective and to imagine instead an east–west (or west–east) boundary. Nearly all of the territory south of this boundary – roughly defined by the military outposts linking the colonial settlements of Buenos Aires, San Luis, Mendoza, Santiago, and Concepción – remained free of Spanish colonial rule. With the exception of a few heavily defended Spanish outposts along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, native peoples claimed and enjoyed sovereignty in this vast region known as Patagonia by the Europeans.

The indigenous peoples of lowland South America have until recently been marginal to the history of the continent. The Spanish focused on the rich highland regions taken over from the Aztecs and the Inka and regarded the lowlands as frontier areas, difficult of access and lacking the large settled populations that could be put to work to enrich their overlords. The lowlands were therefore largely left to missionaries and those settlers who had failed to make their fortunes elsewhere. These were regions little involved in the major events of the Spanish empire or in the turbulent nineteenth-century histories of the republics that succeeded it in South America. It is true that the lowland peoples of the upper Amazon did give the Spanish authorities a serious fright in 1742, when they rebelled against Spanish rule under their leader, Juan Santos Atahuallpa whom they considered the new Inka. But the rebellion faded out, and the lowland peoples returned to their marginal obscurity until they were brutally dragged into the limelight during the Rubber Boom 150 years later.

In Portuguese America there were no great highland empires to be conquered. The lowland peoples were the native population, and the Portuguese systematically enslaved them. In fact the Portuguese slavers became so ruthlessly efficient that they succeeded in eliminating the indigenous populations of large areas of the hinterland and driving the surviving native peoples into the least accessible parts of the continent. As the availability of forced indigenous labor dwindled in their Brazilian colony, the Portuguese took to importing black slaves from west Africa. By the end of the eighteenth century, Brazil had become a place where a white élite ruled over a large, servile black population, and the Indians were both socially and economically marginal.

This chapter deals with the lowland peoples of northern South America who inhabit the countries surrounding the Amazon Basin (see Map 26.1). These populations are scattered throughout Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, so it will be necessary to say something about the policies and particular circumstances of all of these countries. The approximate numbers of lowland Indians living in each of these nations are given in Table 26.1. Such numbers can be no more than rough estimates for a number of reasons. There is no precise definition of the lowlands and therefore no way to establish the geographical boundaries of such a region.

In the early years of the twentieth century, scientists in the Tarapacá desert of Chile’s Pacific shore found the mummified corpse of a colonial native nobleman, a cacique. They were able to date the mummy precisely because he carried in a pouch a 1680 document certifying that the deceased had paid “the papal bull for the holy crusade.” This tax entitled those who paid it to indulgences that would shorten their stay in Purgatory. To be buried in an ancestor cave according to the ancient rites, it seems, colonial Andeans felt one also had to obtain the promise of Christian salvation. This idea marks one of the stages in the long process of integration that took place in the course of hispano–Andean colonial coexistence. The same cultural complexities that the dead man’s family apparently envisioned in terms of an Andean-Christian afterlife, make it hazardous to analyze the colonial experience of daily life. This chapter concerns the transformations experienced by the indigenous Andean populations from Pasto (in southern Colombia) to Tucumán (in northwestern Argentina), from the reforms of Viceroy Francisco de Toledo (1569–1581) to the Túpac Amaru II wars of 1780 (see Map 15.1). Toward the end of this era, most of these peoples were still Aymara, Quechua, and Pukina speakers, and they still lived in recognized native polities – about 1.5 million persons, 400,000 of whom paid tribute in 1750 – but they had become bearers of a culture and social organization so transformed that the depths of change still resist historiographic conceptualization.

A thorough bibliographical survey shows that despite innovative recent work we still know very little about most of the stages in this long-term development, from the thematic, as from the regional point of view. Hence any synthesis of the colonial history of the Andean world is bound to be premature. The outline formulated here is provisional and attempts to trace only those few trends that appear to be most significant. It proposes a global explanatory framework at some expense of nuance and caution.

