Indigenous Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes

Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis eds., Indigenous Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2014. 323 pages. ISBN 978-0-82235660-8. $24.95 USD paperback.This is a superb collection of essays on one of the most exciting topics in Latin American history: the intellectual history of people not usually considered intellectuals-in this case Native people. The authors draw on a distinguished intellectual lineage that begins, in essence, with Karl Marx, and descends through Antonio Gramsci, E. P. Thompson, and the influential Africanist Steven Feierman, whose study of peasant intellectuals in Tanzania launched a wave of studies of the same topic in other locations.The editors' framing of the project is thoughtful. They are sensitive to historical change on both the Indigenous and European sides of the cultural divide, and to the many ways in which knowledge could be inscribed - a term they often use in order to avoid the fraught term writing. Maps, codices, quipus, dances, oral traditions, and other technologies of inscription fall within their generous definition of intellectual productivity. The contributors are also sensitive to contrasts between the development of New Spain and that of the Andes, beginning with the fact that many more surviving documents in Native languages come from Mesoamerica than from the former territory of the Inca Empire. A further leitmotif that runs through many of these essays is what the editors term Micropatriotic boosterism, a tendency among Indigenous intellectuals to write about their home territories in ways that legitimated the power of local elites.Though all the essays deserve lengthy notice, I can only offer a taste of their findings. Gabriela Ramos provides a useful comparison of Mexico and the Andes, showing that Andean Natives had less access to government institutions where writing and learning went on than did Mexican ones. She suggests that the decentralized network of cities that sprang up under the Aztecs had no parallel in Inca lands, where all other towns paled by comparison to Cuzco. Nevertheless, Ramos shows that Andean natives were able to get education outside formal urban settings, in homes and workplaces.John Schwaller offers a fascinating dual mini-biography of Fernando de Alva Ixlilxochitl and his brother Bernardo de Alva, using the contrasts between them to illuminate the intellectual careers of each. Fernando was governor of his hometown and translator to the Indian court. Bernardo was a beneficed priest. Both were important intellectuals but did contrasting things: Fernando glorified Texcoco in books for a Spanish audience, and Bernardo expounded Spanish culture to Native listeners in his many sermons.John Charles looks at Jesuit education in a time of idolatry extirpation. Some Andean Natives with education became fervent Christians, and others without it clung tenaciously to their ancestral ways. But the keen-eyed Charles shows that these two groups were not mutually exclusive: fervent Christians kept fingers discreetly in pagan pies; incorrigible idolaters discreetly adopted and adapted European beliefs. …

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