Listening to Andean Idolatry Trials: 1650-1680

Abstract

In this dissertation, I read with open ears the witness testimonies of the seventeenth-century idolatry trials filed under the section "Visitas de Hechicerías e Idolatrías" at the Archive of the Archbishopric of Lima, attending to the vibrant traces murmuring between the lines, engaging in exercises of reconstruction that build sound from silence. I offer the earliest reconstruction of a non-notated Quechua song, overviews of funerary sound practices, rethatching ceremonies, dancing rituals, sacred landscapes and ancestral journeys, as well as the first known historical documentation of the usage of whistling bottles. I reflect on the impossibility of communicating vibrancy through the written word, on the foolery of trusting archival sources as pillars of truth, and on the fruits of engaging with the fiction of the native perspective—a naïve intention of understanding history outside of colonial agendas and systems of signification, embracing instead questions and worldviews I perceive as relevant in the long history of Andean ritual. I construct historical narratives using a variety of vocabularies, materials, and approaches to the archive, seeking to challenge the seeming transparency and authority of archival constructs of truth and disciplinary objects of study. I mold clay to study history, circumventing the colonialist silence imposed by the symbolic systems of signification in which archival sources are inscribed. My listening rests on a site of impossibility, which I challenge by foolishly opening my ears to the ancestral voices that enlightened faculties of truth deem impossible and colonial powers sought to demonize and silence.