The central thesis can be stated in a few words. Once the overarching integrity of Andean hierarchical control had been destroyed (especially upper-level organizations like the Inka and macroregional states and cults), domestic units took over many control functions. Domestic economy came to ensure economic coherence by handling mercantile and nonmercantile exchanges and by sustaining social cohesion.

Peoples, tribes, and nations are not eternal entities. Of every named and believed-in society, one can ask not just where it came from but also who believed it to be real: its members, outsiders, or both? When, for how long, and why? In South America as elsewhere, colonial regimes, which so often sought to pigeonhole the groups they overpowered, at the same time unintentionally generated new social groups and sometimes whole new societies. These often escaped the ready categories of both American and European thought except under rubrics of social pathology, and yet many believed them to be real. Sometimes the newly generated categories became important to their members’ sense of self, and, when mobilized, worked fateful changes on their surroundings. This chapter concerns the processes of ethnogenesis – the ways in which new human groupings came to be, and how they were categorized in colonial cultures. It emphasizes the search for factors contributing to their emergence, or non-emergence, as “new peoples” sharing belief in their own uniqueness, solidarity, and legitimacy. Each section focuses on a particular kind of encounter (rather than on a period or area) and highlights the characteristic ethnogenetic processes it generated.

Overall the chapter argues that while colonial society was prolific of new categories of people, not all new categories of people defined themselves as peoples. And for those that did, there were various choices for group definition besides internalizing the stigma of “mixed blood.” Indeed groups that acquired a strong sense of corporate identity tended to define themselves in terms other than “mixture.” In the pages that follow we have outlined the political and demographic reasons for these outcomes as well as for persistent “mixed” labeling where it occurred.

To understand the problem one must first of all accept the sheer unfamiliarity of colonial social categories. Colonial society used the language of “birth” (a semantic field including genealogy, supposedly inherited characteristics like color and moral disposition, and hereditary status) to discuss what would later be called “class” and “race.” The unequal parts of society were often spoken of in terms of “blood“; people of similar “birth” or “blood” were suitable mates to each other. Bad or good sources and matches of “blood” in one’s genealogy determined “purity,” which had become an ideological obsession of Spanish Christians well before 1492.

This chapter centers on the recent history of Andean indigenous people in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. In these countries indigenous history and the history of the peasantry overlap broadly; the majority of the rural population is indigenous in origin and most rural dwellers still subsist as peasants. (Exceptions are found along the Pacific coast, in the Amazonian lowlands, and in a few highland enclaves.) During the second half of the twentieth century, however, urban influences have become more and more a part of indigenous history, mostly via migration. In this chapter I take into account both rural and urban versions of indigenous identity. The indigenous peoples of Colombia and Chile are also discussed here, although their situations are somewhat distinct. The Andean area of Argentina receives passing mention. Intensifying relations among diverse modern native communities across political and ecological frontiers demand some treatment of these five countries’ other, non-Andean, indigenous groups, especially Amazonian networks, which interact in fundamental ways with each state’s Andean peoples. This articulation in turn generates new overarching processes. Following contemporary practices in various locations, we use the terms “indigenous”, “Indian” and “native peoples” interchangeably for all these peoples.

Published demographic statistics are unreliable where ethnic identity is concerned. Only in Peru and Bolivia do censuses even provide estimates on this topic, and they do so indirectly at best, via language. Such data tend to be imprecise because they fail to define the subject clearly and underestimate numbers. Many census respondents tend to hide information that could cause them problems, and census takers cover peripheral regions poorly. Although it is dated, and although some planners suspect overestimates while indigenous organizations allege the reverse, Mayer and Masferrer’s 1979 synthesis remains the most reliable detailed overview. According to those authors, as of about 1978 the indigenous composition of the Andean countries was as shown in Table 25.1.

These figures should be considered minima. Where detailed Indian censuses have been carried out, the actual figures tend to be higher. For example, in Chile, where the 1992 census specifically asked about ethnic identity, the resulting figure was 928,000 excluding people under 14 years of age.

We have tried to make our perspective reflect that of Andean and indigenous peoples themselves, more than that of states and larger societies.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL SETTINGS

The aboriginal populations of the western fringe of the Amazon Basin live in close proximity to one of the most spectacular breaks in natural features in the continent. For centuries they also lived on the edges of two great hegemonic empires, first that of the Inka and then that of the Spanish crown. Until recently the combination of these two factors seemed sufficient reason to justify including all such groups in a single “montaña society” category exemplifying a distinctive “cultural zone.” The postulate of a homogeneous region inhabited by homogeneous societies is, however, largely fallacious. It arises from a perspective based on the high cultures of the Andes that long determined a biased view of the lowlands. Geographically, ethnographically, and even historically, the western sub-Andean fringe is by no means a uniform whole.

Landscape

Nowadays the term montaña refers in a general way to the eastern slopes and foothills of the Andes. It thus encompasses several clearly differentiated ecological zones, stretching from the so-called ceja de montaña (’brow of the mountain’), a fringe of dense, mist-cladden, low-growing forest ranging in altitude from 3,500 to 2,800 meters, down through the cloud forest to the high tropical rainforest of the Amazonian plains. The cultural and geographical area loosely designated by the term montaña extends from the headwaters of the Caquetá, in southern Colombia, to the headwaters of the Mamore (one of the major tributaries of the Madeira) in southern Bolivia.

From the sources of the Caquetá to the upper Napo, the standout features of the montaña are its breadth and relatively gentle relief. The undulating plateau, with its southwesterly inclination, is broken up by U-shaped valleys such as the Sibundoy, San Miguel (formerly Sucumbios), and Baeza valleys. These cut so far back into the cordillera (which is very narrow in the area) that their headwaters lie hardly more than 60 kilometers from the Pacific coast. Farther south the slopes of the western cordillera become steeper, dropping into sunken but fairly wide and fertile valleys such as those of the Zamora and the Upano rivers, running from north to south and cut off from the Amazon plain by bleak secondary chains like the Cutucù and the Cordillera del Condor. At latitude 4° South, there is a further transition. The Andes suddenly lose altitude and subside into a tangle of hills and valleys running in varied directions.

The people of the Gran Chaco and those of the Paraná Plateau were culturally very different but for most of three centuries were tied together by the mutual hostility of the dominant peoples of each area. These Native American groups and their native and European allies and dependents fought with each other periodically, and warfare was the normal relationship between these two culture regions in the late sixteenth century. This chapter looks at the people of the Chaco in their aboriginal cultural state, as they got the artifacts that enabled them to make the changes that revolutionized their lives, as they chose missions when the culture of the mounted warrior no longer served their needs, and as they returned to the Chaco when the mission system fell into ruins. It also looks at the culture of the Guaraní as they adapted to the early Spanish settlers’ demands for labor and women, as they moved into nucleated settlements that Europeans helped them to build – including Franciscan reductions, encomienda towns, and the Jesuit missions. It finally traces developments after the departure of the Jesuits and after independence.

THE PEOPLES OF THE CHACO

A flat alluvial plain sloping from west to east, the Chaco lies north of the Río Salado between the Río Paraná-Río Paraguay system to the east, the foothills of the Andes to the west, and the current Paraguayan-Bolivian border. In the 1500s nonsedentary, band-level peoples speaking Guaycuruan languages dominated much of the Chaco. The peoples whose descendants would later be known as the Abipon, Mocoví, Toba, and Pilagás inhabited the plains and scrub forests of the southern Chaco, while the ancestors of the Mbayá toured the northern Chaco above the Río Pilcomayo. They were first known to their Spanish and Guaranf enemies by a variety of names such as Mepenes or Frentones and Guaycurú, which often reflected their appearance or style of dwelling. In the southeastern Chaco, Abipon peoples developed three major subdivisions by the 1700s that corresponded to bands: plains dwellers, forest dwellers, and a riverain people, once separate, who identified themselves as the Abipon after conquest. The Mocoví at contact lived along the western Río Bermejo, although some bands migrated eastward toward Santa Fe (Argentina) in the early 1700s. The Toba, often allied with the Mocoví, recognized three major subdivisions in the seventeenth century.

The indigenous peoples of Brazil responded to the European invasions in a variety of ways that drew on aboriginal social and cultural patterns but also transformed these in response to particular historical circumstances and opportunities. Through a series of case studies, this chapter offers a broad synthesis of the history of indigenous societies in Brazil from the colonial period to the beginning of the republic. Although vast areas have been left out of the discussion, the chapter, by concentrating primarily on the south, the central coast and northeast, and the Amazon Valley, traces the main themes and processes that characterized indigenous contact with Europeans. Within each area attention focuses on the dynamics of pre- and postcontact history of specific peoples and regions: the Guaraní, Kaingang, and Xokleng of the modern-day states of São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Río Grande do Sul; the Payaguá and Guaykurú (also written as Guaycurú) of the Paraguay River drainage; the Kariri of the northeastern interior and Botocudo of the states of Espirito Santo, Minas Gerais, and Bahia; and for the Amazon Valley, the peoples of the várzea from die mid-to-upper Amazon and several of its main tributaries (the Tapajós, Madeira, and Negro; see Map 19.1). These cases are illustrative of processes that characterize much of lowland South America. Together they demonstrate that by the beginning of the twentieth century, the dynamics of change in indigenous societies were based on an entirely different set of factors than those that had been their principal determinants in the colonial and imperial periods.

THEMATIC OVERVIEW

The cases selected for presentation illustrate one or more of the following themes, which have guided the construction of this chapter: (1) diversity of aboriginal sociocultural patterns; (2) patterns of penetration and conquest; (3) directions in Indian policy; (4) transformations in interethnic relations; and (5) forms of adaptation and strategies of resistance.

Diversity of Aboriginal Sociocultural Patterns

In all areas of Brazil, early explorers were astonished at the density and diversity of native populations. Such diversity represented complex and varied forms of spatial organization and settlement patterns reflecting different cultural orientations and adaptations to specific ecological circumstances. Thus the south had an altogether distinct human landscape in terms of spatial organization and group mobility from the Amazon floodplains and the eastern and northeastern interior.

There already exist a number of basic chronological narratives of the course of the European occupation of northeastern South America from the Amazon to the Caribbean, but even where the fate of the native population is the focus of such accounts, little is said of changes occurring in the cultural and social practices of those indigenous populations themselves. It is the intention of this chapter to remedy that situation. Accordingly chronological narrative is balanced by extended analysis of the longterm historical processes that generated the major events, otherwise so ably captured in these narratives. In short, while rehearsing in outline the key moments of European colonial advance, beginning with the initial encounters between Europeans and Native Americans and the various attempts at colonial establishment, the main emphasis is on indigenous social process over the long term.

Until around the 1650s these attempts took place in two broad zones of colonial interest and activity: the lower Amazon River including the Maranhao captaincy on the one hand, and the lower Orinoco, coastal Guayana, and the Lesser Antilles on the other. A period of seemingly unstoppable colonial advance followed, up to the 1750s, at which point the tensions between the metropolitan regimes and the growing indigenous colonial élite found significant expression in changing policies toward missionary activity among native peoples. Finally, South American nationalism and neo-colonialism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided the backdrop to the final phase in the incorporation of native peoples into the modern state.

An extended discussion of issues in current research and debate prefaces this analytical narrative. The historical anthropology of native South America stands at an important crossroads, requiring it to discard the outmoded conceptions and assumptions of earlier scholarship. The main results of this new scholarship are presented via a consideration of the political, economic, and cultural character of native society at the turn of the fifteenth century. This baseline provides a context for the examination of the change and innovation that occurred over the subsequent four centuries and permit, in conclusion, some assessment to be made of the genetic, social, and cultural continuities and disjunctures among native South Americans, then and now.

This chapter concerns the early years of invasion in the southeastern part of South America, specifically the vast basin of the Río de la Plata (sometimes called River Plate). Its scope includes all of Paraguay, as well as Tucumán and Cuyo in modern Argentina. How can we capture the essential characteristics common to the histories of these three areas?

Here, as in most other areas of America, indigenous societies that did not build strong centralized power structures, and that consequently lacked tributary or semitributary systems for the production and circulation of surpluses, faced Europeans for whom such systems were the essence of politics. In these cases European conquest did not mean a state takeover of an existing state, as in the Andes or central Mexico, but rather a long and arduous campaign to “pacify the territory” and build a labor-exploiting system amid native societies of drastically unfamiliar constitution. It was the difficulty of this process, from the European viewpoint, which attached the label “marginal” to such areas. (To some degree the formerly Inka-ruled areas of Andean Argentina, with their more complex native polities, formed exceptions.)

In broad strokes these commonalities create a common history. First, the Spanish found it necessary to overcome nearly every group through armed struggle. Although the presence of a few “allies” made part of the job easier, military conquest was still a difficult road for the Europeans to travel.

Second, the colonists devised numerous ways to extract surplus by controlling indigenous peoples’ labor. All of these systems were variations on obligatory “personal service” – that is, labor levies which crown officials could assign to favored Spaniards or to local industries and other applications. Theoretically the crown tried to hedge personal service with rules distinguishing “tributary Indians” and “tributary age,” but regulation did not work as planned; for example, forced labor obligations fell on multiple members of the same family. In Paraguay and Tucumán, this system survived until the end of the colonial era.

A third common element among these colonizations is that mestizaje, or miscegenation, began quite early. “Racial” mixing pervaded the entire area covered in this study. The reasons were numerous and complex. Political reasons included the fact that some of the conquerors felt obliged to join the family networks of ethnic leaders. In Paraguay an additional motive was to accumulate a labor force based on women. Along all the frontiers, the scarcity of European women inclined men to seek out native mates.

There are moments when circumstances seem to pound away at existence itself: a lack of bread, or a feeling that everything is going badly. Native Andeans must have experienced many such moments during the various transformations in their way of life from the time of the conquest and colonial implantation onward. Nevertheless two centuries passed before conditions were ripe for indigenous people to rise up against the symbols of what oppressed them and against people for whom they had incubated a historic hatred. When they did they were influenced by explosive feelings, informed by new images of the world, and led by caudillos (charismatic strongmen) in whom they saw their own aspirations embodied.

Coexistence with the Euro-American “other” was a constant daily fact of life in the viceroyalty of Peru. It was never a simple one for anybody. The stratified and indeed estate-based social scheme recognized by officialdom and sometimes theorized as a set of paired “republics” – the “republic of Indians” and the “republic of Spaniards” – each with its own hierarchy, was crosscut by de facto differentiations of class, race, and access to power. The viceregal order that came under attack from Andean rebels and their allies was in some respects a typical European ancien régime, yet in others an unpredictably novel one shaped by peculiarly American forces including, as this chapter emphasizes, Inka and post-Inka institutions of leadership and ideologies of legitimacy. These pages synthesize the evidence concerning Andean rebellions and indigenous resistance from the end of the seventeenth century up to the penultimate colonial period, 1780–1800. It emphasizes forces within Indian society, forces traditionally neglected in favor of arguments about external factors, or macroscopic and “top-down” processes, which claim to explain revolt but usually explain only its context. The objective is to approach a political economy and an ethnology of mobilization, as well as to sound out Andean thinking and daily habits of resistance leading up to the late colonial explosions.

The “Republic of Indians” did not mount a single unitary assault on power but a number of qualitatively different struggles.